August 11, 2005

I opted out of yesterday’s meeting with the potential acquirer of Tom’s company; he was very pleased with the way the meeting went. It was only four weeks ago, when Tom first went down to meet the CEO of this privately held company. Early last week, talks picked up again, resulting in yesterday’s visit to discuss: what opportunities exist to work together, what an integration of our product would look like, and what the action items are for future discussions.

Learning New Insights

He’s been here three times before in serious discussions, kissed a lot of frogs who weren’t that serious, but this time may be different. Tom learned a few things today. They reviewed our company’s sales forecast. The visiting CEO’s observations were, “These figures are aggressive.” Tom apparently replied with, “Yes, we are aggressive. We did these during our investment talks, based on assumptions. As he caught me up on the meeting, Tom mentioned that he wanted to update the sales forecast based on the pipeline with some assumptions rather than all assumptions and channel partner promises. “This is a great cultural fit and they move fast. This is a better fit than the current partner we’re trying to finalize the agreement with and the very large company we negotiated with…the agreements still in legal after 6 months.” The next steps are for the potential suitor to present Tom with a continuum of options of how we could work together, ranging from reseller agreement to acquisition.

100-Day Plan Complete for Friday’s Meeting

The first draft of my 100-Day plan for Marketing is complete with the Management-by-Objectives style overview, the 100-Day deliverables list, and the Marketing Needs Assessment. I updated based on my conversation with Tom near the end of the day, then sent out the three documents to Barbara, Luke, and Tom for their review prior to our Friday meeting.

Business Goals, Values, and Features Map Complete

One step I take before building the Solution Development Prompters (SDPs) sales tool are the org charts that provide a visual of the target audience, their Business Goals, Value, and Features Map that map to value statements. I completed the primary target audience org chart yesterday. Today, I’ll create a couple SDPs for Friday’s meeting. I still have three other documents, in addition to the SDPs, that I want to rollout on Friday. I should be able to get them done today.

The Smart Lemming Diary is a series that chronicles a journey of laid-off worker, who becomes a Vice President of Sales Operations & Marketing for a small entrepreneurial healthcare technology company.

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