Keep questioning
Sure, you could get it wrong completely, but that’s not usually the case.
“(It’s) not a matter of if some of these market trends are going to happen,” Etzler says. “It’s the when they’re going to happen.”
He gives the example of WebEx, the only still-successful Web conferencing company he can name from the original pool of 50 or 100 companies that invested in it — but timed it wrong.
“Most people have guessed wrong,” he says. “They were way too early so they had spent all their (money) by the time they really needed it. They had spent all their money on marketing, all their money on technology, and there was not enough people adopting and they went out of business.”
That’s why it’s so important to continue communicating with customers in your pipeline to keep gauging the need. That communication shouldn’t stop when you decide to launch a project. You need to keep monitoring and keep questioning the information you receive.
For example, Etzler expected one of InterCall’s new services to flourish by now, but he hasn’t seen traction in terms of revenue. In those cases, it’s a matter of following up with customers who indicated desire and making sure that the forecasts you founded your decision on actually happen.
“Instead of trusting the pipeline, we are having folks — even I, as well as the senior vice president of marketing — talking to that pipeline specifically to give them a little adult supervision to make sure that it will happen,” he says.
When you collect projected numbers ahead of time, you have something to track progress against later. Etzler measures revenue and margins both overall and for individual products. That way, he can quickly see if the margin is only a fraction of his expectations and put effort into picking up the slack.
“Part of the fun is I’ve got to make sure that we do what we say when we say it,” Etzler says. “So you really try to have some rigor around: Is this really what’s going to happen?”
How to reach: InterCall, (773) 399-1600 or www.intercall.com
