The weather has given us its annual sharp reminder of how fragile our transport infrastructure really is and no doubt there will be the odd business leader wandering through their half empty offices pondering the notion of home offices and this in turn brings another question to mind:

Should they be getting on with a Cloud strategy?

“Why not” is the logical answer but from the CEO’s perspective there are plenty of reasons “why not” and one of the biggest is politics: the political infighting such a radical change may bring with it.

Our CEO will start thinking about the stakeholders; who are the people to gain from a Cloud strategy? Who are the people to lose? And this at all levels of the organization. Just mapping that out is going to be a big enough task on its own then managing the upsurge of positive and negative emotions could become a full time job! And who likes getting involved in company politics anyway? Our CEO needs someone to help them do this as well as catch some bullets.

Enter the Cloud salesman – but is he up to it?

One essential ingredient that is sometimes overlooked in the early stage of a company's life is sales. Everyone gets jazzed up about raising money, building a product, launching a website then, lo-and-behold, a few months or even a year rolls by and you wonder why the customer service team always goes home early. Rest assured, if you don't have sales, you won't have to worry about any other problems for long.Good sales are a critical ingredient in growing any company. If you think of sales people as the human fertilizer that helps to grow revenues, you won't be far wrong.

But what sort of sales person do you need?  Bearing in mind there are 4 sales cultures - yes:  4.   For more information read the Why Killer Products Don't Sell Book Summary ( or simply buy the book)

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 Companies need to make managing change a COMPETENCE, not just have experienced a lot of change.

Many companies say that they "experience a great deal of change", or even "are experienced at change".
 
But to really drive continuous improvement in a fast moving world, companies need to make change management a Competence.  Something that they recognise as a skill that can be taught, honed and developed. Particularly in the next 2 years because it is going to be a very turbulent ride.

I was in a major Waterstones store in London in the business section seeing if I could see my latest book Why Killer Products Don't Sell. You may say author ego, but I'd like to justify it as "checking up on my publisher, Wiley.  The book is about how to sell innovative products and services into corporates - B2B.

Finally found the floor where there are business books - bearing in mind is it a HUUUGE store. There had to be 30 meters of shelving with business books. Everything from Accounting for Dummies through to Macolm Galdwells excellent new book "Outliers" which looks at what makes people successful.

What was interesting, was there were only 50cm of shelving for books on selling.  5m of shelving for books on marketing. So do people not buy books on selling? In which case Dominic and I have wasted our time writing Why Killer? So if they don't read them, how do they gain the skills?

Some interesting perspectives from Bob Apollo from Revenue Insights who has been tracking the principles of the Chasm for a number of year, having spent some with Geoffrey Moore just after he published “Crossing the Chasm”


"It’s clear that you can’t wave a magic wand and cross the chasm overnight (or at all).  One of the things I’ve observed is that start-ups reach the chasm faster now than it used to be when Moore wrote the book (fewer early adopters).  Pragmatic buyers rule!"

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When a recession hits everyone becomes more risk averse. They want more sign-offs before they purchase. They want to pick winners. If you look at the Chasm picture, those who were Early Adopters have now become Early Majority.

So now it is even more difficult to find your Early Adopter / Evangelist / Mentor. Now your networking and farming skills are going to become even more important. And once you think you've found your Early Adopter you need to qualify hard ot make sure that they really do have the budget to launch a meaningful Proof of Concept (POC)