From the start, Charlton made it clear that he wouldn't be working overtime alone. All remaining staffers were expected to take on work outside their job descriptions while the company scrambled to rebuild. Late-night Tuesdays and Thursdays were mandatory. Twelve-to-fourteen-hour days became the norm. Employees often came in as early as 6 a.m. and routinely worked weekends. The pace hasn't slowed much since then, even though a full management team and staff are now in place. Charlton, who has been known to bring his cell phone with him to the bathroom, still has a penchant for setting up 6 a.m. conference calls with Tidal sales managers and for riding everybody else hard. "The treadmill is running a helluva lot faster now," he declared at a training session for Tidal managers early this year. "If someone isn't working hard enough, they're not committed."
Despite the "huge commitment" required by Charlton, "I was excited to be part of it."
--Patti Stephenson
A big believer in performance measurement, Charlton has instituted strict goals for everyone from software developers to the company's marketing staff. The 25 or so so-called inside sales reps, for instance -- whose job is to cold-call customers and generate leads -- are required to average roughly 100 calls a day and to produce at least 10 solid sales prospects a month. Even the outside public-relations person is expected to produce at least eight press releases and place one major article per quarter. New sales hires immediately get the message that they need to demonstrate dedication to their jobs; indeed, Tidal's job-offer letter to sales reps explicitly states that their employment is contingent on their ability to score at least a 90% on an "entrance exam" on the company's training materials the day they start. Not surprisingly, Charlton's approach has spread through the company. "We're as serious as a heart attack," says Jim Griffin, a buddy of Charlton's from a previous employer who now oversees Tidal's inside training programs. "It's a lot easier to be a manager if you're a hard-ass up front."
Charlton pushes his sales staff to do whatever it takes to bring the deals home. If that means reps have to stay longer in a frigid midwestern city in the dead of winter, as was the case with Tidal regional vice-president Paul Throldahl last February, no problem. Throldahl had called Charlton on a Friday afternoon from the Minneapolis airport to say he'd obtained an oral commitment on a deal with General Mills. Charlton claims he ordered him to check back into a hotel until he had a signed contract. And if closing a sale means calling customers at home or at a hotel in the middle of the Pacific, so be it. Charles Smith, an IT manager for a nationwide copy-shop chain, remembers being stunned when a Tidal rep began sending him faxes and calling him on his cell phone at a conference he was attending in Hawaii, in hopes of finalizing a contract. "It was like, 'Hey, these guys really want this," Smith says.
What customers (and competitors) think. The copy-shop chain ended up signing a $125,000 enterprise license agreement with Tidal. But the software company's hyperaggressive style has put some customers off. Charlton himself admitted that a top buyer for Compaq's IT department "wasn't too happy about it" when a Tidal sales rep called him at home to see if Tidal had beaten out another competitor on a Compaq deal. Tidal ultimately won the contract but only after getting a stern warning that calling Compaq managers at home was out of line, according to one Compaq insider. Tidal had less success landing a recent deal with a major Philadelphia media company, though not for lack of trying. The systems administrator, who was overseeing the company's purchase of job-scheduling software, recalls that one "too pushy" Tidal rep called him 10 times in one particular month. Nor did he quit there. "Oh, my gosh, he went up the chain, down the chain, around the chain," recalls the buyer. "Everybody who was involved in the project was getting a phone call. It was like, 'OK, you guys can stop any time now." In the end, the company opted to go with a Tidal competitor -- whose sales rep called the buyer only about once a month.
Tidal's competitors, for their part, complain that the company's sales force isn't just aggressive. They claim that Tidal will do whatever it takes -- including slashing its prices and hyping what its job-scheduling software can actually do -- to win a contract. "They used to drop their price through the floor," says Tim Donovan, former product manager for Tidal competitor AppWorx. In several instances in which the two companies went head-to-head, Donovan claims, Tidal tried "to win deals away" from AppWorx by, for instance, giving away a $100,000 software package for the price of a three-year support contract. "It really was 'Get the deal at all costs," Donovan says. Charlton insists there's "no truth" to those claims. "We stay to a pretty regimented price," he says. "We don't discount." As for his competitors' criticism, Charlton shoots it down as sour grapes. "I think [our competitors] are a little mad because we're growing faster than they are," he says.
