1. Extremely Difficult Sell: First and foremost, understand that hardly any prospects will pick up the phone. For every 100 dials, expect 5 people to answer and only 1 person to have a conversation with you who is actually qualified. Most people will just never answer even if you're calling from randomly generated numbers with a local area code (VividCortex uses legal technology to facilitate this). The company's audience (predominantly DBAs) is very introverted, making the salesperson's job that much more difficult. Not only do prospects practically hate salespeople, they also know more about the technology that VividCortex supports, which is unlike most every other sales job. Usually, salespeople are the experts in the product they represent but not so much with VividCortex because of the technical nature of the sale. This is the kind of job where having little to no sales experience is actually a bonus. From my experience in this role, proper speech and articulation were actually detriments to success since the audience just didn’t want to engage with salespeople anyways. The market for VividCortex’s product is not nearly as extensive as the company would like to think. Management often touts the fact that VividCortex has no known direct competitors, yet any entrepreneur can realize that the very presence of direct competitors is product validation. Rather than competing against known providers in the market, salespeople are forced to compete against their prospects’ inertia (the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality), which is probably the most challenging sale anyone could make. The company is basically trying to convince DBAs that they can to do database monitoring better through VividCortex (which is actually true), even though less robust database monitoring platforms might be adequate for most DBAs. Somehow VividCortex thinks it’s a good idea for its least technical employees to deliver this message to very technical people.
2. Insufficient Marketing Support: Marketing provides quality and educational but ultimately inadequate content to support the sales team. The company hosts a number of informative webinars and it publishes relevant blog posts, but those efforts seem to evangelize the product rather than generate sales or even qualify leads. Most leads that come from marketing aren’t even qualified, so marketing support becomes more of a distraction from selling.
3. Inaccessible Market: VividCortex has defined the market its pursuing or at least wants to pursue, but the company clearly hasn’t identified a way to attract the mass market. It’s facing the classic “Crossing the Chasm” dilemma that so many startups encounter. VividCortex has grown rapidly since its founding but that growth is probably a result of early adopter clients knowing of the CEO through his book. Unfortunately, only so many DBAs are familiar with High Performance MySQL and many of them aren’t even using the open-source databases VividCortex fully supports.
4. Unrealistic Goals: Management has expected salespeople to schedule 25 demos/month in the past, even though experienced and successful salespeople never produced those numbers. It’s as if management picked that number out of thin air because it sounded impressive.
5. Subtle Company Indoctrination: Earth Day is a holiday, which is actually a nice gesture on the company’s part. Nothing harmful there but I’m concerned that getting off for Earth Day is part of the CEO advancing his own political agenda through VividCortex. The company toes a dangerous line by honoring Earth Day above all the other “holidays” on the calendar. For example, I highly doubt that the CEO would take off for Lee-Jackson Day even though many Virginia-based companies consider that day a holiday.
6. CEO’s View of Salespeople: Though I can’t prove this, Baron seems to see salespeople as inferior to developers and other professions for that matter. While I was working at VividCortex, Baron addressed the salespeople as “sales guppies” when leaving the office one evening. Maybe that comment was somehow meant as a compliment but my understanding is that the term guppies refers to a smaller fish in nature. I can understand Baron not liking salespeople in general (just like most DBAs), but I certainly hope he respects them. After all, the very lifeblood depends on the quality of his salespeople. Kind of makes me wonder why sales has been a historical struggle at VividCortex.
