2. Now Where Were We…
• We left off last week with HIS Inc. in
Brooklyn, NY, searching for a Director
of Marketing who could lead them
into the huge IBM mainframe market.
Someone:
– well-connected,
– technically savvy,
– with lots of street smarts,
– tons of sales & marketing
experience,
– well-spoken and
– highly intelligent.
• Unable to find anyone that fit the bill,
they hired this idiot instead:
3. Actually…
• I had one great advantage: I had worked with the best sales and
marketing guys in the business at both SMS and McAuto, so I
recruited them to HIS, and matched them to their “native” territory
Bert Hochstein
HIS Inc’s own NY
native, for the
Northeast region
Brain Fitzpatrick
One of SMS’s best
reps ever, for the
Rocky Mtn states
Jud Foreman
An IBM & SMS
superstar, for the
Western region
Roland Thibault
An SMS & McAuto vet & ex-
CFO, for the Mid-Atlantic
Dick Schopp
A old McAuto pro & sales
superstar, for the
Midwest
Mike Crabtree
Ex-Mac sales
support maven
Larry Evans
Ex-McAuto
sales support
guru, also
designed HIS’
clinical apps.
Don Trammell
Ex-SMS and
McAuto sales
superstar, for his
native South.
Some jerk from
Philly who got
off the wrong
subway stop in
Brooklyn…
4. Fly In The Ointment
• There was one minor challenge to selling HIS Inc:
– The system didn’t exist!
• Although Heshy’s team were programming their proverbial pants
off, there would be no demonstrable code for some time until the
translation program was done and Basic code morphed into PL/1.
• Actually, a minor problem! I had seen how SMS, McAuto and many
other vendors were able to “sell systems before their time”
– (a practice that happily has ceased in this modern age…)
• But just in case you moderns wonder how we
ancients were ever so dumb (should I add -
immoral?) as to sell a system before it was ready,
here’s the recipe, just in case this terrible practice
ever sees the light of day in these technologically
advanced & far more enlightened times:
5. How To Sell “Vision-ware”
1. Super Sales Team – a team of elite sales pros who:
A. Sell themselves with total credibility, evangelizing their
strong internal belief in their company & its product vision.
B. “Closers” – able to make businessmen commit with pen in
hand both their personal and their organization’s future.
C. Proven track record – having made quota for many years
and closed numerous deals in the past – no room for
rookies!2. Marketing Mavens – Backed up by an HQ team of:
A. Media gurus for ads, brochures, & presentations (foils
back then, ppt today) that refine the vision.
B. Sales support pros who can blow prospects minds
either in 1-on-1 demos or in group presentations.
C. Proposal team that does not know the meaning of the
word “no” when answering RFP feature checklists.
6. Selling “Vision-ware,” cont’d
3. Executive Commitment – the entire C-Suite willing to:
A. Wine and dine with prospects’ executives & Boards making
HQ visits, often involving weekday nights & weekends…
B. Willing to order everyone in the company to drop whatever
they’re doing and help in a sale, demo, site visit, RFP, etc.
C. Willing to invest heavily in sales commissions and
marketing budgets for ads, booths, T & E, and give-aways.
4. Technical “Breakthrough” – the latest techie fad:
A. Far more modern than established “legacy” systems,
which were mainly shared batch-processed systems.
B. With hot buzzwords that caught the ear like: 4GL, on-
line, real-time, Open, C/S, Cloud, thin client, SaaS, etc.
5. Timing – to match your product vision with an intense
market need (– like launching an E.H.R. in 2008!)
7. We Had It All!
• Whether luck or hard work, we filled all 5 criteria:
– Sales superstars Schopp, Foreman, Trammell, Hochstein &
Fitzpatrick brought in 1-2 deals each, all large medical centers
who wanted modern IBM mainframe software badly.
– Lured in by a blizzard of marketing hype, sample of which
follow, with absolutely brilliant images courtesy of Izzie
Lifshutz, and demo’d into submission by Gershon & Dale
Finklestein.
– Wined & dined by me and the reps all over NYC – was there
ever a better place to lure prospects to? I think I saw Cats 12
times that year, and had a table in my name at Mama Leone’s!
– Convinced by Heshie & his technical geniuses that a translation
program would work, and yield an instant modern HIS for IBM
mainframes, on-line, real-time, db, programmed in a 4GL!
– And all at a time when mainframe COBOL code and VSAM files
8. Samples of Our “Shtick”
• Stunning 2-page ad in HFMA’s
Journal, which got me an
interesting letter from IBM’s
attorneys for using their logo
without permission…
– (sad to see the World Trade Center –
we took countless prospects to dine
at the Windows on the World…)
• Some of the many give-aways from
our booths at the AHA, HFMA, NEHA,
Mid-Atlantic and IBM’s ECHO
conventions - no HIMSS back then in
1982 – 1984, the years of our launch.
– And on the following page, some
great text from this brochure:
10. So What Went Wrong?
• Why didn’t HIS Inc. become as successful as Epic is today? Two
things conspired circa 1984 (and not George Orwell!)
– Late Programming – as brilliant and hard-working as they
were, the programmers just kept taking longer and longer to
finish and de-bug the translator code and resulting PL/1.
– Competition – a number of other firms saw the need for
modern software for IBM mainframes, and jumped in too:
• IBM announced their PCS/ADS/Patient Accounting at their
ECHO conference, and the lemmings rushed to them…
• SMS announced “SURPAS” (SMS’ Ultimate Patient
Accounting Package), which never saw the light of day…
• Medicus spun off Medipac into a separate company
named MediFlex, which started selling mainframes
aggressively…
• Stay tuned next week for HIS Inc’s denouement, rebirth, and
