When to go over the boss's head?

[Evans, Marv]

Originally Posted by legion

5 months isn't a whole lot of time to recover from a bad manager. Things have been pretty bad for awhile and the Germans weren't letting on.

This is probably very accurate. Good luck with your search for something else. Any competitors or similar businesses you can scout out??

[Rick Lee]

Yes, I left on a high note with no enemies. My former German boss loves me and will always step in to help, if I ask. Though I'm not sure he would help if I were to go to a competitor. I'm not sure I want to stay in this biz, as the US market is totally mature and saturated, with plenty of the competitors spending more on marketing alone in the US than our company earns in total annual revenue. Though I do have some feelers out to the competition. We'll see.

The problem here is that the German division is so used to the business just growing on trees and coming to them, that they can't figure out how to compete in the US. And I'm not convinced they really want to. We rent a vacant address in NoCal to look like we have a presence in the US, we're registered there as a business, but only have four (now) employees in the US, all working from home - FL, SC, NC and MO.

My German boss told me the one saleswoman they hired to get our office in Hungary up and running this year has already closed more new business than all of the US. I told him Hungary is a small country with a language no one outside of Hungary speaks at all, they have a large open source software enthusiast community and it's a perfect place for a company like ours. If you want to copy that, go to Iceland, Finland, Burma, etc. - you know, other places with impossible languages no one else speaks. Everyone speaks English and everyone operates in the US. We have no competitive edge here.

[stomachmonkey]

Average deal at $7K and there were 5 of you?

Making some assumptions (because obviously I have no idea what base and bonus were) it sounds like once you throw in marketing, trade shows, GA (even though you work remote) each one of you needed to do 1 of those $7k deals every 2 weeks just to break even or come out slightly ahead.

That's a lotta work.

[speeder]

What product or service were you selling, if you don’t mind saying? I’ve been reading this for going on two years and it still doesn’t make much sense w/o knowing that.

[Rick Lee]

Originally Posted by speeder

What product or service were you selling, if you don’t mind saying? I’ve been reading this for going on two years and it still doesn’t make much sense w/o knowing that.

Sorry, it's helpdesk software, total B2B and you'd never touch it if you weren't in the biz or working in an IT support role somewhere.

SM, there were only two sales people in the US, now one. The US has a decent book of renewal business, so that's what they rely on to keep the doors open. But, not sure if I mentioned this on a previous page, the US division's main reason for being is to pay the German CEO's salary, thereby keeping it off the books in Germany and making that publicly-traded company look that much more profitable (in Germany only), keep his L visa so he can live in the US and pay US income taxes. So, while they wouldn't complain about making money in the US, they plan to lose $250k/year, every year. It's all baked in. But cancelations are now outpacing new business revenue, not due to any dissatisfaction or whatever. It just happens when customer companies get acquired or go out of business.

They don't know how to deal with it and their only business plan for the US is, "We need quick wins or you're fired." No talk of revenue targets divided by avg. deal size divided by months or quarters, how many leads it takes to close a deal, how to get more leads, etc.

[KFC911]

Wow...not what I expected when I opened this thread . Best to ya Rick...a year from now you will look back...and be just fine. Play yer guitar some (more) ...

[Rick Lee]

Originally Posted by KC911

Wow...not what I expected when I opened this thread . Best to ya Rick...a year from now you will look back...and be just fine. Play yer guitar some (more) ...

I'm gonna start selling some of the Marshalls I've built or rehabbed pretty soon. That'll cover the mortgage for a few months.

[legion]

We use HP Service Desk here....

[flipper35]

There is a company I spoke with at Spiceworld last fall that is based in Germany (the even had Lederhosen) and I thought you might have worked for them actually. They do patch management, software pushes, corporate OS installations and so forth.

The IT help-desk stuff is cheap to free these days, it would be a hard sell to anyone but a very large company.

[Rick Lee]

Originally Posted by flipper35

There is a company I spoke with at Spiceworld last fall that is based in Germany (the even had Lederhosen) and I thought you might have worked for them actually. They do patch management, software pushes, corporate OS installations and so forth.

The IT help-desk stuff is cheap to free these days, it would be a hard sell to anyone but a very large company.

Funny you mention that. Our biggest competitor is our free product. It's too damn good. And there is even a grey market in eastern Europe, where companies will host and support the free version, not paying us a dime, and then charging their customers for it, who can't host or handle it on their own. We won't lift a finger for a non-annual-contract customer, no matter how much they offer to pay. It's "sign a contract or pound sand." But in mostly western Europe, the business beats a path to our door and the hardest selling we do is, "Would you like fries with that, maybe a super size?" In the US we are rubbing two sticks together.

I keep saying "we." Now I mean "they."