Sales Innovation in a Traditional Industry

This is the second excerpt from my interview with Ned Trainor, president and co-founder of BuildSite, an online product database used by the construction industry. It is part of the Sales 2.0 Leaders Interview series.

Ned launched sales in a traditional way in an attempt to meet with the manufacturers who would be his advertising customers. When results didn’t meet expectations, he began working with my company, Phone Works, to design a new way for BuildSite to engage customers by phone and online, track every prospect contact and close sales without leaving the office.

Anneke: Tell us about your customers: Would you describe them as Sales 2.0 innovator types?

Ned: There are a few, but these are fairly traditional industrial companies. Some are divisions of Fortune 500 companies, and they’re big; they do $500 million in sales or more. Others are little chemical companies that have 20 employees. They have tended to be sort of shoe-leather sales people, and they mostly use their own reps or manufacturer reps. It’s a very traditional, automobile-intensive, personal-meetings type of selling.

Anneke: Why innovate in such a traditional space? What’s the benefit to you?

Ned: We had to be innovative — the old way wasn’t working. Our outside reps couldn’t get the appointments with the right people at the right time. A lot of these companies have downsized. No one has any time to do anything.

One of our taglines is, “Look it up on BuildSite … and get it done.” We’re trying to appeal to our users’ desire to just cross one thing off their to-do list. We have to do the same for our advertisers. We have to show up when they want to see us, not when we happen to be in town.

Anneke: What measurable results can you point to from transforming your sales model?

Ned: Revenue is really what we’re looking at. Q1 was our best quarter we’ve ever had, and Q2 is going to be as good as Q1. And that’s because of the new sales model. In terms of qualified leads, we’re not in the Hail Mary mode a month from the end of the quarter, going, “God, I hope this guy closes, or else we are really in trouble.”

It’s, “OK, I’ve got this guy with this probability, this guy with that one.” I’ve got a half a dozen or more that could close within the next couple of weeks, and if half of them do, we’ll have a record quarter. I can see it, I can feel it. It’s OK, and if they don’t do it now, then we’ll get them in July. They’re not going away.

Anneke: If you were talking to another executive about the journey to Sales 2.0, the challenges and the rewards, what advice would you give them?

Ned: I’m lucky. I have an organization of 10 people, so there are no behaviors to change. We knew we had to do something. We didn’t have the resources to try this for six months, and if it didn’t work we’d try something else. But this was the right thing to do, and I had a few people telling me not to do it. I did it anyway.

I would say to anybody that it’s worth taking the risk here. I don’t see any downside. Try it out. You don’t have to change the whole organization, just do it in a corner of it, and see what happens.

Read the full interview with Ned Trainor in the Resources section of this website.

Tags: innovation, Sales 2.0

Innovation in Business Practices: Part of the Oracle Culture

I was honored to be included in the “Conversations with Early Innovators” section of Oracle Corporation’s  Innovation Showcase, which is now being featured on its website along with a 100-day countdown to Oracle OpenWorld. As the founder of Oracle’s inside sales group, I stressed the innovation of Oracle’s business practices while others interviewed focused on the company’s technology innovations.  There’s a fun story about Ted Codd – the father of relational database – in there, too.  Here’s the interview in its entirety:

Anneke Seley was the twelfth Oracle employee and the designer of the company’s revolutionary phone sales operation that is now called OracleDirect. She helped to organize Oracle’s first user conferences, which were the predecessor events to Oracle OpenWorld. Currently, she is the CEO and founder of Phone Works, a sales strategy and implementation consultancy that specializes in helping companies incorporate phone and Web selling into their sales models. Seley is also the coauthor of a new book, Sales 2.0: Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).

Q:What was innovative about the telephone sales organization that you started in 1985?

A:It wasn’t typical for a company to sell complex enterprise software by phone, but in 1985 that’s basically what I was recruited to do. I had joined Oracle in an entry position in 1980, but in 1985, when we were releasing products for the PC, the old distribution model of having a field sales organization sell every single copy of Oracle was no longer practical or economical. So I started the phone sales organization, which everybody in the field thought was going to be a total disaster. They said, “Who would buy software on the phone? This is really important, complex system stuff that people run their companies on. Who’s going to buy it, without seeing somebody in person?”

Q:How successful was this new sales organization?

A:We started out with two employees. By the end of the first year, we had about 20 people. It was the fastest growing sales organization in the company. And now, you can see what happened—OracleDirect brings in hundreds of millions of dollars. We did very well. Prospective customers were very happy to talk to us—and buy products—on the phone, as long as we knew what we were talking about.

Q:Did your sales staff do a lot of cold calling in the early days?

A:No, because we had a very active and successful demand generation marketing program that would drive leads into the company. We also had advertising. I recall one early ad, created by Rick Bennett, which had a picture of a biplane [representing Oracle's competitor] being shot down. It got a lot of attention for being so aggressive.

Q:The book Sales 2.0, which you coauthored, has a chapter about Oracle. Would you give us some highlights?

A:It shows how Oracle in the 1980s was very forward thinking. Nowadays, it’s really common for organizations to launch or have a big part of their distribution strategy include an inside sales or phone and Web selling component. It wasn’t so common in 1985. But a key point about Sales 2.0 is to sell in the way the customer wants to buy and to align your resources appropriately—given the profitability, the size of the deal, the size of the customer, and whatever makes sense. For a lot of customers, it was totally fine not to see a salesperson. Sales 2.0 is about more effective and more efficient selling for both the seller and the buyer that’s enabled by technology. Innovation is not just about the technology, but also about the business practice that you enable with the technology.

Q:You also helped to organize the first Oracle conference—what do you recall about that?

A:It was in 1982, if I remember correctly. I think we called it the Oracle User Conference, and we held it at the Hyatt Union Square in San Francisco. I know we had fewer than 1,000 attendees because I remember it was a big deal when we had the second annual conference and attracted 1,000 attendees. The audience was mostly developers. It was an incredible success—and a useful venue for enabling direct contact between the Oracle developers and the Oracle staff and the customer base.

Q:Any speakers stand out in your mind?

A:Tedd Codd, the father of the relational database, was the keynote speaker at our second user conference. It was held in San Diego at the InterContinental, which was a big step up. I was a kid then, and here was this historical figure who was so important to the company, and we were honored to have him at our user’s conference. I believe he was retired from IBM at the time. My job was to keep the conference on schedule and to deal with the logistical side of things. And here was Ted Codd speaking before the audience, and he wouldn’t stop talking. But we had to get to our next session. So I asked him at least three times—you know, “Thank you, it’s such an honor to have you here, and now we’re ready for the next session.” But he just kept on talking. It was definitely a moment that I’ll never forget. He wasn’t a schedule kind of guy. I think he was really enjoying himself. And, I don’t want to assume anything, but these technically brilliant people want to see their inventions become reality. It was meaningful to him that Oracle had done just that, by creating the first commercially available relational database. [Editor's note: Oracle founders used Codd's published description of a working prototype for a relational database as a model for the Oracle database.)

Q:What drives Oracle’s culture of innovation—does it come from the top?

A:Absolutely, it comes from Larry. Larry was a technical guy. He loved technical innovation, and he hired people that were really, really good. We didn’t necessarily follow the rules that other businesses follow. We’d hire people like me—who graduated with a degree in human biology from Stanford—and let them start a sales division with no sales background. The idea was to give smart people a project and let them figure it out. That’s the essence of the culture at Oracle. It started with technical innovation, and then it expanded to other parts of the business.

How is your company’s culture innovative? How are you transforming your business practices to be as innovative as your product or service offerings?

Tags: innovation, Innovation Showcase, inside sales, Larry Ellison, Oracle, Oracle OpenWorld, OracleDirect, Ted Codd