Book Review – Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross

Every now and then I come across a book that makes me go wow.  Predictable Revenue is one of them.

At some points the writing style seems a little choppy, but the message was pretty amazing.  Learn how a team of 1, completely changed how sales were being done for salesforce.com, ultimately building out a 12 person team that resulted in $100,000,000 a year in new sales.  And yes, that was recurring revenue!

It’s a fascinating story that tells of how Aaron went from CEO to Junior salesperson to someone who revolutionized how a billion dollar company manages their sales.

And yes, he does plug salesforce.com as a tool quite often!

Here is a quick summary of his methods:

Predictable Revenue is all about creating Predictable Lead Generation

First, get your team specialized by separating your sales group into the following roles:

• Sales Development – (Qualifiers)
• Account Executives – (Closers)
• Account Mangers – (Farmers)

Next, focus your Sales Development Team properly by doing the following:

• Ditch cold calls
• Invest real time in developing your target customer
• Invest more real time in researching and getting to the right people who work for your target customer
• Reach out using mass email in a simple format that is short, clear, honest and to the point.  The main point of the email is to ask a C level executive to point you to the right person in the company whom you should talk to about your product or service.  He said he was getting 7-10% response rates on this method!
• Call and build a relationship with that person by learning everything there is to know about the company.
• Qualify the lead based on key criteria.
• Pass the lead onto the Account Executives to close it
• Track metrics such as qualified leads per week, not things like calls and contacts

There is so much more to his methods and I highly encourage anyone developing a sales team to invest a few hours reading Predictable Revenue.  

Does Office Space Really Matter?

I was thinking back to my fondest days in the software industry.  There are four times that came to mind:

1. Crushing the ping pong ball on a Saturday afternoon, shirts off, with my soon to be business partner Ahn Ahn at Microsoft.  And no, I don’t think we were there that day working on Microsoft tasks!
2. Freezing my ass off in our Ballard office with no heat at 2am trying to get client projects out the door.
3. Late night Denny’s with Ahn Ahn after working a full day at Microsoft, and a full night on the business
4. My 2nd office in Vietnam, right in the heart of the party district. We’d regularly work til 9 or 10pm, then often hang out drinking together.  One particular night comes to mind as it was my birthday.  So after a long day of work, the team and I drank ourselves into the ground and I missed my flight back to the USA the next day

All these memories, the space was never really that important to me. I had a nice office during my time at Microsoft and it just felt secluded.

What clicked in my mind as we designed our our new Vinasource office was these fond memories were all about my extreme experiences, good and bad.  It was these experiences that spawned emotions and drove me to work harder.

With that in mind, we set out to create an office that was fun, exciting, dynamic and community oriented.

Still about a month away from completion, here is what we are doing:

• Open floor plan, grouped by projects with project names hanging from the ceiling
• The “War Room” – beautiful conference room with mounted projector made for efficient project meetings
• The “One Room” – Techies like games, clients use skype, Xbox One is an awesome skype experience.  The One Room features a couch, small conference table, 60 inch screen, game character fat heads on the wall and an Xbox one. Skype calls with clients take priority, any other times, anything goes
• The “Arena” – We find there is no better way to let off steam than to battle it out on the ping pong table
• The “Library” – As techies we spend a lot of time on a screen. Sometimes it’s nice to just pick up an old fashion book and kick back on the bean bags.  Afternoon nap is cool too, after all, who didn’t fall asleep in a library back in school at one point in their life?

So if you ask me, do I think having an amazing class A office space matters, I’d have to say no.

But creating a space coupled with a working culture that breeds extreme experiences is critical.

Making That First Day Special

A few years back we recognized that a lot of our retention problems happened in the first week of work. After asking around, I found out that it’s a relatively common problem in Vietnam as candidates are still looking at options up through their first couple of weeks. This posed a serious risk to our project schedules and sales pipeline. For the longest time I just accepted it as a fact of life and basically threw my hands up in the air, until I started reading some articles about creative onboarding.

Sadly I don’t remember where i read it, but a quote that stuck in my head was “when it’s all said and done, a team member will only remember their first and last day”. With this in mind I sat down with my team and started putting a new process into place that we call the 5 days of fun.

The key to the 5 days of fun is the team member’s mentor. Each day they meet for coffee, discuss the previous day, and get feedback both directions. The mentor isn’t involved in the team member’s review process so they serve as a senior member who can really drive in our core value “Build open and honest relationships through communication”.  Some of the ideas we embrace during the first week are:

• Fun – Every day there is something fun. From foosball to ping pong to drinking games. We make the new team member feel like they want to go back to the office
• Lunch Roulette – Our guys love to gamble, so we make lunch into a game! Right before lunch we gather the company to the middle of the office. The new team member then draws 3 names out of a hat. Along with the mentor, the 5 team member share an intimate lunch.
• Real work – We make sure they are doing multiple tasks that are real and valuable to our business
• Recognition – From day 1 to day 5, team members are encouraged to interact with the new member. We hang a big sign on their desk and formally remove it on graduation day
• Learning – Everyday there is some learning activity taught by a trainer who specializes. We want to make sure the team member is schooled in everything from company history to process.
• Photo Journal – All through the first week we take pictures of the new team member. The following week those pics are put into a video and played up on the lunch room tv.

Got a cool onboarding technique you’d like to share?

 

Here’s why we flattened our company

I have been blessed to have spent a majority of my working career as an entrepreneur surrounded by great people.  I’ve spent much of this career reading business books, blogs, and magazines. While there are many different opinions on how to run a business, no matter who you talk to in the entrepreneur or managerial world, they will tell you this: “It’s critical to surround yourself by great people”.  That being the case, as leaders, the next step is to make sure you have done everything in your power to set those great people free to grow the business.

The evolution of Vinasource started as a couple of guys, sick of Microsoft process, who wanted to operate freely and build great, affordable applications for our clients. We were fortunate to find a dynamic, enthusiastic group of developers in Vietnam and we were off to the races. We ran the company loosely, with very few rules, and loosely based process. Once you get into dealing with cultural differences, time zones, communication challenges, and English as a second language you realize process is the key to success.

But having a good SDLC and having a structured hierarchy of team members are very different things. When I was at Microsoft, they went through a realization that most developers are not cut out to be managers, and, in fact hate the routine duties managers are faced with.  So they stopped pressuring devs to move “up” the ladder and instead created an individual contributor track. Even though I was there through this evolution, I found myself making the same mistake again at Vinasource.

Cut to 2011. As we worked to really define our processes in a way that worked for our team and our clients, we started slowly “promoting” developers to managerial positions. By 2012 we had a beautiful hierarchy structure that resulted in us taking 50% of the time away from our top devs who were now managing people instead of pursuing their passion – writing code. As a services business, our three key metrics are utilization, partner satisfaction and team happiness.  We weren’t doing particularly well in any of the three.

My aha moment came when I was reading an article in Inc Magazine titled “It’s Time to Ditch Your Org Chart“. The study on Valve in particular and their Handbook for New Employees really resonated with me and made me think “wow, that’s an awesome place to work”. As soon as I started contemplating the idea for Vinasource I knew it was exactly what we needed to do for the following reasons:

1. Our core team unit was based around a client project, not a technology
2. Most devs don’t like to manage
3. Utilization is a key metric
4. Project team members are better suited to review a team member than a manger
5. “We own our work” is the #1 value in our company.
6. We needed to empower people with the ability to choose their work (project), train specifically for that work, be evaluated fairly on their work
7. We needed people who loved initiatives driving them: The “Champion” was born

So in 2014 we flattened the company. We appointed a managing director to focus on company initiatives. We are in the process of hiring a training coordinator to help people find the right resources they need to get better at their role. We do a quarterly “request process” that allows people to move projects. We focus more on roles and responsibilities within a project team (which fits nicely with the family values found in our culture). We introduced 360 reviews in which each reviewer’s opinion carries equal weight in the final score.

In our company now nobody reports to anybody. A project team has a unified goal each iteration and they work together towards it.  Piece by piece they work to build amazing software for our partners.  We are helping team members understand that they own their career growth and have the companies full support in climbing which ever mountain they choose. While it’s still a work in progress, the initial team satisfaction level, which we measure using a tool called Tiny Pulse, has been climbing each month. I’m excited to come back and post more concrete results once we’ve hit the 12 month mark.

While flattening your company may not be the way to go for you, one thing we can agree on is you need to find good people, then find a way to set them free.

Wipe out the org chart

What Does Transparency and Social Media Have To do With Creating a Strong Business Mindset Across Your Team?

Recently I was interviewed by Entrepreneur Magazine columnist Chris Hann.  The question they were trying to answer was “Do you accept friend requests from your employees on Facebook”. The short answer for me is yes.  The long answer is a bit more involved. I’ve been really excited about a recent move in our company to provide full transparency to our team while teaching everyone what it means to take ownership in our business. At Vinasource, one of our core values is “Build open and honest relationships through communication”.  What this means as company leaders is that no information is kept secret from the team. While some people feel big about privacy, I’m not one of them. In the modern era of social media, it’s a bit of a pipe dream to think you can really keep many too many things a secret. So, why not embrace it! At Vinasource we use social media to expose different parts of our company culture to the world.  This is valuable both for internal participation in company functions and external recruiting. A core competency we measure each month is “Business Mindset”.  Combining this with the value we place on communication, we have embarked on a mission to help our team members fully understand our business.  The first step to this was opening up our financials both at a high level, and at a project level. Currently, we are working with our team members to truly understand what it means to run a business, starting at their project level.  Every project has the core elements of running a small business:

• Team Building
• Client Satisfaction
• Budgeting
• Profit and Loss

By flattening our organization and getting rid of the hierarchical management structure, each team member has more significant roles within their project.  The most important being monthly peer reviews. While we are just starting down this path, I’ve already seen a noticeable bump in enthusiasm.  Using Tiny Pulse we measure our teams happiness and the week after we revealed our first set of financials we saw an immediate spike. Sure, there is probably a place and an industry where it makes sense to have a hierarchical structure and keep separation between your personal and professional lives. In tech though, I think it’s going to be harder and harder to recruit in a closed organization when you are going against forward thinking companies such as Valve, Zappos and Google.