Vendors: Frenemies or Friends? with Michael Ducy of The Goat Farm

This is a joint episode with The Goat Farm, the enterprise DevOps podcast, with all three Arrested DevOps hosts plus Michael Ducy from The Goat Farm. The conversation started when Matty and Michael, both at Chef, were in Seattle training the sales engineers and got talking about being a partner to customers rather than someone handing over a bill of sale. Bridget is at Pivotal and Trevor is at 10th Magnitude, so everyone has been on both sides of the vendor table. Trevor opens with a customer telling him he's the guy from the podcast and they want to work with him because sometimes he sounds smart.

Using DevOps to Sell DevOps

Michael says the Seattle training was built around value stream mapping and Kanban, so the sales engineers would have some DevOps fundamentals as tools for conversations with customers. Trevor asks what value stream mapping is, and Michael explains that you draw a current state map of how a piece of work flows through a process and where time is spent, then build a future state map that removes the waste. It comes from lean manufacturing, and Gene Kim is a proponent of it in The Phoenix Project. Michael has done enterprise software sales for eight years, mostly on the presales side at BMC, Instratius (which Dell acquired) and Chef, and now manages Chef's East presales team. He wants to be less of a demo jockey and bring more value to the conversation.

Five Kinds of Salesperson

Bridget says the golf-and-wine stereotype doesn't match the field people she has met at Pivotal. Matty introduces The Challenger Sale, which describes five profiles: the hard worker, who makes the calls and follows the process, the lone wolf, who ignores the process and closes deals with a Rolodex, the relationship builder, the problem solver and the challenger. The problem solver says "tell me where it hurts and I will sell you the Band-Aid," while the challenger teaches you something about your business you didn't know and acts as a trusted advisor.

Bridget pushes back that you need a relationship before you can challenge anyone. Matty's answer is that the relationship builder means you buy from me because you like me, and Michael adds that many CIOs buy from the same salesperson they have bought from for 20 years. Trevor, as a principal consultant, finds himself in the problem solver role, and says Matty is probably half problem solver and half challenger. Michael says you have to wear different hats depending on the customer, since some know their problem and some have read about DevOps and called the DevOps company to buy it.

Eight Units of DevOps

That leads to a recurring question: "do you want to sell them 8 units of DevOps today, or do you want to sell them 4 units of DevOps over the next 15 years?" Bridget says you sometimes have to give people what they need, not what they want. Matty explains that with a subscription model, selling a customer something they aren't ready for creates a churn customer who will cancel in a year.

Selling in an Open Source World

Michael contrasts his proprietary days. The customer knew little about the software, the documentation was behind a login, and a $2 million deal meant convincing everyone through executive relationships. In the open source world, the customer is often smarter about the software than he is and asks why they should pay him. The sale runs through the individual contributors who sell it upward to the economic buyer. Bridget adds that if those people can't look at your code on GitHub they will veto it, and Michael says you're also selling the community, which gives customers other people to share the pain with, where in the proprietary world you're "always angry at the vendor for not giving you what you need." Bridget adds that customers can choose among vendors, since other companies also help with Chef and commercial Cloud Foundry.

Matty describes r/sysadmin complaints about vendors' cold calls, with SolarWinds getting the worst reputation, and the flip side: when you do your own discovery, there's a lot you don't know to look for, which is the advantage of a trusted advisor. Michael says one reason he left BMC was that he kept wondering "what are you trying to hide" when documentation was behind a paywall, and recalls an executive saying the customer shouldn't be able to download the software because it's enterprise software and complicated. Bridget says that at Pivotal, missing public information is usually because nobody has had time, not malice, and describes a ThoughtWorks person who found an error in Pivotal's docs and was pointed to the GitHub repo to submit a PR.

Good Vendor Relationships

Bridget says when she was a Chef customer at Drama Fever she happened to run into Julian Dunn, who was doing product management for the thing she was unhappy about, and told her where it was on the roadmap, with no secret handshake. Matty's example is a rep from Serena Software on a small deal of about $50K, who talked about the roadmap and told him he wasn't ready for something yet, so they'd get him there. It paid off: they later partnered in a big way, and Matty says a hard sell on the problem he described would have gotten them barely anything.

Proof of Experience

Michael says Chef used to run proofs of concept the traditional way, with experts setting up the tool, writing the customer's use case and demoing that the software solves the problem. They realized that was broken, and now "it's more about can the customer solve their use cases with the software." Matty recalls his own Fast search POC at Apartments.com, six weeks with the vendor's engineer building everything. If he came in and wrote Chef code to install WebLogic, "it proves that Matt can write Chef code," which doesn't help you because he doesn't work for you. He calls it a proof of experience, a time machine to see what it will be like, and says it is physically and emotionally exhausting and his favorite part of the job. His sign that it is working: "when the stickers go on the laptop, you know the deal's on its way."

Michael says the point is to challenge expectations in enterprises that say they could never work that way, by having people do it. Bridget adds that if only one part of the organization is in the room, the parts that are always at war aren't, and you sell them the units and they don't use them, so you have to get everyone in the room, since you can't just buy a tool. Michael quotes Adam Jacob: the tool reinforces the culture and the culture reinforces the tool.

Everyone Is in Sales

Matty quotes Nathan Harvey: "everyone's in sales in your organization." Bridget found a 2014 tweet of hers for a presentation to her sales organization, "DevOps is culture, princess. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell something," and Andrew Clay Shafer's reply was "everyone is selling." Michael brings up Daniel Pink's To Sell Is Human, which says one in nine Americans work in sales and the other eight are selling something too. He says the presales team teaches value stream mapping, Kanban and pair programming during the POC, and then at the end tells customers that what they just did is foundational DevOps, and that they had no idea the presales team had done "the DevOps on them." Bridget adds that they did the DevOps for themselves.

Closing thoughts: Matty, who never thought he'd be good at sales, doesn't think wanting to change the world and being a good salesperson are mutually exclusive, and asks listeners to skip the assumption that everyone is selling snake oil: "Assume positive intent." Bridget, who as a sysadmin was lied to about IOPS, is humbled by how much customers trust them, and says sometimes the right answer is to stop hating each other and talk, which she calls "DevOps therapy."

This was a special co-production with The Goat Farm. Don't forget to subscribe to their Enterprise DevOps podcast on iTunes or Stitcher!

• The Challenger Sale In Less Than 10 Minutes
• “To Sell Is Human” - by Daniel Pink
• Value Stream Mapping

Check Outs

Michael

• "I’ve discovered that tweeting something inflammatory about Docker will give you a really popular tweet."

Bridget

• PetFinder.com - searching for that adoptable pet of your dreams

Trevor

• Bryan Fuller co-producing the new Star Trek TV series
• posh-git

Matt

• git-blame-someone-else
• New DreamWorks/Netflix Voltron series title announced - Voltron: Legendary Defender
• Snarky Agile Tees

Upcoming Events

• DevOpsDays Rockies is offering a 10% discount for ADO listners with the code ADO2016

Upcoming CFP's

• DevOpsDays Rockies and DevOpsDays Seattle CFP open until February 28th
• ChefConf CFP open until February 29
• DevOpsDays Atlanta CFP open until March 1
• Dockercon CFP open until March 18
• Platform/Spring One CFP open until March 24
• DevOpsDays Vancouver and DevOpsDays Minneapolis CFP and Abstractions open until March 31
• DevOpsDays Washington, D.C. open until April 15
• DevOpsDays Salt Lake City open until April 19
• DevOpsDays Amsterdam open until May 30