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March 7, 2005

Birth of a salesman | Mike Dow uses his IT experience to launch a new firm that provides sales help for tech startups

By Alan Elliott
Mike Dow came into the world as a salesman in Hermon in 2003. He'd had prior incarnations: nearly a decade as the information technology director for Cianbro Data Services, a stint as owner of a technology training company and years of bouncing around the globe to audit financial data for American Express.

But not until 2003 did he cinch his first sale, winning Cianbro Data Services, a division of the Pittsfield-based construction firm, the contract to expand Hermon's municipal wireless network. And that's when the bug bit. "It kind of crept up and surprised me," said the 38-year-old Portland resident. "I'd been a project and operations person, in the trenches and managing IT people for so long, that the selling kind of surprised me. I realized, 'Wow ˆ— I like this.'"

A year later, Dow launched his own company, Tilson Technology Management. He and Brian O'Connor, who has more than 20 years of communications and telecom experience, opened an office last July above the State Theater on Portland's Congress Street and began to market themselves as a sales force-for-hire aimed specifically at technology companies.

Both résumés were thick with tech management and implementation experience. But there was one thing conspicuously missing: extensive sales credentials. The team's combined sales experience, in years, yields only single digits. What's more, while most companies outsource at least a portion of their manufacturing, considering a similar strategy in sales raises difficult questions.

Case in point: the dozens of small businesses managed by the $2.1 billion venture capital firm Atlas Venture, in Waltham, Mass. Although Atlas does little business in Maine, it handles a diverse portfolio of tech startups, many times from the embryonic, pre-phone-number stage. It is a period of development when tech firms need to focus on producing a quality product, not beating the bushes for sales, said Alex Bichara, an Atlas senior IT investment partner.

And although the question of outsourced sales crops up regularly, Bichara said, most companies are reluctant to delegate the task. "Every company needs to have their core competencies, but outsourcing the relationship with your customers, your lifeblood, is something many companies simply will not do and certainly no one will do lightly," he said.

Despite that fact, Tilson ˆ— named after Dow's grandfather ˆ— already has established two partnerships that keep the team busy. For both Chicago-based construction industry tech firm Burger Consulting Group Inc. and Buckfield-based telecom firm Oxford Networks, Tilson does IT consulting and project management.

The company will invest the balance of its efforts, Dow said, in the small technology players he has worked with in Maine for a decade. "These tech companies often are five to seven employees and don't have the time or orientation to be selling," he said. "They are oriented to their craft, often struggle with the sales environment and can't afford a full-time, experienced sales person."

A little patience
When he left Pittsfield for Vermont's Middlebury College in 1984, Dow had no thought of chasing a career in sales, technology or business. He signed on to a degree in East Asian studies, learned to speak fluent Mandarin and tinkered with the idea of working in the U.S. diplomatic services. He even went so far as to interview with the CIA. "But at the time I wasn't thinking about my career," he said. "All I could think about was how to bust out of Maine and see what the rest of the world was like."

Out of Middlebury, Dow took the American Express job, which sent him around the world doing data analysis for financial audits. It was his first window into IT, and subsequent career moves piggybacked on that experience. In 1993, he moved back to Maine and started a computer training company with his brother, John. A contract providing software training to Cianbro employees got Dow hooked up with the construction giant, and soon thereafter he was on contract with the company fulltime, managing its IT department internally and taking on outside projects, like the Hermon job, for Cianbro Data Services.

Now, two decades after his unlikely career began, Dow has grounded Tilson in its work for Burger ˆ— a firm with which he came in frequent contact during his years at Cianbro ˆ— and Oxford Networks. He's hopeful that his knowledge of markets nationwide will help Maine tech companies find new outlets for their products. Dow says his potential client list includes the more than 200 member companies of MESDA, as well as many of the contractors with whom he and O'Connor developed relationships as IT managers.

Although the approach to every company is slightly different, the basic Tilson program is clear. The company charges by combined retainer and commission. The retainer is essentially the wages of an entry-level salesperson. Commissions are figured on a case-by-case basis, according to profit margins on specific products. Dow cautions clients it will take a minimum of four to six months before the effort begins to bear fruit. "This idea that I am always closing a deal somewhere isn't what I'm selling," he said. "It is a sales activity and a presence in the market."

Ongoing work with Burger accounts for about two-thirds of Tilson's revenues, with contract sales making up the other third. Within five to seven years, Dow said he'd like to reverse that model; he forecasts $500,000 in annual income at that point, with five to seven salespeople on staff and contract sales accounting for two-thirds of the company's business. (He declined to disclose current or projected revenue figures.) Still, Dow anticipates it will be some time before the company considers any kind of advertising or marketing budget of its own, "because it is a very focused group of companies I'm interested in," he said, referring to small tech startups.

Potential clients have two common concerns about outsourcing their sales: One, an outside sales agent simply might not click with the customer. Two, the agent could fold, abandon the sales agreement or, worse, abscond and lure the customer to a competing vendor. "If the outsourcing company goes away, their client has to feel like their relationship with the customer will remain intact," Bichara said.

Dow not only agrees, he suggests reluctance to outsource sales might be greater in Maine than elsewhere. In terms of operations, entrepreneurs and business managers here lean to the conservative side, he said. As a freelance sales operation, that means the toughest sell may come at the client company's table, rather than at the customer end of the deal.

Tilson does have the advantage of being a familiar face in Maine, an element that can alter the geometry of the sales relationship. Last month, for example, Dow brokered an agreement among Oxford Networks, the city of Lewiston and a handful of technology services and equipment vendors. The project was to install a networked series of video screens in the Lewiston Colisee, allowing high-tech advertising to be beamed throughout the venue.

But the deal had stalled, said Oxford Chief Operating Officer Craig Gunderson, because the city wanted sophisticated, additional technology married to Oxford's networking capabilities. Requests for proposals had gone unanswered, and both sides were at a standstill, so Gunderson gave Dow a ring.

Sitting on the fence
"The challenge was the relationship with the vendor community," Dow said he realized when he arrived. "Oxford and Lewiston were having trouble getting vendors to respond. There were a number of stakeholders and nobody was really in charge."

Dow determined just what the city wanted, and located the gaps between those needs and Oxford's capabilities. He then identified a palette of video, network cabling and audio technologies able to bridge those gaps. In the end, it all worked out, and Oxford gained a sale to the city. But deal was also a painless, outsourced sale for several vendors ˆ— all Maine-based, according to Dow ˆ— that now provide services and equipment for the project.
The enabling factor? "It was Mike's knowledge of technologies and technology companies and how to integrate them," Gunderson said.

Selling is, in reality, a kind of byproduct of what Mike Dow does naturally. Sure, he understands the mechanics of a sale. (See "Dow and Zen," this page.) And he's had some top-notch training, including a seminar, taken while he worked for Cianbro, by heavyweight New York negotiator Chester Karrass. Dow said the Karrass program caused him to be more conscious of the moment of the deal, of different styles of closings, of being alert to the broader range of issues affecting the person on the other side of the table.

But ultimately what Dow does is recognize opportunities to put new technologies to work. It's a knack that requires keeping on top of the latest technological developments and how to apply them in design solutions ˆ— not to mention the ability to understand mechanical intricacies and machine code, yet still communicate clearly with business decision makers.

"He sits on the fence very well, so to speak ˆ— understands the technology, but can talk about it in layman's terms, which is critical to us," said Randy Link, owner and founder of Auburn-based Clearpath Innovations Inc., which develops software, primarily for handheld devices. "We generally approach operations managers at companies and they are not going to understand all the ones and zeros of IT talk." (Link said Clearpath hasn't signed on for a full sales outsourcing arrangement, but the company did contract with Tilson for several months to develop prospects for its products.)

As Dow continues to build his client list, he likes to think that he could help companies build relationships farther afield. He has kept up his bilingual skills and maintained contacts in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Beijing and Singapore.

Dow admits he gets excited exploring possible connections between Maine technologies and the booming Chinese economy. But one of his many challenges is to keep those ideas in the back of his mind and, for now, try not to talk too much about it.

"It's strange enough for many of the companies here to ask what is it like to outsource their sales function," Dow said. "So, culturally, I need to deal with that issue first, in English, here in Maine."

Tilson Technology Management

615 Congress St., Ste. 403, Portland

Owner: Mike Dow

Founded: July 2004

Employees: Two

Services: Sales force- and chief information officer-for-hire

Revenues, 2004: Did not disclose

Contact: 877-381-6627

www.tilsontech.com

Dow & Zen

It's the most dog-eared page in the sales dictionary: "The first rule of sales is to listen." When spoken in Mandarin, however, it somehow takes on a new gleam. Learning that second language, Mike Dow says, was the best conditioning for a career in sales that anyone could imagine. "Because I really had to learn to listen when I was talking to someone," he said. "Not just to the words, but for the cultural point of reference, the body language."

Moving to Asia, living and working in Singapore and Taiwan as a young man, only drove that conditioning deeper. "Doing business in another language forces you to really think about, who is this person on the other side of the table, and how are they trying to connect with me?" he said.

In a good deal, Dow said, the price must be within reason. But he has come to see good deals as being less about money and more about delivering a service in a way that keeps a buyer happy and meets the goals of his or her organization. It all runs, he said, to a code of interpersonal relations he learned in Asia called "face." "When you give somebody face, you are giving them respect, showing you care about them as a person and that they are valuable," he said.

The comparatively brusque American sales style fixates on the bottom line: Get in, close a deal, get out, Glengarry Glen Ross-style. But when you begin to listen to the exchange, Dow said, sales ˆ— even in America ˆ— "are so much not about that."

He gives an example, one ongoing sales prospect in Maine. During visits, Dow talks very little about what he is trying to sell. "I don't really care as much about closing the deal as I care about understanding what is going on in [the client's] life," Dow said. "We'll get around to what is right on the business end at some point."

That doesn't mean Dow is not business oriented, he said. "It just means that I learned in Asia about getting to results sometimes with a little bit different technique."

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