Tommy's Veriblog

Interesting blog post from Basho about the ROI on upselling versus prospecting. Seems like prospecting is "coming back into vogue". It never really should have gone out of it, should it? No. Pick up the phone!

Phone versus Email for cold calling is a bit of a religious war. Your typical battled-hardened sales veteran tends to the "Pick Up The Phone You Wimp!" view; where the Twitter-savvy, IM-friendly yoof will be more inclined to send an email. In general. Personally, I fit firmly into neither demographic, but I am a fan of the veterans' view. In my experience, much of the arguments for email and against phoning are simply thinly disguised (or maybe subconscious) call reluctance. A recent example demonstrates why at least in my case, sales prospectors are pretty much wasting their time with email.

You run a small business. The economy that is rocking behemoths like GM is threatening to swallow your little boat whole, or smash it against rocks. Your car just broke down. You've just found out that your cholesterol is dangerously high. And your oldest kid is getting into trouble at school. What do you do?

There are two ways - one bad and common, the other rare but good. The first, I'll call the "If Only" way; the second, the "Despite" way.

The "If Only" way responds to problems by imagining and longing for a world where the problem does not exist. "If Only" I hadn't started my business in 2008. "If Only" I'd taken that safe job. If only my client hadn't gone bankrupt and became unable to pay my invoice. And it involves thinking enviously about the lucky people who are not experiencing your troubles. Basically, it is to live with the worldview that life is supposed to be easier than it is.

A particular technique in complex sales is the Monkey's Paw. This is where a small sale is used to "prime" a client to be more accepting of a much larger sale. The technique gets its name from the nautical term referring to a particularly bulky knot tied in the end of a lightweight line (a "heaving line"), to act as a weight.




With the Monkey's Paw at one end of the line, the other end can be tied to a much heavier line. The Monkey' Paw can then be thrown from the boat to the dock, and the person on the dock can then draw in the heavy rope on the end of the light one.

Well I've been reading, "Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive!", by Goldstein, Martin and Cialdini. It's a fascinating review of psychology research into how we make decisions. Chapter 14 gives an excellent example of the Monkey's Paw in action (albeit not specifically in a sales situation). More important, it gives a idea of why it is the technique works.

Matthew Gladwell's book, "Blink", is essentially about how our subconscious minds can make decisions and lead us to take actions, but it also discusses how inaccessible that subconscious process can be to us.

One example is the way top tennis players execute a forehand drive. A key part of the action is (or was) to use the wrist to roll the racket over the top of the ball on impact, so as to impart topspin. Gladwell quotes top tennis coach, Vic Braden,

"Almost every pro in the world says that he uses his wrist to roll the racket over the ball when he hits a forehand."

The trouble is, although high speed filming of a tennis pro's stroke shows that he or she does indeed do the wrist roll, it happens long after the ball has left the face of the racket. There really is a correlation between the wrist roll and an effective forehand, but it is not a direct causal correlation in the direction of roll-to-performance. It seems that being good at tennis tends leads you to roll your wrist for the forehand; but it is not at all clear that rolling your wrist for the forehand will make you good at tennis. Clearly something is making Andre Agassi a better tennis player than you or me; but rolling the racket over the ball isn't it.

I think we can learn from that in the field of computer programming.

The sharp end of selling is the cold call. Few people like doing it, but for engineers -- typically more interested in things than in people -- it can be worse than poking yourself in the eye with a rusty nail. And for Professional Services firms, it's often seen as Not The Done Thing; something telemarketers for insurance may do, but not high falutin' lawyers, or accountants, or verification consultants. In fact, so reluctant can some people be to do this kind of prospecting that there are entire books and courses dedicated to handling call reluctance (e.g. "The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance"). Others promise that you can sell without cold calling at all (e.g. "Never Cold Call Again").

Personally I believe that cold calling, while not the be-all and end-all, is an essential part of the professional consultant's sales arsenal. Verilab has been using the Sandler Sales Institute for some time now, as part of its overall training approach. And the Sandler System has some refreshing views on the cold call.

I've decided I need two blogs: one a "work" blog to talk about Verilab, verification, consulting and so on;  the other a "personal" blog to rant about everything else. In practice, I don't have a clear line between work and personal, so who knows what will end up where. But let's try, shall we. Hmm, yes, let's.

To make the split, I've duplicated the entire blog up to and including this, the fork entry. If you are reading this at http://www.darklingwood.com, you are on my personal blog. If you are reading it at http://blogs.verilab.com/tommyk, you are on my work blog. Until now, which you chose made no difference. From now on, it will.

If you're on the personal and would rather be on the work, unsubscribe from Darkling Wood via http://feeds2.feedburner.com/DarklingWood and subscribe to Tommy's Veriblog via http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TommysVeriblog. If you want the opposite, do the opposite. Or you can do both. And of course, it's not too late to come to your senses and do neither. And anyway, if you're lucky I'll be caught up by the paradox of choice, and end up never making a single post ever again.

Another one of the Verilab team has started The Blogging Thing. Will is our systems guy, but that can sometimes imply not much more than someone who makes sure your email works and who runs the backups. In practice, Will -- a functional programmer by training -- is really a systems guy on steroids. He is part of our ongoing strategy for keeping Verilab right as far as the convergence of hardware and software methodologies is concerned. If you've ever wondered if recursive make is harmful for chip builds, if you've ever struggled to filter out those bogus non-warnings from the log output of <insert your favourite EDA tool>, if you've ever wanted to jump out of a high window because your <insert your favourite EDA vendor> simulator won't work unless you first run a seventy-two-line csh script (and you're running bash), I think you'll find his stuff useful.

One of the scariest movies ever is Father Of The Bride. It's bad enough the poor dad, George Banks (played by Steve Martin) having his retirement funds sucked out of him by the sinister wedding-planning villain, Franck (Martin Shott). But the worst part is when the daughter Annie (Kimberley Williams-Paisley) announces to George that she is getting married. We see the twenty-something beauty announce the marriage, but George double-takes because all he can see is the five year old version of Annie, his precious baby girl, speaking the same words. As the father of daughters myself, I have to blink back a tear every time I'm forced to watch the damn thing. A similar, although less emotional marking of the quiet, inexorable passage of time happened to me today in Best Buy.

I just bought a new PC. Actually, it was an old PC - a refurbished Dell laptop. I spent $400 on a beat up brick, instead of, say, $1,900 on something shiny and new for a few reasons. One is that I'm a terrible maximizer and am still trying to decide which shiny and new machine I should get. Another is that I actually need two machines - one shiny and new, but also a stopgap machine for one of my team while her Lenovo goes back for repair. And the Dell is a perfect stopgap machine. But most important of all is this: