innovation
Getting your Piece of the PIE
Whether you are selling, consulting, or managing, there is a foundational approach that has consistently helped me succeed. I call it PIE – an acronym that stands for Perspective, Insight, and Experience. When applied effectively, these three elements provide a robust framework for solving problems, winning clients, and leading teams to remarkable outcomes.
Over the years, I’ve taught this methodology to my teams, and it’s been a critical driver of their success. While I usually reserve it for a small circle, I believe it’s time to share it more broadly.
As an aside, years ago, I wrote a post about some of the negative aspects of the “reckless” application of PIE.
Perspective – Broaden Your View to Stand Out:
To truly differentiate yourself in any field, you need to develop a broad and informed perspective. This involves understanding the larger environment in which you operate: the market, competitive landscape, customer needs, technological advances, and regulatory shifts. A dynamic perspective evolves as you gain new experiences and encounter different approaches to solving similar problems with other businesses or in other industries.
This requires a broad understanding of the environment, market, competitive landscape, legal and technological changes, and more. It also grows and changes as you experience new and different things—especially when different approaches to similar problems are taken. It is how you start to stand out in the eyes of your prospects, customers, and team.
Earlier in my career, I taught technical courses. Two or three people usually stood out. At least one wanted to prove they were better and smarter, and usually, one discussed strange approaches to solving problems. When digging into those strange approaches, you would often identify something creative and brilliant coming from a different perspective on the problem. Curiosity and a desire to improve drive innovation.
In business, perspective becomes your differentiator. When you can see things from a broader, more holistic viewpoint, you position yourself as someone who can offer more than just solutions—you offer foresight, adaptability, and creativity. You become the lighthouse that guides your clients around tricky situations and to a better destination.
How to Apply This:
- Stay informed about industry trends, not just within your niche but across related sectors.
- Engage with diverse thinkers, challenge your assumptions, and be open to unconventional ideas.
- Regularly reassess your strategies in light of new information or shifts in the business environment.
Here is a post that discusses perspective as the starting point.
Insight – The Power of Seeing What Others Don’t:
Insight is one of the most valuable assets you can bring to any business interaction. Too often, people are trapped by existing tools, processes, and perceived constraints. Insight allows you to pierce through these limitations and identify opportunities for improvement that others miss.
Here’s where perspective plays a role in insight: the broader your view, the better your ability to generate actionable insights that can transform a business. My most successful deals and projects were not won because I followed the status quo—they were won because I brought fresh ideas to the table. By reframing the problem and presenting a path to a better solution, I created value that competitors cannot match.
How to Apply This:
- Question assumptions and typical approaches. Ask yourself, “Is this really the best way to solve the problem?”
- Look for inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and areas of waste in processes. These are often hidden opportunities for innovation.
- When engaging with clients or teams, offer insights that reframe their challenges and provide a path to improved outcomes by initially focusing on the “what” instead of the “how.”
Here’s a post that delves deeper into insightfulness.
Experience – The Foundation of Wisdom and Credibility:
Experience is the foundation that supports both perspective and insight. It’s the repository of lessons learned—both successes and failures—that shape your approach to problem-solving and innovation. The more varied and in-depth your experience, the better equipped you are to offer valuable insights and strategies.
Consulting, in particular, is a fertile ground for gaining diversified experiences. By working with multiple clients across industries, you gain exposure to a wide array of challenges and solutions. In sales, this experience translates into powerful stories that illustrate your ability to help clients achieve better outcomes. The more experience you accumulate, the more confident you’ll become in your ability to deliver meaningful results through transferable competence (taking skills and lessons learned from one domain and applying them to another).
How to Apply This:
- Reflect on your past experiences—what worked, what didn’t, and why. Use these lessons to guide future decisions.
- Build case studies from your experiences to demonstrate your expertise and credibility when engaging with clients or stakeholders.
- Continuously seek out new challenges that stretch your capabilities and expand your knowledge base.
As Albert Einstein wisely said, “The only source of knowledge is experience. You need experience to gain wisdom.” But it’s not just about accumulating experiences—it’s about leveraging them. Your past successes build confidence in your abilities, while your failures provide invaluable lessons that help you avoid costly mistakes in the future.
Beyond the Hunt: Fueling Sustainable Enterprise Sales Growth
The software start-up world is obsessed with “Hunters” – salespeople laser-focused on landing new customers. Job boards are overflowing with companies in “growth phases,” desperate for new logos. Understandably, the revenue from each new customer can mean a 10-20x multiple in company valuation in the VC-fueled race toward an exit. But what happens after the deal closes? Is that frenzied growth sustainable?
The Long Game: Profitability and Sustainability
My experience leading a large business unit and running my own company has taught me that sustainable growth requires more than just a flood of new logos. Here’s why:
- Cash flow is King: Lines of credit can vanish overnight (remember Silicon Valley Bank?). Relying solely on external funding is a risky approach.
- Not All New Business is Good Business: Unprofitable accounts, high-churn risks, and customers with limited growth potential can drain your resources faster than you can acquire them. Efficiency matters for scalability.
- Profits Drive Long-Term Growth: Organic, profit-fueled growth, especially when driven by innovation, creates a much more resilient and valuable business.
The Power of the Hybrid Sales Model
To achieve sustainable growth, you either need an extensive and fully integrated organization that seamlessly transitions from the sale to implementation (not many companies are able to accomplish this), or a hybrid sales team that excels at both hunting (50-70%) and farming (30-50%). Landing a new customer is hard work, but retaining and growing them is just as challenging and crucial. Customer acquisition costs are often too high to justify losing a customer only a year or two after the initial win. Treating new customers like assets (instead of commodities) is essential to long-term success.
Mastering Strategic Accounts: Turnarounds and Growth
Large, strategic accounts—Tier 1 companies with strong brand recognition and significant revenue potential—present unique challenges. In my experience, these accounts often fall into two categories: those I initially closed and then grew (ideal, as you have already laid the foundation for success), and those I inherited in a neglected state and had to turn around.
Turnarounds require a unique skill set. They demand as much time and sometimes even more effort than landing a new logo, blending aspects of both hunting and farming. It takes commitment, skill, patience, and effort to understand an organization and find new ways to deliver value. Relationships and trust take time to develop, and in this situation they are in question (or worse).
Case Study: From Churn Risk to Multi-Million Dollar Expansion
Take, for example, a large Financial Services company I inherited when their Strategic Account Manager left. The account had been neglected for two years and was riddled with problems. We lacked executive relationships and higher-level visibility within the organization. They were evaluating competitors, and we knew nothing about it! Even though they were an existing customer, we were the underdog.
I organized a day-long on-site meeting to understand their pain points. We identified immediate issues, shared our vision for the future, began building trust, and demonstrated our commitment to their success. Following this, we spent a few hours getting to know the team over dinner. It was an eye-opener for me, with them providing more information about their needs and how best to approach them.
The result? Within three months, I closed a $500K expansion deal, followed by a $500K consulting engagement and then a $3.25M two-year cloud expansion and upgrade prepay deal. My team and I rebuilt the relationship, solved critical problems (even going beyond our product scope), and provided a clear path forward with our AI-powered platform. I became a trusted advisor who was valued by their executive team. It was a true win-win.
The Bottom Line: Building a Sustainable Sales Engine
Install base growth and customer retention is critical for long-term success, especially with larger customers. The approach has to be multi-dimensional. It is a team effort, and the Account Executive is the quarterback. Relationship management, customer success teams, support, and services all play a role. Effective communication is bi-directional, where the customer has insight into what is coming down the road and input into the direction of products they rely on. This becomes a true partnership that adds significant value to both organizations.
Does this hybrid approach apply to every company? If you’re IBM or Oracle, your offerings are broad and deep, and your customers are largely locked-in. “Land and expand” is part of their DNA. And if you’re selling end-of-life products, your focus might shift towards maximizing the “long tail” through customer success and services to minimize costs and maximize profitability.
However, for most growth-stage Cloud and SaaS companies, the hybrid sales model is an essential part of their success.
Call to Action:
- Evaluate your sales team structure and compensation plans. Do they incentivize both new customer acquisition and ongoing account growth?
- Invest in training and development for your sales team. Equip them with the skills needed to excel at both hunting and farming. It can be a difficult transition, but is worth it in the long run.
- Need help building a high-performing hybrid sales team or turning around strategic accounts? Let’s connect!
Lessons Learned from Selling Kubernetes
Cloud-native, containerization, microservices, and Kubernetes have become very popular over the past few years. They are as complex as they are powerful, and for a large, complex organization, these technologies can be a game changer. Kubernetes itself is a partial solution – the foundation for something extraordinary. It can take 20-25 additional products to handle all aspects of the computing environment (e.g., ingress, services mesh, storage, networking, security, observability, continuous delivery, policy management, and more).
Consider the case of a major Financial Services company, one of my clients. They operated with 200 Development teams, each comprising 5-10 members, who were frequently tasked with deploying new applications and application changes. Prior to embracing Kubernetes, their approach involved deploying massive monolithic applications, with changes occurring only 2-3 times per year. However, with the introduction of Kubernetes, they were able to transition to a daily deployment model, maintaining control and swiftly rolling back changes if necessary. This shift in their operations not only allowed them to innovate at a faster pace but also enabled them to respond to opportunities and address needs more promptly.
Most platforms utilize Ansible and Terraform for creating playbooks, configuration management, and other purposes. Those configurations could become very long and complex over time and were prone to errors. For more complicated configurations, such as multi-cloud and hybrid environments, the complexity is further amplified. “Configuration Drift,” or runtime configurations that differ from what was expected for various reasons, leads to problems such as increased costs due to resource misconfiguration, potential security issues resulting from incorrectly applied or missing policies, and issues with identity management.
The surprising thing was that when prospects identified those problems, they would look to new platforms that used the same tools to solve them. Sometimes, things would temporarily improve (after much time and expense for a migration), but then fall back into disarray as the underlying process issues still needed to be addressed.
Our platform used a new technology called Cluster API (or CAPI). It provided a central (declarative) configuration repository, making it quick and easy to create new clusters. More importantly, it would perform regular configuration checks and automatically reconcile incorrect or missing policies. It was an immutable and self-healing Kubernetes infrastructure. It simplified overall cluster management and standardized infrastructure implementation.
All great stuff – who would not want that? This technology was new but proven, but it was different, which scared some people. These were a couple of recurring themes:
- The Platform and DevOps teams had a backlog of work due to existing problems, so there was more fear about falling further behind than confidence in a better alternative.
- Teams focused on their existing investment in a platform or on the sunk costs spent over a long period, attempting to solve their problems. The ROI on a new platform was often only 3-4 months, but that was challenging to believe, given their own experiences on an inferior platform.
- Teams would look at outsourcing the problem to a managed service provider. They could not explain how the problems would be specifically resolved, but did not seem concerned about that lack of clarity.
- There was a lack of consistency on the versions of Kubernetes used, the add-ons and their versions, and one-off changes that were never intended to become permanent. Reconciling those issues or migrating to new, clean clusters both involved time and effort. That became an excuse to maintain the status quo.
- Unplanned outages were common and usually expensive. Using the cost of those outages as justification for something new was typically a last resort, as people did not like acknowledging problems that put a spotlight on themselves.
- Architects had a curiosity about new and different things, but often lacked the gravitas within business leadership to effect change. They were usually unwilling or unable to explain how real changes happen within their company, or introduce you to the actual decision-makers and budget holders.
Focusing on outcomes and working with the Executives most affected by them tended to be the best path forward. Those companies and teams were rewarded with a platform that simplified fleet management, improved observability, and helped them avoid the risky, expensive problems that had plagued them in the past. And, working with satisfied customers who appreciated your efforts and became loyal partners made selling this platform that much more rewarding.
Six Ways AI Can Become a Sales Management Enhancer
As a VP of Sales, I would spend the first 60-90 minutes of every day reviewing a dozen different news sources, looking for information about new technology, competitor announcements, proposed legislation, and M&A news. I looked for anything relevant in critical industries, news about our customers or their top customers, and staffing changes within their companies.
My goal was to identify anything that could negatively impact deals in play, threaten the customer base, disrupt the run rate business, as well as seize opportunities to break into a new company or displace a competitor. You feed your findings and speculations back to your team, along with suggestions, talking points, or specific directions to help them maintain or increase their success for the current quarter plus the next few quarters.
You look for trends and leading indicators that could help your team and your organization achieve greater success. Winning feels good, and the rewards make you want to achieve even more.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be able to do all this and more. It will be more consistent, analyze information without bias, and do so on a more timely basis.
1. Automated Intelligence Gathering
Focus your efforts where they add the most value. AI can automate the collection and analysis of data from multiple sources, including news feeds, legal updates, social media, and competitor websites. This automation can save considerable time and minimize the chances of missing relevant information. Natural Language Processing (NLP) can identify, categorize, and correlate relevant information, providing actionable insights without the need for manual review.
2. Enhanced Lead and Opportunity Identification
In addition to the correlations above, Machine Learning (ML) models can analyze trends and patterns in data to identify potential leads or opportunities for expansion. By understanding market movements, customer behaviors, historical behavior, and presumptive competitor strategies, AI can suggest new targets for sales efforts and highlight areas where teams could gain a competitive edge.
3. Improved Internal Communication and Collaboration
Sales is not just about selling but also about collaborating internally to create the best possible products and services to sell and identify the best approaches to generate awareness and interest in your offerings.
AI systems can serve as a central hub for information that benefits various departments within a company. By integrating with CRM, marketing, support, and other internal systems, AI can distribute tailored information to different teams, ensuring that everyone has the best insights to perform their roles effectively and promoting a more cohesive and coordinated approach to achieving long-term business objectives.
4. Forecasting and Predictive Analytics
With the ability to process vast amounts of data, AI should significantly improve forecasting accuracy. Predictive analytics can estimate future sales trends, customer demands, and market dynamics, providing businesses with more opportunities to make better-informed decisions—better resource allocation, optimized sales strategies, and, ultimately, higher revenue will be the result.
5. Increased Efficiency and ROI
By automating routine tasks and providing deep insights, AI can free up sales and management teams to focus on strategic activities. The efficiency gains from AI can result in significant cost savings and a higher return on investment (ROI) as teams do more with less, capitalize on opportunities faster and more effectively, and ultimately make more money for themselves and their company.
6. Continuous Learning and Improvement
Machine learning models will improve over time as they process more data, meaning the insights and recommendations provided by AI will become increasingly accurate and valuable, helping businesses continuously refine their strategies and operations for better outcomes.
Future Perspectives
While it’s true that AI may not yet be ready to take over complex roles like enterprise sales, its potential to enhance these roles is undeniable. As AI technology continues to evolve, its ability to provide highly accurate forecasts, improve win rates, shorten sales cycles, and enhance competitiveness will only grow. The future of AI in sales and business management is not just about automation but about augmenting human capabilities to create more effective, efficient, and thriving organizations that are better able to compete in an increasingly competitive global landscape.
So, what do you think? Will this work? Will it be good enough if everyone is doing it? Leave a comment and let us know.
“Acting Like a Startup”
Over the years, I have heard comments like, “We operate like a startup,” “We act like a startup,” and “We are an overnight success that was 10 years in the making.” These statements are often euphemisms for “We are small and not growing as quickly as we would like.”
There are numerous estimates of startups in their first few years. One of the best descriptions I have found is from Failory, but Investopedia and LendingTree have similar but differing take on the statistics and root causes. All three articles linked to are worth reading. The net result is that the outcome of failure is much greater than success, especially over time. So, “acting like a startup” is not necessarily good, even when true. You want to act like a successful startup!
Understanding the data and various causes for success and failure are great inputs to business plans. I have been a principal with successful startups, both early employees and founders. Understanding the data and various causes for success and failure are significant inputs to business plans focused on long-term success. As a Founder, there are a few points that I believe to be key to success:
- You have specific expertise that is in demand and would be valuable to an identifiable number of prospective customers. How would those customers use those skills, and how would they quantify the value? That understanding provides focus on what to sell and to whom.
- A detailed understanding of the market and key players is needed to hone in on a niche to succeed.
- Understand your strengths and weaknesses, then hire the most intelligent and ambitious people who complement your weaknesses and strengths.
- Understand how to reach those potential customers and the messaging you believe will compel them. Then, find a way to test and refine those assumptions as necessary. Marketing and Lead Generation are very important.
- Have a plan for delivering on whatever you sell before you get your first sale. A startup needs to develop its track record of success, beginning with its first sale.
- Cash flow is king. It is far too easy to run out of money while looking at an excellent balance sheet because of receivables. Understand what matters and why.
- Founders need to understand the administrative side of a business – especially the financial, legal (especially contract law), insurance, and taxes. Find experts to validate your approach and fill in knowledge gaps.
- Consistency leads to repeatable success. You standardize, optimize, and automate everything possible. Wasted time and effort become wasted opportunities.
- Finally, there needs to be sufficient cash on hand to fund the time it takes to find and close your first deals, deliver and invoice the work, and then receive your first payments. That could easily be a 3-6 month period.
Those are the foundational items that are reasonably tangible. What is not as concrete but equally as important are:
- Having or developing the ability to spot trends and identify gaps that could become opportunities for your business.
- An agile mindset allows you to pivot your offerings or approach to refine your business model and hone in on that successful niche for your business.
- Foster a sense of innovation within your business. Always look for opportunities to deliver a better product or service, improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your business, and create intellectual property (IP) that adds long-term value.
- Focus on being the best and building a brand that helps differentiate you from your competition.
- Become a Leader, Not a Manager. Create your vision of success, set expectations for each person and team, and help eliminate roadblocks to their success. Trust your team to help you grow and replace members quickly if it becomes clear they are not a good fit.
Steve Jobs once said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
Winning is hard, so focus on the journey. Making your customers’ lives easier and allowing your employees to be creative while doing something they are proud of will lead you to your destination. But when things start going well, don’t sit back and convince yourself you are successful. Instead, continue to focus on ways to improve and grow.
Success means different things to different people, but longevity, growth, profitability, and some form of contributing to the greater good should be dimensions of success for any vision.
Where Ideas, Experiences, and Lessons Learned Intersect 