The perils of ignoring customer feedback, should Nokia have paid more attention to AT&T?
It’s critical to be in touch with your customers although too often we fall into the trap of wanting to share all the great things we can bring to them, to help them in their business. What must be a two-way dialogue can become more of a monologue if we are not mindful to stop and listen.
That’s probably truer now than it has ever been, due in no small part to the enormous changes everyone has faced in the last few months with Covid-19 and its impact on all of our customers’ business and their changing needs. It’s essential to make listening to customers an ongoing process, even when you are being hugely successful, growing strongly, and enjoying significant market share. And it’s not just engineers and product people who need to listen to customers. In fact, great sales teams make it a point to listen to their customers and help identify unmet needs. If you fall into the trap of thinking all of your customer’s needs are being satisfied you end up being blindsided to what’s coming.
A stark example of this for me was the later stages of my time at Nokia. In the mobile phone world, Nokia was the acknowledged leading vendor. Market share across Europe and the Middle East was 40%, closer to 80% in China and India, and many other parts of Asia. Central and South America were also growing rapidly, with the only real gap being in the US, where Motorola and RIM/Blackberry, had taken the leadership position.
Our largest ‘customer’ in the US, AT&T, was giving us feedback on our user interface, complex menu approach, and product design. This was difficult to hear based on a long history of leading the industry with the intuitiveness and simplicity of our devices. The feedback was also discounted because it came from a country Nokia considered to be “behind” in terms of mobile phone technology and design and because Nokia’s US revenue was low compared with the market potential.
Clearly, with 2020 hindsight (pun intended), we didn’t listen well and we didn’t act on what we heard. As you may recall AT&T was initially the exclusive seller of Apple’s iPhone, the pioneer in a mass-market touch screen interface on mobile devices as well as offering simplicity and application access in an intuitive and friendly UI. And the iPhone’s rapid acceptance was a humbling surprise for Nokia.
The moral of course is always listen to your customers, even when their feedback is hard to hear or perhaps especially when it’s hard to hear.
David is a proven executive sales leader and general manager with a track record of growing revenues, improving efficiency, and operational excellence in the customer-facing side of companies. He has deep experience in transitioning a business from an on-premise proposition to SaaS, as well as scaling businesses with efficient, repeatable, and scalable sales processes and go-to-market design leading to significant revenue and profit improvement.
David has held senior executive positions in both large, complex, global multi-billion dollar revenue companies such as HP and Nokia, and mid-sized companies, in the low to mid-hundreds of millions, such as ShoreTel and Shutterstock. He has led sales and customer success teams selling to all customer segments ranging from complex solutions to large enterprises, to high-velocity sales to small and medium businesses. He is a rare bread that has crossed the chasm between product sales and software/SaaS sales. Similarly, he has led a variety of different selling motions, covering field-sales and inside-sales direct to customers, through to combined direct selling with channel leverage, and full channel-led based go-to-market models.
David is a current independent Board member of a portfolio company of Dubin/Clark. Most recently David was Chief Revenue Officer at Shutterstock leading the evolution of Enterprise sales and customer care functions and associated process, workflow, systems, and productivity to enable next-level scaling. Enterprise revenues increased 22% to $248M in 2018, during which time sales productivity increased by 20%.
Before this, David was a section 16 officer as SVP Worldwide Sales & Customer Success at ShoreTel. During his 6 years at the company, he was instrumental in the company transition from an on-premise company to a SaaS company, growing total revenues to $360M with recurring revenues at 63%, across services and hosted revenues. The four-year 22% CAGR in UCaaS grew to over $150M and culminated in a strategic sale to Mitel.
David’s career began at Compaq/HP a global IT solutions and services company where he gained significant experience in supply chain order management before transitioning to sales. He held various sales roles of increasing scope and responsibility within the UK & Ireland before his promotion to VP and transition to Houston TX. He held P&L BU roles for the PC and Intel Server businesses of up to $4B in revenues, before transitioning to head of Americas for the HP Software business, growing those revenues to $400M. As SVP Sales, Marketing, and Services of Enterprise Solutions at Nokia he helped build a new business division to $3.8B, delivering profitable growth and focus through the divestiture of non-core assets.
David holds a BS in Economics and Quantitative Studies from Queen Mary College – University of London, England
David has held senior executive positions in both large, complex, global multi-billion dollar revenue companies such as HP and Nokia, and mid-sized companies, in the low to mid-hundreds of millions, such as ShoreTel and Shutterstock. He has led sales and customer success teams selling to all customer segments ranging from complex solutions to large enterprises, to high-velocity sales to small and medium businesses. He is a rare bread that has crossed the chasm between product sales and software/SaaS sales. Similarly, he has led a variety of different selling motions, covering field-sales and inside-sales direct to customers, through to combined direct selling with channel leverage, and full channel-led based go-to-market models.
David is a current independent Board member of a portfolio company of Dubin/Clark. Most recently David was Chief Revenue Officer at Shutterstock leading the evolution of Enterprise sales and customer care functions and associated process, workflow, systems, and productivity to enable next-level scaling. Enterprise revenues increased 22% to $248M in 2018, during which time sales productivity increased by 20%.
Before this, David was a section 16 officer as SVP Worldwide Sales & Customer Success at ShoreTel. During his 6 years at the company, he was instrumental in the company transition from an on-premise company to a SaaS company, growing total revenues to $360M with recurring revenues at 63%, across services and hosted revenues. The four-year 22% CAGR in UCaaS grew to over $150M and culminated in a strategic sale to Mitel.
David’s career began at Compaq/HP a global IT solutions and services company where he gained significant experience in supply chain order management before transitioning to sales. He held various sales roles of increasing scope and responsibility within the UK & Ireland before his promotion to VP and transition to Houston TX. He held P&L BU roles for the PC and Intel Server businesses of up to $4B in revenues, before transitioning to head of Americas for the HP Software business, growing those revenues to $400M. As SVP Sales, Marketing, and Services of Enterprise Solutions at Nokia he helped build a new business division to $3.8B, delivering profitable growth and focus through the divestiture of non-core assets.
David holds a BS in Economics and Quantitative Studies from Queen Mary College – University of London, England
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