 That's great. I'm gonna let people come in for a minute stall for time a couple of promises We're gonna we're gonna talk about sales, but we're not going to talk about car sales I'll get into that a little bit later. I also promised that I'm gonna try to speak very slowly I'm an American I do get excited and I would be happy to speak Twice as fast as I am right now, but sometimes for the international audiences. I go a little bit too fast So I'm going to try to keep my cadence nice and calm And then Donna Benjamin wanted me to make an Australia joke Because we're not really in Australia, but some people think we are I Am not going to do that No, no No, Australia. Okay. The doors are closed. That means you're trapped in here with me I will give you this other little tidbit. This is ten years since my first Drupal con The first talk I ever gave was at Drupal con Sunnyvale It was the last session on the last day in the last time slot and we're about 20 people in the room However, I got four job offers when it was over. So I also finished 10 minutes early We might finish early. Okay We'll just launch into things. I'm Ken Rickard. As I just mentioned, I've been coming to Drupal con for 10 years This is my 22nd Drupal con probably my 12th or 13th session But my first sales session, which is kind of interesting. We'll talk about that a little bit I'm officially the director of professional services, which at Palantir, which is based in Chicago, Illinois where I work Means I run the sales marketing and consulting operations. It's a little bit strange We use professional services to distinguish from our production services who are the people who do You know all the actual development work and design work So that's contact information if you ever need it and I thought I would start a little bit with my career path This is a simplified version of my career path I've been working professionally in the web space since 1998. I actually learned HTML in 1995 When I was a graduate student because even in 1995 it was clear that video over the internet was coming and As a grad student I was concerned I was at a state university in the United States not a top-tier school and What would stop that university from piping in video lectures from Harvard or Yale or Oxford? And Then just hiring people to proctor the classes. So it's like I better get out in front of this ink this HTML stuff the The L shaped box is where Drupal overlaps with the rest of my career So I'm actually a failed academic that I went into the newspaper business. I'm responsible for introducing Drupal to the newspaper Industry in the United States. It's kind of fun So that webmaster job was at a small newspaper I was an online director at another newspaper then I moved to corporate headquarters It became I had about four jobs in six years Product managers the easiest one and it was at that time that I discovered Drupal We had been building classified advertising systems. We're actually using our own proprietary scripting language that let web developers write commands to an oracle back-end It was funny it turned into a pretty full-fledged scripting language It was written at the exact same time as PHP and for the exact same reasons That's because the C plus engineers didn't want to write HTML code And they also didn't trust HTML coders to write against their secure database. So They had to bridge that again And then I left that And joined Palantir as a senior engineer Also, I'll date myself a little bit In between those two things I had an interview with Acquia who's celebrating their 10th anniversary this year, too when I interviewed they had five employees and I had dinner with Dries and Jay Batson the co-founder and they said halfway through dinner They said so what job would you do at Acquia and I said oh sales engineering How many of you know what sales engineering is by the way? No, I'm gonna back up and tell you what that is But Dries looked at Jay and says I don't know what that is and Jay explained it to him and then they looked at each other and they said they said in unison. Oh, yes We're not ready for that So the sales engineering piece is fascinating. Let me ask a different question. Okay. How many people in this room are? Sales people how many of these people in the room are developers How many of the people in this room manage sales people How many people in the room manage developers so okay So there's lots of people who don't know what I'm talking about. There's some people who will just say yes I've heard all this before and that's fine So a couple of interesting pieces as a senior engineer again My job is delivery right as a team lead my job is delivery and team coaching and management sales engineering is is The dark art in the middle sales engineering is the process by which a technical person from your agency Explains what you can do what your product does And makes the connection to the technical people on the other side to prove that you can fulfill the requirements of the project Sales engineering is a little bit more dominant in traditional software sales Let's say you were going in to buy a CRM system Right the sales engineer would come in and take your requirements and say well This is how we're going to implement that thing Right so sales engineers are for a lot of people in the Drupal community in particular myself included Is the bridge between being a developer and be getting into sales? I actually started doing all of Palantir sales engineering about seven years ago Which means for six and a half years. I wrote all of our technical estimates for all of our projects And then when a client wanted to say okay, so we're doing a multi-country multi-country Multilingual installation, how are we going to do that and how are we going to you know be compliant with law x and law y? That's what sales engineers do right. They're sort of your heavy hitters You probably have them on your teams, but you probably don't have an official position for it You probably just pull someone from the production side in to participate in a conversation or to answer a few questions that then the sales people go so From there I ended up taking over sales so everything that I'm going to tell you Comes from a very different Perspective than most traditional trained sales people and I should also point out that I had a great conversation with is talk Who's one of the track chairs? And he's from Slovenia and he said we really want to have an American perspective on sales But please do not sell used cars to these people please do not do high-pressure sales And so we'll talk a little bit about that sort of thing We're also going to play a game called where what Drupal Khan were these photos taken at this is fun What is sales? This is actually a gourmet ice cream stand in Paris. This is from 2009 This is on the Il Saint Louis right behind the cathedral Notre Dame In this guy is like one of the three finest ice cream makers in all of France and he doesn't advertise and he doesn't sell anything He just stands in his window and scoops ice cream Sales is I mean it's a fascinating thing and there are huge books written on it at its bottom sales is about Meeting the demand of people When it's funny when his talk was talking to me about that high-pressure sales what we consider high-pressure sales is when you Work very very hard to create demand often panic Right great example would be If you went to all of the Drupal 6 customers you had in your country and said oh, no Drupal 6 is no longer secure and stable We have to fix that problem for you right now, or you're gonna run into the next Panama papers Remember the Panama paper. It's been six months. Everyone's forgotten the Panama papers, right? You're at vulnerability to be hacked We have to fix this for you That's that's a bit of a high-pressure sale right because you're creating a demand rather than Satisfying a need so there's a real tension in most sales organizations between what you consider outbound sales and inbound sales Outbound sales is when you go out to absolute strangers and try to convince them that you have something that will make their life better Right most traditional advertising is based on outbound sales Inbound sales is more Traditional web marketing where you do you know content creation you do SEO you do all the things to drive people to your website and interact with you and then hand you their information and ask you to contact them, right? One of the things that I would recommend being a sales manager for a couple of years now is you should figure out in your organization which of those models you use and which one you're good at and Which one is sustainable for you? Palantir has been in business for 21 years and Sustained itself pretty well for 18 years on nothing but inside sales or inbound sales So people would come to us and say hey, we have a problem and we'd say oh, we'll love to help you fix that problem That'll be great the the problem becomes The market is so crowded and there's so many solutions that It's very difficult to get enough work just showing up at the door. So there is an analysis you'll want to do about How am I getting my clients? How am I reaching those clients? How am I retaining those clients? So sales is in in its essence, then I would say the art of matching Customer need to the services that you can offer and I should also point out I assume everyone here works for a services firm not a software There's some different things if you're selling software like if you work for lingo tech They have a different sales model because they're selling a more concrete thing Right lingo tech is I think from a sales perspective very enviable because they go in with a very very dedicated value proposition You're in Switzerland. You need to have everything in four languages We can make that happen and cost-effective and we can provide the translation support from a sales person That's an easy sell Right as opposed to the kind of work that most of us service agencies do which is oh, you need a website That's going to do what? That's a much more complicated piece so The question that I want to get at actually is what are you really selling and that's why I think making that Distinction about agencies versus software packages is important again because lingo tech is selling a very concrete solution Platform sh, you know pantheon very concrete solutions to very specific problems, but many of us are selling something very different like oh The museum the Leopold I would love to work with the Leopold Museum for example. We went there the other day The Leopold Museum they need a web presence. They need a web presence. That's going to attract people to visit the museum they need a way to encourage people to to Both international visitors and locals to come frequently They have a whole string of requirements that they might have to tease out with a with an agency So it's a very different sales process, right? It's a bit of a discovery How many of you by the way when you're selling things or when you're organizing projects? Do you split the the introductory discovery phase and the actual production into two parts? We we like to do that. We don't always get away with it, but we would prefer to do it that way It's very common because on a lot of complex projects You don't actually know what the client needs the the client might think they know what they need right, but if If they haven't thought through all the permutations or if they don't have a lot of expertise They might think oh, these are the trends This is what we have to do and you'd find with a little bit of analysis particularly content strategy analysis Exactly what they do need and then you build a budget and a project plan around that. That's a really great way to go about things Also asked this question what the sales people actually do Anyone know where that is? That's Dublin That is Dublin. That's actually I think from Drupal dev days not from Drupal Khan last year Sales people in some respects are then a bridge from your organization to the outside Organize it to outside organizations, right? They're the folks who are out there. They're the face of everything that you do The other question a lot of you manage sales people this is my great question. This is more Paris by the way How are you supporting sales success? What are you doing to make sure your team is successful? I'll give you this one anecdote When I was working at a newspaper company I Was a technical person, right? I had some minor sales responsibility for the internet side And we had a sales team of about 12 people and I went into one of their sales meetings at 9 o'clock in the morning And the sales manager spent about 20 minutes giving out fake prizes and candy And they sang a song and everyone was having a great rollicking time and when it was over I was very very confused and I went up to the sales manager and I said what did I just watch Why did you just waste a half an hour of working time? Singing songs and playing silly games and she said because these people all do outbound sales they're going to go out to strangers all day long and Nine out of ten people are going to say no and three out of those ten people are going to be hostile about it And if I don't pump them up and get them excited and make them feel good, they're all gonna quit Fortunately, I you know that's something you should pay attention to when again you're managing your sales How are they responding to right are they up to the challenge because sales is very The word I like to use is fancy. It's Sisyphean Right roll that boulder up the hill And it goes down. I'll give you I don't like to talk about numbers But I'll tell you this over the previous 12 months. We actually exceeded our sales quota by 35% Wow great, huh? Yeah, and I'm facing a shortfall in the fourth quarter How the hell is that possible? Right the answer is because a lot of those contracts have to be done beat by the end of the third quarter And so I'm cramming a bunch of work into a short period and now I have to go get more work It's exhausting and so you do need to put some structures in place to support what your people are doing We're not going to spend a ton of time talking about that however, but I There's a whole session to be done just like Joe's session this morning about how to Encourage community contributions. There's a great session to be had about just this topic I am not the right person to do it. This is very alien to me. I'm not a big rah-rah You'll do great tomorrow Person that's just not in my nature So let's get to the real bottom of things. What are people actually buying from you? Right? There are a lot of classic statements about this too People are buying outcomes. This is the first thing you have to remember It's the first thing you have to train your salespeople Right and the rest of your team They're not buying Fancy JavaScript. They're not buying Drupal. They're buying an outcome and the most important thing The reason why that discovery phase up front is very important is because that's where you help define the outcome Right and I'm going to tell you when we talk about training clients to succeed You start to define those outcomes during the sales process This is what you want to start talking about as quickly as you possibly can Look some outcomes. These are fun projects. We actually completed. This is this is one of the great ways to do sales, right? We Mass.gov just finished up. That's the the state of Massachusetts. It's the entire government. It's a that project took us 14 months. They'd been working on it for 12 months prior to us joining. They're gonna be working on it for the next three years Cleveland Clinic is a fascinating Example, I'll just brag about for a minute. They didn't even build it in Drupal We just did the strategy and design work for them But Cleveland Clinic is one of the three finest hospitals in the entire world and they are the gold standard for Healthcare marketing in the United States There's a giant healthcare internet conference in the US every year and the guy at Cleveland Clinic one Induction of their hall of their marketing Hall of Fame last year and so people do actually call us about that They call us to do design work because we're the people who designed that Even though they build it in site core, which is a Microsoft technology But these are outcomes these are things that you can point to right this is actually your probably your best sales tool in most cases Right. Hey, look what we've done for other people who were like you and I'll get back to that in a bit The other big point is clients trust people who can deliver. I like this little slide This is part of our team. Some of you met George. George was here George to met who's the founder and CEO But that's Cynthia Phil pot. I worked with Cynthia on and off for 20 years. She's one of our project managers Kelsey Bentham who's one of our engineers Nate Streetinger. Who's one of our front-end developers? These are the people who you know, they work with and when I promised is talk. I wouldn't give the car salesman pitch one very common sales strategy that I've used and works fairly well is the The pitch to trust the pitch to confidence, right? Where you're saying look we have the experience we have the understanding you can trust us to get things done and it goes a little bit further to because We do a lot of agile process. We do a lot of work in the open We do a lot of collaboration and one of the things we like to say also is you can trust us to tell you the truth Right. One of the sales techniques that I will use sometimes is to say look Something is going to go horribly wrong on this project. It's going to happen. It always happens There's nothing anyone can do to prevent that. The question is how do we respond when something goes horribly wrong? Do I tell you the truth? Do I tell you about it? We work together to fix it. Do I try to hide it from you? right and Again for services firms a lot of what you're trying to do is match the right Clients with the right work and the way you want to work right like we don't do 24-7 support we don't work weekends We don't work overtime to get things done because we understand that eight hours in front of a computer is draining And you're not going to get people's best work. So We have those kinds of conversations right and we talk about the people and how they're going to integrate How your people are going to integrate is especially true if you're dealing with multinational teams All right, our support team is actually based in Budapest And ours that's because we only have enough support work for one full-time employee And it's impossible to hire one full-time employee with all of the skills you need to do support So our friends in Budapest give us four people and we use pieces of them and it's great It works out really really well, but we have to talk about that transparently as part of our process I Through this in for his his talk as well. They're like, where does Drupal fit into the whole thing? Otherwise, I wasn't going to talk about Drupal at all because the answer is it fits in when it's valuable to the client's goals We were very successful for a number of years because we were considered one of the top Drupal firms and Drupal was a hot thing And so people would come to us. Oh, we need Drupal done Yeah, that was eight years ago and the market has changed drastically in that time I mean, Aquia wasn't around FFW wasn't around You've ever tried to sell against FFW. It's painful They're huge. They're Aggressive, they're successful. I don't know about in Europe, but we can't sell to anyone who's never talked to Aquia before Aquia sales team is three times larger than my entire team Everyone in the United States has talked to Aquia right, so People have heard about Drupal, but it's no longer The differentiator differentiator a little bit if you saw Dries's keynote on Tuesday He's even talked about that so when he talks about the proliferation of Node.js and some other technologies right when he starts talking about marketing more than Technology becomes really really interesting and the shift. I mean especially in selling Drupal that we've seen is You know eight ten years ago. We were selling to technical people. We don't sell to technical people anymore We sell to marketing people now because it's interesting the tools have gotten sophisticated enough that you generally don't need technical people to do Most of the day-to-day work Right, which means marketing people marketing teams own the stack end-to-end That's just like they are really fascinating change So Drupal matters sometimes right if you're dealing with government agencies where open data is a big deal, right? Hooray Australia, right? Drupal's a huge selling point But the average industry right we were across the street last night from Unilever Austria headquarters, Unilever doesn't care about open source. They might care about saving a little bit of money But Drupal is not a selling point. They're trying to get jobs done so It's a big lesson I had one person who I know he was polite he showed up He said oh you're talking about sales and he left and I said well before you leave take this away. Here's the big thing when we talk about leveling up your sales team and and like I said teaching clients to succeed It's your sales pitch sets the tone and the expectations for what a client thinks about as success All right, it's critically important to get out in front of that And my follow to that is why do some projects fail? This is not a Drupal config picture. This is we did a we did a charity Team building exercise where we went to a school and help them clean up their grounds But they had a building that was totally disused and falling into disrepair You know why do some projects fail some projects fail because people on them don't know what success looks like Sometimes projects fail because people don't have a long-term plan For that success one of the things we keep finding when we talk to clients Is that no one has any idea what they're going to be doing in January of 2019? You should If you're investing in Drupal 8 or a new website right now You should have a plan for what you're doing in in 16 months 18 months and people don't because they're incapable of in many cases they don't have the time or the Inclination I would say to think that far ahead, right? It's not something that in part of the culture So projects fail for a number of reasons and it's important. I think to be able to review those with potential clients and This goes to a lot of I don't know if you anybody went to the being human track But it was in Joe's talk today, too, but in the being human track they talk a lot about Open communication and understanding where people are coming from It's important and can be very helpful in the sales process To find out what are the consequences for the person you're talking to if the project goes badly We've done projects, of course where if it if the project you know goes over budget or over schedule There's a huge financial penalty. We did a big publishing company a number of years ago And if we hadn't hit their deadline, it would have cost them a quarter million dollars Which isn't a giant sum of money, but it's a significant sum of money So understanding, you know, where can things go wrong and in the sales cycle if someone is willing to talk to you about this You're in Right if they're willing to be this honest and vulnerable with you you have established the trust Right and you have done your job So It's okay to talk about failure It's important to talk about success, but it's also okay to talk about failure And again success starts at that sales point where you outline for folks What is it? What are we actually doing and how are we gonna know that we're done? So this is where I get into the sort of meat of things as I watch the time. We're good on time It's not even 1115. We do go to 1145, right? I like to get people out on time Actually, I like to finish early so It's important I think and very beneficial again if you run say the production team It's important to outline for your sales team. How do you do things? How do you want to communicate things? How do you manage risk things like that so they can talk about it? So I put together like a sample deck. We do a lot of what we call pitch decks that are really just Introductory conversations to help people understand what it's like to work for us with us, excuse me And to set some expectations about what how the project is going to unfold So these next few slides are a very abbreviated version of what I promised I think in introduction, which is here's some tools that you can use either externally or Internally to train up your sales team and train up your clients What's interesting about this this little next couple of slides? I'll show you frequently what we find in the sales process. It's one of your biggest problems It's another session entirely You will often find that you're selling to the wrong level of the organization I don't know if that happens as frequently in Europe But if you meet someone here at a Drupal con they might be in charge of web development and have no budget authority Whatsoever right and they really like you and they want to work with you But they can't and someone is nodding aggressively over there, right? But they can't green light the project So what you end up doing is either? Trying really hard to get in front of the right person or more commonly Pitching to that person and then giving them materials so they can make the internal sale Because the internal like the seat this chief marketing officer doesn't want to be bothered talking to vendors All right, this is a very common problem So this is one of the ways that we get around that is by putting together these kinds of presentations say look Here's how we're gonna solve your problems and yes You're free to use this internally to sell the project and if there's anything you need us to do to help we're happy to And that works decently well But it's something to watch for so my other sort of professional sales advice be very aware of what level of the organization You're selling to and if you if you have a sophisticated sales organization, you generally have people who's Part of their job is to figure out who you're talking to and why you're talking to them Right and the trick is to get to the decision-maker as quickly as you possibly can So we like to say we help you succeed. Well, okay. How do we do that? Hey? This is a small project We're gonna focus on four things. We're gonna focus on your strategy your user experience design Your front-end development your back-end develop very simple project. We might be building a Excuse me. We're building a single page. We actually did this project single page websites To promote museum exhibitions and what we actually built them was in Drupal 8. We built them a single page application builder Powered by Drupal 8 and the paragraphs module So they have all these cool little components that they can create these, you know interactive Experiences that promote certain events at their museum great four-part project. We're gonna talk about strategy What do you want people to do? We're gonna talk about how we design the user experience Then we're gonna do the front-end piece then we're gonna do the back-end piece and then you'll be done There's some other stuff that we're skipping in this case Generally when we talk about things and I have a longer talk about just this We usually talk about all eight of these things All right your strategy your user experience design front-end and back-end development Deployment which people often forget to plan for oddly enough training We do a lot of training because it's very rare that our clients want us to Maintain their site long term. They want to do it. They have to do it We talk about project management. We talk about Support I think it's again one takeaway if you want like practical things to go do Write yourself a list of the things that you think are important that every client does and that's what you start selling to Right, so when I talk about training clients for success, this is one of the things we talk about. It's like, okay What's your long-term plan for support? How are you doing deployments? How are you doing updates, right? You do you roll out new features every two weeks. What's your QA process? Right, what's your testing process? So there are lots of ways to break all of these things down because all of these items all break down into smaller pieces as well So when we start walking through things say, okay, okay, let's talk about the strategy part of the project We're gonna frame those goals. You know, there's some technical strategy Right the technical strategy is a part I like because I used to work in a newsroom And so I like to talk about editorial workflows and how many people do you have who can create content? we were doing a project recently with a university publishing house and they wanted to have Custom landing pages for many many events. They wanted to be able to spin up these elaborate landing pages and The question came down to okay. Well, who has time to create that content? and no one raised their hand and So that idea got scrapped But I mean they wanted to pour a ton of resources and development time into building this really cool thing That they couldn't actually use because they didn't have enough staff for it That's a hugely important thing to talk to people about Yeah, we do user research right understanding how people are doing things and that classic Understanding who your audience is on it's really important to focus on your highest priority audience Because that's gonna help you prioritize your features and help you prioritize your budget So all of these things come up, you know, what are your analytics? How are you actually measuring and tracking success again? I'm gonna say this like six times There was one thing that's really important you train train your client to do it's define their success Criteria the term that we use in the US. I don't know if it's over here is KPIs key performance indicators KPIs can be things like How many page views did we get how many? Requests for proposal submissions that we get through our forms In the case of the sales team our KPIs are what's our gross revenue for the year, right? That's a KPI What's important about KPIs is they are measurable. They are trackable and they are Reportable we put our sales KPIs on a dashboard that's visible to the entire company All right, so anyone can come in at any time and see how we're doing based on our metrics All right, so if you have someone whose job is on the line If they you know don't deliver a successful project Nicest thing you can do for them is help them define KPIs and figure out how they're gonna report them back to their management Right because then they can take control of the narrative of success Does that make sense? Right. Hey, how are we going to know that this project for the Leopold Museum was successful? Well, we would like our Austrian Visitor count to rise 10% over the next six months. That's measurable right, we'd like our You know yearly annual membership to rise 5% over the next year Perfectly measurable. These are KPIs and you get people to sign off on them Right, they also let you of course have like sign posts on the way so you could say hey It's six months in and we were expecting a 5% increase. We were hoping for a 5% increase We've only got two so far. Maybe we should increase our advertising budget It lets you plan for things so walking through these kinds of things with clients, right again as part of the sales process to Expose them to things that they're not thinking of because remember I'm making the assumption that you're all dead-on professionals and you do this all the time Our average client works on a web project once every five years Right, they're not exposed to these things all the time. So it's our job to help educate and say look This is what's really really important Yeah user experience design these are the fun parts, right? User journey mapping unit is a fancy word for saying what do we want people to do? All right, we want people to come browse our events click and buy a ticket great. How do we optimize that? So it's really easy to do Yeah, what's your information architecture? How does that happen? What's your content strategy? What's your multi-lingual strategy? It's all user experience question. This is also where we do usability and accessibility testing right by the way again American I don't know what the situation is in Europe But if you want to do high-pressure sales if you want to just go start cold-calling people accessibility Especially if they're taking in the United States if they're taking government money, they have to be accessible There was a grocery store chain that just got hit with a an accessibility fine Because grocery store was considered to be an essential service and therefore subject to the Americans with Disability Act And I apologize for not doing my research and knowing if there's similar things here in the EU And then yeah front-end development. What do we do here? The big thing we talk about again along with accessibility is responsive design and dear Lord We're not designing things in Photoshop anymore We don't do static comps If you're ever working with a designer who wants to give you static comps You should fire them immediately or if you're feeling like Joe and polite you should train them on how not to do That anymore you should be doing component-based design should be doing living style guides that can be used over and over again this is a big deal because Doing a design system is actually kind of hard and it takes a lot of time and it's hugely valuable And that sort of gets to the heart of what you're doing at this point in the sales process, which is you are Establishing value for the service that you provide Right. So walking through this and the worst project we did in the last three years Was where someone else did the design and they gave us a hundred and fifty-two Photoshop files And they didn't use responsive design They used adaptive design which meant that they wanted the layouts to be different on mobile than on desktop because things We threw them away and It set the project back six months and the client was furious and we had no choice Yeah back-end developer walk through this So this is the type of thing that we get into in this is usually like our second sales conversation Are usually our first sales conversation is get to know you who are you what's your role in the organization? What are your goals? What's your timeline? Do you have an actual budget? All right, we throw a lot of projects away at that point. That's okay because if they don't have a timeline of budget a Timeline of budget and a feature list or at least an inkling of what they want to accomplish. There's no there there's nothing to do so This is usually our second conversation where we say okay. Here's how we're going to solve your problems Here's how we're going to define them. Here's how we're going to attack them And my advice here is I sort of go back from the here's my fake presentation back to the real presentation You're selling confidence through experience as a general rule, right? Again, if you don't want to do use car or high-pressure sales What you want to be able to do is walk into the Leopold Museum and say you know We just did this exact same thing for the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Let me show it to you Let's talk about how we solved their problems. Let's talk about how we took their digital assets We took their audio tours and we took their photo catalog and we took the art They were using for their brochures and we used to build these multimedia experiences That's what gets people excited. This is the easy path to sales really to go and say look we've done this before Here's some examples You of course want to emphasize what sets you apart from other firms and the irony here of using a code thing is This is the difficulty in Drupal right now Again, I presume you see this pressure in Europe. My experience is a little different Largely because in the US there's a lot of off-shoring to European firms particularly in Eastern Europe You know, why would people hire us when you can hire a Ukrainian firm for a quarter of the cost who have the exact same level of technical skill That's a huge problem for us Right Like I said, I mean we had to outsource our support operation to Hungary because we can't afford to keep enough people To do all the work that has to be done because you can't find all that we can only afford one full-time employee for that so that's a huge problem and The reason we're seeing a lot of pressure in the United States because there's there's pressure from two sides in the market And I mentioned like FFW and some of the things that aquee is doing so number one There's a huge explosion in the market, right? You have very nice companies like Srean Srean who's here who has a huge staff of Indian developers who are much less expensive than we are and Very technically competent and have a great track record And so I can't sell against them on the basis of how good our code is it doesn't work that way right and at the same time we have Really really big firms who are either advertising agencies or famous design firms coming in from the high end of the market saying Hey, Leopold Museum. You should work with us. We designed the Guggenheim. We designed the lot of lot of So you have to find very very quickly what makes you stand out Right, and it could be there's someone in the audience. I know it could be you're the best Nordic newspaper Website solution in the entire industry. Great. That's a thing as long as you know that markets big enough to sustain you But that's another question for another day Another piece of advice show expertise in project risk management. I have another Talk that I do the two-minute guide to everything you need to know about risk management The 32nd version is write down everything that can go wrong How you're gonna make sure it doesn't go wrong Who's gonna be responsible for making sure it doesn't go wrong and what you're gonna do if it does go wrong That's it. That's risk mitigation 101 but it's it's hugely important again because The people you're dealing with again. These are big important expensive projects for most of them And they don't know what could go wrong and they especially don't know how to respond when something goes wrong And then yeah connect to your past projects to client needs we use this one a lot This is world business Chicago, which is really just a promotional vehicle for the city of Chicago to encourage businesses to come and do business there Right and this opens tons of doors for us because it's really just pure marketing and It's got support from the mayor and all this other stuff. So people in Chicago really love this So we use this all the time, but there's a guy who's got a great job. There's a guy named Andre hood Andre works for phase 2 big US based Andre's entire job is to open new markets based on their past work And he's good at it. He's really good at it. So he'll say, oh, yeah, we've done museum websites before. You know what's similar to museum websites? Libraries, yeah, and then he'll go sell a bunch of libraries based on what they've done in museums We've used this very effectively as well Our bread and butter clients used to be universities Then we started doing some university med schools and now we're doing a lot of hospitals It's just sort of this natural progression. You have to be able to crack those doors open by making connections by saying, hey This problem space that you're dealing with this looks and sounds familiar. Here's how we've solved that for other people Check time. Okay, we're at 15 minutes left. I want to save time for questions. I'm almost done More sales thing emphasize long-term benefits. This is the tulip fields in Holland. These are great These have been here for hundreds of years. I love that photo But long-term benefits of which this is actually one of the places where selling Drupal actually will benefit you Because of the total cost of ownership since there are no licensing fees, right and the pace of innovation Right, there's a there's a company in the US to work We're going after right now because they sell to universities and They just went from being a software that you buy and install on your own servers to being Software as a service platform, which has made a lot of their customers very angry They're also very slow to develop new features. And so we're just targeting every single one of their clients We've already worked with three of them And we're actually teaming up with aquee to go after the other 25 Right and we're gonna go after here's the long-term benefit of switching to an open source platform, right gonna be very successful campaign I suspect This one's important to build trust through mutual commitment When I was talking about like you want to get to what Does failure look like what are the consequences of failure some of the most? Successful not just sales conversation, but professional conversations. I've ever had with people are like look If this project goes sideways, what what does that mean? I was talking to one university administrator and her project Literally halfway through her team had tried to build the project And they had failed essentially we came in and we're like look you're gonna need to spend Another 80% of your budget for us to come in and fix all this Right. She was not happy And we were talking about it. She said yeah the the new President of the university just did a Drupal implementation at his old state university 50 miles away If I can't do this I'm gonna look stupid and incompetent and I'm gonna look she did not actually say she was gonna lose her job But clearly she was going to lose her job And I had to say look I understand this is a huge budget commitment I understand this is not how we want wanted to go But if we do this I can guarantee that you'll be able to go to the president and say here's what we did Here's how we did it here's gonna be the long-term benefit for it That's huge now I don't have the same kind of my my neck's not on the line the way hers was But if you can make that connection that people understand you know what is important to them That's hugely important You want to guide the client to the right outcomes? This is from our old office if you can't read that it says you have never experienced Shakespeare until you've read him in the original Klingon It's a It's a wharf quote from Star Trek It's on our wall But we do a lot of this right and this is where I Again teaching clients to succeed take that mindset when you start those initial conversations get them thinking in the right way Right so that they can get to where they need to go And explore how you're going to work together. This is I think also really critical for international teams We did a project recently where Our team was in Chicago and Cincinnati Another small u.s. City in the Midwest Their developer was a russian guy living in New York City They had another developer who's half time in North Carolina their project manager was in Abu Dhabi, I think And that created some interesting problems So you want to when you're talking to people about how your project is going to go talk about like what tools do you use? How do you communicate? By these reports like we use github for these things. We use JIRA, which I hate but the team likes We use google hangouts all the time How many of you are remote companies? How many of you like Do your work not together? right, how many of you work it separate from your client's workspace Right like you don't go to your client's office every day So they're always going to have that question. Well, how do we collaborate if we're not meeting face-to-face every day? Oh, we google hangouts. We have a 15 minute meeting every morning Right just standing invitation. We have a slack gym. We have those sorts of things These all build trust by building openness and confidence in the communication tools Um, yeah, we have tons of them So my last piece here when when to talk about you notice. I haven't talked about money directly tied to sales yet it's because again sales 101 the first person to mention money loses. That's in a negotiation. Right, so You discuss the cost after you establish the value of the thing Right, so you walk them through. Hey, these are the eight things you have to do to be successful with this project Here's what your plan is going to look like six months from now. Here's how you're going to measure success Here's what we're going to do 18 months from now And they should by that point be excited They should be anxious and ready to work with you, you know, and then you're like, okay Well, let's talk about how that costs breakdown Typically, here's where I use real numbers, but sometimes in these preliminary conversations. I like to just give these percentages Which I can freely share And these may differ from project to project, but for most of our end-to-end development projects, this is about right Right, we want to spend about 20 of our time on strategy We want to spend a significant part of time on content strategy Right, we want to spend some time on design usability all these things and then this last one this, uh, you know project management support this hey, you have this overhead too, right and Having this frame is really really helpful right because This is not how people are thinking about things typically The worst case actually in many in many I will say the worst sales cost conversations that I have Are for people who think they're buying a piece of software Right, like oh, yeah, I have photoshop. It cost me 200 a year for a license And it does these 18 things that's not how web development works right, so Key and important so my my recap slide Sell to your strengths as I said a couple of times from not selling used cars You want to define your value proposition? Right establish your distinct message Sell to outcomes always sell the outcomes Ground your pitch in your actual experience right, um I actually got into the sales piece because I Had newspaper experience and we were selling to media companies and so I was like the expert All right, that's how I got into it I actually helped Help someone close a deal at Drupal Khan's segged that I had nothing to do with They just wanted a bunch of editors from a Swedish newspaper Wanted to hear from someone who was an expert in the field and since I knew like what computer to plate was It's a printing process They trusted me the way they didn't trust the engineers that they were talked to at the software company Um, yeah anticipate and solve problems and then yes sell the value of doing right. This is actually We speak as a Drupal community where where everyone's success makes everyone else successful Please don't don't like Undercut on pride. We had we lost a client We lost a client. They were on Drupal 6 needed to go to Drupal 8 and I think our estimate for the project was something like $75,000 and the man was outraged. He's like yes, but these people in Moldova can do it for 20 I'm like have a nice life Enjoy Right because they don't know anything about your business. They don't care about your business They're just churning through at the lowest possible price. They can you know You're not going to get the same level of service and if you don't care about that then I don't care about you again, if you were in Angie Byron and Shannon vettis and there was a third woman who I don't know Jen did a talk yesterday about Conflict resolution in the community and they had four quadrants and it was the high value people high value people And nice people basically If you were in the nice and and high skill We would do everything we could for you and if you were in the mean and low skill We would be like goodbye And so this client was mean and low skilled and so Happy to part ways So yeah again to recap that's who I am That's how you reach me. We have eight minutes for questions I'm supposed to also tell you there's a contrib contribution sprint tomorrow right By the way for those of you who are not Developers one of the things that Drupal project really needs are like product managers and Project managers and people can help organize work and define requirements and help people understand how to test things So if you've never been and documentation. Oh good lord. We need documentation. We need marketing help too, actually So if you're interested in such things come to the sprints tomorrow people will be happy to point you in the right direction I'm also supposed to tell you that you can get this session on the Website The recordings based on the rest of the week the recordings will be up by midnight tonight So if you like this session go and leave a few comments If you you can recommend it to colleagues and like say I will open things to questions But I'll go back if you want contact Thank you You said you weren't going to heckle me Donna Okay There's an actual microphone too And it's okay if you want to leave I won't be offended You talked about George His name's not George. I'm just making fun He talked about uh the inter Selling to the right person in an organization And helping people do the internal sales Up if if you haven't got to that person What about when you're you might be talking to the right person? But there are other people who are doing the anti sales job Perhaps the I perhaps you're talking to the marketing people and your IT team are actually going no hell We want to use site core Right This is a common problem everyone heard and understood the question The common problem of right so maybe you're talking to the right people Maybe they really want to work with you But other people in the organization are kind of sabotaging things and this does happen Really in I'm going to call it professional sales organization This is something that a position called the business development rep Really digs into the the bdrs are the people who are sort of doing the hunting and gathering for the sales people So the sales people can focus on the the big important sales conversations and So no more you want to understand who you're talking to part of the the script we actually have for our bdr Excuse me is to to ask who else in the organization makes decisions about How you do things on the web? And I'll give you two interesting examples There was one hospital system We really wanted to work with and they would have liked to work with us But they were a totally microsoft it department and Normally we would just let it pass We actually got a we got an email yesterday from an auto manufacturer Who desperately needed developers and one of our solutions architects looked at and said yeah, you're microsoft stacked You're invested in these things. We really can't help you unless you're willing to do these other things So that's a huge bump in that hospital case We actually give them the hard sell I put together like an 85 page presentation About why they should be using open source the the problem boiled down to they wanted to host everything internally and they were Iis microsoft all the way to the ceiling And there was no way we were getting in there I'll give you the worst example. We had a big project that we were doing biggest sale I ever made And the I the director of it basically didn't care The marketing team was running it. He's like i'm not gonna block it But i'm not gonna support it Um, and then the person who was championing the project who was the chancellor of the university retired And then two weeks later they hired a new marketing director And the marketing director immediately killed the project The 2.2 million dollar project I was not real. Yeah So that's hey with the exchange rate right now. That's like a 1.8 million euro project. Yay A giant hole in my budget. Okay. Thanks And that that was actually because we didn't create the right alliances within that big organization. I mean, there's a whole dynamic to Again when you're dealing with large organizations understanding who are the players One of our successful university clients They actually told us very very clearly. It's like, okay, we're over here We're responsible for these things in the marketing department But the pr department has their own concerns and they're hostile to us in many cases And so they they were like, we need you to come and give a presentation To an open house to the entire university where they can ask you questions about things. I mean, this does happen The the highest pressure sales pitch I ever had to do was coming back from Drupal con or dev days in Dublin And I had to instead of flying home I had to fly to Minneapolis to meet with the university of minnesota who had an Open house and committee meeting that had half as many there like 40 people in the room And so i'm jet lagged on Having just got off a 15 hour flight And I have to give a two hour presentation to anyone who might show up from the university community To talk about why we'd be a successful partner on the project Okay, hello. Thanks for the presentation And I was wondering how do you respond to clients that ask you to give like a design Presentation to make the visuals of the homepage already to convince them that you have design capabilities or whatever Work which you usually would do like a sprint zero So how do you how do you reply to look? Let me see if I understand your question correctly You're asking for people who want to see to design pitches before they sign a contract Yes, we say no Again, I don't know how it's done in europe in the united states the what is it called the Association of international graphic artists have declared that doing design work up front without pay is called work on spec All right speculative work And the AI GA has declared that to be unethical And so we actually just had a case for this where we had a client who were like we really want to hire you But we we want to see how you would design this one thing We forced them to sign a three thousand dollar contract To do that work and we had this conversation with them like look we I can't So the the problem in a sales corp It's interesting in a group like this. It's easy for me to say that's unethical. We won't do it That's very difficult to say to a client And the AI GA actually if you google AI GA spec work and there's a there's a website I can't remember the name of it. It's like no spec dot com or dot org or something like that They actually have language that you can use And the AI GA language is essentially You're asking us to do Work that requires a heavy investment in research into your company Help understand the strategy of what you're trying to accomplish There's no way we can actually give you what you want within the time period you're asking for And so it wouldn't be an accurate representation of what we would bring to the project That's basically the way they they couch it, but then some with this other client. I actually use the word spec First with the people we were talking to it's funny because then their their chief marketing officer called us the next day Like we talked to the project people and then their boss called us the next day It was like tell me what's going on and it's like I can't do this what you're asking for you know And in that case we played this this works too in that case we played good cop bad cop Right where one person gave the AI GA line. This isn't going to be the best work, you know You know, you're not going to get exactly what you need and I was There to say and we won't So it worked out, but that's a touchy piece But I again the AI GA has a really good set of resources around And I would say please yeah as another development for please don't do that Right the the reason the AI GA says not to do it A lot of the members of the AI GA are freelancers and it's very very unfair If you have time to do work on spec unpaid work and other people don't and you get paid, you know You get a job because of it That's not That's just not fair Right, it's just that's why they consider it unethical Hi, um, thank you very much for not Supporting unpaid graphic pictures. This is a major problem here, too Um, I have a question about the support you said you had to outsource your support unit But isn't the support unit a cornerstone of a long-term relationship with the customer? So how do you solve this problem? Yeah, that's a it's a fascinating question because our support is in in buddhapesh And there's a time zone problem. There's a bit of a language problem all of our support folks do speak Fluent English heavily accented English, but but fluent English we do have Long-term project managers. So the point person that they're talking to one of our people is always on those conversations Unless it's a purely technical conversation That they've already built up a relationship So we're there to bridge to build the bridge and and the trust and the confidence and say look These are the people we use. This is why we use them, right? And it's interesting right because again in the united states if we said, oh, right We have this team in buddhapesh and they cost half of what we do. That's why we use them That will offend people Right. It's it's out. It's offshoring. It's bad. People don't like it. Um So we actually tell them what I told you which is look here's the thing you need this these eight skills We only have enough work for one person We hire these people they give us four people who have that set of skills, right? They can swap that up they give us a flexibility that we wouldn't have otherwise so we can deliver things faster for you as a result So it but yeah Typically those conversations happen with like I showed you synthia phil putt synthia ran our support team for a while Typically it'd be synthia and the client and one of one or two of their developers. So we're always involved there And you know, there are times when we use subcontractors To supplement our team and in those cases you always get Palantir people as well, right? So we're never just like handing you off to someone else You have a session at 12. I have to go. Thank you everybody Let me let me just pack up and get out of the way