Paul O'Dea says many businesses are not close enough to their customers to understand their needs, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

IF YOU have hung around technology industry conferences for a while or if you are a veteran of those dot-com era “elevator pitches” (where start-ups try to pitch their company in a brief period of time), this may sound familiar.

“I’ve seen so many pitches, and am still seeing them, with about 30 PowerPoint slides. And still, there’s not a lot of clarity about the company – who they are and what they are at.”

Because he is still seeing those PowerPoints, Irish tech veteran Paul O’Dea, chief executive of consulting practice Select Strategies, former chairman of the Irish Software Association and an engineer by training, has just published a book to help companies to boil the PowerPoints down to what he calls “the business battlecard”.

His book, The Business Battlecard, summarises the who, what, where, why and how of any company.

“Basically, companies need to simplify and clarify,” he says. “If people aren’t clear on what their company does, that slows growth and execution.”

One critical problem he pinpoints is that many companies are not close enough to their customers to understand the essence of their customers’ problems.

Often they will use complex customer relationship management software but many such tools actually give too much feedback, making it hard for a company to get at the nub of what customers actually want.

This can lead to companies mistakenly thinking they need to focus on several areas of business, believing they will make more money if they do several things for many customers.

“Companies often try to do too many things when they really need to do one or two things in a world-class way,” O’Dea says.

Hence the book argues for the need for the dreaded vision statement, a concept so maligned that the Dilbert cartoon website has an automatic vision statement generator that randomly throws together strings of nonsensical jargon beloved of technology companies in particular.

O’Dea laughs in acknowledgement. “Yes, often they are wishy-washy, and vision statements do suffer from ambiguity, but in the book, I’m trying to put measurability behind a clear vision statement.”

Such a statement will enable a company’s management and board to sit down and assess how well the company is achieving its goals, he says.

“Irish companies often talk and talk, without really figuring out what their company really is meant to be.”

Once that is worked out, a company can move on to figuring out who its ideal customer is. Not anyone and everyone, but the narrow niche that O’Dea calls the “sweet spot customer”.

“The ideal customer is almost the critical success factor for companies, but the problem is, the salesperson’s view is to make targets and sell while the technologist needs to build a product for a specific target customer. The goal is getting alignment.”

That task includes putting some form of real, quantifiable value on customers and products so that companies can understand the actual value of their products.

“What happens at a lot of technology companies is they spend millions on developing products but then don’t go back and measure the measurable business value of their product. They will do all sorts of white papers that never contain any real measurements.

“They need to study this at a pretty detailed level and then they can go to their next customer with a clear model. You’re proving and tweaking the model with every customer.”

Technology companies also make the mistake of never really knowing their customer because “they’ll talk to whom they’re comfortable with”. That often means the techie in systems who maintains the product, not the manager who actually uses it to meet particular needs.

Technology companies “can deepen the solution by knowing their customer” – and then can price more profitably by hitting customer demands.

A related element of the “battlecard” is knowing the competition, says O’Dea. A problem for many companies is not really knowing who their competitors are or seeing too wide a range of them – a signal that a company is trying to do too many things.

“If you’re in the right sweet spot, you’ll be seeing the same competition and you’ll know your competitors,” he says.

Companies then need to define how they are different from the competition – a seemingly simple task – “but what you often get is a load of marketing jargon”. The final element of his “battlecard” is knowing “the channel” – the network through which a company sells its wares or services.

“The fundamental question is, what do we want the channel to do for us? If you haven’t got your channel approach clear, you’re going to find yourself with inhibitors to growth straight away.”

This is an area in which Irish technology companies are particularly weak, he believes. “A lot of Irish companies are focused on direct sales channels and don’t think about indirect sales.”

This is connected to weak product management.

“In Silicon Valley, companies are very aware of product management and they will use multiple channels easily. Irish companies are generally weak at product management and therefore have poor awareness of indirect channels.”

This isn’t connected to a poor understanding of selling, he adds. In the past, salesmanship was seen by the Irish Software Association and other organisations as a weakness in Irish technology companies, but “this has dramatically improved over the years and there’s a lot more capability”.

So what does he think is the Achilles heel for Irish technology companies, besides channel and product management? “The greatest weakness is often at the COO [chief operations officer] level. We have strong CEOs but not a strong enough number two.”

And for the technology industry here overall? “Funding, in the broadest sense. We need an economy that is much more focused on providing funding into entrepreneurial ventures. It is a big constraint now.”

Generally though, O’Dea is bullish on the indigenous technology sector.

“There’s a much better chance that we’ll see a number of €100 million-plus companies in Ireland now. It will definitely take time, but it is going to happen.”

Paul O'Dea's The Business Battlecard: Winning Moves for Growing Companies, is published by Oak Tree Press.