This is for the quiet people.

I’ll come right out and say it. I’m an introvert – have been since as long as I remember. Not bashful or shy or anti-social or a snob…As the book “Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength” by Laurie Helgoe describes it – you are an introvert if you re-energize by being alone rather than being with people.

That would be me. Generally speaking, I’d much rather read a book than go to a party. Prefer one-on-one lunches to a banquet. A few very solid friends to a large number of lesser acquaintances. Quiet to loud.

Guilty.

It has taken me a long time to embrace being an introvert, and to stop trying to be something I’m not. Many of my clients are surprised when I tell them that I lean this way. I have had my client friends tell me that I have to be extroverted because I am so ‘up’ and energetic when I am meeting or consulting with them. Well – that’s because consulting is what I do. It’s how I earn my living. Who in the heck wants a low energy consultant? It doesn’t mean that we introverts cannot be energetic and funny and sing karaoke. It just means that we will most probably run out of energy before our extroverted friends do. I know I do. One of my consultants has asked me a few times why I never work on the plane…he always sees me reading a ‘book’ on my Sony reader. The answer is that I am re-energizing. It’s something I know about myself and I no longer fight it. Tried the working on the plane thing…just stare at the screen. Drool forms.

This introversion ‘affliction’ affects how I sell consulting services and how I run my company. Oh how I envy those who go to networking functions and meet 100 people in a night. Get tons of business cards, and make 100 new friends. Or those who can pick up the phone and just start calling people…shot gunning for prospects. I interview a lot of people for jobs – most of them introverts as Lupine Partners is a wonderful place to work for introverts – and when I ask questions about their comfort level in selling they usually go into a fear-based rant on how they don’t want to cold call or be perceived as fuller brush salesman.

Me either. And I would submit to you that we introverts can be as successful in sales and marketing as our louder and more socially extroverted friends. I know because I have done it – Lupine is finishing up its 17^th year as a consulting company. Can’t do that without satisfied customers – most of them garnered by me.

If you are an ‘intro’ like me, the first thing you have to do is determine who you are and what you are willing to do – and comfortable doing. Cold calling – no. Large networking and convention events – maybe. Professional intimacy – you bet. Face to face and one on one – always. Don’t try and be something you are not (just to fit the stereotype in your head of how you need to act to be persuasive) – you will just fight yourself and never win. This also applies if you are ‘selling’ within your organization. Whether you realize it or not – everybody is in sales. And there are many ways to skin the proverbial cat.

Give yourself permission to be introverted (if you are), and realize that you have many things in your toolbox that can be used to your advantage when trying to persuade and to solve problems for your (internal or external) customer base. It’s a little more work, I think, than being an extrovert. I plod along having many one on one conversation…because that is what works for me. Building professional intimacy by having many sustentative discussions with a few people at a time. There isn’t much difference from my personal and professional life in this regard – it took me a long time to realize this and embrace the ‘tactic’. I have flown to both coasts just to have a short face to face conversation with a customer or prospect – because I know this works for me. Has proven out time after time after time. Some would say that it is not the best use of my time. And there is probably some wisdom in that sentiment – but the proof is in the pudding. Seventeen years old and going stronger than ever.

Reading the Helgoe book noted in the beginning was a real eye opener for me. Permission to be yourself is a good thing…and a profitable one too.

“Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

This is something I have done in my 30 years as a professional. But to be truthful, probably goes back to my earliest years…never was comfortable going the easy, popular route. Just never made sense to me. Possibly some genetic deficiency…

It’s why Lupine Partners’ website looks different than our competitors. It’s why my personality and beliefs are so prevalent on the site and in all of our products. NOT because I am that much of an ego maniac, but because all of my competitor’s sites are so homogenous and bland, that you cannot get a sense of who they are and why they exist. Companies are founded and consist of people – real human beings. To me it’s always been good business to show who you are and why we are good for you – using real words and real emotions. To be different, and to stand out from the crowd.

YOU may choose to move from one group to another by ‘moving’ your ambition, thinking, acquisition and use of information, initiative, and effort. But regardless of your choices, the fact that the majority of your peers are dead-wrong won’t change a whit. For the most part, where a particular person gets to in this continuum from the top 1% to the bottom 40% has much less to do with differences in genetics, upbringing, education, opportunity or luck than it does decisions. Associations matter a lot, but they are or can be chosen. The first critical decision for upward movement is to ALWAYS distrust the majority. It’s not an easy decision to make. It’s even harder to stick to. To see a majority stampeding north and stubbornly turn south. Not easy at all. Remember that whatever ‘everybody’ is infatuated with – you should spurn.

It’s worked for me…

This past December, in the span of 3 days I received 4 different phone calls from software sales professionals that went something like this: “David, I have prospect and they are ready to buy but they don’t want to spend a lot of money on the implementation – can you create a proposal on the cheap?”

Not music to any professional consultant’s ears. I did craft the proposals…and they were crappy as I knew in more heart that I was not serving this prospect well. I was just quoting services for a fee up to their threshold level. Nothing about outcomes. Nothing about success. Nothing about strategy. Nothing.

As a result of the December proposals, Lupine decided to open up our tactics and methodology to the market in order to allow our clients and prospects the opportunity to become The Wizard. We have created and are currently selling the “Do it Yourself Guide to Implementing Yardi Voyager”. It’s for those prospects who don’t want to spend/invest the money for outside consulting – i.e. unsuspecting Wizards. And it’s for those Wizard wannabes who have been itching to ‘look behind the curtain.’ For those who want to go it alone, but desire to be educated and to have us looking over their shoulder. Everything we know about software implementation has been included in this Guide.

I’ve been told by several in the industry that I am crazy for doing this – signing a death warrant for Lupine Partners. Who opens up their intellectual vault and shows their secrets to the world? Us, I guess…And this is one of the reasons why I went ahead with this effort. I look around and see what others are doing, and then do the opposite. To stand out, to differentiate, and to serve my employees and customers. This is no death warrant. In a changing economy, CHANGE!

Change. Just to be clear Lupine Partners is a consulting firm. We still consult with clients on a daily basis. We are also in the product solution business. We consult with our clients through our products on a daily basis as well.

We created our Guide with our team of 5 each having a separate responsibility and function while we carried our full consulting load. Amy served as the project manager using the exact methodology that I teach in the guide. In other words, we practiced what we preached. We had an issues list, held weekly status meetings, had a kickoff meeting, and a lessons learned process at the end of the ‘engagement’. Maggie was responsible for the packaging and shipping. Brian, Angela, and I created the content – each handling about a third. I also had (have!) the responsibility of marketing and selling the series.

Not many consulting firms or companies can match our speed to market. Our 27 DVD series was completed in about 2 months – from soup to nuts. Our agility is a by-product of working together for a very long time, working overtime as necessary, and having a trust in the relative strengths of the individual team members. In our company, the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.

While the Guide was built for new customers, an interesting phenomenon has occurred. Existing Yardi clients have been buying it…Reasons given to us include:

• · not wanting to be held hostage by key employees
• · having to add more properties to their portfolio and wanting to ‘do it themselves’
• · using the Guide as an internal training document

As a marketer, I have been trained to enter the conversation going on in my customer’s and prospect’s head. For prospective software buyers, one of the questions is always: Why does an implementation have to cost so much? It’s a good question – really good. The honest answer is that doing it poorly can be devastating and expensive in ways that most people don’t think of. A few being:

• · An increased amount of time on their old, inefficient system
• · Loss of organizational confidence
• · Loss of time spent on meetings and tactics that did not take them to their goals
• · Employee firings resulting in increased training costs and ramp-up time (on their regular job)
• · Organizational recriminations
• · Money spent on software license fees for a product they were not using
• · Money spent on outside consultants – with no implementation to show for their consulting investment
• · Competitors had pronounced operating advantages due to being on a more current software platform

When should you be the Wizard and when should you beware the Wizard? My answer is that you be and do both all the time – as much as you can. Independence is a good thing – except when it isn’t. For example, if the independence takes you away from your core earning potential or your core business…then you need to be marginally dependent. If you are in a dependent mode, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket and don’t trust one Wizard absolutely. Hate to say this…even if that wizard is me.

The following is framed on my office wall.  It keeps me focused when things don’t go according to my desires.  As I read it here again, I realize that it also very much applies to software implementation:

1. Things will not always go exactly as you have planned.

2. Things might take longer than you have planned.

3. You might encounter some heavy bumps while following your plan.

4. The bumps may frighten you.

5. You may have to change direction to get where you want to go.

6. You might have to temporarily ‘park’ in a place you don’t want to be and this might trigger anger, fear, worry, impatience, and resentment.  And while all this is going on you may think and act as ifyou are the ‘only one’ going through this.

7. You can, however, go through all of these seemingly negative situations with a smile, if you have trained yourself to do so.

When we are leading software evaluation efforts we normally ask the software vendors for two customer lists from the software vendor: one of its large, major customers and one of its customers that are a similar size to you. You really need to think through your strategy with regard to reference checks. They can be a colossal waste of time or excellent feedback. The strength of the reference calls is going to come down to the questions that you ask. And you need to determine what it is you really want to know.

Who makes these calls? Is it the whole team, a handful of people, or just the project manager? There is no reason for a whole team of people to sit through a phone conference with the poor person who agreed to give a reference. Invariably, all discipline will break down and the reference giver will be barraged with questions from the third row. Go with a two- to three-person reference team: one to ask the questions and two to transcribe the answers and to listen for things not asked or answered.

What is the strategy for determining who to call? Ideally, it is not necessarily a company that made the vendor’s “A” list. All of us put our best customers on reference lists, the ones we feel certain will say good things about us. With a bit of research (go to the vendor’s web site) you can probably find some “off-list” customers. Having said all of this, be thankful for whoever you can get. Getting customers to take the time to give you the information you want is not an easy proposition. Take what you can get.

The results of these vendor reference calls should be summarized in a grid or a narrative. You do not have to wait until the product demonstrations to make these calls. Oftentimes after the last vendor demonstration you will want to go right into the final evaluation process. Making these calls—which often take a while to coordinate—can be a real momentum stopper. Ideally, you should make these calls prior to the vendor demonstrations. There is no reason to wait until after the vendor shows you his products. Don’t pass out the reference call information until you get to the final deliberations; it may prematurely bias an evaluator against a vendor that has not yet had a chance to give a demonstration.

Somebody asked me recently about the most outrageous software demonstration I had ever participated in. I have two…couldn’t choose between them.

The first…was my first. Way back in 1990. This particular software company came to my employer’s office with two sales professionals. One was the local sales rep – the other guy was brand new to the software company. So new, that this was his first day on the job…a bit of a gunslinger was he.

These two guys were so out of sync with each other….the low-point came when they actually wrestled the keyboard from each other trying to make a point. Very funny. Needless to say we killed them…The demonstration was so bad that it worked to their favor. I contacted the president of the software company and explained what happened. He came out and did the demo with another sales professional…and they eventually won the sale.

Interestingly in retrospect…this whole little drama was the first step in me forming Lupine Partners. More on this another time.

Lesson: If you are going to be bad…be REAL bad.

Second really bad software demonstration: As more and more technology has become Internet based, it is not unusual for software vendor salespersons to request Internet connections to be made available during the demonstrations. This particular vendor made a big deal about having the connection; processing over the Internet was a large consideration for this particular client.

The demonstration started, and very quickly we began to go through the scripts. The software vendor salesperson was talking about the speed of the processing. I looked up at the screen and noticed that the whole demonstration was running on c:\localhost, which for the technically challenged means that the entire demonstration was running locally on the vendor’s laptop. In other words, the entire Internet connection “hook-in” was a sham. I held my tongue to see if the representative would correct his misdirection. He didn’t. He proceeded through the whole day talking about the speed of the vendor’s internet product. When I held the debriefing that night, I asked the team about the Internet speed. They were very impressed. I then asked how many of them knew that the entire demonstration was local, processed on the software vendor salesperson’s laptop. The IT director raised his hand. The other people in the room were shocked—and then they were angry. We had a long discussion about product and company—good product, bad company.

The really interesting turn on this story was that three weeks later I was going through demonstrations with another client with this same vendor. The same thing happened again. It was an entirely different sales team; in fact, these were senior sales people. I held my tongue and then did the same thing at night: revealed what had been done to the project team. Same result, same anger.

All of this was avoidable. All the sales representative had to do was disclose upfront that he was going to do the bulk of the demonstration locally in the interest of speed and timing. That’s what everybody else does. But they were insecure about the functionality of their Internet offering that they misled.

The really interesting point is that the software company in all 3 examples…from 1990 to 2004…is the same company.

There are scoring systems to gauge the financial soundness of software vendors. They ask for years of financial statements and from these statements try to determine the companies’ financial shape. The determination of financial soundness is in itself a subjective determination. Does having a large cash balance mean that you are financially sound or does it mean that you have not been investing in new technologies or reinvesting back into the company? Does having no debt mean that you are financially sound or does it mean that you are missing the boat by not borrowing to take advantage of business opportunities? If you had a bad year last year, does it mean that this year is doomed? And so on.

The only thing I look at on the financial statements is the notes section—if there are audited statements from a CPA. At a minimum, ask the following five questions in the RFP:

· How much is your recurring revenue? In other words, if you do not make a new software sale this year, how much revenue would you have coming in from your existing customer base?

· How many deals do you have in your pipeline and what is your success ratio of demos to sales?

· How many sales have you made this year?

· How many sales have you made that have not yet started implementation?

· How many implementations do you have in process?

To me, the past is past. What you want to know is whether the vendor is viable at the moment and how big its customer base and recurring revenue stream is. If you want to go into a full-blown analysis of the financial condition of a software vendor, you need to determine in advance what the criteria will be for financial soundness. I have been a CPA since 1982 and I can tell you that this is a slippery slope and not easily done unless you get audited (not a compilation and not a review) financial statements from a CPA. The audited financial statements should be given an unqualified opinion.

In 2007, a software sales professional friend of mine and I commiserated with each other over our shared conservatism toward money, that kept us sitting on the sidelines, out of highly leveraged real estate investments pyramided one atop the other. We both knew the same fellow, somebody half as smart as either of us and less industrious, who was making $100,000.00 to $150,000.00 each time he bought and flipped a pre-construction high rise condo contract, then using that profit to tie up three, then that to tie up nine. It is, of course, all gone now. The sunny clime buried in a blizzard of bad paper. Never taking any chips away from the table and parlaying every wager as if the idiotic appreciation and frenzied buying would never end came to a conclusion I’d predicted from day one. It took a little longer than I’d envisioned. But neither of us envies his easy profits now.

The obvious point is that most of what we see shining from afar is covered with grit and grime when you get up close, and is often really nasty if you get inside. It is easy to envy the illusion. Comparing your own situation to the fiction of others’ is certain path to real disaffection and discouragement, but to what end? It’s also easy to envy the temporary, the star of the moment for whom success greater than yours appears to be so easily obtained.

But the teams that look best early in the season are not necessarily those winning late and through the play-offs. In a small snapshot of a brief window in time, we can make just about anything seem smart – even lending to people without ability to pay, even pyramiding debt and calling it income.

It is usually best, as Tom Peters observed about the behavior of ‘the excellent’, to stick to YOUR knitting. To invest in what you know and understand, including yourself. To “focus tight” on your business, your products, and your customers – the economy you can make and mold and largely control through your own initiative and imagination. A new year is upon us, in some ways, just the rollover of an artificial, made-up page in a calendar; it must occur for the calendar business to exist. But in other ways, an inspiration, a motivation, to re-think priorities, renew energies; re-make the world around you to your preferences. While everything seems changed, nothing has changed: we still prosper one good customer relationship created and sustained after another after another, multiplied as best and as rapidly as resources permit.

Immediately following The Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland went into production on the Mickey Rooney movie Babes in Arms. In this movie, Rooney plays Mickey Moran, a talented singer and musician, son of a veteran from show business. Garland plays a pretty girl who is also a very talented singer. One day, a big opportunity arrives for Mickey, a big contract to set up his own show. However, things don’t go well, and to avoid being sent to a work farm, he decides to improvise a show in the country, despite the awful weather conditions. And then comes one of my all-time favorite exchanges:

“Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” Mickey says.

“We can use my Dad’s barn!” Judy says.

This same “gee-whiz, let’s just rush ahead with this project” attitude is something I have seen on numerous occasions with my clients.

A not untypical scenario would entail the IT manager being summoned by the president of the organization and told to find a new software package for the company. And that’s what he does; he goes out and finds a package on his own. He puts on a show and uses his dad’s barn. It’s a hasty, quick, impromptu activity that does nothing to move the organization forward. It’s probably not the right vendor or the right functionality—but it is a package. And it is one that most people in his firm have heard of. Low risk for him, and it didn’t take much time or effort to sign the contract with the software vendor.

The problems occur once you start planning the implementation and conversion from your existing systems. Functional items that the IT manager assumed would be in the new package aren’t there because he didn’t ask and he didn’t plan.

Remember the Fram oil filter commercials from the 1970s, “You can pay me now, or you can pay me later”? That logic is the same for software evaluation and implementation. If you don’t do the proper planning, then you may hit a point where you may have to abandon the implementation and revisit the entire software selection effort.

Years ago, a large retail operation in the Southwest hired my consulting firm to lead it through the implementation of a just-purchased software product. We started the planning process and by the second day of discovery, I began asking very pointed questions about their newly purchased software, things that would ordinarily be part of a retail package. I received the answer “I don’t know” quite a few times. At the end of the session, it was obvious that they really had not contemplated all of the operational needs in their organization.

The project was kicked off, but in my head and heart I knew it had a small chance of succeeding because the client was not ready for the change that a new software package was going to bring. They had not defined their requirements and accordingly had no idea if the package would be up to the task.

As the project went on and I exhibited some “tough love” to my clients, they became increasingly agitated about where things were going. It culminated with me telling the business owner (where was he during the “selection” process?) that he just wasted a bunch of money and needed to create a team with representation from every area in the organization to aid in a new software selection effort. I told him he needed to go slower so he could finish faster.

If you scrimp here and try to pick the software vendor in an organizational vacuum, you most likely will get backed into a corner at some point. The chance of getting a software solution match is directly proportional to the amount of effort an organization spends in planning the evaluation and in seeing that every functional area within the organization is represented in the process.

Thanksgiving was a big deal when I was a kid. Relatives gathered. But mostly what I was waiting for was the Friday after Thanksgiving.

I vividly recall the day and weekend immediately after Thanksgiving as something really big and special, when I was a kid. That was the official start of the Christmas season. That’s when you drove into the city, to the big department store near downtown Houston, and saw Santa Claus, and shopped..

The death of the downtown department store as mecca has destroyed a lot of ‘specialness.’ Now the holiday shopping experience surrounds you and bombards you. Worse, now Christmas season starts before Halloween. I’m sick of it before Thanksgiving even gets here. I don’t think we’ve done the kids, ourselves or even retail commerce any favors by stretching the season into a calendar quarter.

But the bigger point is how much of “the special” has been taken away, spoiled, diminished and diluted. There’s real opportunity there for the business person who finds a way to give his customers (internal and external) a truly special event, something to look forward to with anticipation, to experience with awe and wonder and fun.

In any case, I hope your Thanksgiving holiday this year is somehow special.

When I say ‘thanksgiving’, you’ll be included in the thought.