From the earliest days of SAIC, I felt one of the best ways to build the business was to have our technical staff deeply involved in selling their contracts. I think this helped us get follow-on business. Other companies handle sales and marketing differently — they split them. The people who would see the customers would be sales and marketing, not the people doing the work. Most customers want to see the people who are going to do the work.

Click on the comments link to share your thoughts.

- Bob

Here are comments on some of your recent responses:

Lloyd Burdge (Week 7): I’m glad to read your comment. This is the way it is supposed to work. Not everyone experienced the same thing you did. Of course, the idea was to attract, retain, and reward employees for their contributions to the company.

Donna Cunningham (Week 7): I appreciate your comment.

Gael Tarleton (Week 7): I hoped people would think about what was best for the organization and not just themselves. If they think only about their own self-interests, the organization becomes #2 in their minds — or worse.

Bill Wright (Week 7): I think you’ve hit the nail squarely on the head. Employee-owners treat a company’s finances much more seriously than do non-owners.

Bob Wertheim (Week 9): Thank you, Bob, for your comments. We’ll be including examples of this sort in the book. Getting the customer’s advice on procurements if you can do it is certainly a valuable approach.


6 Responses to “Week ten: Marketing with technical staff”

  1. 1 Donna Cunningham

    The customers that I worked with LOVED the fact that the technical crew was instrumental in bidding for follow-on contracts. Since they were familiar with our faces and knew that the same people who had performed on the initial contract would be involved in the subsequent efforts, a trust was built up that didn’t exist between the SAIC marketeers and the customer. In my experience, the technical staff was more stable than the marketing staff, so if the east coast marketeers approached our customers, it tended to be a different set of people each time. I recognize that we as technical staff were probably not as aggressive in squeezing every last dollar out of a possible contract possibility. But on the other hand, our propoal efforts were grounded in experience and reality. All of the proposed efforts my teams worked on came in on time and within budget because we were able to manage customer expectations up front.

    The downside of this approach was that contracts, even follow-on contracts , were a competitive affair within SAIC. We sometimes found ourselves bidding against other SAIC entities for contracts and even follow-on work. We could have used a ruling from on-high that stated that once you had a contractual relationship with a customer, you had first shot at follow-on efforts. This would have made SAIC appear less dysfunctional and may have allowed more cross-group efforts when it came to actual contractual performance.

  2. 2 Kim

    Dr. Beyster,

    I like the outline you’ve posted and look forward to reading the book. The unfaltering ethics of SAIC, combined with the employee ownership are what drew me to SAIC and have kept me here for 10 years! What you did to found and build this company is admirable, and your leadership methodology should be a used a textbook for leadership training.

  3. 3 Gael Tarleton

    Dr. Beyster –
    The philosophy of having technical staff sell the work, win the work, perform on the work, and be held accountable directly by the customer for meeting the terms of the contract was the most powerful element in employee ownership for me and the majority of the people I hired. This gave the customer the lead role in defining the relationship with the contractor. This meant that SAIC was enhancing the career opportunities of our customers, frequently when the customer was at a mid-level position (and thus SAIC could ride the coattails as the customer was promoted and led bigger efforts). Maybe what I liked most about SAIC’s philosophy of letting technical people get the contracts is that it allowed us to guage our customers and figure out when to bring in the leadership and when to keep our heads down and let the customer alone. Only one time in my career did I have a situation where SAIC senior managers violated this principle. The customer asked me to submit an unsolicited proposal to support him. A senior SAIC manager contacted the customer and suggested that a different person than me should have the lead role on the work. The customer told SAIC to not bother submitting the proposal. Then the customer called me and told me to figure out how he could MIPR money onto a different contract so that I could support him. We made the customer do too much work to get SAIC money, and get the person he wanted. I never let that happen again.

    Gael Tarleton

  4. 4 Greg Smith

    I have followed your model throughout my career. The separation of sales and marketing from delivery does nothing but filter important information necessary to accurately bid and deliver on projects while adding to the overall noise level of the process.

    In addition, pure sales teams will not even see the opportunities before them if they don’t really understand the problem domain. The more technical the sale the more engineering must lead the sale.

    I remember getting yelled at by a sales VP for selling a deal without one of his salesman present. His salesman left the meeting early after declaring that no business was evident. By staying, listening, and participating I was able to close a deal and it resulted in a significant project. My response to the sales VP was to ask him if it would have been better to turn down the business.

  5. 5 Sharon Gilmore

    I think employee ownership was brilliant for another reason. As long as the employee/owner was still employed by SAI, they would have to be crazy to vote against the desires of Bob Beyster. Thank goodness, he is a brilliant man and it truly was in the interests of the employees to go along with his business decisions. I worked at SAIT for 2 years and was married to a Corporate VEEP who was with SAI from the early years.

  6. 6 Bob Wertheim

    As a former customer, I can only add a hearty “amen” to the policy of having the technical leader, not the marketing staff, take the lead in defining new and follow-on business. In my program office we assumed that our industrial team mates were both technically qualified and motivated to help us do what was best for the program. Even when that might seem to generate less near term business for the contractor, it was “win-win” for us all over time.


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