Cooking Up a Storm: Ten Reasons Why SharePoint™ Clients are Often Rightly Wrong

"The types of clients we were dealing with weren't taking SharePoint seriously..." Partner CEO 

The issue of clients not seeking or taking professional advice has been on my mind for some years but listening to the increasing vocal agreement by expert consultants in SharePoint™-land, it is time to scope out the simple problem – that the client isn’t always right and more often than not they are wrong, rightly or wrongly.

Having worked with SharePoint over the last decade as both client and strategist I know that at first and without any guidance (hence Salem™) it takes a long time, and I mean a long time to come to grips with what SharePoint really is and what it can do. It is in many senses conceptual and everything from an applied science to an applied art form. Like many people, there is a ‘penny drop’ moment at around the year to eighteen month mark where things start to become clear and the multifarious elements of SharePoint and their interconnectedness start to make real sense.

In client businesses, eighteen months can be a very long time indeed and in that first eighteen months you can be sure it can be the start of serious implementation and adoption problems where SharePoint is concerned. Whilst SharePoint can satisfy the revenue fix of a one-off point-solution seller or a licence seller, it can leave a client in the SharePoint doldrums with a large initial investment and nowhere to turn later. Whilst there are many reasons why this happens, it is increasingly clear that the client themselves must take much of the wrap.

For those of you who have ever enjoyed the TV show Kitchen Nightmares with hard-hitting expert chef Gordon Ramsey you will know that each week he enters a restaurant business which is falling apart and in a wholly independent way reads the owners the riot act to save their bacon. He uses various techniques after initial observations from early and simple rectification tasks all the way on to threatening to walk out if the owner is unwilling to listen or take heed of his overall wisdom. Welcome to the world of SharePoint Nightmares.

The problem for many consultants is that whilst they really are at the top of their game there is a subtle difference between their own position and that of Chef Ramsay. Ramsay is not on their payroll and ultimately it doesn’t matter whether the restaurant owner listens or not. If they don’t their business collapses and he walks way. For the SharePoint consultant however, there aren’t so many (though there are a few yes) who are able to speak so freely and walk out of the door with no recompense for their time. Not being paid by a client and being able to say what you really think is a luxury that is often only afforded in conference presentations, articles and occasionally in pre-sales sessions.

When encountering your own SharePoint Nightmare scenarios it is easy to be viewed as part of the problem where a client is concerned and quickly become embroiled in a burgeoning blame culture pointed squarely at you. Don’t shoot the messenger? You are in the firing line for sure as the harbinger of bad news – they got it stubbornly wrong for not listening.     

Here are ten rogue reasons why clients must take some responsibility for getting things wrong when embracing SharePoint:

1. Sounds like a job for the IT guys

Disenfranchising SharePoint from its natural business ownership is the biggest error any client can make. Clearly every IT department in the current climate is defending its reputation and fighting its corner but all too often SharePoint, without a business roadmap, without a logical plan with all its technical features and functions is placed directly in the hands of IT ownership. The reasons below highlight many of the wrong reasons why this occurs.

Once in the hands of IT, internal personnel frequently take the opportunity of ramping up their own resumes by playing with, practicing and learning SharePoint internally with little or no outside help before latching on to a business pilot that then rapidly runs out of control and demands non-existent IT budget and resources that the CIO had never dreamed of or anticipated. This begins the downward spiral of discontent, change controls and of ‘future projects’ that rarely materialise. 


2. The worst vice is advice 

Have you ever wondered why the client believes they know better than the subject matter expert? It is an increasing trend based primarily on the basis that any independent professional is trying to fleece them and lives only in an ideal world of fantasy SharePoint installations and doesn’t have practical, real-world experience of running a business. The consultant recommendations are based on the perfect idealism of a Microsoft manual somewhere, so they wrongly think.

What this lack of heeding advice actually means is that the client is often scared; scared of hearing and therefore accepting that they may have got things wrong or of hearing the truth that advice has been ignored. It is easier to prove the consultant wrong than to shoulder the responsibility for blame, lack of planning, budget, resources and strategy right? When the doctor says stop smoking or the garage mechanic says that the car is broken from bad driving or the electrician tells you that you need a re-wire or the dentist tells you that you need some work, you argue with them do you?

One of the reasons why we don’t argue with long term, time served, trained professionals is because we acknowledge that they are the experts in their chosen field and we regretfully accept something generally needs to be done to fix the situation. We may request a second opinion however if the repair bill is too expensive. It is very possible that because of the undisciplined nature of the SharePoint profession with its plethora of unqualified and uncertified contractors that IT is not taken seriously as a profession and therefore advice is optional, only accepted in the final eventuality and often only when it is reassuringly expensive.

It is the responsibility of client to select and heed the professional advice of the experts they choose to work with and live with the consequences if they do not listen.

3. SharePoint is just more software (or a service) isn't it?  

Due to the history of Microsoft software bridging the gap between business and the home (think Office and Outlook) and therefore its relatively easy installation and engagement, it is easy to see why a client may take the view that SharePoint is simply more software to be installed and used, just like Excel or Word. That excuse would have been very plausible back in 2003 but doesn’t work so well in 2013 where there is a colossal history and learning of the SharePoint product and platform. With hundreds of conferences and masses of internet information, fifteen minutes of any client time online would educate anyone enough to  realise that SharePoint is very far from simply a piece of software to install and be up and running in minutes with.

Consequently the continued excuse by clients that they didn’t realise so much was involved really doesn't wash and points firmly back to the first two points in terms of internal playing with software and the absolute refusal to work with subject matter experts who are deemed unnecessary and expensive. As Red Adair, the oil fire rescue genius said, “if you think working with an expert is expensive, wait until you work with an amateur”.

The continued failure of clients to approach SharePoint with the respect, seriousness and budget required to ensure it brings the value and benefits required is at the heart of the problem. It has a Microsoft badge on it so it must be easy.  Office 365 will not make the situation go away, it may simply exacerbate the problem further because there is even less for the client to plan to get them going - only to find that once they have the service, they have absolutely no idea how to engage with SharePoint Online but have already started playing with it with live business data.

It is the responsibility of every SharePoint client to spend time understanding the product, understanding how to engage with it, defining a business strategy, roadmap and service blueprint as well as ensuring both business and IT governance are aligned. It isn’t hard, just choose an expert to help.

4. I'm far too busy to do my homework 

 

Anyone who has ever tried to manage a SharePoint project from either the IT side or the partner side will know the problem here. Client stakeholders are rarely available because they are far too busy doing more important things like day to day work, having lunch and meetings and answering their phone and emails. Expand this issue exponentially across the entire stakeholder team and you will be lucky to get a meeting of all stakeholder members more than every 4 or 6 weeks, if at all.

Just like a pet at Christmas, with SharePoint comes responsibility, serious responsibility. I was once asked at a keynote I gave at Microsoft how I succeeded as a business owner in delivering SharePoint successfully to over 20,000 people and I said matter-of-factly, that I hung myself out to dry, I lived and breathed SharePoint, its commitment and responsibilities to my business and owned it as if it was my very own baby.

From the outset the client must appoint a business sponsor and committed stakeholders who can themselves make budget decisions and own the SharePoint program on behalf of the entire organisation. If they are unwilling to do their homework, they will undoubtedly fail the exam and will only have themselves to blame.

 5. That's far too big to consider, let's just do this

For many organisations, SharePoint is a business program rather than an IT project. This program-centric view occurs naturally due to the interconnectedness of related business services that must be delivered in unison or in parallel. Due to the overlap in feature services it makes a great deal of budget and resource sense to take a program approach to SharePoint and something that lays at the foundation of the Salem™ value proposition for SharePoint.

Taking the program approach is not something that always comes naturally with SharePoint because it has largely not been sold as a program to date. Instead SharePoint has been largely sold as a development platform or some kind of flexible and agile development tool. It reminds me of a Microsoft author who once told me that he had been requested to remove the word ‘program’ from his chapters and replace it with ‘project’ by the editor as it was viewed as a less expensive proposition and would be ‘less scary’.

As the client has rarely planned for a program, does not have a program manager or program budget and the best they may go to is a (cheaper) ‘senior project manager’ in IT so it is far too tempting to jump straight into a short-term IT-centric project and get things going. What this all too often means is that the client believes that if they put something in short term the business will like it and then someone else can go and ask for more money later from an ever-angry Finance Director or CFO.

It is called introducing SharePoint organically, by stealth and as many can testify, this tactic rarely works or convinces anyone and such short termism has been demonstrated time and time again to fail. A CIO being scared of the CFO really is no excuse when approaching the subject of the  SharePoint budget but fear occurs because as in step 1, the client placed the responsibility for SharePoint and its relative budget wholly and wrongly in the hands of the CIO. Once again it is the client responsibility to define the business strategy for SharePoint in advance or work with a strategic partner to define a roadmap that can then be assigned the required budget and resources. Turning a project into a program is not an easy thing to achieve later in the day if the initial project itself undermines the intrinsic program.

6. We are a huge company and we know our business
 

Being brow-beaten by companies with large internal teams with their own agendas and vested interests is commonplace and you are often simply left feeling overwhelmed. What this means is that many organisations don’t want to be told what to do with SharePoint or how to approach it and will do it themselves in the same way they have approached everything else. It is caused by a detachment to the services that underpin their business. The large client will take the view that they have hundreds of incumbent IT staff and generalist managed service providers. Once again we come back to the issue that the client is taking the view that SharePoint is just software that has pre-defined services that just get picked up as they go along. One thing that SharePoint is definitely not is Exchange.

The end result is that the client all too often passes responsibility to those who do not know SharePoint, have no history of it and will not be told differently. To provide an example, I have encountered a number of organisations that have requested complete farm designs from highly qualified Gold Partners only then to witness the potential implementation stall due to internal IT architects re-architecting the farm design believing that they know better, not trusting the expert partner and frequently breaking many best practice design rules. On more than one occasion I have heard it said that best practices are for ideal worlds and not for the real world! The client must shoulder the responsibility for this scenario.

7. We are far too busy implementing SAP

Relative to other points made earlier in this article, why is it that implementing SAP or PeopleSoft, Dynamics or other enterprise platforms is taken seriously and thus planned for, resourced and budgeted for with over-zealous programmatic seriousness whilst SharePoint is treated as the poor, project second-cousin? There are many reasons why this occurs but it is largely due to perception, marketing and associated costs as well as internal divisional stakeholder sponsorship. SharePoint typically lacks any form of direct sponsorship at the outset because no one is sure what they are going to use it for, or that it is viewed as a general development platform for everything apart from the big services.

SAP and similar platforms are accepted as big, heavy duty, Finance and HR-related platforms sponsored by Directors with political weight with the relative investment requirements. From the very start these platforms are understood for what they are and what they are likely to cost. How an SAP platform could ever produce an ROI to cover a $half billion investment is personally beyond me but I am sure there are examples. However SharePoint doesn’t have a fundamental business raison d’etre because it has never come under direct attack from a business-orientated competitor, therefore it has never needed to develop a specific business value proposition according to some and subsequently lacks natural business sponsorship. Its natural flexibility may also simply be its problem.

The result of this is that SharePoint has not set out its stall in the international market as a heavyweight enterprise platform that requires X, Y and Z in terms of typical investment, resourcing and approach to be viewed by clients in the same way as SAP or PeopleSoft. Consequently it lacks a degree of business seriousness which in turn means that the client does not treat SharePoint with the gravitas it deserves. Don't misunderstand the point, I am not suggesting that SharePoint is SAP, what I am pointing out is that where large enterprise platforms have clarity, raison d'etre and an applied benefits model attached so they are approached by the client in a far more serious way. 

According to Salem™, SharePoint is modular at a business service level in a parallel way to that which we find in other major enterprise platforms like SAP. However until Salem™ becomes all pervasive in setting out the SharePoint stall the client will fail to interpret the SharePoint platform as anything more than a lesser cousin of larger enterprise platforms which in turn means the client will misjudge the SharePoint platform, its weight and continue to treat it with a lack of due diligence. There is a danger that this may be exacerbated further via the vagaries and flippancy of ‘social’ and the (perhaps wrongly termed ‘light-weight’) consumer proposition of Office 365.

One may argue that SharePoint is not SAP or PeopleSoft or anything similar and its strength lays in its alternate ways of being adopted. The point here is that clients frequently pay far more attention and make a far greater investment in the platforms that they apply a major business value proposition to. It would be fantastic if this was the case of SharePoint as it really deserves it. Whilst the client fails to grasp the enormity of SharePoint, and they have been told, they will continue in the main to treat it as far ‘lighter’ than we know it is and that impacts a great many other things.

8. Don't be ridiculous, how much?! 

 

Ah yes, this little chestnut – cost. How many times does the SharePoint professional face the unrealistic budget expectations of an ever hopeful and budget challenged client IT manager. “So you would like to deliver 10 separate business enterprise services by the summer? Yes please. How much will it cost? Well it depends what specifically you want? Well I have $10,000 but we already have the software and licences, we will need to get the servers in that…How much?!! We will do it ourselves then…”

You know how it goes – completely unrealistic expectations or wanting everything for not very much. An interesting game to play is to ask a client audience to place a value proposition against each service to be delivered. In other words, how much do you think an intranet costs? Don’t bother determining what it contains just get a figure to be stated out loud. You will frequently be surprised how little client audiences think things cost.

There are a number of issues with budget and they often stem from point one in this list which is that IT has been tasked with delivering a business solution using SharePoint but without any associated business budget. This is due to lack of business ownership, sponsorship, involvement and because the client didn’t take the time to understand what SharePoint is, what the aligned business strategy is and what it requires in terms of budget and resources.

Whilst it is very much the tasks of the professional partner consultant to educate the client in terms of detailed costs, it is the direct responsibility of the client to apply adequate budget to commence a SharePoint engagement and to have an in situ method of raising further capital in a timely manner and at a realistic level to engage with the platform effectively. Having unrealistic budget expectations for a full enterprise platform does nothing except create more issues and leads to insistent corner cutting, which starts to contribute to SharePoint program and project failure.

Looking at the cloud and Office 365, some budget issues are alleviated such as per month, per seat costs which can far more easily be anticipated. Whilst the client may be thinking that there is no infrastructure requirements think again. A well connected cloud service will need associated connectivity from Active Directory and other things that will require infrastructure onsite as well as the ubiquitous issue regarding corporate bandwidth. Let’s make this simple, a 4mb link for your 10,000 users to the cloud will simply not cut it for an enterprise collaborative platform irrespective of any WAN accelerator solutions you may be convinced to invest in by the infrastructure team.

I am on record for asking Steve Ballmer the corporate bandwidth question in front of 1000 people so this isn’t the first time this issue has been raised and it certainly won’t be the last. Like many things in life, you get what you pay for and for clients their ultimate SharePoint service is to a degree aligned with the level of investment in the correct areas. It is the responsibility of both the client and the partner to ensure that this is money well spent and spent in the right way.

 

9. I can get a contractor for $200

Picking up from the previous point, with little budget in place and no plan or business strategy the next step for the client to get things wholly wrong is to go for the cheapest route in terms of service delivery and that usually means resourcing.

Prior to the implementation of SharePoint there will be little if any SharePoint experience within an incumbent IT team, though these days there could be some. There is no way of knowing at the outset whether any incumbent SharePoint experience is actually good, solid, educated experience. Again the client may be tempted to see SharePoint as nothing more than software or some service that can be picked up and learned in an hour or two and which anyone in the team can master by Friday.

Once this has been demonstrated to be a mistaken belief the next step is to hire a skilled resource that can sort things out and gain rapid progression for the least possible cost. I have yet to meet many organisations that hire a CEO, CIO or CFO on the cheap. Similarly you know what happens when you go to the cheapest garage, the cheapest kitchen fitter or buy the cheapest clothes, they tend not to do the job or last as well as their more expensive cousins. They say you often get what you pay for.

So why then does a client believe that expert SharePoint skills can be gained for so little? Expertise is not gained overnight and can take years to obtain, mature and refine and therefore there is an associated cost of hire. Professional skills cost money but professionalism saves both time and money in the long run. Fees are not defined by recruiters, recruitment agencies with high margins or the misleading ‘market rate’ statement, fees are aligned to the professional skills and services that are readily available.

Hiring a cheap plumber may fix a problem for an hour but a professional plumbing firm is likely to fix the issue permanently. Anyone who has ever seen Holmes on Homes knows that. Similarly hiring a professional SharePoint partner brings the variety of professionally honed skills from an experienced team that live and breathe SharePoint for a huge range of clients, day in and day out. It is also likely that the professional partner team has been fully trained with professional certifications to prove it. This is rare if not impossible to find in a single person for $200 a day so frequently, inevitably and wrongly described as a ‘SharePoint expert’.

Inevitably it is the client responsibility to understand the cost of skilled partner resources, the range of resource requirements for on premise or cloud and their availability when embracing SharePoint and thus budget accordingly. If the client chooses to ‘go cheap’ then that is their responsibility for what may happen next and the subsequent cost of remedial action.

10. They told me it is easy 

Why would SharePoint be easy? Why is defining and delivering any enterprise business program easy? Why would the delivery of any enterprise business platform be easy for that matter? There is no evidence for this in the last 30 years. Unless something is almost completely pre-built, pre-deployed and pre-designed and performs exactly per your established requirements, it is very likely not to be easy and requires involvement, thinking and sustained commitment.

Any organisation contains three ages of workers, the young, the middle-aged and the old and therefore there are three completely different audiences to engage with for a start. This means than any single service delivered may have a range of educational and adoption challenges. An extensive, feature rich, comprehensive platform such as SharePoint is naturally going to contain complexities and these complexities take time to learn, embrace and work with. Therefore misjudging what is required to embrace a product like SharePoint must be the fault of the client and not because Microsoft should have told them. When SharePoint proved more complex than first thought (Microsoft doesn’t state what SharePoint should be used for or how it should be adopted) surely most can work out that a product that contains everything from enterprise content management to business intelligence is going to take some serious work to adapt and adopt. I have a feeling that, historically, the free versions of WSS/Foundation etc. set the scene for problems here by making clients believe things were easier to adopt than was really the truth.

Denouement

So where do these ten points leave us. A difficult one, this, the client is always right, they are paying the bills, your bills but if you don’t stand up and be counted and say what you know is right with all your professional experience and knowledge then who is really the wrong one in the equation?

Clients cannot be expected to know everything about a product they have yet to embrace which is why there is a parallel, global SharePoint industry of qualified professionals. However when a client starts to argue with SharePoint professionals, believes they know best whilst having no evidential experience and chooses to ignore professional advice then eventually and inevitably things will start to fail, you will be proven right, they will be proven wrong, they will distance themselves from you or worse still they will blame you. It may be far too late to rectify things by that stage, the business adoption then starts to fail and we have yet another long term dissatisfied SharePoint customer who moves on to playing with their tablets and seeking more gratifying alternatives.

The entire long term future of the SharePoint industry, whether in the cloud or not depends on its inherent professionalism, the client seeking out and then heeding advice professional advice, qualified advice, advice that is respected and valued,  advice that is accurate and valuable. Failure to speak out now may mean that in the years to come you have nothing to speak out about at all. 

The question is whether you are strong enough and prepared enough to be the chef?

 

Copyright Genius! by Morgan & Wolfe. All Rights Reserved 2013.

 

Our Sales are all at Sea: Lets Hit the Deck !

“Have you got the updated sales deck”, shouted Dave across the office, “the one with the latest client logos for Financial Services?! We will need it for the meeting tomorrow at 9am.”

For someone who has been in the technology industry for almost quarter of a century I have seen many things come and go and all too often good things go and many bad things stay. One of those things that has unfortunately stayed and which by now should have long since evolved out of the window is the traditional sales manager approach with their rather old-hat presentation pitches to clients framed perfectly against a back-drop of inane ‘sales slides’ that clients continue to endure to this day.

What makes me see things from a slightly unusual angle is that I have sat on both sides of the IT/Business relationship fence, having been both the seller and the business buyer. Having spent almost four years buying technology as a client I can tell anyone willing to listen that it is not a pretty place to be. As a technology buyer when faced with daily and monthly cold calls from sales people followed inevitably by (when I have run out of excuses) the ubiquitous sales pitch, face to face. 

“Do you have a projector?” requests Dave hopefully.

 It is the general view of some that to sell a value proposition is to repeatedly call a client by wearing down their barriers and eventually winning them over. In today’s sophisticated marketed-to-hell-and-back society, buyers are somewhat more sophisticated than they were back in 1855 (or 1985 for that matter) but that does not stop the tried and tested method of bothering a client until they sign that purchase order.

You know what I mean. It is weekend, month end, quarter end, year end, or the edge of my sanity. Sorry it has taken me three weeks to reply to your email as it has been quarter-end (if you are selling to a seller) becomes “sorry I have emailed you 13 times today” (if you are the buyer from a seller) as “it’s our month-end you see”, ah yes 13, unlucky for some! If its quarter-end be prepared to take the phone of the hook, turn on the answerphone and head for a holiday on the international space station.

Every old trick in the book is seemingly still thrown onto the field of sales play by the ageing sales diehards including the free-lunch (I can buy my own lunches really), free sporting incentives (I’m not ever going to be good at golf) and the ’drinks after work’ thing (being sold to in the pub through the pseudo friendship approach, that old chestnut). I was recently hypocritically at a complimentary sporting event for research purposes only you understand which, looking at the thousands of people choking on mass-cooked steak and Chianti in hospitality, demonstrates that corporate hospitality remains an (inter)national sales pastime for those in the club and is very much alive and well. I actually went to watch the sport and bought nothing.

It appears that the old adage, “If you throw money at them or comp them they will buy won’t they as they will like me for who I am and feel grateful?” Ehm no, not any more. Over the years these tactics have all been tried and believe me I have been tested, to the very edge of my patience. It is true to say that sometimes things are purchased simply because there is a sort of need but you like the person selling to you enough to buy. Therefore people buying from people is true, well kind of.

Going back to 1990 I remember the IT Director of a corporate giant revealing how he had selected SuperCalc 5 as the spreadsheet of choice for the global organisation because his son was using it at school. I rest my case.   I have news: the buyer has advanced their approach to buying and being sold to in these modern times and in part this is because purchasing decisions are made by a wider landscape of business and IT personnel than before and they don’t know, or want to know the rules of being sold to.

Why is it therefore that old sales-presentation techniques have not adapted and modernised in parallel? Whilst there will always be a few who fall for the outmoded techniques of drinks, sports and the “what’s in it for me personally” approach , as if it were part and parcel of some massive executive club, the majority have long since moved on and do buy in a different way. What ever happened to purchasing something because it simply is rather good and useful and beneficial and of actual value to me and my business? Ah perhaps rather naively that would be far too easy in this throw-away, try-it-now-and-bin-it-later global economy. Perhaps some believe that people rather enjoy being sold to as it justifies their superior  position and the responsibility this bestows.

The purpose of this article is not to bash the salesman, the buyer or indeed the act of ‘selling’ as everyone is trying to sell something, even if it is just their own personas. One only has to look at the nonsense promoted through personal profiles on social network to appreciate that – brand generation Y (why) anyone?!

In fact the desire to write this article was actually prompted by recently sitting through what I can only describe as the most tortuous opening presentation of yesteryear and one that sadly still haunts the vast majority of Microsoft partner sales openers today – the ubiquitous (death by) PowerPoint slide deck, partner sales presentation with accompanying rather hopeful, companion narrative, regarding uniqueness and differentiation – or the ‘sales deck’ in short.

“On the next slide on the screen, we have a sales team of 12 and 14 developers, making us the largest partner in…”, extolled the salesman.

You have seen them haven’t you, the people in sharp suits with the latest laptop or tablet and a dongle in hand hurrying to a meeting whilst requesting a projector.

Let’s dig deeper. Deep down in the psyche of some sales managers appears to be a dictat, some ancient rule set in a tablet of stone or carved into a biblical granite rock from time immemorial that before engaging ANY client in ANY useful way of ANY kind apart from ordering a coffee with sugar, even if there are only 30 minutes available in total, the client must first endure without ANY form of input, a PowerPoint slideshow demonstrating ANY, some or indeed all of the following:

·         The Partner Company Title (with a name that is frequently unpronounceable or Greek for something irrelevant)

·         The Partner Locations (often based on the irrelevant value of convenience)

·         The Partner Owners/ Directors (who you will never actually meet as they live in Nassau, Bahamas)

·         The Partner Background in bulleted form (with phrases like ‘key milestones and “high bandwidth value’)

·         The Partner History in bulleted form (we will come to that later)

·         The Partner Offerings to Market  - (Microsoft graphics such as the segmented pie included)

·         The Partner Differentiation in bulleted form (which usually provides absolutely no clear differentiation)

·         The Partner Case Studies (in a generally unreadable format - send them out later as PDF)

·         The Partner Website & Contact Details (the client will have the details already, that’s why the salesman is sitting in front of them right now)

·         And worst of all – Next Steps with the Partner…..(rather optimistic at this stage I’d say)

 

Every sales slide all too frequently contains any or most the following:

·         A peppering of Microsoft and other vendor logos

·         Any Silver or Gold competency partner logos

·         Phrases du jour (typically gobbledegook – ‘enterprise social’ anyone)

·         A consistent slide theme( irrespective of whether the slides have any visual impact whatsoever)

·         A constant peppering of the Partner logo (as if by repeating it everywhere subliminally the client will cave in and be mesmerised. They won’t, trust me.)

·         Traditional & unqualified sales speak phraseology (including classics such as “the Country’s leading…”

·         An Office 365 logo and a website domain name (now with the word ‘cloud’ in it, it used to be the word ‘soft’)

 

For those on the sales team who have secretly seen through the sales deck, its long windedness, lack of specific value, time wasting capabilities and its general inadequacies they will still be forced to present it which causes further issues. You will have seen the presenter, tab quickly through a number of slides muttering that they are irrelevant or no use today and move swiftly on. In this instance, therefore you are enduring a speed reading version of the slides but gaining absolutely zero value except being slightly entertained by an annoyed sales presenter. Even the act of tabbing quickly through the many irrelevant slides is already presenting an image of client disconnection, even if the presenter is to be congratulated by being their own person.

So let’s clarify tell what the sales deck may have just revealed to me about the partner company:

·         The partner company may lack originality – there is a ton of multimedia outlets and styles out there, much of which I can watch before the partner salesman even arrives to see me and only one of which the partner has chosen to use - slides. Where are the companion videos, animations, podcasts and engaging reference materials that are interesting to watch, listen to and read and could I view them on my new tablet or smart phone? If the partner isn’t using the latest technologies to promote their company, how on earth can they convince me they know how to work with the latest technologies and bring the greatest value to my own organisation?! I have decided that they can’t.

 

·         The partner appears to be the same as almost every other potential partner as I have seen the same logos, messages, templates, designs and images and presentation method time and time again on other people’s decks already. Shakespeare could have written the sales script, yes it’s that old. It is like reading an online dating profile where everyone is 29 and everyone loves reading and swimming. Next.

 

·         The partner is typically NOT the ‘UK’s or US leading..’ anything and if they say this without proving it accurately & convincingly I cannot believe anything else they say either. It’s like using the word ‘quality’ – is that ‘good quality’ or ‘bad quality’?! Therefore making statements like the #1 cloud partner means nothing more that they believe their own PR which worries me as a client from the very start and makes me not want to buy. If they can actually evidence it, prove it and demonstrate it then good and we can move on. Even if they are the world-leader in Office 365 sales, this still doesn’t tell me that they are any good for my organisation; it just tells me that they are good at selling online cloud seats. Being the oldest, longest, largest doesn’t actually tell me anything except that someone somewhere is being just a little bit egotistical. And as for ‘Partner of the…’, yes, it really doesn’t mean anything at all.

 

·         In parallel, industry jargon really does start to punch major holes in the good ship ‘partner’ and slides can be heavily sprinkled with these as if they are some kind of marketing magic, fairy dust.  Consider some of the most overworked and over used phrases that need a serious reality check. Phrases such as “mission statement” or “trusted partner” are used to perpetuate a myth that in some way the partner is actually the house of the holy, is separate from a larger heathen rabble which simply cannot be trusted, whilst is simultaneously sponsored by NASA. There are over half a million Microsoft partners and most can very much be trusted and almost all have a mission statement, it’s called making profit whilst delivering good service.

 

·         Organisational statistics in slides out of context tell me absolutely nothing about the partner organisation as we all know the phrase “there are lies, damned lies and statistics”. Telling me that the partner organisations has 100 SharePoint Consultants, work in 13 countries, have over 1300 clients and 5 corporate offices probably also tells me the Directors drive Aston Martins and that I am about to be fleeced. I may add that telling me they have three MVPs on the team doesn’t add to the value proposition either, though it might. A tricky, fickle business this.

 

·         The slide-presenting partner has at this stage demonstrated no clear differentiation to market because everyone and anyone can and does present a technical demonstration of software features and functions which I can be absolutely sure is what is coming next after these slides. Why? Because there is someone silently sitting patiently in the corner tapping away on their laptop not listening to a word their companion sales person is saying. What I want is a quick view that the partner is indeed the de facto strategic partner of choice as demonstrated by everything I am being shown. Instead I am now going to choose a partner purely on price as I have nothing else whatsoever to go on except ‘likeability’ and ‘cultural fit’. I have had four partner slide presentations today and they all looked the same to me.

 

·         As an aside ‘cultural fit’ is usually based on client budget which in turn means that you will ‘culturally fit’ if you don’t appear too big, too small, too smart, too cheap, too expensive or too frightening.  You are going to struggle preparing for that in a slide deck as the initial budget tends to be as random as a roulette wheel.

 

·         The partner is clearly not a thought-leader or perhaps leader in anything much at this stage simply because they have not provided our client with anything in the deck that reflects originality or uniqueness as demonstrated by the existence of the deck itself in the format it is presented in. Perhaps the thought-leadership will show itself at a later stage. Worse still the sales person feel able to waste time and that of the team by dragging us through these slides knowing that they really don’t bring any value at this juncture and if they REALLY believe that they do then you can be sure they are not the partner for us.

 

·         There has been a recent trend to re-style partner websites with lots of squares to make them feel very ‘current’, like the Windows 8 and cloud (I am not allowed to say ‘metro’) interface. Because so many websites have done this, what it actuals says is we lack originality and copied everyone else. Which also puts a word into my client-orientated head, that word is ‘avoid’. Any link between slides and any form of tile based graphics makes me wonder if we live in a world where there is any originality left.

 

·         Worth mentioning is that if the partner presents me with far too many client logos then I may start to believe that they do not value client confidentiality of non-disclosure agreements which makes me rather concerned? Similarly, sector specific client logos don’t necessarily tell me what I want to know because I may like to know how their methods transcend business verticals as much as can be accurately applied to any one in particular. In other words it appears they are trying to second guess me and make themselves appear relevant and I can see through it.

 

·         Having a ‘memorable’ company name or a domain name with the word ‘cloud’ in it or anything Greek, or indeed anything else intellectually pompous will not make us more likely to see the partner as cool, techno-relevant and buy from them, no. Neither is the Director’s history or background of any interest at all. The fact that they went to Harvard or Oxford and started the company aged 23 with their college friend really doesn’t make the slightest difference to the quality of the solution the partner is trying to sell me.

 

·         “Established in 1994” doesn’t necessarily sell me anything positive. Indeed it can also have negative connotations when a slide spells out partner history and longevity. Now you might think this can’t be true but a SharePoint practice established in 1994 means that the practice was doing something else probably until around 2003 which makes any relevancy only true since 2003. As it takes time to build case studies and history as well as a decent client base the practice has been around since 1994 but really been a full SharePoint practice since around 2005. In which case the first 11 years offered no value at all to the pitch. A practice of 2 to 5 years may actually be more fresh, more up to date, indeed far more relevant for my organisation. Therefore old is not necessarily good, it will depend if our partner is offering a wider range of services or something more niche and focused.

 

·         The inclusion of the SharePoint segmented Microsoft pie (graphic) or anything remotely similar tells me that they have nothing else and therefore no original business value proposition for me and they will be leaving my office earlier than they thought therefore we can move past the Next Steps slide right now. It certainly tells me that they have not put in any effort and developed more suitable materials or considered a business-aligned framework approach. If they seemingly won’t make the effort now, what happens later?

 

By now you should be getting my drift here and it’s all for good reason. Clients deserve great engagements from the very start. It is quite remarkable why some sales personnel feel that anything up to 30 minutes for a one-way, slide-deck introduction is acceptable to drag and trawl everyone through as if it was some perverse engagement right-of-passage. It isn’t, the only right-of-passage will be the passage marked Exit. All too often these sales slide decks are composites created by good natured marketing people who have never marketed their own way out of their marketing office, together with sales managers who have wound up in IT companies and who have failed to adapt a technique that was lasts seen selling mainframes in 1979.

I prevaricate unnecessarily. The purpose of the PowerPoint (it always is PowerPoint, isn’t it) sales-deck presentation is to achieve what exactly? Is it any of the following?

·         Introduce the potential partner as the knowledgeable, subject matter expert in the relevant field – in other words demonstrate they know what they are doing and can prove it

·         Introduce the partner as professional, established, preferable and distinguished in achievements and better than anyone else out there who may do the work instead

·         Explain who else thinks they are the partner of choice,  worthy in what they do and will stand up and say it independently and without meals, sporting visits or after work drinks

·         Align the partner company with what the client does to demonstrate that they understand what they do and how they work and how they can fit right in

·         Display relevant badges of distinction that demonstrate end to a degree prove, skills and talents and knowledge

·         Tell the client where the partner is, who they are and  how they typically engage

·         Make the client like them or want to like them as well as believe them as well as demonstrate that they have something of real value to offer at a price that ‘culturally fits’

·         Demonstrate history which literally means that they have time to practice their speciality subject,  know the answers and are likely to still be around next year when maintenance and support is required

·         Offer some real, tangible, palatable evidence to back every statement they make to reassure and address and provide confidence in what they say is true.

 

Ask yourself this question: How much of the above could actually have been achieved without having to say it through slides but instead through web evidence and other materials that can be consumed in advance of your meeting and without wasting valuable time or boring anyone? I am sure the answer is that most of it can, should and therefore be simply abbreviated and confirmed by email in advance of the session. In my own experience, a partner wouldn’t get through the door if I hadn’t learned enough in advance to invite them and establish an early value proposition. If they could address these points without a face-to-face, sales-deck-pitch approach then why didn’t they take the time instead to achieve those things and why instead did they present the sales deck to me?!

As an aside, it always makes me laugh when I receive emails and communication from sales people purporting to be experts in SEO (search engine optimisation). “We have looked at your website and can assist you in getting to number one in your sector and search engine phrase”. Really?! “Well I have looked up your company under the term SEO and can’t even locate you by page ten of the search results, so goodbye”.

Let me stress this for those that do not yet wish to understand, the sales deck at the beginning of a partner meeting more often than not undermines most things of value that you go on to present and it eats into everyone’s valuable time, all too frequently wasting the sales opportunity. From a Microsoft partner perspective what a sales deck does more often than not is undermine the value proposition that a partner is in fact trying to establish.

The sales deck all too often achieves the following:

·         It can undermine the potential partner position with negative connotations to the extent that potential clients are no longer sure they want to work with the partner

·         It demonstrates that the partner company appears to lack any real form of originality, creativity or inspiration due to its lack of soul

·         It can undermine the partner company credibility, not enhances it, due to wild, misleading, inaccurate or boastful statements or ones that are simply unnecessarily audacious

·         It can accidentally define the partner as part of the pack not leading the pack as it’s a version of the same deck that most others present in many cases

·         It can easily waste time as the deck takes time to go through when it could have been covered in a different format at a different time e.g. in advance

Okay so let’s say that we buy this argument and we are either going to cut down the opening sales deck pitch, radically change its format to something far more useful or else drop it like a hot potato (oh how I wish). Well what does the client really want instead?

In engaging with any client at all as part of pre-sales, one may wish to consider and address the following:

·         All clients have limited time, just like resumes and CVs so partner materials are selling the partner fast in a few headlines. Therefore think about the format of your partner resume (website, multimedia, other engaging collateral etc.)

·         Volume of clients doesn’t reassure the client, but original, independent referencability does

·         All clients can see through boastfulness, exaggeration, outlandish statements and statistics

·         Industry speak, jargon and techno-babble can make a partner irrelevant rather than relevant

·         Overt sector alignment can actually often be anything from a distraction to a complete turn off so be careful

·         Originality, creativity, thought-leadership and strategy are all attractive propositions

·         Technical must always be replaced or at the very least aligned with true business value proposition to succeed

As a final comment, the vast majority of IT sales presentations I have endured (yes endured) over 25 years have been dull, lifeless, too casual, sometimes overly-familiar but generally lacking in engaging delivery and story-telling. It amazes me still how relatively few people can actually present to an audience effectively, and present in a thoroughly engaging way. Professional presentation skills-training should be part and parcel of almost every practice with a sales or pre-sales division with no excuses. Monotonous, monotone voices are not attractive or acceptable in presentation scenarios.   Clients really do want to buy and they most likely do want to buy from you but from the moment that first sales slide projects up onto the wall, the foundations inevitably start to crumble.

Surely this cannot be true you may think, we present with our deck and we already win. Perhaps people already like you or view you as the inevitable choice, or that you are currently being recommended from a particular source or that there are only worse alternatives or that simply that you are the cheapest. Nothing stays the same for ever either, as off-shoring and the cloud have so ably proven in recent times. Business failure occurs when sales strategy is slow to adapt and evolve.

Potential clients are frequently desperate for a sales session to be valuable, insightful, thought-provoking, engaging and dynamic, but sadly largely they are simply not.  People frequently ask why the Salem™ framework sessions as pre-sales scenarios go down so very well with clients? The answer is because Certified Salem™ Professionals practice what we preach here. So here comes our own selling bit and without any form of sales deck! The Certified Salem™ Sales Expert has been deliberately designed to teach sales professionals exactly how to present SharePoint™ and the associated Microsoft stack in a dynamic, engaging way that has meaning, huge quantities of thought-provoking, thought-leadership and a logical, sequential approach to services using business language that anyone can grasp fast.

The Salem™ framework is fun, interesting, clear and insightful and it is as flexible, as dependable and as adaptable as any potential client could possibly wish for. You couldn’t ask for a better introduction to any Microsoft partner practice than that now could you?

 

Copyright Genius! by Morgan & Wolfe. All Rights Reserved 2013