HRExaminer Radio is a weekly show devoted to Recruiting and Recruiting Technology airing live on Friday’s at 11AM Pacific
HRExaminer Radio
Guest: Tim O’Shea, Technology Strategist
Episode: 140
Air Date: December 23, 2015
Tim O’Shea has been in the industry for more than 20 years. He began working at Pragmattic Marketing and went on to assume a variety of roles in solutions consulting and implementation management technology. Moving on to product management at Lumesse, and more recently, Success Manager, at Path Intelligence, Tim’s clients coin him as the go-to guy in assessing client needs and finding just the right solution. He’s one of the few product managers in the industry with deep implementation experience.
Guest Website and Social
- Subscribe in iTunes
- Downloadable MP3 File HRExaminer Radio Episode 140: Tim O’Shea, Technology Strategist
Transcript
Begin transcript
John Sumser: Good morning and welcome to HR Examiner radio. I’m your host John Sumser and we’re coming to you live from downtown Occidental, California, a sleepy little mountain village just before you get to the ocean in Northern California. It is pitch black outside because this is still nearly the longest day of the year. By the way, whoever decided that the Solstice wasn’t New Years and scheduled New Years for 10 days later? I’d be interested in knowing that. Anyhow, today we’re talking with Tim O’Shea who’s a technology strategist out of Phoenix or Scottsdale, Arizona. Tim’s been a major league player in the digital HR, digital recruiting arena for a really long time 15 or 20 years I think. Anyhow, I’m going to let Tim introduce himself, how are you Tim?
Tim O’Shea: Hey John, I’m doing great thanks for having me on. Yeah you’re right I’ve been in the software space for about 20 years and in the HR part of that for the better part of about 10 years, so been around the block with that stuff. My first job was a software company, was with probably with the second and the last 360 degree assessment provider back when companies had one internet connection and one email account for the entire company, so I’ve been in the space for awhile.
John Sumser: Well, so how did you get here, it’s not everybody who wakes up when they’re 5 years old and says, “Hmm, what I want to do is go work in the digital HR world.” How’d you end up being there.
Tim O’Shea: The first time I got involved in something in the HR space was actually when I was really young I was working in an insurance company and I needed to build a performance tracking system for a bunch of clerks. It was all done manually at the time. Everybody basically had tic sheets on pieces of paper and they put PCs in our office to run like a tracking system. I went in at night with a copy of Microsoft Works and I downloaded it without anybody knowing and I built this performance tracking system. Then was able to get all my reports done really, really quickly. That got noticed, that got me more IT related work to do in the organization and some folks that I worked with went on to an assessment company so I got a job working in an assessment company. Doing 360 degree assessments, did that for a while.
Then went on to a CRM software company, at that place started doing lots of product demos and eventually became a product manager working on the internationalization of the products. Doing translations in the local requirements for the 4 major European Languages, sorry Portuguese. Did that, that got noticed by some folks at an HR software company that you know called, hire.com. Went to hire.com, while I was there within about 6 months I ended up going to Europe where hire.com decided to sell their product with a company called Step stone and I was one of the folks that went over to help get that started.
That’s really where it started to accelerate around HR. We did recruiting solutions all over Western Europe, that was really interesting. Step Stone eventually turned into Lumeness, which was an end to end account management system. Lumeness I did solutions consulting, so understanding product requirements, or customer requirements, doing product demos. Eventually got into product management where we were building the go to market story. That’s really how I got to where I am right now.
John Sumser: That’s pretty full spectrum set of skills and experiences. Let’s see if I get this right. You do implementations, you do product demos, you do product positioning, you do have international market development and localization experience in all of those areas. Something that you didn’t mention is that you started out doing marketing so you’ve got the business development piece too. How about a little bit about Pragmatic Marketing?
Tim O’Shea: Yeah that’s a great point. I spent some time at Pragmatic Marketing and what Pragmatic Marketing does is they teach product managers how to build great products. If you’ve been in a software company long enough if you walk through a product management group, you’re going to see a grid that people have tacked up to their desks and it’s the Pragmatic Marketing framework. I was trained at Pragmatic, spent a lot of time on that framework. The whole idea behind it is, if you’re going to make products that people love, you need to be market driven.
What they taught us to do was how you go about understanding market requirements and how that’s different from building stuff based on what the founder thinks needs to happen. Or based on what the sales guy needs to close that one next deal. It’s discipline around gathering market requirements from people out in the business. How you synthesize those into buyer personas and user personas. I’ve done a lot of work around both of those things. Buyer personas help you to drive your sales cycle and how you build your sales cycles. User personas are driven … are used to drive the product and that I know that in agile organizations they create user stories and do things a bit different, but it’s basically the same thing there.
The other big thing that we learned at Pragmatic was how to do real, win/loss analyst. To do it in a way that’s removed from the sales process. The biggest thing about win/loss analyst is, it tends to be used or in many cases it’s used as a tool to figure out which sales guys are doing the right things and which ones aren’t. That’s not really the biggest benefit around win/loss analyst. At Pragmatic what they taught is to do was to pull it out of the sales cycle and the idea behind it is, it’s not an autopsy on what happened on that deal but to understand the buying process.
That’s something for software companies, buying processes radically changed in the last 10 or 15 years. You know hear now people say and a lot of sales methodology say 80% of the sale’s done before the buyer meets with a sales person. What win/loss analyst allows you to do is to understand that buying process, not only before they contact sales people, but once the sales process has become visible to the vendor. That’s one of the things I do now is win/loss analyst, help organizations understand that and then map their story to that buying process.
Instead of making it a coercive thing, from what I’ve seen, sales methodology is more often than not about how we can control the process, or how we can challenge people and essentially manipulating them into do things on our timescale. I think that when software vendors work really well, their mapped to the buying process, they understand how that works and they’re working in concert with the customer to get to that buying decision.
John Sumser: That sounds great in theory. Let’s say you’ve just walked into a new client and they’ve got a sales process that’s in some level of disarray and the non-sales executives are pretty sure it’s because the sales guys are screwing things up. How do you bring some calm to that process so that you get a rational analyst rather than a scapegoating process?
Tim O’Shea: The first thing is to gather data. Gather as much data as you can. Data ultimately can overrule the hierarchy in a non-dysfunctional organization. I think it’s not one call to one sale that happened one week ago. That’s the first thing. The second thing is not to focus on the sales tactics but on the fit between the buyer’s problem and the vendors solution and understanding how does that product fit. How does that happen? That’s one piece of it, the other thing is to understand not so much from a sales tactic perspective, “Did they call on this and how do they follow up and what was their proposal like?” Understanding from the buyer’s perspective. How did the salespeople articulate the message? How did the salespeople connect that product or that solution to the problem that they’re trying to solve?
Ultimately, unless you’re just a difficult person to be with, that’s where the match get’s made. Technology is important, the sales hygiene is important, but if you’re not connecting with the buyer’s pain, you’re not going to get a sale. I think that’s the piece is understanding the story and making sure the prospects that you talk to, whether they buy or not, are able to articulate back the story that the vendors trying to tell. If that’s not the case, that’s the place where you try to fix it. Making sure the salespeople understand the story and deliver the story, not in a robotic fashion, but in a way that creates that human connection. I think now that opens up another problem which is what happens if a company doesn’t have a story right?
John Sumser: Right.
Tim O’Shea: I think as technology vendors we can get in trouble with that where we get focused on the solution or here’s the way we want to talk about it. It’s a very feature function technology based view of the product and at the end of the day, what makes sales happen, what makes products get sold and ultimately get used is a human connection. A person to person connection where the buyer gets to a level of comfort. I think that great salespeople do that intuitively and great sales people will make up their own story or they’ll adapt what’s laying around on the shop floor and they’ll put it together into a good story. Great salespeople are hard to find and really hard to keep. Building a story is how you get the rest of your sales team to be more effective.
John Sumser: You’ve been at this a long time give me a sense … Well, let me tell you a little story. When I was in my 20’s and headed off to graduate school, I got into a great relationship with a guy who headed the department that I was in in graduate school. I went into his office one day and I said, “What I want to be when I grow up is a management consultant.” He said, “Why don’t you wait until you’ve managed something before you run around giving people advice about to manage stuff.” In our world there are plenty of people running around giving advice in the areas that you’re describing, who never actually spent time with clients. Would you give me a sense how many clients you’ve had relationships with over the course of your career?
Tim O’Shea: It’s hundreds, and the relationship span is a broad spectrum, but hundreds of clients if not in the thousands if you figure in 20 years. I’ve been in c-level suites at dozens, no probably hundreds of companies. In fortune 500, big auto manufactures, big heavy iron manufacturing companies, Information technology companies. During the dot-com boom I sat in, God I cannot tell you how many web startups with the giant break rooms full of candy and things like that. It’s a lot of … yeah, it’s hundreds. I would name some of them but yeah, your talking about the biggest manufacturers in the US. Folks that make cars, they make farm equipment, they make mining equipment. I’ve gone to see them. Folks that make electrical welding equipment things like that. Really deep relationships with other organizations.
Petrochemical organizations where we did assessment programs. Folks that make copiers and printers and things like that. Those are some of them, I’ve been to see lots of companies that I didn’t get to do really long relationships with where we went to do sales presentations, demos and interviews over the years. Yeah, I’ve been in boardrooms with CEOs and Chief HR officers. Companies that maker airplanes and stuff like that.
John Sumser: You’ve seen the relationship between technology providers in HR and their clients in every imaginable circumstance at every point in the process from the development of a proposal through the end of the relationship.
Tim O’Shea: Yeah, yeah and the other thing. Sorry I jumped. The other thing, understanding the relationships between the executives in an organization. Amongst themselves and the dynamic that that creates and how software companies need to navigate that and that’s changed dramatically over the years. When I first got into a sales role in technology the CTO or the CIO had all the power over a purchase for software. You would talk to the business buyer, you know if it was a VP of sales or whoever you talked to them, but ultimately you would have to go and kneel before the CTO in order to make something happen. That’s changed dramatically. The dynamic between the senior or the chief HR officer and the CFO and the dynamic there, I think is one of the things that I spent a lot of time in. How that dynamic changes and how you navigate that to make a project work.
John Sumser: What are you doing these days?
Tim O’Shea: These days I’ve been helping software companies with two things. One is going out and understanding what is their market is looking for and doing that in terms of win/loss analyst. As well as some primary market research, so I’m doing that. The other thing is once they have that information or if they already have that information, helping them to develop their product story or their go to market story. Working with them on some of the very tactics. How do you create a good product demo that resonates with the people who are going to make decisions in that buying process. Those are the two primary things that I’ve been doing lately.
John Sumser: That’s great. Where do you see all of this going? The sales process has been evolving for the last 15 years where’s it going to evolve towards?
Tim O’Shea: I think people want it to evolve toward a completely automated process, I think that’s where people want to get it. You see organizations trying to drive everything to online sales. You see organizations trying to … That idea that 80% of the sale is done before they talk to a salesperson, let’s get it to 100%. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think ultimately we’re going to be right where we are in terms of the involvement of salespeople. I feel like the guy who’s saying there’s nothing left to invent, but essentially one of the things that’s going to continue is you’ll always in big ticket, big change types if transactions you’re always going to have people involved. There’s always going to be a salesperson sitting in a conference room across from a buyer helping them make that emotional decision, helping by creating that human connection.
I think that it’s not a function of what we can automate, it’s a function of the things that we can’t. The fact that humans have to make that connection, they have to have that emotional thing that machines and technology just cannot ever do. As far as where that takes us, I think in terms of the evolution of the sales cycle, I think organizations … vendors will get much better at that in understanding how do you create human connections. How do you sustain those over a long period of time? How do we tell a story in a way that makes us feel good, makes the buyer feel good. Ultimately gets to a positive implementation, positive use around the technology.
John Sumser: In that world where things are increasing, if not as a more as a percentage automated, increasingly sophisticated. Does the salespersons role change?
Tim O’Shea: Yeah, I hope it does. I think that a salespersons role changes, it’s really distilling down to what great sales people do right now and getting everybody to that point where what their focus is on is, how’s this going to fit in the organization? How are you going to make this work versus this is why I’m better than competitor X. Because I think what’s going to happen is, there’s so much information about solutions out there and it’s much easier to get information about a particular solution without talking to salespeople now that the salesperson’s role becomes really, “How do we make this work in your organization?” How do we get to not the close of the deal being the end point, but the realization of value in the technology. How do we make that the end point?
I think there’s a lot of “If that happens, or when that happens” I think there’s a lot that vendors need to do to change how they look at salespeople, how they compensate salespeople. How they attract and retain salespeople. Because the age of “How do I differentiate from my competitors?” I think that will go away. How do we deliver value in the long term is where they’ll be focused. At least that’s what I hope.
John Sumser: That’s an interesting picture. I think you just described a world where being older gives you an extraordinary advantage and for the last 15 years being younger is what gave you an extraordinary advantage. What I mean by that is if the game is tilted towards whoever has the best online presence and that what you’re trying to do with an online presence is shape the relationship that leads to the sale.
Then the simple passage of time gives you the ability to accumulate a level of depth that’s really hard to catch up with. This is one of the big questions in a world driven by search engines. Weight comes from volume rather than quality and if you’ve got 10 years worth of weight, somebody who’s just starting up has a damned hard time being heard against that thing. Do you think that this future that you have locks out new providers?
Tim O’Shea: No, I don’t think that’s the case because I think that with newer vendors it’s a matter of perspective. I think that the way new vendors accelerate is by having a different perspective and understanding things change before the established, comfortable vendors ever know there’s a change going on. I think there will always be space for startups and for new players because they’re able to look at things from a different perspective. One of the things about that weight and having all of that experience is, it has a narrowing effect, or it can have a narrowing effect on your vision. I think that that’s what shakes up markets, what shakes up technology is a different point of view. Yeah, yeah, it’s a different point of view.
John Sumser: Great, great.
Tim O’Shea: No go ahead.
John Sumser: We have blasted our allotted time, what should I have asked you that I didn’t get to ?
Tim O’Shea: Well one thing is how people can get in contact with me.
John Sumser: Okay well, let’s get to that in a second. I will do that, let’s see what you want people to take away from this. What are a couple of bullet points that you wish people would remember?
Tim O’Shea: I think the things I would want people to take away are, number one, you need to understand the buying process of your target market and the only way that you can do that is to go out and ask people. Ask them in a way that doesn’t make them feel like you’re trying to rehash a sales cycle. You can only do that with really good outside win/loss analyst. That’s number one. Number two is to make sure that when you’re going to market that you have a compelling story and it’s a human story. It’s something that connects with people where they sit. I’d say it’s those two things, yeah, yeah, I’d say those were the two biggest bullet points.
John Sumser: Perfect, so why don’t you take a moment and reintroduce yourself and tell people how to get a hold of you.
Tim O’Shea: All right, so again, my name is Tim O’Shea, I’m a technology strategist. I work with HR software companies all over North America. You can reach me via email at tposhea42@gmail.com, that’s tposhea42@gmail.com. You can find me on LinkedIn, Timothy P O’Shea on LinkedIn, or on Twitter @tposhea42.
John Sumser: Well, thanks time, it’s been great talking to you and thanks everybody for listening in. You’ve been listening to HR Examiner Radio, we’re coming to you live from beautiful downtown Occidental, California and I hope you have an amazing weekend. Thanks everybody, bye-bye.
End transcript
