Editor’s note: This blog post is part of our ongoing series of True Sales Tales.
Today just about every successful company runs on processes, for sales, for manufacturing, for development and for many other purposes. But some 20 years ago, a process wasn’t so commonplace–and evolution of a standard development process not only helped save my company, it made its eventual substantial growth possible.
In the mid-1990s, I founded one of the first Apple dealerships in Vienna, Austria. I was a major devotee of Apple, and was very excited to do this. The dealership took off and did well–but it wasn’t very long after we started that I realized that the real future was in software–what people were doing on all those computers being sold and serviced. It occurred to me that software development was what really needed to happen for my company to generate value. And so I immediately established a software division for my new company.
The first thing we began doing was building websites for clients, with graphics and HTML. As we got rolling, I realized that we had to define our process: learn how a site was supposed to look, figure out the graphic aspects required, and gather all user specifications. Fortunately the sites we were building as our process was being evolved were small–the enormous ecommerce and content management sites were things of the future at that point. In fact there weren’t even platforms available yet for these kinds of sites.
But there was one constant problem with these small sites: people didn’t want to pay much for them. In fact, it seemed that the smaller the company, the more service they wanted for the least amount of money.
There came a point where I said, “Right, that’s enough.” After quite a number of these projects that made little to no money for us, I made up my mind to only sell large projects. I wasn’t going to sell any more $3k-$5k web sites. I wanted to engage in projects that were of the $100k to $500k size.
Not much was known about the web in those days by the average user. So I found that if I was going to make decent-sized sales, I had to sit down and show a prospect company what was really possible on the web. I had to offer them solutions. It required some investigation, which we did–and then I was able to start pitching some real sales.
Not long after I began this new quest, I hit pay dirt: I sold the local Jewish Community a web site. And this was no small job: it was roughly 25 times the size of anything we had done in the past.
I had just one little issue that had to be resolved: I had no programmers who could deal with a job of that size! All the programmers I had hired up to that point were only skilled enough to build the small sites we had been selling. So in order to deliver this new big project, I had to get busy very fast and hire the right talent.
Selling something that you don’t have the means to deliver might seem like a dangerous thing to do–and in most cases, it certainly would be. For example, you wouldn’t sell a new house if you had no team to design and build it. But in this instance I had a saving grace: I had already evolved a very workable development process. A good process always has one great characteristic: it is scalable. Hence I just needed to add the right staff with the right skillset onto the team, and run them through the same process. I did so, and we delivered the completed web site in a timely manner.
The lessons learned:
1. Always have a standard, workable process.
2. Make sure that process is scalable. In my case my process scaled well–it was the same process I had used with the smaller jobs, but much more magnified and detailed.
Today this is common knowledge for most companies. But it’s a lesson I learned well all those years ago so still make sure it’s applied.
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