At the 11th hour, I decided to head up to Ipswich to BT’s Heath Martlesham engineering R&D facility.
I did not have a particular desire to see what BT where up too as an organization, but Doug Richard was hosting one of his excellent School for Startups.
Now I last visited “Adastral Park” during the 1980′s. Those not familiar with this part of the world – semi-rural Suffolk, BT’s research Labs where built in the 1960′s on the site of a former RAF base.
The main building represents all that was wrong with post war architecture and the central tower is I am told reflects back to it’s RAF days give a control tower feel, but reaching up into the stars, hence the name.
Well apart from the name change in the 1980′s I cannot see what else has changed ?
The building is “shabby and dated”, the hospitality was at minimal levels, other than from the fine girls that did car park duty – out in pretty indifferent weather.
But this is the bit that would worry me as a BT shareholder – you have I’d guess over 100 budding entrepreneurs in the room along with one of the countries, if not Europe’s leading entrepreneurial educators in Doug Richard, they made no effort to do any marketing at all !
A BT chap came on a the start did the health and safety brief, informed us not to take any photographs and left! – that was it – after that zip.
Surely the thousands of engineers are working on something they could at least give us a sneak preview on?
I now understand why it’s called “Adastral Park” – somebody’s head is certainly in the clouds !
Hopefully some BT employees where in the audience, they need marketing advice as badly as startup’s do.
Roy 11th June 2010
In a past life I worked in the world of IT sales and enjoyed it immensely, and made some good friends who where either customers or fellow colleagues.
Like most professional sales people I attended numerous sales training courses, seminars and events in order to “improve my game” and better understand how I could improve my chances of sales success, then I stumbled upon something very powerful that I still make use of nearly every day, and it’s a useful business tool even outside sales.
At the time I was working for DEC (Digital Equipments) largest European distributor and had been invited by a regional sales director to speak to his sales team. I did my pitch and I elected to stay for the rest of the day and it is perhaps one of the smartest business decisions I’ve ever made.
Each member of the sales team was asked to outline their major prospects over the coming months and give an overview of what they where working on.
One of the sales team was enthusing over a particular project prospect they had, and the sales director said, “this is all very good, but what is the impending event?” and at that moment I noticed that the prospect reporting sheets also had a box marked impending event.
The sales representative said that at this time he had not clearly identified the impending event because he was not close enough to the customer, so the sales director said “no impending event, more than likely – no sale this quarter.”
Over lunch all of this was explained to me, Impending events are really important things to understand, because this is what drives the customers buying cycle and indicates if the sale is likely to happen and when it is likely to happen.
In business most businesses put off making a decision until the last moment, because it is always wise to keep your options open, however if an impending event is identified, the seller can understand what the likely actions and timing of the customer might be.
For example a software licence might need to be renewed on a specific date, so if an alternative vendor wants to pitch he must do so in time for a transition to occur before the existing software must be renewed for X years. Another example maybe that your competitor is about to launch a new product that makes yours obsolete and you need to plan for a new product launch.
A printer may need to be aware of the dates of the major trade shows for his customers, because extra or new marketing collateral might be needed.
The closer you are to your customer the better you are likely to be given the information you need to identify the impending event and plan your marketing and sales activities accordingly.
Ironically the world of aviation has thousands of impending events every day as each aircraft rotates or lands.
Roy 7th April 2010
