behind the towers

The direct sales operation officially launched in the spring of 1989 with the hiring of Ben Minsk by Paul Sylvia to augment our efforts in the Eastern Region of the U.S.  Ben was a perfect fit for Wellfleet – he was highly motivated, eager to learn about the products, and was relentless in his pursuit of new customers. We were in a race for new customer acquisition with Cisco, with Cisco having a two-year head start. It was a tall order for our sales people, but most realized that the market was expanding at a far faster pace than Cisco’s ability to sign new customers. We had a fighting chance to succeed.

Direct sales teams are a big expense for startup companies. They require a substantial upfront investment in people, training, lead generation, marketing tools, etc. Sales cycles for routers in 1989 were measured in months, further exacerbating the cash outflow. Nonetheless, gross margins were well in excess of 60%, so we knew we were in potentially rewarding financial territory. Furthermore, the engineers were still very busy with a long list of product features and functions requested by our existing and prospective customers.

Additional network-layer protocols were being added every few months – XNS, AppleTalk, Novell – as well as numerous functions to augment our IP and DECnet software. We also had to look ahead to engineering our own implementations of future standards – the OSI-ISO protocol stack, OSPF routing, BGP3, etc. More hardware interfaces needed to be developed to address the growing number of 802.5 token ring and FDDI networks as well as future standards such as HSSI. There was always work to do for the engineers to add to the current product family.

All of this activity naturally feeds into the sales effort. Customers needed “product roadmaps” to make certain that they were investing their capital, time, staffing, and training in a supplier that would meet their needs several years into the future. It was critical that Wellfleet’s sales team present a credible outline of what was to come in the future – what features and functions would be delivered, and when the customer could expect them. And then the engineering, manufacturing and order administration groups had to fulfill those expectations. Everyone in the company had their turn “in the barrel”.

The environment was stressful, intense, frenetic, amazing, and at times, surprising. And it was fun. All of us were extremely busy, there was no time for bureaucratic b/s, instead there was a general sense of “just do it”. If you messed up, you did what you could to correct your mistake, asking for help from anyone who could provide it, told your boss what you were doing, and moved on. Keeping up the momentum was paramount; foot-dragging wasn’t tolerated. We were in a race against Cisco.

The sales team were the “tip of the spear” in our battle with the bad guys. Regrettably, too much of their time was spent in parrying attacks based on what we now call “misinformation”.  “Wellfleet is going out of business”, “Wellfleet has to raise more outside financing”, “Their router doesn’t work”, etc, etc. The b/s from the Left Coast was endless and relentless.

Our approach was quite different, based on what I called the “H-P way” of selling. Namely, we trained our sales people to speak about the positive attributes of our products – designed from the ground-up as a scalable system with compute power that increased with the addition of more network connections, a unique capability in the industry. No other competitor could make that claim, defensibly. Our emphasis was on what we knew our products could do well, not on what we suspected that Cisco’s couldn’t.

Nevertheless, the competition was fierce and constant. One obvious conclusion reached in early 1990 was to stop playing defense exclusively. It was time to go on offense. Hiring Gary Bowen as the Vice President, Sales & Marketing was step one.

Gary came to Wellfleet from a regional sales director position at Masscomp, the then Massachusetts-based workstation manufacturer based in Westford, MA. We shared an investor and board member in Russ Planitzer from J.H. Whitney. Russ knew Gary’s track record and reputation and recommended him highly to Sev. Gary was a big man, about 6’ 4” with a long reach – an excellent power forward in basketball terms. He was a seasoned sales executive with a keen instinct for marketing that still seems rare from my experience. He often stated that the function of marketing was to generate sales leads by making “bold, defensible claims” about the company, its products and its people.

Early on, Gary believed that Wellfleet needed to get on the offensive relative to our competition. His idea for our first print advertisement was captured in the headline “The World’s First Multiprotocol Router That Really Works” over a photo of our products. It ran in the industry press that then reached much of our targeted audience – Network World, ComputerWorld, InfoWorld to name a few. We all wondered how successful that ad would be. It didn’t take long to find out.

Within the first week of the add appearing in the weekly and monthly publications, we heard from Cisco’s lawyers – “cease and desist” stated the demand letter. I was thrilled. Clearly, the ad had had its desired effect – for once, we were on offense, and Cisco had to play defense by explaining to their existing and prospective customers why our ad wasn’t accurate. Naturally, we had to pull the ad – no one was interested in fighting through lawyers. But we had finally fired the first shot across the Cisco bow. And the splash was distributed all over their ship. It wouldn’t be the last.

Gary brought an energy and passion to our sales and marketing efforts that invigorated the entire company. We knew we had a great product that few people knew about and even fewer understood. By hiring the right people, particularly the field sales and support folks, at the right time, Gary initiated Wellfleet’s exponential growth curve. Clearly, he was the right leader at the right time for the company’s subsequent growth. Increasing sales creates the momentum for additional investment in new product development, extends the company’s reach into additional geographies and vertical markets, and catalyzes further partnering opportunities.

One such partnering opportunity which quickly developed was with Hewlett-Packard. Once again, I found myself at the forefront of a relationship that was to profoundly affect the trajectory of Wellfleet. Once again, I was to learn that it is often better to be lucky than smart.