Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1080843
46 PCB007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2019 are failing in a market that is generally grow- ing. There are a lot of dynamics involved. One of them, of course, is how companies approach sales and marketing. What trends are you see- ing overall? McNabb: What I'm seeing is companies are get- ting more sophisticated when it comes to ad- vancing their sales success. For instance, imag- ine that you make a medical device and have great sales with four out of the five hospitals in town. What we do at MRINetwork is look for the person who walks into that fifth hospi- tal and has everybody react with, "Nolan! It's good to see you." Who was a solid relationship within those accounts and can help us make that transi- tion more smoothly? If there's a distribu- tion network, who has worked with that network? It's that proven track record of success rather than hiring a probability of success. That is an important distinction. One of the favor- ites from my career is I worked with a com- pany that developed a cool new technology. It was a filter that would evacuate the carci- nogenic plume created by laser surgeries; you don't want to kill everyone in the operating room suite! They intended to sell the device to the hospitals directly, so that the hospitals could put one in every operating room. That seemed fair and made sense. But because I was in a position to be an ag- gregator of insight and was able to talk to so many smart people, one of them said, "Why don't they sell this on an OEM basis instead? They can attach one of those to each laser that they sell. Now, they sell a machine that doesn't kill people." The net effect was the company jumped from a one-million-dollar first year's sales expectation to four million dollars. Johnson: It's an easier sell to the hospital be- cause that feature is already built in. McNabb: Right. Another company I worked with was about to launch a new product that they were really excited about. They were com- peting in a market segment dominated by two powerful companies. They came to me and said, "We want someone with sales experience in this broad sector." I responded, "Why don't we find salespeople who have experience with this exact product?" They answered, "How can they? If they have gone to these customers for the last five years and said, 'This is the best there is,' how can they suddenly show up with our product?" I told them, "For the last five years, I brought you this because it was the best there was. Now, there's something better, so I've switched. I think you should switch too.'" It was very easy. They passed that first giant competitor in eight days, and it became the number one product in the world in their category in about nine months. Johnson: Wow. McNabb: Their success was way beyond ex- pectations, simply because they got a bit more strategic about how they approached the mar- ket. They reached #2 in eight days, and became #1 in less than nine months. Johnson: I'm going to give for you a thought experiment speaking from my industry. Let's use the example of a PCB manufacturing shop. They do a lot of chemical engineering and chemistry work. They manufacture the PCBs that then go into all electronics. The chips and connectors get attached to the PCB to become the finished working electronics. These fabricators make the boards to the customer's custom design. Teams design their boards, then submit them to a fabri- cation shop to manufacture them. Obvious- ly, there's a lot of this since the raw num- ber of boards being manufactured is on the rise. There are a lot of dynamics surrounding overseas production and then coming back, Terry McNabb