Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1288481
SEPTEMBER 2020 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 13 sion got to sell its product. They invented the product, then designed, built, and manufac- tured it. Then, the sales division sold it world- wide. The interface to the customers was al- ways the same, no matter what product line they sold. They were a separate organization not controlled by the Divisional people who invented the product. They were engineers but professionally trained in selling and at the right level, in the right moment. Also, everyone spent two or three years in sales support engineering before they got pro- moted to sales. In the sales office, a new engi- neer would come in, and for a couple of years, they would be the technical support. They were in the field before they moved up to be- ing a salesperson. Johnson: HP is a large organization that turned out to be very successful at selling technol- ogy. A few companies that I've worked for have modeled their sales organizations after HP. Many of the people who set up those sales organizations brought prior experience at HP with them. Those sales teams were very suc- cessful. Does that model still fit when you're a $20-million-a-year PCB fabricator in North America, for example? Holden: Some of the basic principles do. As long as you sell a competitive product that has quality and reliability, then it's there. If you don't have quality and reliability, then you're forced to compete on cost, and there are so many people. It will be beaten down to really low margins. If you have low margins, then you don't necessarily have a lot to invest in the future with. Johnson: It becomes a downward spiral. Holden: The HP model worked until the end of my career, and then it utterly failed when I got into the software business side of HP. We went down in flames a number of times because the volume of the sales was such a paradigm shift from selling voltmeters, hardware, and com- puters. When we trained people to sell soft- ware and software solutions, it went poorly be- cause they couldn't adapt the hardware model to a software model. We wasted hundreds of millions of dollars of investment—including a career I had invested five to seven years of my life into—and I had to find another job inside of HP. We looked at our potential customers and the computers they used. One-third used HP computers, one-third used DEC VAX com- puters, and one-third used IBM computers. We had to sell to all of them. We created software such that it didn't matter what computer they had. We gave them the version that would sit on top of a VAX or IBM because no customer was going to change all of their hardware, IT resourc- es, support, etc. But the sales vice president would not allow anybody to sell HP software if it did not run on an HP computer. We went blue in the face trying to convince him that that's not the software sales model. That lim- ited us to one-third of the market rather than the full market. If we were only focused on one-third of the market, we weren't going to be profitable enough in the long-run com- pared to our competitors; they were going to allow their software to run on any of the ma- jor systems. There was so much momentum and investment put in just to abandon it and use HP software. Happy Holden