It was a couple of years ago now, but it still stands out in my head. Birch Hill Equity Partners was the newest offspring of TD Capital, launched as a Toronto-based standalone that would emerge as Canada’s leading mid-market buyout firm.

But before all that grinding activity and high-flown success, there was only a newcomer, and the daunting task of having to create an entire technology infrastructure for it. Because, in spite of the fact that Birch Hill was a spinoff, the company was established as an independent, so everything, and I mean everything, had to be invented and installed and integrated from the ground up for it—ideally, at the hands of a single-source supplier.

I’m happy to say that, (more…)

By Wendy James, Managing Editor Business and Technology 360

The majority of senior management believes that their product or service is fundamentally easy for their clients or customers to buy. Unfortunately, in many cases, this is not the reality. But wait, you’ll protest, this is NOT our case. But the question is, how do you really know? When was the last time you experienced your organization as your customer does? When was the last time you actually tried to buy from yourself?

If the answer is “not recently” or “actually, never”, you may be well served to test the buying waters as a potential client would. Their perspective is often radically different. In my experience, a customer’s perception of how easy a company is to buy from has little to do with how good their products or services are, but on how well prospective customers feel their needs are discovered and known by your frontline sales staff, and how well they are responded to. In other words, ‘How much do you know about me, the customer’? This is real customer experience, the real sales proficiency, and the frontline reality is often very different from senior management’s perception. (more…)