The latest KEA (Kiwi Expat Association) newsletter mentions that Auckland-founded Right Hemisphere has won an American Business Awards ‘Stevie’ for outstanding sales achievement. The ‘Stevie Awards’ have been described as “the Oscars of the business world”, so this is a great endorsement not just of five good quarters of sales growth but of building a sales & marketing capacity.
Crossing the Chasm from your technology innovators and early-adopters to a wider market is still a key challenge for kiwi innovation exporters, even 17 years after Geoffrey Moore first wrote the book. Right Hemisphere haven’t just set up a US and international sales office, they’ve also invested in solution-based sales methodologies, recruited excellent people and defined their market.
Right Hemisphere sell ‘visual product communication and collaboration solutions’. On one hand this can sound like IT jargon, but on the other it is a well-defined market where they know they have a superior product (and it’s not jargon to Fortune 500 customers in that market). Right Hemisphere invested a lot into identifying their market, their customers’ pain points and understanding their competitive advantages. The result is that they’re no longer just another maker of good 3D software tools.
They have a clear value proposition – and invested in developing it. Sometimes I think people have a misconception that sales (and marketing) is about persuasion, manipulation, flash presentations. The most effective way for someone to buy from you is to know what they want and offer it. That means market research, bringing in outside perspectives, listening to customers and even dropping some previously successful product lines.
Congrats to the Right Hemisphere team – Todd Caponi who won Worldwide Vice President of Sales of the Year and the team who were finalists in the Software Industry Sales Team of the Year category.