Foreword

Mr. Field Sales Manager-Mike Needham

Watching from my 37 year HP career, in factory marketing, I was always fascinated by the personalities and performances of the field sales force. We would see these individuals in action when we flew out to help with sales pitches, or on the floor of trade shows and seminars, and in their factory visits when there was great camaraderie and more than just a touch of region to region competitiveness.

Our field sales culture derived from 13 independent rep companies in 1960. Personalities ranged from charming good-old-boys in parts of the South, to the technically demanding men calling on the PhD geniuses at Bell Telephone Labs, to the lookalike engineer rookies at Neely Sales, who looked like military 2nd Lieutenants, with their crewcuts, called in from Central Casting. I also remember that we factory folks also viewed Neely's hiring for administrative staff as being the rejects from the Universal Movie Studies one mile up the street. The rep companies came with a certain undercurrent of misogyny.

Professional Sales management came with the HP acquisition of those rep companies, putting the strategies and operations all under the control of the man who hired me in the midst of the 1958 recession, Noel Eldred. Noel's primary marketing slogan was borrowed from someone, "Nothing happens until someone sells something!" With a sale, and upon the delivery, that becomes revenue, which pays all our wages, pays for more parts, more design engineering, more assembly labor, and a thriving company that takes over the world.

Over the years, as I traveled to visit customers with the local Field Engineer, to consult on technical aspects of microwave instrumentation, I observed truly creative selling going on. You could tell instantly that there was heartfelt rapport with their customers. Of course it helped to be selling HP products which were top of the line. No customer could ever be faulted for a bad purchase decision if it was HP. Especially on big deals that might involve support test gear that would be deployed with, for example, a radar system. Our global backup for distributed systems was a confidence builder for a manager tasked with purchase decisions for support and maintenance.

My memories are full. On one trip with an FE in New York, we were stopping at a customer's plant to pick up a loaner oscilloscope, and the customer told us he had decided to buy Tek. My FE simply said that such a decision means he would not get his commission. Since that FE had really aided that customer over months with other loaners for special tests, he told us on the spot, "OK, I'll buy yours."

At the reception desk of an aerospace company in Wisconsin, the FE I accompanied asked if he could use the phone. I was puzzled when he had himself paged. Once the paging announcement came, customers began showing up to the lobby, to consult technically, to negotiate price and delivery, and such. Afterward, I was pretty harsh on the FE, but he pointed out that the company had just received a HUGE airborne radar contract and so many design engineers needed to talk with HP, that his time could be best distributed by making sure he didn't have to go through the security rules which would require accompanied walks if he went to each customer desk, one at a time.

I called once at the NASA Center at Houston. In meeting our customer, I quickly realized it was the first time I ever experienced a person with Tourette's Syndrome. His behavior was most difficult for normal discussion, and ours was complex/technical. I was stunned to watch my FE deal with this impediment in the most sensitive and charitable manner, patient, empathetic, effective. As we walked to the parking lot, I found out that this particular customer engineer was in the genius range, and was a key specifier for a large quantity buy. I was so impressed with the adaptation of that FE.

As a marketing neophyte myself, I could watch and learn Human Relations 101 from FE veterans. Technical people, as we know, are not particularly good at interpersonal signs that are important in negotiating a sales decision, whether for one product or a whole shopping list. In the 1950-60s, before HP marketing had settled on the training program called, Managing Interpersonal Relations, the field force relied on intuitive sales personalities, and on-the-job observations of successful senior FEs. Some regions like Neely had developed a variation of a written personality test which was customized by compiling the answers from their most successful FEs, and using that as a filter for new hires. By that time I was Microwave Division Marketing Manager, and I determined that I needed to take the test myself. I flew down to LA, to the psychiatry offices of a Dr. Bob Reveal (I kid you not.). After I finished, his admin graded my answers, ushered me into the Dr. Bob's office, and he proceeded to lay out my whole personality like an open book. At that point I realized that you could indeed pick out personalities which would be winning sales candidates.

Over the years, I received a few offers to come to the field, but having seen the types of good FEs, I knew that such a life would be a serious frustration for my personality. Those men and women must face their mirror every morning, and command, "Let's go get 'em tiger," and they have nothing but my sincere admiration.

Mike's memoir reveals all those things. It's not the story of the stage show, Death of a Salesman, or the anvil salesman of 76 Trombones. But it is an army of dedicated people who know their crucial role in the success of any company. To that end, I once wrote a monograph for the HP Employee Newsletter, Measure, during an economic downturn, which Mike has agreed to append to his memoir as Appendix 1. In it, I call for all factory employees, from finance working on field expense accounts to the shipping teams, to cut the bureaucracy and help the FEs get orders.

I found that the real value of Mike's story is an inside view of Enterprise selling. When you are working with the Ford top management to envision an employee benefit of furnishing home Internet connections for tens of thousands of employee families using PCs and printers, that beats calling on a design engineer to sell one signal generator. Mike often called in HP top management to help seal the deal. One aspect of that was the fact that HP was already using in its own global operations the latest in IT data handling, which entailed systems that tracked everything from internal email in 1974, to the order processing to parts procurement to production scheduling, shipment, invoicing and receiving the customer check. HP was internally demonstrating these innovative systems. Then, when you bring in CEO John Young to explain all that, your sales pitch just escalated to an order with a big commission.

Mike also connected with HP's top leaders during some VERY complex corporate transitions. From Young to Platt to Fiorina to Hurd, and during major acquisitions like Compaq and others, these all had significant impacts on field management and strategies. We see these unique personalities thread through his life and career.

John Minck

HP Memories

This memory of PERSON_NAME's career at hp results from the work of the www.hpmemoryproject.org website of Marc Mislanghe, who with John Minck edited and published the original archive of Memoirs. After Marc's untimely death in 2014, Ken Kuhn has now assumed the custodianship with John, and together they will continue to expand the Memoirs section.

One of the main objectives in starting this website in 2011 was (and still is today) to get in touch with people who have worked at hp from the birth of the company up to today. We are interested in hearing your memories no matter what division or country you worked in, or whether you were in engineering, marketing, finance, administration, or worked in a factory. This is because all of you have contributed to the story of this unique and successful enterprise.

Your memories are treasure for this website. While product and technology are our main concern, other writings related to the company life are highly welcome, as far as they stay inside the hp Way guidelines.

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