Go-To-Market - featuring Terry Hughes of otaView

Although I call myself Terry, my given name is actually Terence. Throughout my career I have used Terence as my go-to-market mnemonic. I’ll share with you that mnemonic today, and if there’s one thing you should take away from this article, it’s to remember “the Terence sales process”; it works! Think about how you can apply TERENCE to your current sales challenges.The best example of TERENCE in my career was when I took over sales at a company with annual revenues of $0.5M Within 2 years, annual revenues had become $3.4M, we had become well known within the industry, and we had some really high profile reference customers.This is how we did it.

T ARGET: instead of trying to sell to everyone, we focused 100% on the lucrative carrier market. We set ourselves a goal of $3M in revenue and 10 carrier customers within 2 years.

E STABLISH: selling to carriers required a different class of product and a different set of skills; we re- structured internally before going out there.

R ELATIONSHIPS: although it was expensive, we attended all the tradeshows and industry events, we presented our vision and wrote groundbreaking white papers, we joined the associations, and we adopted a consultative selling approach. The carriers started approaching us to do business!

E VALUATION: we were proactive about providing packaged evaluations on our terms, and when carriers did on-site assessments our “Establish” phase had made us prepared and ready with most of the answers.

N URTURE: carriers were notorious for dragging their heels, so we had to be assertive. We went to them with a well-thought out execution plan including timescales, and we were prepared to walk if they wanted to move more slowly.

C LOSE: instead of putting all of our hope in Vodafone, we signed several tier 2 carriers first, which gave us great experience and some great revenues in shorter timescales.

E XPAND: our solution was GSM circuit- switched but our roadmap was GPRS; carriers bought the GSM solution because of what we would be able to do when GPRS was launched.That all happened in 1999, and that company is still going strong!

Terry Hughes runs a wireless sales consultancy company in Canada, called otaView. otaView is a member of WIP. Terry has spent the last 20 years in telecoms in Europe, mainly heading up sales and business development, including 7 years at Vodafone and 4 years at 2 start-ups. Before setting up otaView he was VP Sales at Zi Corporation for 4 years, licensing embedded software to OEMs. Having worked within the world’s biggest carrier, then spending many years selling to carriers and handset manufacturers, Terry has seen it all – and sold it all !

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