Plus, to Gerdes's eye, there seemed to be a communication disconnect among potential partners. Many of the small companies didn't have the context or contacts to know who the decision makers were or where the opportunities lay. And the large companies often lacked the resources to investigate which of the hot young businesses had the best fit or to shepherd fledgling start-ups through the alliance process. "If it weren't for BMG, somebody else in the equation would have to do more than their fair share," says Mike Dusche, product manager at Microsoft. "For us, that's usually difficult to justify, because the investment isn't always commensurate with the opportunity." Dusche says he gets a couple hundred partnership requests a month. "To get my time or my developers' time, they really need to show us an articulate, crisp business plan about why we should be willing to invest our resources. And BMG helps them get to that point."
But for Gerdes herself to get to that point, she first needed to augment her network of relationships. Although she had developed many technology-industry contacts, most were at PeopleSoft, IBM, and Oracle, and the majority of her prospective clients were more interested in partnerships with SAP (PeopleSoft's chief rival), Hewlett-Packard (rival of IBM), and Microsoft (rival to all, basically). "So I went with the market demand and developed my key contacts from there," she says. "The value of my past experience was primarily in identifying an opportunity, correctly targeting the decision maker, pitching the idea, and then delivering the goods."
Although Gerdes had dealt with Microsoft in the past, when she first approached the company as the greenhorn CEO of BMG, she needed to target a new contact. "I saw a very specific market need for E-commerce solutions," she says, an area in which she had never worked with Microsoft, "but I knew that their E-commerce strategy was embryonic and needed partner validation and adoption." She figured she could help Microsoft find appropriate strategic partners to work with. So she got the contact name from a Microsoft press release. "How's that for methodical research?" she says, laughing. "Elapsed time: 10 minutes." She then pitched her corporate-courtship service to that person in a cold call. "He answered on the first ring," she says. Two weeks and three meetings later, her first big-company relationship was up and running.
From there, Gerdes followed the lead of her clients and spotted further opportunities to play matchmaker by specific product area. For example, companies that were looking to enter the manufacturing or financial-technology arenas typically sought to hook up with Hewlett-Packard for the hardware and Oracle for the database. Small content providers (from on-line grocery stores to used-book sellers) wanted to hook up with Yahoo and America Online and other media groups such as Time Warner, NBC, and Disney. Gerdes responded by cementing relationships with nearly all the above.
To prove that she was for real, Gerdes gave away her services to BMG's first two clients. Once she established credibility with her larger-partner organizations, Gerdes was able to gain enough access to strategic information beyond telephone directories and organizational charts that she was privy to the companies' strategic planning. "They realized that if I could do this without their insight, then I could increase the quality of the relationships even more significantly if I had more knowledge of their strategy," she says. Mike Dusche agrees that Gerdes's knowledge of Microsoft saves him valuable time in talking with other companies. "When I show up, I don't need to spend time bringing them up to speed," he says. "We can move right forward with the tough questions as fast as possible."
BMG is now a nine-person consulting firm with offices in Seattle, San Francisco, and Austin. Gerdes counts among her staff a technical team of engineers who evaluate her clients' technologies and determine how they might align with the technologies of potential large partners. She also employs what she calls "business-relationship managers," typically M.B.A.'s who have experience in developing high-tech businesses. Such a diversity of expertise ensures that Gerdes is not the only BMG staffer with negotiation skills and a killer address book.
But Gerdes is selling much more than a rundown of who does what, where, and why. She also brings her own special brand of chutzpah, which somehow enables her to prod both sides of a partnership without offending either. "It's a real art to be able to keep things moving without appearing obnoxious," says Mike Walsh, vice-president of worldwide database operations at Navigation Technologies Corp. (NavTech) and a recent Gerdes client. "But that's really what Sarah does." Gerdes's energy and enthusiasm are obvious and infectious. In meetings she can't keep herself from pulling out her laptop and calling up her well-prepared charts and graphs to illustrate a point. In this day of proliferating acronyms and swarming buzzwords, Gerdes supplies a working knowledge of corporation-specific nomenclature. "She knows how they speak at Microsoft," says Mike Grandinetti, another recent client. "She knows the words that are most meaningful to them and has a lot of credibility within Microsoft as a result."
By the time Gerdes met up with Richard Farrell at Full Armor, she had facilitated more than 30 deals. Even so, and despite Oscar Newkerk's urging, Farrell was skeptical. "I thought, 'We're making headway on our own here. Why do we need BMG?" he says. But the more Farrell heard about Microsoft, the more a relationship with BMG made sense. He quickly learned about the disparate nature of Microsoft's independent groups--independent to the point where one group doesn't always know what the others are doing. Plus there was the issue of how his time as CEO was best spent. When Farrell found that working with Microsoft would mean ferreting out and negotiating with six or seven Microsoft subgroups, he decided that he would regret not working with BMG. "It was expensive," he says, "but if we tried to do it alone, how many opportunities would we never even know about?"
