Terry Ledden, managing partner of Sales AboutFace Inc.

These are tough days for Ottawa's technology sector. Most mature companies are coping with slumping sales and startups are nervously lining up customers, anxious to collect revenue for their first products.

Whatever the case, there is a sharp focus on sales and marketing.

Unfortunately, this is not an area where local companies have distinguished themselves. There is a perception that Ottawa possesses spectacular research and development talent, but falls short when it comes to sales and marketing.

How does Ottawa measure up? To answer that question, the Ottawa Business Journal surveyed three local experts.

The first is Colleen Francis of Engage Selling Solutions. She has worked for the past 15 years building sales divisions with public and private companies across North America. She says Engage Selling is focused on "developing innovative sales approaches with the objective of giving teams the edge they need to win more deals, consistently."

The second expert is Terry Ledden, managing partner of Sales AboutFace Inc. He has been helping companies in the technology, professional services and manufacturing sectors improve sales effectiveness for the past 15 years. Sales AboutFace is the Ottawa authorized licensee of U.S.-based Sander Sales Institute, which has 70 offices throughout North America.

Finally, there is Tim Redpath, who runs a marketing consultancy called Train of Thoughts, which offers clients advice and action to solve business problems in the areas of strategic planning, market research, market development, integrated communications plans, brand building and special events. Before starting his own company, Redpath was vice-president of sales and marketing at Kanatek Technologies Inc. He also managed various marketing functions for Mitel Corp.

Here are their thoughts on sales and marketing.

OBJ: How do you assess sales and marketing talent in Ottawa?

LEDDEN: I believe our local tech community is facing a challenge with respect to defining talent. There's no consistent or common context within which to assess talent. In the U.S. market, where many of our local tech firms compete, strategies have been shifting. Yesterday, U.S. players placed a heavy emphasis on having a better product or technology in order to win. Now, product superiority is no longer the name of the game. The highly competitive U.S. market — our battleground — has been shifting toward an approach to winning based on how they're selling, not just what they're selling. Our local talent tends to represent a cross-section of the traditional approach that typically relies on the need for some product, price or industry advantage in order to win. This seems to be in our gene pool from the smallest startup with brilliant engineering ability to some of the largest players in the country. Our competition to the south has been building a go-to-market strategy that leverages continued R&D excellence along with a systematic, customer value based sales and marketing model. When I assess local sales and marketing talent in the context of our competition, I see organizations hiring traditional product and price dependent salespeople, typically because someone told them they had talent. These are the same people I see not making it in this tougher competitive climate. The talent gap is also evident across founders and management who may not have had the experience in developing the sales and marketing systems needed to scale the business.

FRANCIS: There is talent in Ottawa but it has not generally been well developed or used by local companies. Companies have not always understood what to do with a sales team, how to ensure they are successful, nor have they always done a great job of matching specific sales skills to the requirements of the company. Startups require different sales skills than mature companies. Regardless of the industry vertical — software, telecom or hardware — companies have to learn how to match up the salesperson with the job that needs to be done. Does the salesperson have to be in the trenches, prospecting for new business and building a market or do they need to manage one account that will take two years to make a $45-million dollar purchase decision? Both jobs are sales yet require different skills. We don't hire java developers to build Asics chips. In Ottawa, the biggest sales mistakes I have seen have been because the skills of the salesperson did not match the job that needed to be done.

REDPATH: Ottawa has an extraordinary wealth of research and development talent. Anyone meeting local startups can only be impressed by the ideas and skills in our local community. Ottawa has some very talented marketing people and salespeople, but not enough of them. Our local successes show the skills are there. Failure is a byproduct of trying and is very common in growth areas like Ottawa. There are all sorts of reasons for failure — lack of marketing and sales skills being just one reason. But we certainly need more marketing and sales talent ... a lot more.

OBJ: Presuming our sales and marketing talent need to be improved, how do companies do that?

FRANCIS: Sales is not an event, it's a process. Like any other process-driven profession, sales skills needs to be practiced, refined and mastered. Companies need to start investing in developing and modernizing their sales teams. They also need to begin educating entire organizations that they are a revenue-driven or market-focused company. This is a shift away from the traditional idea that they are technology-focused companies first. In a market-focused company, everybody sells and everybody is focused on what the customer, the market, wants to buy. In order to be market focused, we need to sell. In order to be profitable, we need to have strong, well-developed sales skills.

LEDDEN: While the shift in U.S. approach may sound daunting, the good news is that they've taken a highly traditional approach to making it happen — with mixed results. Take the sales forces of these companies as an example. Except for a few best-in-class companies, too much has been spent by these organizations in an attempt to reskill their sales forces in strategic, solutions and value-based selling approaches with too little return. This is where we have the opportunity, locally, to take a slightly different approach and outdistance the U.S. industry's transition to sales superiority as a non-traditional source of advantage. First, align the offering and the marketing and sales messages around what's important to the customer — the business value in terms of productivity improvement and ROI on the investment in your company's whole product. Next, adopt a systematic selling approach, but understand that there are hidden weaknesses that cause sales organizations to fail even when trained in more advanced sales approaches and techniques. Assess your sales force for hidden weaknesses such as the need for approval, difficulty recovering from rejection, issues with personal self-concept and other self-limiting issues. Combined with a low desire to succeed and a lack of commitment to do whatever it takes, these weaknesses will neutralize even the best sales process and techniques training by preventing salespeople to execute.

REDPATH: First, you have to measure yourself against the best companies in the world, not the closest, and strive to beat them. You can't be satisfied with being number one in a small market like Ottawa. You have to compete in the big market to be successful. Then, it starts with leadership: understanding the role of marketing and sales relative to the company and its products, investing in the right skills, training, research and program delivery. A good plan is pointless if there is no budget to execute it. A budget is wasted without the right talent to execute it.

OBJ: Is it possible to run a sales and marketing department from Ottawa or should this function be run from the United States or another more international centre?

FRANCIS: It completely depends on the product set and the stage of the company. I know of a company in Bozeman, Montana — a place that's smaller and harder to find than Ottawa — that did $50 million per year, all with sales centralized in Bozeman. It would be ludicrous for Nortel or Mitel to have their sales teams 100 per cent based in Ottawa. However, companies doing most of their work selling on the phone or smaller internally financed companies with limited budget might find it most effective to be located here. I know it's possible to have a successful and profitable team based in Ottawa and selling internationally, because I was a bag-carrying software sales rep based in Ottawa. Who were my clients? Exxon, Microsoft, the U.S. Air force and the IMF.

LEDDEN: Depending on the stage of the company's development, there are advantages to locating sales and marketing leadership (often one in the same at this stage) within Ottawa HQ. Close proximity to R&D and the daily decisions that impact competitive performance are critical in the early growth stages, however, not at the expense of putting distance between sales management and the market. About 85 per cent of sales management's time should be spent holding salespeople accountable, coaching (pre-call strategizing and post-call debriefing), finding and hiring new and better sales talent and growing the performance of the sales team. This involves appropriate combinations of face-to-face time with salespeople inside the prospect and customer environment as well as long distance support. So I'd be weighing the advantages of proximity to HQ in order to make things happen against the disadvantages of cross border and airline logistics.

REDPATH: Marketing's job is to interpret and fulfill customer needs. You don't have to be physically close to customers if they are in the U.S., but you do need sound methods of communicating with them and good listening and analytical skills. Where marketing groups are big enough, the tactical and field marketing should be regionalized to people who understand the nuances of local markets. Sales can be managed from anywhere, but sales personnel need to be in the face of their clients, wherever their clients are based. It makes sense to have sales people living next door to clients. The key to success is to understand customer requirements and to be responsive. It's an attitude of mind and, frankly, it doesn't matter a whole lot where you are based.

OBJ: What's the biggest piece of sale and marketing advice that you would give high-tech companies based in Ottawa?

FRANCIS: Hire the right people with the skills you need to get the job done. Don't be afraid to look for salespeople outside of your industry. Some of the best startup sales people come from financial advisors offices because they know how to make cold calls and deal with objections. Develop and modernize sales skills. The markets have changed, our clients are smarter, and have more access to information. They buy differently then they did five years ago. We need to sell differently as well.

LEDDEN: Technology CEOs and founders should raise the bar for themselves and their sales and marketing organization by differentiating themselves not only on the basis of engineering and R&D advancements, but also by the way they sell and market. Every CEO and founder needs to adopt a systematic sales process and become skilled at asking both salespeople and prospects the right questions at the right time. CEOs and founders who ask the right questions will also be best prepared to answer the right sales and marketing questions from the right potential investors. Those that do will capitalize on this impending shift toward sales superiority as a new nontraditional competitive advantage.

REDPATH: Don't expect clients to knock on your door. If they do, congratulations! Mostly they won't, so go out and find them. Talk to them, find out what they want, how they want it delivered, how much they'll pay, and what colour they want it. And then invest in your marketing and sales programs to be the best in the market.