We’ve read the dumb company: how to avoid the fork in the road (part 1 and part 2) and dead company walking: avoiding the graveyard (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7 and part 8) articles, and the two installments of “we want to be a smart company” (part 1 and part 2), and we truly want to be a smart company, and we are taking the mistakes, and advice, to heart. Is there anything else we can do?

There’s always more you can do! However, there’s not much left to talk about that’s true across the board for all software companies. That being said, we can give you ten final pieces of advice that just may help if money is tight, leads are few, and sales are hard. Today, we’ll give you the first five.

01. Don’t Put Off Improvements / Hard Decisions You Know You Need to Do / Make

Fixing it later always takes longer than you think, and the timeframe multiplies the longer you wait! If you need to rip and replace part of the platform core for scalability, start as soon as you realize that it needs to be done. If your target customers aren’t educated enough to realize why they need your product, start investing in a series of educational content pieces of different forms to get them there. If you need to cut the marketing and sales deadweight, do so ASAP. The longer you wait, the more it hurts you and them. Doing it early allows you to give them a fair notice period and time to help them find a more suitable role.

02. Chop the Dead Wood — especially in Management & the C-Suite

Refocus the dollars on the developers, content creators, and solution-focussed sales people who are actually generating value. the doctor can’t say this enough. You wouldn’t believe how many startups in tech have been dragged into oblivion by an overweighted inappropriate management team (because the investors thought big names would bring success) — but if they aren’t the right people for the job, or the job isn’t even needed to begin with, nothing could be further from the truth … and instead of being the buoyant striders intended to get you across the lake, they are the cement shoes that sink you to the bottom.

03. Tell the Truth, No Matter What

Especially around what your product does today, and especially especially with respect to anything asked by a customer. Any individual with a half a brain knows that no product does everything, and any individual with a brain can be educated as to why no product should and, more importantly, why they don’t want some of the features the Free RFP vendors are promoting (because it’s not feature, it’s function, and, more specifically, the function they need to do).

The reality is that a good customer will value the truth, especially when they hear so little of it these days among the lies, damn lies, statistics, Gen-AI, marketing buzzwords and hogwash. Moreover, they know they probably don’t need everything they ask for and definitely not day one (as it takes time to learn modules and suites and use them to full effect). They also know that most of the “wish list” gathered from across the organization is just stakeholders trying to be useful and they really only want the functionality to do their daily jobs, and, more importantly, the stakeholders will be happy if that core functionality is done well.

So if you’re missing a few things, that’s okay. The customers know there will always be pain (if work was always fun, people would want to work for as little as they could afford to), so as long as you can relieve the majority of, and the most common, pain, those customers will be quite happy to suffer a little aggravation here and there instead of the cluster(f6ck) migraine they currently have on a daily basis.

04. Sales Channel Reconsideration

Look at how you are selling now and think about if that is how, or the only way, you should be selling.

If you are not doing partner/channel sales, maybe you need to do partner/channel sales. If there is a niche consultancy advising clients on a daily basis with problems that your solution solves, maybe you should be training those consultants on how your solution can be used to solve the problems, training those consultants on how to install the solution, and then putting a partnership agreement in place for those consultants to sell the solution for you to their clients for which it is appropriate.

If you are relying mostly on partner/channel sales, and they aren’t coming in fast and furious like you hoped, maybe you need to step up direct sales. In the right circumstances the right partners will do wonders for sales, but if they are consultancies, it will be highly dependent on what customers come to them, since most niche consultancies still have to take what they can get (while the Big X take the lion’s share of projects, even those which they probably shouldn’t because they are already so busy trying to support so many clients with digital transformation projects, because any consultant who turns away any work at a Big X risks getting fired). So even if your consulting/services partner is your greatest champion, you can’t always rely on them to be a consistent source of sales.

05. Rethink Partnerships

Regardless if it is part of your strategy or not and what partners you do, or don’t, have today. It’s rare for a company to get it right out of the gate, or for the strategy that is right out of the gate to be the best one down the road as markets change, directions change, plans change, etc. If things are going well, you follow the if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If things aren’t going well, you evaluate and rethink it. Your strategy/partners could still be the right strategy/partners, and it just needs more time for the strategy/relationships to take off, or it might be that you need a new strategy/relationship.

No consultancies or complementary offerings selling your solution? Why? We’ve mentioned time and time again that no solution is everything to everyone, and there’s always a complementary solution or service that can add value, even if it takes a bit of work to identify it. So if you don’t have a services / implementation partner trained and certified to sell for you, why not? And if you don’t have relationships with one or more complementary solutions with companies with a complementary culture and value, why not? Even if it is only the odd referral, it could help … and if you’re going up against a suite, and your solution is not, it could definitely help. (After all, most customers who need a “suite” really only need a few key modules, at least for the first few years.)

Alternatively, if you only have partners who filled your ears with sweet nothings until you agreed to be a partner and then gave you sweet nothing once the deal was inked, they are NOT partners, especially if right after the deal was inked they decided to partner with another solution provider with a bigger offering and price tag and sell that instead. Those partners should be dropped faster than a radioactive potato and replaced with a new one.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

In part 1, you admitted that you read the dumb company: avoid the fork in the road and dead company walking: avoiding the graveyard articles (links in part 1), taken them to heart, admitted you’re making some mistakes and that you’re not doing some key functions as well as you could. Most importantly, you know you need to do more to avoid becoming a casualty of the next mass corporate extinction that’s coming. And you asked us to tell you what else you could do to avoid becoming a dead company walking (or, even worse, a zombie company^*)? And yesterday we gave you our first five suggestions. Today we give you our next five.

06) Remember Websites are MORE than Static Web Pages

Your website should be a dynamic and interactive website that quickly guide visitors to the educational and informative content they want, with point-based and constructable demos, targeted education and thought leadership, and easy to find contact us options for information requests and specific live demos from thought leaders and solution professionals, not sales people. (Qualify the lead, then pass it on to sales.)

It should not, like the majority of websites today, be an overload of hogwash messaging and buzzwords, fancy animated graphics that don’t actually show the solution in use, a constant barrage of questions (along the “do you have trouble with …”) with the uniform “contact us for answers” directive. It definitely should not contain nonstandard terminology for modules, functions, and processes. (And definitely don’t mislead and say you’re an e-Procurement tool if you’re an e-Sourcing tool, and if you don’t know the difference, that just means you didn’t do your homework!) Confusing or non-existent information on target industries and market size (as we all know there is no one size fits all solution, and pretending that your company has one is just obnoxious). Or utter lack of information on pricing tiers and benefits. (Maybe you can’t give an exact price because you offer SSDO or advanced analytics that requires a lot of pay-per-use cloud processing, but you can still give a base license fee or range. If you’re a M+ annual solution, you don’t want companies that can’t, or won’t, pay more than 100K reaching out. The market should understand you get what you pay for and that a 100K solution won’t, or at least shouldn’t, have all the features of a 1M solution, but also that, if they are a smaller company, they shouldn’t need all the advanced features of the 1M solution either.)

07) Tap Your Talent for Top Tens

Sometimes the talent you overlook (because you think they are just a developer, pre-sales solution advisor, etc.) has the best ideas (and sometimes they don’t, and that’s why you use your leadership to filter out the best ideas).

If you have a problem, or just want to look for opportunities for improvement, ask your people first. Now, they won’t identify or come up with everything (as they have a limited view from a single function and may not have the decades of experience that is sometimes required to come up with something that is both “obvious” and revolutionary), but why should you pay a consultant to help you with improvements you can identify and make in house? You want the consultant focussed on the big win improvements you don’t see (and not easily sidetracked with the dozens of things you can do better).

So, ask all of your employees to come up with, anonymously if it helps, the

• ten best ways to save money,
• ten best investments across the business,
• ten best ways to improve productivity,
• ten SaaS apps you can do without,
• ten functions that would totally change customer productivity in your core offering
• ten functions that could be removed from the roadmap because they are actually low value,
• etc.

And while you will get a lot of pyrite, you will get some gold nuggets. And if you’re knowledgeable enough, you’ll be able to separate the gold nuggets out. (And if not, you’ve jump started your expert advisor with some unique insights into your business and your team and that will improve their productivity.)

08) Always Pause for Innovation

Regardless of how you interpret what we tell you in #10, if an opportunity for innovation presents itself, always pause to evaluate it and see if it is a true opportunity, fits in with the plan, and would make the product, and the plan, better. If it would make the plan better, and it wouldn’t slow progress down more than a small amount, work it into the plan. If it would make the plan better, but would slow progress down a moderately significant amount, put it on the roadmap to be considered in the next plan update (as new ideas might emerge that make it less of an impact by then). Moreover, when you stumble upon it, the right innovation will improve the product, the plan, and even the timeline.

09) Sign in Blood

Once you have a plan, sign your name to it in blood. The only thing worse than not having a proper plan is abandoning a good plan part way through (because you get too anxious or lose faith) … if, after investing a lot of time and effort, you abandon a plan part way through, you might as well just shut the doors now instead of retreating into the castle to starve as you wait out the siege. Greatness takes time, effort, and sometimes sacrifice.

10) Drive Decisions Like You Just Heisted the Antwerp Diamonds

Once you have a direction, don’t stop. Don’t pull over. Keep going until you successfully escape the EU, sorry, until you escape mediocrity and unprofitability. (And definitely don’t panic along the way. If you got out clean, and have 24 hours to make your escape, use every last hour, because once you cross the border, you’re off Scot-free.)

Once you have it all figured out and committed to, you have to be Hagar behind the wheel and drive, drive, drive. Slowing down will lead to stopping. Stopping to abandonment, and then, instead of improvement and success, it will be failure and the beginning of the end. As per 09, you have to see the plan through, and this will only happen if you never stop — you have to keep going as long as there is a drop of gas in the tank.

^* yes, zombie companies exist in our space too; and, as the entertainment industry would have you believe, since we’re not medical doctors working in morgues with a constant fresh supply of brains, it is a fate worse than corporate death!

We’ve read the dumb company: how to avoid the fork in the road (part 1 and part 2) and dead company walking: avoiding the graveyard (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7 and part 8) articles, taken them to heart, admitted we’re making some mistakes and that we’re not doing some key functions as well as we could. Most importantly, we know we need to do more to avoid becoming a casualty of the next mass corporate extinction that’s coming. So, can you tell us what else can we do to avoid becoming a dead company walking (or, even worse, a zombie company^*)?

01) Get Help to Identify Where You Need Help

We’ve (kind of) said this many times, but we’re saying it again. You don’t know what you don’t know. Get help from an expert who’s been in this space for at least a decade (and seen what’s worked pre- and post- the last two consolidations), and preferably the last two decades (as this cycle is going to be the worst since the late 2000s and most of the new generation of “thought leaders” and “experts” might not have a handle on what’s coming). There’s still a few of us left. See this posting where the doctor freely directs you to long-time experts in the space (which include areas he’s not the best suited to help you and areas he is … if you’re offering a solid solution to an industry segment that is currently helping your customers, he’d rather you get help and survive than not).

02) Improve Blogger / Independent Analyst Relations

Let’s face it, you’re probably not going to get much help from the big analyst firms. They’ll take your money and throw you their standard research that is mostly useless to you (because you need research customized to your niche and your needs); then take more of your money and only give you a mostly useless write up (with limited reprint rights in that you could do the write up yourself, but then you won’t have the logo) in return; then take even more of your money and put you on the map that everyone knows mostly consists of the same big companies year after year (due to limited analyst time) who are usually paying customers (as the analysts know them best) and typically only suited for F500/G3000s (because they are high priced suites); and then, if you still have any money left, take the rest of it and write about whatever tech you want them to and provide great shill for your marketers. But not once will they tell you if you’re going in the right direction or help you innovate (only if it is the current perceived market direction). It’s not their model.

03) Double Down on Education

It’s not just about what your product can do, but what your customers need to know to advance on the Procurement maturity ladder (where the majority of organizations are still on the floor reaching for the first rung, despite all the work done in the 2000s on how to climb the ladder). You need to educate them on what they should be doing, why, and then teach them what types of technology can help them even before you tell them about your technology. As per our dead company walking: avoid the graveyard series, education first is how you win in the end. Pace yourself while your competition runs themselves into the ground and drops dead. Always remember it was the tortoise (who can live 30 times as long) that won the race!

04) Thought Leadership Trumps Marketing Madness

Not only do you need to double down on education, but once you walk them from where they are to where they should be, and show them how your solutions solves a significant number of their primary problems, you still have to show them the wonders that lie ahead and accompany them on their journey through the dark forest until they, one day, reach the light. You have to convince them up front you are going to do this, do this through the implementation, be there every step of the way through the first few months as they get their tech legs, and then always be there to lend a hand when they need it.

While it might be time consuming at first, this won’t be as time consuming or strenuous as you think on an ongoing basis if you teach them how to learn for themselves and solve problems, as time goes on they’ll call on you less and less. It will eventually just be a quarterly check in to see how things are going and offer new thought leadership to help them up their game.

05) Focus on the Community

Find where they are engaged and go there, or, if they don’t have a place to engage, create one and bring them to you. Do you have a local chapter of a professional association where senior buyers or procurement leaders regularly engage? If so, go there. And, most importantly, leave your tech behind. Just educate them on an important topic and what they should be doing to ensure they are handling it appropriately. Seeing a big problem in tail spend in your clients, educate them how to identify it, manage it, and track it before high priced or unapproved purchases get out of control. Seeing a lot of companies unprepared for a new legislative requirement about to come into effect, show them how to identify which relationships need to be better managed, which contracts might need to be updated, and how to identify which risk mitigations are appropriate. Etc. If you impress them with your knowledge, they’ll come to you if they need help identifying a solution. Then, if yours is the right fit, and they’re a private company, they might even skip the RFP.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

In short, as per Part 1, you

1. keep admitting to every mistake you are making and do something about it, then
2. continue by looking for cost-effective opportunities for improvement and pursue them and finally
3. never, ever, ever forget the timeless basics.

Today, we’ll continue by describing what you do when you identify, and admit to, one of the last two mistakes (mistakes 11 & 12) we chronicled in our two part introduction to our “dead company walking” (Part 1 and Part 2) series (where we helped your potential customers identify problems that signify you are a SaaS supplier they should be walking away from). (You can find part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7 here.)

A) Our tech works, any failure is the result of the implementation team/org

We’ve said it numerous times before:

Any failure is your fault, no ands ifs or buts.

If you sell the product, you are responsible for making sure it can work before selling the deal, does work after the implementation, and gets used. Otherwise, you failed.

Moreover, when it comes to external implementation teams, it’s up to you to make sure they are up to snuff.

Put together an implementation partner certification program, and don’t allow anyone to implement your product until their personnel takes your program and passes your course.

Now, it’s true that certification alone isn’t enough to make sure the partner’s personnel puts in the proper effort, but at least you have certainty that they do know how to implement your product, and if a partner will actually go through the effort, they are probably serious about doing a good job on the implementation, which greatly increases the odds of success.

And if they won’t get certified, then you know they don’t care about customer success, just revenue. And, to be blunt, that’s not a “partner” you want!

B) We know what we’re doing.

Okay, the doctor will admit he misled you and is only offering up a solution to one of the mistakes in this article because this is the one mistake you won’t admit to, and he knows it. You think that because you raised a lot of money on a great story that you know how to write the story all the way to, and through, the ending, and that the ending will be a great one. And nothing will shake you from that belief. He’s seen it too often in recent years. Big money creates big egos, and they don’t reset until the walls come crashing down.

Now, for any of you dumb companies reading this for whom it’s not too late, here’s the reality of the situation that you must do everything in your power to avoid.

The reality is that you, like everyone else, can write a story if you put your mind to it. It might even be a good story. But here’s the reality: there’s no guarantee that story is going to sell (or at least sell anywhere nearly as well as you are predicting, or that the ending is going to be the one that you want). The only companies that have achieved both have done so either through luck (which is rare and which you can’t count on) or through learning (by consulting with the best experts they can find across multiple areas of their business).

You know what you know, but you don’t know what you don’t know. And if you

1. can’t admit this
2. can’t recognize when someone is right when they are telling you that you don’t know something (or are missing something critical)
3. can’t recognize when someone is giving you (part of) a solution

You’re in trouble.

You’re also in trouble if you assume that because you are a great leader or a great sales person you are a great CEO, or if you assume that because you are a great CEO you can make the right tech decisions, and especially if you assume that because another great CEO told you something was the right tech move (for their company), it is the right tech move for your company.

Everyone has a particular set of skills they are best at, and a set of skills they are certainly not best at, and that’s okay — especially if the set of skills you are best at puts you in the top quartile or higher and brings a lot of value to your company. No one can be an expert at more than a few things. If it takes at least 10,000 hours or five years, and sometimes 20,000 hours, or ten years, to master a subject, then it should be clear that a person will only be able to master a few skills in their lifetime. And if it’s a hard skill, very few will even try (which makes you incredibly valuable).

For example, just because the doctor is one of the leading experts in the Americas and Western Europe on Strategic Sourcing Decision Optimization^* (SSDO), is a great architect of optimization and analytic products, has been a great CTO for SaaS companies building advanced tech problems, and can model almost any business scenario mathematically — including the most complex financial models you can dream of, that doesn’t mean he’d be a good CFO. In fact, he’d be a p!ss p00r one and knows it! (That’s one of the reasons he won’t start his own company and be a CEO because startups require a core mix of skill sets, and the right core team, as per the great Garry Mansell’s Simplify to Succeed, and he only has half of them; and in a pinch, he’s a better [acting] COO than CEO, but even then there are better COOs.) And that’s fine. The skills he has are immensely valuable, so why should he pretend to have skills he doesn’t?

So if you have anyone on the executive team who thinks they know it all, or don’t need help, you only have one recourse: get rid of them. It’s harsh, but nothing will kill a startup faster than one that won’t get the help it needs, and it will need help until it can afford a team with all the skill sets it needs to make the business successful. Big money only takes you so far, because if you aren’t selling big deals, that tap will be turned off faster than a speeding bullet.

^* who at one point not only built or consulted on the majority of SSDO solutions between 2000 and 2015 across the Source-to-Pay market but also built models over a decade ago that were only equalled by CombineNet (acquired by Jaggaer) [Sandholm] and Trade Extensions (acquired by Coupa) [Andersson], and only surpassed by Coupa (who acquired Trade Extensions).