Giri

They are a document-management software provider. Grew out document digitization.

They had a conference for their VAR’s from around the world. Thousands of attendees — very impressive.

Shame we didn’t get engagement here.

Justin

True. But I did distribute an email with a link to this topic to attendees — and it is possible to contribute here without registering. I probably neglected to mention the second point!

The good news is that more than half the people in the session requested a copy of the extract from my book — which is huge!

Hi, it IS a tough sell to start getting folks posting on a new site. I’m with Laserfiche and very interested in Justin’s ideas and I only came to this forum because our social media specialist told me about it.

Anyways, I know people were paying attention to Justin’s class because in a separate session, we had a discussion with vars on ramping up sales capacity, and when someone talked about “adding more salespeople” the folks who attended Justin’s session certainly perked up witha “wait a minute…” response.

Anyways, FWIW, I find that among our Vars, the principals tend to NOT spend much time on online communities.

Justin, I just filled out details to receive more info your book/process/training. Ironically, I also just completed a review of LaserFiche for the news site I write for, and have a lot of interest in the market they are in, which is today very channel-dependent and field sales oriented. I hope to talk more about your work. I can’t comment on your session as I did not attend (so I hope this comment isn’t out of line or too far off topic) but I would offer this for the general ECM/BPM/Workflow market that LaserFiche is in:

generally companies in this space (specifically the software vendors) are great at software innovation, but lousy at selling. So generally they really on early adopters and spend more money on finding prospective customers who “get it” or they’re very reliant on direct sales — in both case is heavy premium to pay (in either or both marketing investments and sales commissions).

These companies are typically bought by larger companies, or the more mature companies like LaserFiche over time build very strong partner/VAR channels, who typically are focused on small-to-mid vertical market segments (i.e., regional players who are tightly connected to their customers).

None of these options create an obvious path to quickly scale up sales for the ISV who has built “the better mousetrap” so the focus on which vendor has the most bleeding-edge capabilities is in many ways misplaced. There is a great opportunity to improve on sales efficiency in these software segments.

Me’Shel

The way NOT to get management buy in is to attempt to sell the new model yourself (better not to be a martyr!)

The trick is to provide my book to management without advertising your position — and then offer to broker a discussion between your management team and myself (a conference call).

You can do a better job of influencing your superiors if you appear to be undecided yourself.

Justin