Q&A: Razi Imam, Landslide Technologies

Considering his humble beginnings, Landslide Technologies founder Razi Imam is an unlikely winner of the Carnegie Science Awards, announced earlier this month. Imam, a wildly successful, self-taught entrepreneur and innovator who will soon add author to his list of titles, sought to find out why he was chosen for the 2010 Startup Entrepreneur honor. He only got coy smiles in response to his queries, but he believes it was something as simple as it is self-deprecating--realizing there was somebody better than he to drive his Pittsburgh-based sales management software company’s growth.

After the company cleared its second round of funding in 2008, Imam shifted focus to growth and decided to begin the search to replace himself as CEO. In January, Landslide announced the hiring of 30-year veteran executive Rick Faulk, who appears poised to push the company forward with a fresh venture capital round of $8 million.

“That was the reason,” says Imam, who was nominated for the award by a Carnegie Mellon University professor at whose class he discussed his story about not standing in the way of growth.

Personal growth is something with which Imam is intimately familiar. The son of an immigrant telephone operator in Kuwait, Imam, taught himself to program computers while working at the Kuwait University library.  He now has two decades of experience in launching successful companies and is widely considered a leader in cutting-edge sales and sales management techniques.

He earned his MBA at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and is a big cheerleader for the state, evidenced by his soon-to-be-launched 113 Industries, a materials science incubator that will look to link PA’s considerable brain power in developing nanotechnology with manufacturing capability. Also, Imam’s book Driven will be released on June 13. It will go a long way into explaining what drives Imam and how others can do more with less.

Keystone Edge (KE): What motivated you to write Driven? And please explain the concept of “Junoon.”
Razi Imam (RI): It took me 90 days to write the first chapter in 1997 and I was exhausted just doing that. Since then I’ve been researching super-achievers—people if you met them are just like you and me but they end up achieving phenomenal, game-changing events in their lives. When you go deep in their psyche, you start to see certain patterns that make them that way.

When you start to see those patterns in people like Nelson Mandela or Steve Jobs, they all have this word that I call “Junoon.” It’s an Arabic/Persian word that I use as an expression for achievement. In that state of Junoon, they have certain elements that open up for them. They get some kind of inspiration that guides them, then they get some kind of insight that helps them understand the parameters of their inspiration. Junoon is like an energy cell that keeps powering them and keeps them on task and motivated. I wrote the book because I felt we all have this element in us to do something great in our life. All we have to do is invoke that process.

KE: How will your new materials science incubator operate?
RI: Pennsylvania is very strong in materials science. We were at one time the world leaders in material science. Between Carnegie Mellon, Pitt and Penn State we are again becoming world leaders. We have so many scientific breakthroughs at these schools.  113 Industries will be spawning companies that will come out with next-generation materials. We’ll work with universities in identifying discoveries that are clearly breakthrough and work with these ideas in a prototype lab to create prototype materials. We’ll provide sales, marketing, and business development expertise. We’ll go out into industry and speak with companies like BASF, 3M, Alcoa, companies that are good in manufacturing but might not be connected to the innovation coming out of universities. We’re considering a facility in Pittsburgh and will officially launch in July.

KE: What do you feel like is Landslide’s most innovative contribution to the sales industry?
RI: Our greatest innovation is identifying the best, most successful sales process of a company and codifying it and making it available for everybody. We figured out in every company there are two or three top salespeople who consistently meet their numbers. The rest work really hard and struggle to meet their numbers. What we’ve figured out is the process of interacting with customers and determining why the top salespeople are hitting their numbers.  We designed software using an algorithm that identifies the processes of top sales people and made it available for everyone to follow. It increases total value and total revenue of companies. That’s why were labeled visionary.

KE: What’s the most important difference between Sales 1.0 and 2.0?
RI: Traditional Sales 1.0 was outbound and outreach--you go out there and find customers and pitch products and ideas and build relationships and try to sell a product. Sales 2.0 is inbound. Buyers are coming to you because now buyers are more aware on the Web from a perspective of what you do and they’re already searching for a solution. The nice thing is Sales 2.0 is about making processes and the structure of organization where you can be found easily for a solution you offer. Your buyers are already in need of a solution. Sales 2.0 becomes not necessarily trying to pitch a product but to understand where the buyers are in the buying process. Sales 2.0 is a more buyer-driven process than a sales-driven process. It has made buying easier. It’s a very different mindset, and if a company doesn’t’ make buying easy it cannot be successful.

KE: What do you forecast as the next big trend in customer relationship management (CRM)?
RI: I think CRM will move from just being database software to more of a marketing and interaction software where it is more about getting the right buyers to come to your organization. In the past it was about entering all this information. Our new CEO came up with this beautiful statement: “Find 'em, get 'em, keep 'em.” It’s the future and I totally agree. Any CRM that can deliver those three things will be successful. Your CRM technology should be able to help your salespeople find buyers, get them to buy from you and you should be able to keep them as buyers. You don’t want attrition to occur.

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Joe Petrucci is managing editor of Keystone Edge. Send feedback here.

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