If your enterprise software brings revenue it is worth a lot more than if it just cuts costs – the revenue model shift from Subscriptions to Transactions June 4, 2014
Posted by Bernard Lunn in Corporate Strategy, Enterprise Sales, SAAS, start-ups, Strategy Workshop.Tags: b2b2c, crossing the chasm, revenue sharing partnerships
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Historically, the objective of enterprise software was to make employees more efficient by automating tasks. The software industry moved from cutting G&A costs to making people at the front line more efficient through software such as CRM, Marketing Automation, Business Process Management and Collaboration.
In all cases, the business model was licensing. The licensing model moved from perpetual to periodic (monthly or annual). Seen in this context, SAAS is just an evolution of the old licensing model (plus bundling the hardware into the price). Consumerization of software is a natural response to the risk/reward shift of periodic pricing in SAAS. When vendors got all the money upfront, they could afford an expensive sales process. SAAS shifted the risk to the vendor who got investors to fund the cash flow gap. Investors were happy funding that cash flow gap because periodic SAAS revenue is more predictable and therefore more valuable. To reduce the cost of sale and therefore minimize dilution, entrepreneurs created consumerized services and Freemium.
That about brings us up to date.
So, what’s next?
What’s next is usually an evolution when it comes to enterprise. There may be a disruptive 10x technology shift driving the change, but big companies tend not to make big disruptive shifts. There are exceptions of course, the most famous being Intel’s shift into semiconductors under Andy Grove. That is such a compelling story (told in Only The Paranoid Survive) and so many enterprise executives reference it in glowing terms that we can easily believe that it is the norm. It is not the norm; it is “more honored in the breach then the observance”. Enterprises have built-in inertia, because senior managers are incentivized to optimize short-term profits.
The next iteration will continue the risk/reward shift that was started by SAAS. This will change the revenue model from licensing to % of transaction/revenue (in any shift we see hybrids of old and new so many ventures will mix subscriptions with transaction revenue). I am observing a few innovators who are combining digital consumer marketing techniques with selling a partnership model to enterprise. This is where the puck is going. These ventures get their revenue from a % of the transaction/revenue. This is obviously highly scalable. These ventures take on more risk and have to generate more value before they get paid, but if they can get there they have great scalability and moat.
The idea is simple. You create a consumer service and get enough users that you prove the proposition. Then you scale by partnering with enterprises. One way to look at this is as a technique for crossing the chasm. You can easily find early adopters online. (I say easily, it is of course not easy, but the techniques for doing so are well understood and documented). However, scaling beyond that is hard. Only a tiny % of ventures, blessed with great virality and addictiveness, cross the consumer chasm. As always exceptions (such as Facebook) prove the rule while blinding us to the rule with their brilliance. Many other ventures will cross the chasm by partnering with enterprises. One reason that enterprises are so big is that mainstream consumers trust these large enterprises.
If you prove the proposition directly with consumers you have created a lot of value. You can exit at that point. You can sell to a company that can cross the chasm to the mainstream consumer. Or you can partner with the enterprises that have access to those mainstream consumers in a shared revenue model and scale to become a large enterprise. You will typically be making one or more of these propositions:
- Get more revenue from their existing customers. You are accessing their customer base and they are using your service to get extra revenue from those customers.
- Bring them new customers. This is where the big $$$ prize lies. If these new customers represent the early adopters, the enterprise will be worried that eventually their mainstream customers will “see the light” and want to switch to your model. If they see that they will buy you for a big premium or partner on terms that are more advantageous to you; in this situation you have real clout.
You can create these partnerships on a white label or co-branding basis. Obviously you get higher margins if you get co-branding. There is a spectrum of co-branding. The more traction you have with consumers, the more clout you will have in those co-branding negotiations. Once again, Intel was the thought-leader, with their Intel inside campaign. These negotiations are fundamentally about “how big is my logo vs your logo?” Screen real estate is precious, so this matters. If you have 1 million consumers and the enterprise has 1 billion consumers you have reasonable clout if your 1 million represent early adopters and they can see their 1 billion moving to your model at some point. If you have only 1 thousand consumers, you will be limited to offering a white label service.
Back in the days of the Dot Com Boom/Bust era we saw the concept of B2B2C. Like many concepts from that era, it is easy to ridicule this one, because it did not happen then. That may simply be related to the % of people online. Now that more than 50% of the global population have mobile phones, the concept of tiny ventures getting millions of consumers directly is no longer a pipedream. However it is not wise to ignore the power of the incumbent enterprises. Rather one should get enough traction with consumers to have some clout when negotiating revenue sharing partnerships with those enterprises.
Thought leadership selling for enterprise software creates a qualitative feedback loop that can get marketing & product management on the same page. May 5, 2014
Posted by Bernard Lunn in Blogging, Enterprise Sales, Enterprise Web 2.0, SAAS, start-ups.Tags: sales, sales management, thought leadeship selling
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There are two core jobs in enterprise software; you either code it or you sell it. All the other jobs, vital as they are, facilitate those two core tasks. In the great companies there is a culture that synthesizes the best of the coding world and the best of the sales world. In those companies both techies and hustlers respect each other and know that they depend on each other like mountain climbers roped together.
Sadly that kind of mutual respect culture is all too rare. For the first generation of enterprise software, the sales guys ruled and they often abused that privilege. It is therefore no surprise that in the next generation, characterized by SaaS and consumerization, many technical founders sought to write the sales guys out of the script.
In the consumer world, there is no selling (door to door salesmen are only in history books), there is marketing and that is tightly integrated with the product (lots of AB testing to find out what gets consumers to hit the buy button).
Marketing has become a science. The creative folks and their hustlers that we watch with such amusement on MadMen have been banished to the history books along with door to door salesmen. We now have a perfect quantitative feedback loop of Analytics feeding into Marketing Automation feeding back into product feeding back into Analytics….
That would be OK if selling to the enterprise one user at a time – the consumerization story – was all that was needed. It is a venture lifestage issue. You get early traction, the foot in the door, one user at a time using Freemium. To grow your share of budget you need at some stage to engage with the people who manage these enterprises (or sell to an acquirer who can do this but that is a very limited pool of acquirers).
So what you need is a qualitative feedback loop integrated with this quantitative feedback loop. You need to hear what people are thinking and feeling about your product, what would entice them to buy more. When you find this out you need to quickly integrate this into your product and your marketing; this has to be an agile feedback loop. For this you need humans who can understand the nuances of the enterprise you are selling to, the geography and the trend line dynamics in the niche you are focused on. They also need to be credible inside your company so that the voice of the customer is heard.
Thought leadership selling is a forgotten art. I think of it simply as industry expert bloggers who sell or salesmen who blog credibly about the industry. This Forbes article outlines it well, the key quote is here:
“Take Salesforce.com as an example. This was an organization that took cloud-based software-as-a-service for customer relationships into the mainstream marketplace. There are several elements to its success, namely a strong product, but it also has an army of thought leaders who specialize in app development, sales lead development, sales management, etc. that helps customers do their jobs better. Salesforce’s model, driven by product success and thought leaders, has led to a familiarity with “the cloud” and a willingness to accept it in a corporate environment. These achievements not only helped the cloud computing industry with adoption rates, but helped make Salesforce a leader in the cloud-based CRM space.”
I think of this simply as industry expert bloggers who sell or salesmen who blog credibly about the industry. It is no longer OK for customers to read interesting blogs on your site and then meet sales people who cannot continue the conversation because they follow the old fashioned scripted model of selling. This is particularly true when crossing the chasm through the bowling alley of niche markets. Of course in the early days, the founders do this and in very late days you can hire teams of sales people who follow a more scripted approach, but you need thought leadership selling to make the tough transition from the early days of founder led selling to mature enterprise sales processes.
Enterprise Sales FAQ May 5, 2014
Posted by Bernard Lunn in Enterprise Sales.2 comments
This is the final # 12 in a serialized book called Enterprise Sales for the Digital Age, delivered here as 12 blog posts. You can get value from each in isolation, but if you really need to understand enterprise sales, reading the whole series is worthwhile. You can buy an improved version, neatly printed and bound, for $6 from Amazon.
Enterprise Sales FAQ
Q: When should I go to my contact’s boss without his/her permission?
Background. You have spent a long time building a relationship with somebody at a prospect who always says the right thing, but the months roll by and nothing substantive happens. You know the boss’s name but you want your contact to make the introduction, to “take you up the chain”. Again, your contact makes lots of placatory noises, but it is not happening.
A#1: don’t get in this mess in the first place, call high from the start. The worst that can happen is that you learn quickly that there is no budget or that an incumbent has a lock-in. This is far better than taking a long time to learn the same thing.
A#2: if you are in that mess, the old proverb “if you are in a hole, stop digging” applies. Do it and do it now. Don’t warn your contact, he/she will only make it harder. Maybe use somebody in your management team or Board to make the call to the senior guy, but before you use your precious relationship capital, think about whether it is worth it for this account. There are only two outcomes a) you were wasting your time, the deal is not qualified b) they are seriously interested and you have a bridge to repair with your contact (if your contact is political player, he/she will be careful and respectful now that you have a relationship with the boss).
Q: When should I hire a VP Sales vs hiring an individual sales contributer?
A. This is a tough one. A VP Sales should have at least 5 sales people to manage, otherwise it is a wasted cost. In a well-run sales operation, the span of control should be 10 or more. It works for 5 in a startup where the VP Sales takes a hands-on lead from the front role.
This is where raising Venture Capital can help get over this hump. You then have the cash to hire a VP Sales and 5 sales people. You – and the VC obviously – have to be very confident that you have product fit to market and that the only thing needed to scale is a sales team.
Without that luxury, hire experienced individual sales contributers who do not need a lot of supervision. Sometimes one of them is willing to mentor/coach a more junior sales person and may want to become the VP Sales when that position opens up. However one mistake to avoid is being unclear on roles. Don’t hire somebody who really wants to be VP Sales and give them VP Sales type tasks when what you really need is direct sales. That person will tend to focus on the management tasks of the job they aspire to and not do enough to directly win customers.
Q. When do you force something to a Yes or No binary decision?
A. Earlier than you intuitively feel comfortable with. The motto is; “yes is ideal, no is manageable, maybe is the one thing that is impossible to manage”. Whether it is investors or customers, a “maybe” closes off other options. This is where the old-fashioned sales motto “always be closing” comes from. Whether it is a time for a meeting or a signature on a contract, you are always looking for certainty. If it is no, move on. That is what a funnel is all about. If you have lots of “maybes” you might not fill the top of the funnel properly because you hope that your maybes are for real. This is also where a conditional close works. If the maybe is based on a real issue you ask “if we could fix issue x, would you be willing to go ahead?”
Q. What is the right CAC target?
A. You define this as a % of the License Fee. In a SaaS venture you do it as a % of Life Time Value (LTV). This is usually shown as the CAC/LTV %.
A. It depends on the stage of the venture/product in the market. In a mature business, the CAC % should be around 25% ie all your sales and marketing costs should not exceed 25%. In a simple model, you allocate 25% to Sales & Marketing, 25% to R&D and 10% to G&A, leaving a 40% operating margin. That is at maturity. Very early on, CAC is over 100%, that is why you raise capital. How soon you move from over 100% to 25% is a future growth vs current profitability debate that you must have with investors; in a massive market it may pay to keep investing and delay profitability (but you obvously have to be properly capitalized to do that).
Bootstrapped ventures have to keep CAC below 100%. Assuming an even split between R&D and S&M, around 40% each and 10% for G&A leaves you with 10% operating margin. That its hard to achieve and that is why in big, high growth markets, VC (or early exit) becomes essential.
Q. Should we put up a “give us your contact details” gate before delivering valuable content such as White Papers?
A. For startups, the answer is almost always no. Users will click away because you are not yet a trusted brand. You have to earn their attention and trust. Your sales people will have to use the proactive lead gen methodology outlined in an earlier post in this series.
Q. When should I fire a non-performing sales person?
A. In general, earlier than most entrepreneurs do. Get a round table of entrepreneurs together and ask them to relate mistakes they wished they had avoided and “delaying firing when I knew in my gut it was the right thing to do” comes up a lot. It is painful. Most people want to “give them another chance”. This is a natural human instinct, but delaying is bad for everybody in the rest of the company and it might be bad for the individual as well. Everybody can be successful somewhere. Maybe they are not “cut out for sales” or maybe they can be successful in sales in another more mature company (where, for example, there is more structure, support and training).
Have a Performance Improvement Plan. See what can be done to get the person back on track. But track this rigorously and keep it short.
You cannot build an A Team if many slots are filled with B and C team players.
If most or all of the sales team are underperforming – look in the mirror. Maybe it is the product, maybe it is you, maybe your targets are wrong? But if most sales guys are hitting target, the decision is simple.
Q. Should I use domain or technical experts as sales people?
A. This is another tough one. The ideal candidate sits at the venn intersection of a) great sales skills b) great domain and tech knowledge. Good luck, those candidates are rarer than hen’s teeth. Occasionally you get somebody who moves out of a tech or domain role into sales and succeeds, but this is surprisingly rare. In the very early days of a venture, tech and domain skills matter more than sales skills; this is during the 3 projects to a product phase and the person is usually a co-founder. However, when it comes time to scale, it is much better to have a pair of individuals who work closely together – sales and sales support. The tech and domain skills reside in the sales support guy who manages the middle game of proving fit to enterprise need through proposal, demo, POC etc. Great enterprise software ventures are often defined by a superb working relationship of mutual respect between sales and sales support.
Q. Should I use Freemium or Free Trial?
A. The classic enterprise method was a Free Trial that you have to get via a sales person. The positive is that it puts the sales person in control. The negative is that it loses all those innovators in your customer’s (which may include the “innovator with clout” who holds the key to the enterprise-wide 8 figure annual relationship) who just wants some quiet time to experiment (to self educate in your product) before speaking to anybody. Which you choose fundamentally depends on how confident you are about the product. If you think it is the best, Freemium is the way to let it shine. If you think that there are “better, cheaper, faster” alternatives out there but you have the big enterprise brand and the market clout today, use Free Trials to control the process until your R&D/Product team can catch up with the innovators.
Q. Should I use a Proof Of Concept (POC) or go straight to Paid Trial ?
A. The POC has now become too widely accepted; “the POC is the new demo”. This means that too many vendors either a) spend far to much on POCs, killing their CAC metrics or b) skimp on the POCs so that they are not effective. Both are start-up killers. Weak sales people offer POCs far too early. It is free to the customer and looks good in the CRM metrics (“three prospects at POC stage”). Start-ups cannot win with skimpy POCs, you need the time to build something that proves to stakeholders that you have the secret sauce that their recipe demands. A Paid Pilot can also be called the first sale. It is a real sale with real benefits to the customer to real revenue to the vendor. By calling it a Paid Pilot, you signal a) your mission to be an enterprise-wide approved vendor (the Paid Pilot is a step in that direction) and b) you create a real dialogue/relationship with the stakeholder who is paying for the Paid Pilot by focusing on their ROI.
If you have any questions not covered here, please let me know in comments and I will do my best to answer them
Enterprise start-ups need thought-leadership selling, a mix of sales, marketing, technology and strategy May 4, 2014
Posted by Bernard Lunn in Corporate Strategy, Enterprise Sales.Tags: enterprise sales, messaging clarity, software business, thought leadership selling
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This is post # 11 in a serialized book called Enterprise Sales for the Digital Age. You can get value from each post in isolation, but if you really need to understand enterprise sales, it is worth reading the whole series. You can buy an improved version, neatly printed and bound, for $6 from Amazon.
There are two core jobs in enterprise software; you either code it or you sell it. All the other jobs, vital as they are, facilitate those two core tasks. In the great companies there is a culture that synthesizes the best of the coding world and the best of the sales world. In those great companies, both techies and hustlers respect each other and know that they depend on each other like mountain climbers roped together.
Sadly that kind of mutual respect culture is all too rare. For the first generation of enterprise software, the sales guys ruled and they often abused that privilege. It is therefore no surprise that in the next generation, characterized by SaaS and consumerization, many technical founders sought to write the sales guys out of the script. This is the world of Dropbox, Evernote and Yammer, using one click at a time to break into red ocean markets.
Marketing has become a science that is tightly integrated with the product (e.g lots of AB testing to find out what gets consumers to hit the buy button). Consumer marketing techniques have been translated to B2B. We now have a perfect quantitative feedback loop of Analytics feeding into Marketing Automation feeding back into product feeding back into Analytics….
This consumerized approach to the enterprise works well in red ocean markets, but even in those it is a venture life-stage issue. You get early traction, the foot in the door, one user at a time using Freemium. To grow your share of budget you need at some stage to engage with the people who manage these enterprises (or sell to an acquirer who can do this, but that is a very limited pool of acquirers). When you reach this stage, you can take an arrogant approach as in “your users already want this, your job is just to enable more of them to get it” or a more solution oriented approach as in “what big problems could we solve for you if we made this an enterprise-wide solution?”. The latter is more likely to work and it requires some real solution selling.
Even before you reach the stage of CIO conversations, the bots alone are not enough. Humans are needed to create a qualitative feedback loop integrated with this quantitative feedback loop. You need to hear what people are thinking and feeling about your product, to understand what would entice them to buy more. When you find this out, you need to quickly integrate this into your product and into your marketing; this has to be an agile feedback loop. For this you need humans who can understand the nuances of the enterprise you are selling to, the geography and the trend line dynamics in the market that you are focused on. They also need to be credible inside your company so that the voice of the customer is heard. In other words you need thought-leadership selling. Or you could have a marketing person do this, or product management person or a developer or the CEO or whoever can do this job well. This is a task that crosses what are today’s job description boundaries; to do this well, you need a mix of sales, marketing, technical knowledge and a head for strategy. The end game is to close a deal, deliver great software, get a happy reference customer, get cash; that is a classic sales job description. If your Product Manager can do this, great. It does not matter what the job description is, the reality is that it will involve both selling and thought-leadership.
So, what is the difference between thought-leadership selling and solution selling? One answer is “none”. The aim of thought-leadership selling is to solve a big problem for a big client and get paid big bucks, which is a definition of solution selling. The other answer is “everything” because “the Internet changes everything”. The twin tsunamis of change – digitization and globalization – create radical, disruptive threats and opportunities for enterprises. Solutions require radical, strategic thinking. It is no longer enough to shave a small % off G&A costs, you have to show how you can enter new markets, fix existential threats and transform the business. One way to look at the difference is simply that “thought-leadership selling is solution selling on steroids”.
Thought leadership selling is also key to creating a market-dominating company by helping to create a message that really resonates. This Forbes article describes how Salesforce.com did it:
“Take Salesforce.com as an example. This was an organization that took cloud-based software-as-a-service for customer relationships into the mainstream marketplace. There are several elements to its success, namely a strong product, but it also has an army of thought leaders who specialize in app development, sales lead development, sales management, etc. that helps customers do their jobs better. Salesforce’s model, driven by product success and thought leaders, has led to a familiarity with “the cloud” and a willingness to accept it in a corporate environment. These achievements not only helped the cloud computing industry with adoption rates, but helped make Salesforce a leader in the cloud-based CRM space.”
Marc Benioff is a salesman. He is also a technologist, thinker, marketer and strategist, but at heart he is a thought-leadership salesman. You can think of thought-leadership selling simply as industry expert bloggers who sell or salesmen who blog credibly about the industry. It is no longer OK for customers to read interesting blogs on your site and then meet sales people who cannot continue the conversation because they follow the old fashioned scripted model of selling. This is particularly true when crossing the chasm through the bowling alley of niche markets. Of course in the early days, the founders do this and in very late days you can hire teams of sales people who follow a more scripted approach, but you need thought leadership selling to make the tough transition from the early days of founder led selling to mature enterprise sales processes.
Enterprise software market leadership starts with mindshare. Winning the mindshare battle requires intense clarity about your message. If you can distill your message into a single word or phrase that defines your market, you have a big competitive advantage. That is what Marc Benioff did with Salesforce.com.
Of course it is not easy to do that. Thousands of marketing professionals get paid millions of dollars to come up with cringe-inducing phrases and tag lines that last as long as snowballs in hell. What makes it so hard is that messaging clarity has to be based on a very deep understanding of the dynamics of your industry and the position of your company within that industry and the customer’s pain point and your technology secret sauce. If your message does not seem real, it does not stand a chance. In fact it has to seem so real and obvious that when people hear it they assume they have heard it before.
History Lesson – Information Bus
That final touch of clarity that is enshrined in a single phrase or word, can make all the difference. I learnt this the hard way in the early days of the market for real-time application integration middleware, when technology such as Publish & Subscribe, real time messaging bus and Enterprise Application Integration was being adopted on a large scale in the first vertical niche market – financial trading rooms on Wall Street.
My company, Aregon, was an early innovator with solutions dating back to 1984 that were the first implementations in the industry. We were the technical pioneers. However when customers started to ask us whether we had an “Information Bus”, a term invented by a rival company, things started to go wrong.
How To Respond When A Rival Has Mindshare?
None of our responses was very effective.
For example, “no, that is not what we call our technology, let me explain” left people cold. Customers saw the Information Bus concept and automatically “got it”. They did not want to waste time understanding some new concept. Coming up with an alternative message is doomed unless you catch things very early and you are very, very good at coming up with an alternative that will crush the concept invented by your competitor. I mean crush, mindshare is not a game of percentages.
Replying that “yes, we have an Information Bus and ours is better for the following reasons” will get you sales, but will automatically relegate you to the position of follower. You can build a good business as the number two or three vendor in the market and, if you time it right, you can sell out at the right time for a reasonable valuation. That is what happened to Aregon. However that is a far cry from being the market leader in a large market that you define, which was what happened to Teknekron, which was later renamed TIBCO (as in the The Information Bus Company). They invented the market-defining messaging concept andthen became the leader in the booming enterprise integration market.
Why Was Information Bus Messaging So Powerful?
The payoff from getting it right is huge. However there are very, very few examples of great successes. Why was Information Bus so powerful as a message?
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It was simple and easy to understand for the target audience. This does not mean “dumbing down” for everybody. This was a technically sophisticated audience, so TIBCO could count on a base level of knowledge.
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It was based on a genuine “aha moment”. As related by Vivek Ranadive, TIBCO’s founder, the moment came when he asked a software expert to describe why so many software projects failed. As a hardware engineer by training, Vivek, could not understand why well-tested components could not simply plug into the system Bus. Why not do the same with software?
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TIBCO created a clear and simple visual diagram of the Information Bus that anybody could draw on a napkin and understand in a heartbeat.
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The company executed by ensuring that everybody stayed on message. Execution consistency is critical to success. The phrase enabled a dialogue that went into increasing levels of details as the company engaged in customer dialogues. Yet at every level they could come back to the simple Information Bus concept and diagram.
Think SAVE – Simple, Aha, Visual, Execution.
Thought-leadership sales guys are critical to Messaging Execution at the early stage
The best messages come from a synthesis of what you are hearing from the customers and an understanding of your technology secret sauce. You cannot rush that process.
If you force it and hire a lot of standard sales guys to deliver the message, it is unlikely to resonate in the market, you will just blow a lot of capital on sales and marketing. Hiring external consultants to create your messaging is usually a mistake. At best external consultants can act as facilitators, drawing out what is already known but hidden. Great messages cannot be forced out; they have to emerge. You cannot set a firm deadline and it is better to have no message (just great technology and a solution-selling mindset) than a bad one.
This is why you need a breed of thought-leadership sales guys at the early stage who are totally different from the standard sales guys who help you to scale once you have got a message that resonates. Standard sales guys deliver a message, thought-leadership sales guys help to create the message.
Many entrepreneurs fail by not hiring sales people that fit the life-stage of the venture.
Don’t rush to replace the passion and creativity of the founders – the thought-leaders who got those critical and tough early deals – with too much process too soon. This is a chasm that many entrepreneurs fall into. You have to replace the passion and creativity of the founder-led sales in order to build a valuable business, but if you rush that transition you end up destroying what made your company viable .
Everybody wants process – for the other guy!
Developers want to see sales guys follow a process, so that they sell what can be delivered. Sales guys also want developers to follow a process so that the customers they sell to get quality deliveries on time. Both tend to underestimate the amount of art vs science in the other person’s job. That lack of respect can lead to toxic behavior that damages the business.
When you see how the really great developers are not just a bit more productive than the average, not just 2x more productive but 10x, you would be crazy to load process onto their creativity.
Working with armies of average developers requires boatloads of process, but that is typically the maintenance type of work that is sent offshore. It is all about where you are in the life-cycle. Early in the life-cycle, you want to give individual creativity full rein. A bit later you have some light processes for small teams – that is what Agile is all about. In the latter stages it is all about metrics and scalable, repeatable processes. You move from artisan to factory worker.
The same is true in sales. By the time the product is a market leader in a big mature market, the sales teams need lots of process. You can visit the sales teams of companies like Oracle and IBM to find out how to do this well. However, if you are bringing a new product to market, you need to unleash the creative drive of a few great thought-leadership sales people.
Enterprise software is complex. A simple concept/name/diagram like Information Bus is just the enabler for productive conversations that go into greater detail on the value proposition and technology. It takes years for a concept like Information Bus to become fully realized in the market and in those years you need thought-leadership sales guys who don’t expect all marketing material to be delivered in a neat package, they are comfortable with the uncertainty of refining materials on the fly (those final adjustments in the taxi on route to a meeting and the post meeting debrief where you change a message that clearly did not resonate).
Startups need thought-leadership selling because “you have to capture mindshare before you capture market share”. That may sound like marketing, but the thought-leader sales people are also marketers. They don’t expect brochures and canned messages to deliver. They create the messages based on a thoughtful synthesis of their company’s value proposition and the pain that they hear from the market. Startups need to see evidence of that kind of thought-leadership selling before hiring.
Sales Forecasting; keep all stakeholders on the same page by rewarding accuracy May 3, 2014
Posted by Bernard Lunn in Enterprise Sales.Tags: enterprise sales, sales forecasting, software business
1 comment so far
This is # 10 in a serialized book called Enterprise Sales for the Digital Age, delivered here as 12 blog posts. You can get value from each in isolation, but if you really need to understand enterprise sales, reading the whole series is worthwhile. You can buy an improved version, neatly printed and bound, for $6 from Amazon.
Forecasting new business sales revenue is hard. As any sales manager will tell you, that is the ultimate “no, duh” statement. Yes forecasting is very hard.
The reason is obvious – the future is uncertain.
Sales revenue forecasting is also enormously important. Ask any CEO who got hammered by their Board for missing their numbers. Forecasting drives so many critical decisions. Without good forecasts you cannot have a good relationship with investors and you cannot plan your business.
If the company is big and old, you have lots of data to guide your forecasts and errors become rounding errors. However if you run a company that gets revenue from say 5 sales executives, you cannot rely on the usual statistical models. In startups the forecasting is also a lot tougher because there is a step ladder of forecasting difficulty:
– Very Easy: add-on sales to existing accounts. As a start-up you don’t have much of this.
– Fairly Easy: new accounts within a geography and a niche where you have been selling for years. It is unlikely you will have many of these.
– Hard: sales of a well established product into a new geography or a new horizontal or vertical market.
– Really Hard: sales of a new product into a market that is not even well-defined yet. These are the blue ocean markets that allow startups to get traction and scale, but this is a very tough forecasting challenge.
Forecasting recurring revenue contracts such as maintenance can be automated quite easily. You can apply standard assumptions about decay (how many will cancel) and the growth will be based on new contracts.
The problems all come from forecasting new contracts. These are outside your direct control. You are extremely dependent on the judgment of your sales team. SaaS subscription models make new contracts less critical, but investors are still mostly looking for the new contracts (and churn) as the signals of success or failure. Whichever way you cut it, your VP Sales (Sales Director, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Hustling Officer, whatever you want to call her) has a tough job where everything is on the line every day.
You obviously want more sales. Perhaps even more, you want to know what is likely to happen. You want accuracy.
Attempts to automate new contract revenue forecasting usually do more harm than good. The standard approach is to apply closure rates to the sales funnel. The idea is to make assumptions about how many calls it takes to get meetings and how many meetings it takes to prepare a proposal and how many proposals it takes to get a contract. Then you can say we have 10 deals at 40% probability, 5 deals at 60%, 3 deals at 80% and one deal at 90%, based on where your deals are in the funnel. Put all that in a spreadsheet and hey presto you have a revenue forecast.
This approach appeals to engineers and accountants. It appears to be scientific. The problem is that it generates a false sense of confidence and is very susceptible to gaming as in “lets bump up the number of meetings until we get the desired result”. It is a classic “garbage in, garbage out” problem.
It is better to build a system around what good sales managers do in the real world. What they want to know from a sales guy is “will this deal close this quarter?” In the real world it is always binary – it either closes or does not close. 90% closure does not hit the revenue numbers and 2x 90% is still not worth any money.
Of course this leads to “sandbagging”. The sales guy may have 2 deals that can close in the quarter. He will tell his manager that one will definitely close and keep the other one in reserve. If his “committed close” blows out he hustles to close his back-up deal. If his main deal closes, he can either get his back-up deal in this quarter and be the star of the quarter and pick up some nice accelerator commissions, or push it into the next quarter and get ahead of the game.
Everybody sandbags right up the CEO providing “earnings guidance” to public market investors. Is this a problem? As one Board Director put it, “I love getting sandbagged, it means surprises are much more likely to be positive rather than negative”.
Whatever system you put in place, it will be gamed. The trick is not to try and avoid gaming as that runs against human nature. The trick is to get game theory working on your side by explicitly focussing on accuracy in two ways:
1. Measure input accuracy. The old saw, you cannot manage what you don’t measure, applies here. How accurate was salesman x in the past? Note that this is not the same as “did salesman X make target? The question is “at end Q2, salesman X forecast $1m for Q3. Now at end Q3 what was the actual result?”
2. Reward accuracy. Revenue is always rewarded, but with accuracy being so critical to the company why don’t we explicitly reward accuracy? This can be in “attaboy” gifts; rewarding accuracy with cash when a sales guy is way below target could be counterproductive. Yet they must be good gifts – such as the holiday in the sun all expenses paid for top accuracy.
One reason that we do not measure and reward accuracy is that we are too focused on budgets and targets. These are only plans. What we really want to know is what will happen this quarter? Accountants and spreadsheets can measure the difference between actual, forecast, budget and target and the gaps can be used to kick ass. But don’t confuse that with the main objective of getting accuracy.
Many stakeholders are involved in the sales process and can add value in the forecasting process. During the regular sales review meetings all stakeholders should have a say. For example, the head of Customer Support may chime in with data about a nasty problem that Customer X is reporting that will not be easily fixed. That is likely to delay closing. It may also elevate that problem in the fix priority. Or, a salesman may say “POC for Prospect X starts next week”, but the Head Of Professional Services who provides resources for POCs may so “no, we cannot start next week”. The key output from these meetings is a company view on where each prospect is in the sales Funnel (eg in POC, in contract negotiation, Proposal presented, first meeting).
However that must not replace a simple financial forecast from each sales executive by month. You record accuracy over time. Then you can apply simple metrics. For example:
Sales Exec # 1: 90% accuracy, forecasts $1m in February, you record $900,000
Sales Exec # 2: 50% accuracy, forecasts $1m in February, you record $500,000
How to hire the A Team enterprise sales guys May 2, 2014
Posted by Bernard Lunn in Deal-making, Enterprise Sales.Tags: enterprise sales, hiring
1 comment so far
This is # 8 in a serialized book called Enterprise Sales for the Digital Age, delivered here as 11 blog posts. You can get value from each in isolation, but if you really need to understand enterprise sales, reading the whole series is worthwhile. You can buy an improved version, neatly printed and bound, for $6 from Amazon.
Note: a version of this post has already been published on ReadWrite.
This is a guide for tech founders of enterprise software startups looking for outside sales guys who will generate $millions annually. This is not for big old vendors or inside sales.
Here are 9 things to look for to find the A Team sales guys:
1. Track record. This is easy with sales guys, you can see how much they sold in past years, but don’t make the mistake of being too metrics driven. Selling a hot product for a big brand in a booming market is relatively easy compared to breaking into a new market for an unknown startup. More importantly, being too metrics driven can blind you to the other attributes. Would you hire a developer simply on how many lines of code they deliver?
2. Passion. Call it conviction if you prefer, but I like the word passion in this context because entrepreneurs talk about the need for passion (for good reason, passion is what sustains you through the tough times). Yet too many entrepreneurs think, when it comes to sales, that they should hire cynical mercenaries who can “sell ice-cream to eskimos”. That may work for big old vendors, but it fails in startups where smart, innovative customers smell the BS and where the team building between developers and sales, based on mutual trust and shared interests, is key to success.
3. Integrity. Here is a bit of timeless wisdom from Warren Buffet. He advises that, when hiring, look for brains, energy, and integrity; but if the people you find don’t have integrity, the other two qualities will kill you. Sorry, there is no magic trick for spotting intgrity. Sure, do background checks, but also be human, trust your instincts.
4. Intelligence. Enterprise sales using disruptive technology is complex, it needs intelligence to understand the nuances of the enterprise needs and how they relate to a rapidly evolving technology.
5. Empathy. The ability to relate to other people at a human level is essential to sales. This is not a technique, it is a human quality that is probably a mix of genetics and early childhood learning.
6. Great questions. The great sales guys are not looking for a job, they are looking for great products to sell. Do their questions to you reveal an understanding of the dynamics of your market? Are they prepared, have they done their research? Are the questions boilerplate or specific to what you do? What they ask in an interview will indicate what they will ask on a sales call; which segues to point # 7.
7. Listening. Great sales people have two ears and one mouth. If you listen well (really attentively with great questions) the prospect will reveal the key driver for the sale; the rest is easy.
8. Energy. The road is long and hard, you need physical energy. Hire sportsmen who know how to endure pain to win and know that discipline (eg in diet) matters.
9. Ambition. Call it drive if you like. Mix with passion. What is it that makes you bounce out the next day after a crushing defeat?
That’s your checklist. How do you make sure you get these A Team players?
1. Invest your time. Hiring is your most important job. Take the time to interview a lot of candidates; cast a wide net. As a side benefit, interviewing a lot of smart people is a great way to learn more about your market. Spend a lot of face-to-face time with the candidates on your short list. Meet with references (note, meet, not email or phone). Meet with family and friends.
2. Don’t compromise to “fill a slot”. It may allow you to check that box, but it will create 10 more boxes to check if you get it wrong. Don’t be afraid to delay until you get the best possible person.
3. Use the three months onboarding wisely. All that talk about taking your time can lead to analysis paralysis and speed is of the essence in a startup. Most headunters will give you a three month money back guaranty and a three month probation period in an offer is quite normal. You don’t want to make a hiring mistake, but you have three months to spot if you have made a mistake and then course correct without too high a cost.
4. Focus hard on building a win/win compensation plan. That is, a win for the company and a win for the employee. This is hard to do right. Even good compensation plans get gamed, which is why Buffet’s advice about integrity is so critical. Be generous… but also demanding.
Negotiation Ninja Says: in the end game closing, forget your chess skills and play poker May 2, 2014
Posted by Bernard Lunn in Deal-making, Enterprise Sales.Tags: closers, closing, enterprise sales, negotiation
1 comment so far
This is post # 7 in a serialized book called Enterprise Sales for the Digital Age. You can get value from each post in isolation, but if you really need to understand enterprise sales, it is worth reading the whole series. You can buy an improved version, neatly printed and bound, for $6 from Amazon.
I have used the analogy that enterprise sales is like chess with a beginning (get leads), middle (prove fit to requirements) and end (close the contract). In the closing phase, the game becomes more like poker where, as James Bond says in Casino Royale, “you don’t play your cards, you play the person sitting opposite you”.
“Closers” are rightly prized. Weak closers “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”. They give up a great technical/functional advantage to let a strong closer from a competitor snatch the deal.
There are so many books, courses, seminars and theories about negotiation. Much of it “does not stick”, because in the heat of the moment you need to make instant decisions. This is where experience and an aptitude for negotiating count. However one way for negotiation tips to stick in the mind is to relate them as stories, particularly stories where somebody screwed up really badly or did something clever to gain advantage in a difficult situation. These are the Negotiation Ninja Says tales.
#1: Negotiation Ninja Says “don’t throw away the cards that have no value to you”.
As a sales rookie I was reviewing the key issues before a major contract negotiation. With my boss, I made a list of a) showstopper issues and b) “not a big issue for us” clauses.
During the meeting one of the “not a big issue for us” items came up. My boss said;
“Hmm, that is difficult. Do you mind if my colleague and I step out of the meeting to discuss this?”.
I walked out thinking WTF; why make so much fuss about a clause that did not matter to us? When we were alone my boss said:
“So what do you think will happen in the cricket today?”
We spent 10 minutes talking about cricket. The idea was simply to make them sweat about a point we were willing to concede so that we could trade it for something we wanted.
# 2: Negotiation Ninja Says “test how nervous they are with something silly”.
A few days before signing a deal, we were deep in the legal weeds. We were a tiny startup being acquired by a behemoth. We had a lot at stake, so we were nervous.
There was a ridiculous amount of legal Due Diligence stuff. One question was “have you told your spouses about this deal and are they in agreement?” This must have come from some earlier deal where a spouse had created a post-acquisition legal problem. In our case, our spouses just wanted us to close the deal so that we could pay bills and take a holiday.
My partner said:
“Actually we might have a problem there. I have not told my wife about this deal”.
He was not trying to be clever, he was just tired and cranky and wanted some fun.
Even though this was on a conference call, the tension on their side was obvious. The message was clear – the buyer was just as tense as we were, they wanted this deal to close as badly as we did.
In hindsight, we should have done this testing of their nerves a bit earlier. Not too much earlier when everybody is calm (because less is at stake at that stage) but early enough that it could be used to gain some negotiating leverage. The frayed nerves, the raised voices, the table-thumping, these are all signs that a deal is closing. You know that you are stressed. Find low risk ways to test how much they are stressed, to see how much leverage you have.
# 3. Negotiation Ninja Says after high or lowballing, use the blind pig stare and offer a mint
I had given the prospective buyer our price. I was highballing, had set a high price. He just looked at me. Did not say anything. Gave me no reaction at all. Just kept on looking at me. I call this the “blind pig stare”. This made me nervous. The inner “monkey mind” was saying “OMG, I blew it, set the price too high”. The temptation to fill the silence was intense. The temptation was to say something like “it’s all negotiable of course”. I was not a rookie at that stage. I took a deep breath. I took out a mint and offered him one. Normal politeness made him say “thanks”. The tension was broken, we started talking, found common ground and closed a deal.
# 4. Negotiation Ninja Says “on the signing day, don’t blow it by talking about anything more substantive than the weather.
It was signing day, scheduled for 9am. There was nothing more to do, just go there and sign. The two bound documents were in front of us. I said something that prompted the buyer to ask me a question. I did not have an immediate response, needed to check with somebody. He said “let’s reschedule signing to 9am tomorrow”. Later that day something happened that was totally “out of left field”, beyond any of our control. The deal was not signed the next day. In fact, it never got signed. The moral – on signing day never talk about anything more substantive than the weather.
# 5. Find somebody to be the bad guy or volunteer for the job.
Deals can fall apart on price. Despite all the kumbaya win/win negotation talk, price is still one thing where the buyer wants low and the seller wants high. Sometimes you just have to dig in your heels and say no, to walk away from the negotiation. That bruises the relationship. Somebody on the team has to be the bad guy. That usually falls down to a VP Sales type person. You want the sales executive to maintain a warm relationship and you want the CEO/Founder to do the same. You are all agreed on the strategy and the risks of losing the deal, the only question is who will be the bad guy? This is tougher for young startups with a flat management structure. Make sure that any VP Sales you hire understands that occasionally being that bad guy is part of the job description.
# 6. Once you start a bluff, any sign of weakness blows the whole deal
The company was one week away from not making payroll. There was one mega deal in negotiation. We had set a high price. In negotiations, the Founder/CEO refused to budge one inch. I knew what was at stake and knew that giving say a 20% discount (on license fees which were 100% gross margin) would have enabled the company to survive. When he was asked why he refused to budge he responded “If I had shown the slightest sign of weakness the deal would not have closed. They had to see us as the best, most powerful vendor in the market or they would have got nervous about our ability to survive”. The deal closed and the company went on to great fame and fortune.
This is poker in its purest form.
Once after that, with similarly high stakes, I have had to take the same stance. It worked. It does not always work; but what definitely does not work, the sign of a weak poker player, is starting off betting high, acting super confident, then later in the same hand pulling back and “going all wobbly”.
Always Be Qualifying – listen for the screams May 1, 2014
Posted by Bernard Lunn in Deal-making, Enterprise Sales.1 comment so far
This is # 6 in a serialized book called Enterprise Sales for the Digital Age. You can get value from each in isolation, but if you really need to understand enterprise sales, it is worth reading the whole series. You can buy an improved version, neatly printed and bound, for $6 from Amazon.
The old sales adage is “always be closing”. It confuses rookie sales people because they think of closing as something you only do at the end. Another way to think about this is “always be qualifying”. The things you close before the final close are really ways to qualify.
Traditional sales methodologies treat qualification as a one time event. Budget, tick. Need, tick. Decision-maker, tick. That implies a linear process like an assembly line in a factory. Of course the real world is not like that, so you have to re-qualify all the time. This is even more true in the Digital Age, when buyers self-educate online and appear fully qualified at the bottom of what we used to call a funnel and when the “innovator with clout” is that dude with a ponytail and sandals in the coffee shop.
As a sales leader, I love learning from the winners on my team. What is that consistent target-crusher doing right and can I teach this to other guys? For a while I was confused by one of my best performers. He was by most visible metrics, the worst salesman. His presentations were rambling and verging on incoherent. His writing style would have given my English teacher apoplexy. He was consistently abrupt almost rude to all concerned. He came in late, left early and had long, expensive lunches.
I was really interested to find out what he did well. I do not believe in luck being a contributor on any consistent basis. So he must have been doing something really, really well because he was doing everything that was visible very badly.
I discovered that what he was doing very well was qualifying his prospects with great care and discipline. We all know that is what we should do, but very, very few sales people do it at all well. We think that sales is all about hard work, persistence, determination and all those other good Protestant work ethics. So we drive relentlessly on, calling that prospect for the umpteenth time.
This guy waited until he could see that the customer’s need was very real and urgent. He waited ‘till he could hear the screams. He then looked for something to indicate that we had an edge in the deal, some unfair advantage.
His laziness was a bit of an act. In reality he was a tireless networker. That is what all those long, expensive lunches were about. However he worked to create a sense of equality and respect with his customers. Sales people are usually too used to getting on their knees to that all-powerful buyer with the big budget. So the buyer does not respect the salesman and will ignore five of his calls in the certain knowledge that he will get another one.
Yes, it is a bit of a power game. This power game is easy if you work for the dominant player in the game. The power game is hardest to play when you are an unknown start-up, when times are tough and you are behind in your revenue targets.
We were in that position when a small Hedge Fund came on the horizon as a prospect for our real time trading support system. This was 1991 and Hedge Funds were not on our target list at that time, few people even knew what they were. The customer certainly seemed smaller than we were used to selling to. So the salesman told the prospect that we were not interested in their business. This put the prospect in a position of selling to us. “Sure we are small now, but we are growing fast and we need this system urgently and we have plenty of money for IT”. The screams were loud and clear and we closed the deal in record time and they became a good customer (and the Hedge Fund became one of the stars in this industry).
One way of checking for urgency is how much effort the prospect puts into the relationship. You need to see some equality of effort. If you call five times before the prospect returns your call that is not equality. If you send reams of information and give multiple presentations but the prospect won’t fill in a detailed requirements questionnaire, then that is not equality of effort. With every call you want the prospect to DO something. If this does not happen then the screams are not loud enough and you should move onto your next opportunity.
You have to cast a very wide net in order to qualify your prospects properly. Otherwise you will catch a couple of tiny fish in your net and mistake them for tuna! If you cast your net wide enough you will find deals where the customer’s need is urgent and your company has some specific edge in the deal.
The way to make sure you have a live one is to wait for the screams. Get your prospect doing some work before you get too excited.
What really kills weak sales people is when a deal is going great but circumstances change and it is now dead in the water. They did everything right but the deal is dead.
Weak sales people don’t want to see this, it is too painful. That is when management has to make a painful decision to pull the plug on that sale.
Great sales people expect other members of the team (sales support and/or product management) to do most of the work during the proving phase. They are in oversight role, keeping an eye on what is happening to the customer, preparing for the close and filling the funnel with new prospects.
Great sales people will also not be reluctant to say something like “we set this whole POC up the wrong way, we have to start all over again”. If they see that the POC is not addressing the one thing that the CXO will mention in the Press Conference, they will be right. This makes them hugely unpopular internally, but it is better than losing the sale. The great sales people have the credibility from their sales track record to pull this off.
Great sales people are always visualizing that press conference and thinking about the “key ones” (one decision-maker, one business-driver and one selection-driver) and if it is not crystal clear today they will pull the plug even if it was crystal clear yesterday.
Deep in the complexity of the middle game, keep focus by imagining the Press Conference and concentrating on the “power of one”. April 29, 2014
Posted by Bernard Lunn in Deal-making, Enterprise Sales.Tags: enterprise sales, positive thinking, visualization
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This is # 5 in a serialized book called Enterprise Sales for the Digital Age, delivered here as 10 blog posts. You can get value from each in isolation, but if you really need to understand enterprise sales, reading the whole series is worthwhile. You can buy an improved version, neatly printed and bound, for $6 from Amazon.
Deep in the complexity of the middle game, keep focus by imagining the Press Conference and concentrating on the “power of one”.
Maybe you think that daydreaming sounds rather self-indulgent. Perhaps this is some new variant of the old “think positive” stuff?
Actually this is a very practical strategic selling tool. It is also a powerful visualization tool, similar to what great athletes use.
Enterprise sales are complex and it is often really hard to see the wood for the trees; it is like the middle game in chess. Deep in the middle of the sales cycle, you are probably juggling internal politics, resource constraints, demo and proof of concept technical issues, pressure from partners, competitive moves and customer politics – and that’s all before lunch!
You need something to keep you focused on what really matters. You need to know what is the one overriding motivation for your decision-maker. This is the story that your decision-maker will be announcing when the deal is done. She will present why her great initiative will have a big effect on one of the company’s key strategic objectives and why she was smart enough to select the one vendor that was ideal for the project.
Unless you know what this story is, you are shooting in the dark.
Even big, complex enterprise sales come down to the personal motivation of the ultimate decision-maker on your project. Customer politics can get in the way when the personal motivations of different managers are pulling in different directions. However if you know the personal motivation of the big boss (and if you are reasonably confident the big boss will stay in power long enough to get the deal signed) you cannot go far wrong. You can then focus on helping the boss align the pesky, politics-playing managers to the big objective.
To cut your way through the complexity of enterprise sales, you need to simplify. Select one person who is the key decision-maker. Understand what is important to that decision-maker. Select the one big reason why he/she wants to do this project. Select the one reason why he/she will announce your company as the right vendor.
There is tremendous power in keeping the focus to one. Find one decision-maker, one business-driver and one vendor selection-driver. When you see multiple answers, keep drilling and imagine that press conference. The CXO will only have one minute to describe the vendor and why he/she chose you, so there cannot be lots of reasons.
Imagine yourself in the buying shoes. Remember when you have had to make an important decision and how you finally made up your mind. What you will usually find is that it was one simple reason and everything else was incidental. It was probably not a feature that hooked you; the anti-lock brakes on the BMW are good, but is that why you want to buy a BMW?
Even more powerful is the realization that there is often one precise moment when you win or lose a deal, even if the whole sales cycle is 6 months or more. My first job out of college was selling encyclopedias and you could see the moment you won or lost a deal in their eyes; it took me a while to understand that the same is true also in complex big ticket deals. Everything before that is preparation to sell and everything after that is managing the process to closure. Think about decisions you have made and how you made them. There might have been lots of research to get you to a certain point and then a key point when in your mind you think “this is it”. Then you may still spend lots of checking to make sure you are doing the right thing, but you want the answer to be positive. You are looking for verification not problems.
Selling is a people game where intuition is valuable. You will know when somebody is convinced. It is less about what they say, but how they say it, the expression in their eyes, their tone of voice, their body language. No, that will not fit into a CRM system but that is a criticism of CRM systems, not a criticism of the value of intuition.
In some sales, you may not be there when that key moment happens. This is not ideal, but it is the reality in many enterprise sales. At the crucial moment of decision, your decision-maker is probably sitting with the one manager he/she holds accountable for this decision (the “recommendation-manager”). Again, there is one key recommendation-manager, although lots of other managers may be involved in the research and diligence stages.
Although you may not be there at that critical moment, you must have a very close relationship with the manager who is doing the briefing and you and he/she must have total alignment on the key objectives.
In long sales cycles, take time to imagine the press conference. Use this to get clarity on the “key ones” – one decision-maker, one business driver and one vendor selection driver. When it all gets mind-numbingly complex – KISS and focus on those “key ones”.
Athletes do this kind of visualization. You can see downhill ski racers with their eyes shut before leaping out of the starting gate, their hands tracing the path they will take, their mind going over every bump and corner to the finishing line. It is hard to understand theoretically how this kind of visualization works, but the empirical evidence from athletes is clear.
It is also great practical reality check. Great sales people know that qualification is a process, you do it every day not once at some point prescribed in a sales methodology handbook. Great sales people do this because they understand that sunk cost means nothing. It does not matter if you have sunk 6 months and lots of company resources into a sale; that has no bearing on whether or not it will close. Circumstances can change. Or you may have misjudged it earlier. If you cannot visualize that Press Conference, if you don’t have a firm handle on the key ones”, it may be time to pull the plug.
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