Just because you think your product is awesome doesn’t mean your customers will. I have learned that lesson many times. The customer’s opinion is the only one that matters. As I reflected on our deepening partnership with Salesforce, as announced by Neeracha Taychakoonavudh at Dreamforce, I was reminded of a time when we missed the mark (Marc!).

Learning from your own mistakes is valuable, but learning from others’ mistakes can also be very worthwhile, so here’s the story of my mistake when I did not think enough about my customer’s perspective.

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In 2010, I was quite excited by a new innovation that we had developed at Altify. Leveraging the knowledge captured through all of the millions of sales cycles that we had measured in Dealmaker (the original name of the Altify Software Platform), and applying its intelligent rules engine, we launched Dealmaker Genius.

Using Dealmaker Genius, any sales professional could create a customized sales process for their own business in about 15 minutes. We decided to provide this service for free. Prior to the availability of Dealmaker Genius, companies either would get by with their own in-house designed sales process, or they would pay a consultant tens of thousands of dollars to design a sales process for them.

Now they could learn from the experience we had gained from working with the best companies in the world to design their own sales process. We even incorporated crowd- sourcing to continuously improve the Dealmaker Genius knowledge base.

Dave Stein, who at that time was CEO of ES Research, reviewed Dealmaker Genius, and in a blog post entitled There Are No Excuses Anymore, he said:

For the experienced sales leader, this is better than sliced bread. Rather than spending time and money on tips and tricks with little sustained impact, being able to create a customized sales process for their own business can set them on the path to lasting, measurable sales performance improvement … I’d be hard-pressed to accept any excuses from process-averse sales leaders as to why they wouldn’t avail themselves of this tool and the benefits that it will bring.

Had we found the something that everybody was looking for? Well, not quite.

The reaction to Dealmaker Genius was so positive, I thought that it might be a good tool for Salesforce to promote, or to provide for free to its customers. Surely Marc Benioff would be interested!

I was right and wrong at the same time. Here is an extract from our email conversation.

From: Donal Daly

Sent: Sunday, March 07, 2010 6:30 AM

To: Marc Benioff

Subject: Dealmaker Genius – might be of real value to salesforce.com customers

I think you will find this interesting – a web 2.0 app that intelligently creates sales processes.

The TAS Group Releases Dealmaker® Genius, Free Product Enabling Sales Professionals to Create a Customized Sales Process in Minutes, Saving Thousands of Dollars and Weeks of Effort (We were called The TAS Group then, before we changed the name to Altify)

Dealmaker Genius Utilizes Knowledge Base, Domain Expertise and Crowdsourcing to Build the First Free, Global, Intelligent, Online Sales Process Resource (The press release is attached)

Also, you might enjoy this 3min video that explains how/why we are doing this: http://bit.ly/9f3VSB

Best regards,

Donal

Marc responded by asking me whether I had built Dealmaker Genius natively on Force.com, Salesforce’s development platform. Once I explained to Marc that because [at that time] we also integrated with other CRM platforms, building it on Force was not an option. I was justifying my approach, not really a great idea in hindsight, and Marc quickly lost interest.

I had made a rookie error. I assumed that just because lots of people reacted positively to Dealmaker Genius then Marc Benioff would react just the same way as ‘everyone’ else.

Of course I should have known better. This was right at the time when salesforce.com was accelerating its expansion from being primarily a CRM-only company to the platform company that it is today with the Force.com capability at the center of that journey. He would have been interested in Dealmaker Genius has it been an example of Salesforce as a platform as that would have furthered his vision of establishing the platform company that he has so successfully developed over the last five years.

That was the beginning of the current chapter in our partnership with salesforce.com and the start of our journey to deploying the entire Dealmaker sales performance automation solution natively on their Force.com platform, ultimately signing Salesforce as a customer, and prompting me to write Account Planning in Salesforce.  So the effort was not wasted – but it wasn’t as effective as it could have been had I been smarter in my approach.

From Salesforce’s perspective, I focused in the wrong place, and, while what I had was of value to others, it did not solve a specific problem that Salesforce was trying to solve at that time.

The key learning from this story is pretty obvious. Without adequate focus on what my specific buyer wanted, and lacking attention to the other attributes of my buyer, and ignoring the fact that there were others who were important to the buying decision, my pursuit was never going to successful. My product was awesome, but I did not consider my customer’s perspective deeply enough – and that is always a mistake.

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Donal Daly is Executive Chairman of Altify having founded the company in 2005. He is author of numerous books and ebooks including the Amazon #1 Best-sellers Account Planning in Salesforce and Tomorrow | Today: How AI Impacts How We Work, Live, and Think. Altify is Donal’s fifth global business enterprise.