So that is why people like to predict the future. It’s because of the overwhelmingly smug satisfaction we get from being right! After all, we rarely highlight being wrong, so I get to claim an unblemished record for now.

Yesterday I made some predictions about the tech moment of the day: the Apple iPhone announcement. I predicted Apple wouldn’t change the form factor, that they’d upgrade the hardware making it faster and improving the camera, and that the presentation would focus on the new software, iOS 5 and its capabilities. I even mentioned that voice activation might be the surprise that steals the show.

I guess you could say I nailed it. But wasn’t it too easy this time? Frankly, I am not such a huge fan of the current form factor for the iPhone. The glass on the back of my phone is cracked, the phone is less comfortable to hold and more difficult to tactily find the front/top of than it used to be. Tech pundits didn’t want to solve any of these problems, they wanted a bigger screen, because, well, other phones have a bigger screen.

The iPhone has a fantastic screen. Probably the best screen out there. It’s not bigger, but it does display more pixels than almost any other, and I am quite surprised, actually, that folks really want to carry around even bigger phones. Isn’t miniaturization one of technology’s magic bullets?

Apple did exceed my expectations though. Check out what they’ve done with their acquisition of Siri for voice control. I am dubious about talking to my phone as I see people do on their Android phones. It goes like this: press a few buttons and load the application. Stare at the screen for a moment to ensure that it’s ready. Speak your phrase into the phone, slowly and carefully: “F i n d p e e t z a h” Wait. “F i n d p e e t z a h” Wait. “F e y e n d p e e e t z z a a a h”, go to the maps application and type pizza into the search field and continue on with your business. It barely works, not terribly convenient when it does, and it’s a bit odd and certainly unacceptable in a wide variety of situations to ask your phone for that sort of thing. I have “voice control” on my phone. I’ve used it, let me see, never.

With Siri, though, I started to have the same thought I had when Apple introduced the iPhone. Four years ago I saw the commercials of the way it scrolled and opened applications and above all how effective and useful the web was on it and thought “if it actually works that well, that’s really something I’d get.” At the time I had a Windows Mobile 5 phone that I’d learned was really just a large, blocky phone that got my e-mails. You could surf the web, but you really wouldn’t want to do that to yourself, just as you can use google voice, but it’s not really worth doing.

If, on the other hand, I find myself in an Apple store in front of an iPhone 4S and try out Siri and it really does work like that, well, maybe I’ll stop being such a luddite about this voice stuff. My contract’s got about another year. By then the iPhone 5 (or something really competitive) might be out. I can always talk to my phone in the car. There no one can hear my conversation about not having any friends because I smugly think I am right all the time.

Predicting the future is a human obsession, but we’re not very good at it. There is a trend on books from business advice to congnitive pychology to highlight our shortcomings and suggest ways to deal with and even profit from the randomness in the world.

Few reading this blog are coming here for up-to-the-minute tech news, but I still feel compelled to resist all the research on embracing unpredictibility and make a prediction–if for no other reason just to see how I did a few hours later when all is revealed. So, without further ado, here’s what will happen today at Apple’s “let’s talk” event.

Apple makes an effort to concentrate on one thing at a time for its events. It’s a good strategy, ensuring focus from the media and customers. As a result, much talk about discontinuing iPods will not be addressed. Is there really any point to making a fanfare about discontinuing a product? Of course, the iPod continues today, it’s simply seamlessly merged with your phone.

There will be a new iPhone and as I own an iPhone 4, it is clear to me that its design is barely an improvment over the previous phone. The shape is less comfortable, and the antenna problem is real. The specs are better, and it’s a thinner, smaller, phone with a superb screen, which is great, but, aside from returning to some variation on the iPhone 3G there is little to go back to. Nope, all the changes will be the usual hardware refresh–on the inside. Faster chips and better camera will enable the phone to take advantage the real news: the new OS while keeping up with specmanship of other phones out there.

Apple believes that the bigger screens of competing phones are more like badly behaving portable tablets. I’ve seen them, and gosh they look great, but frankly, the thing is supposed to be a phone and these lovely devices just look huge. I thought we left that age; like many, I want my phone to slip in my pocket. I would be surprised, indeed, if Apple didn’t agree with me here and chose to go with more screen real estate.

Expect a 4GS. Whatever the name, expect, above all, for people to be disappointed with hardware changes of the iPhone 5–it’s only a speedbump.

Instead, expect new CEO Tim Cook to spend much more time on the real advancements of today. This is the first time that OS5 is being announced to the masses. It happens every year and every year Apple watchers forget that the world wide developers conference, WWDC, is only public because the media shows up for news. It’s not a consumer event. Only now will the results of working with developers for months be shown to the greater consuming masses. And that means iOS5 features and internet cloud integration. We’ll see a long re-hash of what close Apple watchers already know. We’ll see highlight features and demonstrations of cloud-based music (an iPod in the sky!) and integration across macs, iPads, and iPhones. We’ll see how the iPhone will have access to data not stored on it all.

Apple is not alone in finally realizing Oracle’s promise of the thin client. The new Amazon Fire tablet actually embodies this even better, but the cloud is just another name for the client-server model and it turns out that Apple’s smart phones and devices and smarter still when coupled to the internet in the sky. Expect loads of examples of why that is and how Apple’s solution is, in Tim Cook’s opinion, the way it’s done.

There may even be some exciting voice recognition improvements in iOS 5, although I still wonder asking our phones questions in public will really work. Sometimes it’s great, like in the car when you’re supposed to be driving, but screaming into your phone on a crowded New York side walk or in an airport line is bad enough when people can reasonably expect you’re communicating with another human. When they realize you’re just trying to get your phone to stop asking you to repeat yourself, that’s going to get old fast.

So, in short:

• iPhone 5 = not really. just a speed bump
• it’s all about iOS5
• expect the cloud to be the big news
• some voice recognition introductions could steal the show

Check back tomorrow. I’ll come clean on how good or bad I was at this.

The hardest thing most people have to do in business is lay people off. It’s a business decision that very few take lightly and most of us will do almost any thing to pass the responsibility on to someone else. I honestly think it can be harder to lay someone off than to be laid off yourself. (I know that’s certainly been my case.)

The second hardest thing might be to raise prices. Nobody likes it and today, customers have grown to expect the opposite. But as many small tech companies have noticed, we’re usually not selling millions of widgets with healthy year-on-year growth, so that, even in a weak economy, we might be forced to raise prices.

Setting prices in the first place is a difficult task. Of course you’ve got to cover your costs–all of them, even the tiny hidden ones–but you’ve also got to have something left over to help your business grow. As conditions change, though, what used to be rolled up in the economies of scale might become a distraction from strategic goals and prices have to be increased to accommodate this market reality. Meanwhile, your customers are going to have trouble seeing what’s in it for them. Understanding how you set the price and what’s changed is something you’re going to have to explain.

Therein lies the good news in this uncomfortable situation. We need to communicate with customers, and the more often we have a chance to do that, the better we can take care of our relationship with them. Raising prices is an opportunity to have a (difficult) conversation. The wrong way is to wait until customers send a purchase order and ask them to revise it. Instead, bite the bullet and be pro-active. You’ve got to let them know not only what is happening, but, most importantly why.

You may be raising prices because costs have gone up, or because your competitors are charging more and you just think you can squeeze a bit more out of the market. Niether point is terribly interesting to your customer. Better is too look for something that might actually matter to them. You may be reaching, but maybe all you can say is that doing this strengthens your committment to manufacturing the widget they purchase, or enables you to invest in necessary improvements. That isn’t much, but it beats begging and usually, it is, at least, an honest answer that a rational purchasing agent can understand. It is especially true that original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) need to see their suppliers as partners who need to make money if everyone is going to be successful.

You know the story: that’s a feature, not a bug! You’re not raising prices, you’re ensuring the success of their product! Hopefully that’ll work! If you can’t afford not to raise prices, then losing the customer is the best thing for your business anyway, and if not, you could always back off. Just don’t try that too often!

I’ve been bought a few times. Well, not me, actually, but the company for whom I was working was acquired by a larger one. Once or twice, I was on the acquired side too, but, with many small tech companies developing ideas which require much more money than the owners can find between the couch cushions, being acquired is a common occurance. And it rarely happens friction-free.

The so-called “cultured clash” usually has more to do with communication than differences in how to run a business, which is not to say there aren’t real issues. One experience I’ve seen repeated without fail is the feeling of employees at the smaller company that the red-tape and bureaucracy of the bigger is costly and a waste of time. ‘We never had to do that before we were acquired and we got along just fine!’

There’s just one big flaw in this thinking. You, dear acquired company employee or business owner, did not get along just fine. Otherwise, you’d have had little reason to be bought! Sure, there are exceptions. When the price offered was just too rich to ignore by the folks who stood to make a bundle, but those situations are rather rare–just look at how many successful acquisitions there are compared to failed ones–the acquired companies are struggling, somewhere, at least a little bit.

Once we realize that what looks like a bunch of annoying extra work may actually be covered by things like economies of scale, it’s easier to adapt to the new procedures. They are making you enter your orders at a company thousands of miles away, and you have dozens of new passwords for your e-mail; how can this be better? Maybe tracking business costs is exactly what propelled the bigger company to the top and keeping e-mail secret is more critical to their success than to a little $10 million dollar business.

Of course, the acquiring company may really have much it could learn from the acquired. The first step is to get things working well in whatever system the big-unmovable force needs, and only then suggest improvements. Ego during this process rarely helps anybody, and if you find the other side (remember, you’re on the same side now) is too arrogant to learn from you, it’s hardly the mature thing to cross your arms, stamp your feet and insist: no, you know better!

Some little companies grow up all by themselves, proving their business model and way of doing things really is the best thing out there. Most, though, go through some pretty big changes as they transition from five to twenty-five, to two thousand and five employees. Acquired or not, you’re likely to be doing business differently than you did before if you’re lucky enough to stick around through all that. Enjoy the ride!

Most business-to-business companies don’t offer coupons, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to learn from the strategy. Actually, most of us, whether we use coupons or not, don’t really give them much thought. It seems they’re just another means to entice us to buy something.

Even if we’re not manufacturing peanut butter, there is much to be learned from coupons, for they tell us a great deal about prices. How do you price your product or service? Do you just have a standard mark-up over labor and materials? Have you done research into what competitors are charging? Smaller businesses often don’t even have direct competitors. They’ve done a great job offering some product or service that no one else offers the same way, so competitive market pricing can be very difficult to determine.

Even if you can’t just look at the marketplace to discover what the price should be, a flat mark-up of costs is rarely the best strategy, although it is a good place to start. It is surprising, though, how often this model is applied. I worked with a company some years ago that was selling a laser product for about 60% less than their competition! They weren’t losing money, so no harm done, but after we unceremoniously raised the price we generated more revenue without damaging sales one bit.

Coupons are more than just promotions to encourage purchases that might not have happened otherwise. Instead, they help to divide the market place up and provide valuable information about the real prices people are willing to pay. Suppose you see a coupon for 50¢ off your favorite peanut butter. A thrifty, unemployed college student might very well make the effort to bring that coupon, along with many others, on his next shopping trip. A couple of married professionals with three kids won’t be able to find the time between bringing kids to soccer practice and late night business dinners to take advantage of the lower prices they get by finding, clipping, and sorting coupons.

Manufacturers get to offer their products at two different prices and nobody complains. One lower price enables people who have the luxury (or inconvenience) of valuing money more than time to still buy their goods, and the other allows those whose time is worth too much right now to simply pay top-dollar and get it over with. The manufacturer a chance to see how the product is seen in the market place, without risking pricing it too high or too low, losing customers or leaving money on the table.

It’s still unlikely that an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is going to start offering coupons to their customers, but adapting this strategy to determine prices based on time, but also delivery, guarantees, service, and of course, volume discounts, can provide valuable insight and reduced risk.  What’s worked for your business?

Who is your customer? It’s not as obvious as it might seem. In many businesses, the real customer might not be the person your company is thinking about, but it should be. Simply put, regardless of who drives your business, you’re real customer is the entity who decides to pay you for your products and services. Let’s look at some examples:

Are you a Google customer? If you’re like the majority of us and you only use their services such as search, mail, and maps, then not really. Google’s customers are the people who buy AdWords, and search placements. Without you and me, Google might not have much of a business, but without advertisers, they’d have even less.

Are you looking for new opportunities with Monster’s job boards? Monster has to spend some of its resources making sure you find value in their site; but you’re a volunteer product, not the customer. This is true for all sorts of recruitment firms and the source of many a misunderstanding between recruiters and job seekers. ‘This guy doesn’t seem to be working for me…’ is a common complaint, but frankly, you shouldn’t expect them to. The job seeker typically doesn’t pay anything for the privilege of someone finding a job for her. Monster and other recruiters work for the businesses for whom they find candidates. They’re marketing message must reflect this.

During the start-up phase of a company developing a web-based application to optimize how we buy things, the company constantly had to remind itself who the real customers were (stores) and not be distracted by all the positive feedback they got from people who planned on using the application (individual users). Like many businesses today, exactly who your customer is might not be so obvious because you must get a group of people excited about your product and then leverage that interest and enthusiasm with someone who will pay you.

In an earlier article we discussed the importance of letting people know what you can do for them. Of course, it’s impossible to get the right message if you haven’t even identified who your customer is. Hopefully, you’re well ahead of this game, but given a little thought and you might even be surprised.

In his inaugural address John F. Kennedy famously turned a common question around: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” [Surely good advice today, with both sides of political spectrum explaining what they will do to create jobs and opportunity for waiting citizens, who wonder, not what they should do to create a better nation, but which elected officials will do so for them.] Answering the right question is often critical to success.

It seems logical, after all. “Let me introduce myself,” is a pretty natural way to open a conversation. The majority of company presentation slides start out this way with often one, two, or more slides explaining “who we are.” ‘We’ve got to explain how great our technology or experience is, don’t we? That’s our selling feature!’ Unfortunately, no, it isn’t. Your selling feature is not about what your business can do, but what you business can do for the customer.

I worked with a firm that had an exciting, innovative technology and they are rightfully proud of it. Initialy, the company presentation started out explaining that they were a well-funded organization with patented technology, and then took a few brief moments to explain this innovative technology before showing examples of how it might be used. Sounds reasonable, but the audience never seemed to be listening. And why should they? What’s in it for them?

We turned around their presentation, describing instead typical problems customers might have encountered that the technology could address. Presenters could ask questions about which of these seemed the most appropriate and tailor the rest of the presentation to fit the customer’s specific interests. Armed with this new information, success stories illustrating different applications and results how a customer might save money, or avoid costly maintenance. Suddenly the audience is interested, and they start asking questions about how this technology works. Doesn’t that seem a more logical, to tell them about your products, after they’re convinced that it might do them some good?

Websites often suffer from the same problem. Instead of focusing on how products and solutions might benefit the customer, we have pages describing how our companies and products are different, better than the competition. (Eye On Technology suffers a bit from this, but that’s what this blog is supposed to do–show our benefits.) Customers have little patience to learn about why you’re important when they haven’t figured out why they shouldn’t just click another link. You have very little time to answer this question before they’re gone—don’t waste it.

Whatever you do, don’t ask your sales team if they want to enter more data into a computer. Customer relationship management (CRM) software has been around for decades but continues to gather more attention, especially since the advent of cloud-based services such as Salesforce.com. As you can read over at Sales Machine, not everyone, particularly not sales people, think that’s such good news. The claim is that tracking your sales process and forcing it into some automated system (he’s referring to a rigid pipeline of sales steps) really just amounts to busy work and data for managers to spy on sales people.

Sales people may have their own styles and they rarely include sitting at a computer instead of talking to potential customers, but, since when is flying by the seat of your pants always the best strategy? For that, a cell phone and voice mail is the alternative Geoffrey James is offering.

Some of the problems that can cause CRM to fail:

• a weak database of contacts and titles
• requiring data be collected that you don’t use, or worse use, but with no value-add
• a pipeline that doesn’t meet the typical sales experience in your business
• demanding that sales people follow every step in the pipeline with every customer

Let’s quickly address those points. A weak database is a chore to work with and drives sales people away from using the tool rather quickly. If you don’t already have one, consider purchasing a database of contacts for your market. They’re usually a few thousand dollars, which isn’t so much when you consider the investment in your sales team’s time of not having to enter names for everyone they meet. I’ve had teams rave about the CRM system: “wow! my customers are already in there!”

If you collect data, use it. Keeping track of information just to make reports is busy work. If management is using data and demanding sales people collect it (which, remember, doesn’t result in new sales for them!) then the team has got to see the benefit. If the reports you gather aren’t pointing you toward some action, don’t bother, that’s a waste of the sales team’s time and management’s too. Professionals will appreciate that there are tasks they’ve got to perform that don’t contribute to their own bottom line, but only if they can see a point and better, some results.

One of the biggest failures of the systems that Sales Machine seems to be objecting to, is forcing a series of steps, like an automated industrial process, onto sales.  Realistically, I can’t imagine denying there are some steps that nearly every deal goes through. Contacting the customer and identifying who has purchase authority sound like two that pretty much apply everywhere, don’t they? A well-tailored pipeline gives a sales person the chance to reflect during the process (which in some cases is long enough to ask: where are we here?) and ensure that they’ve done whatever they need to close the deal. Sure, good sales professionals keep all this in their head. They ‘just know’ what they have to do next and specialize for each opportunity. Frankly, we’ve seen both seasoned professionals and newbies alike claim they new exactly when, and how many of, their opportunities would close, yet still miss their forecast. Maybe ‘just knowing’ isn’t enough. Don’t force a one-size-fits-all approach to your business instead, work with those sales professionals and develop one that makes sense. We’ll try to focus on that in another article.

Finally, let’s face it, all the preparation and customization of your sales tool, and at the end of the day it’s just a tool The goal is sales, not activity. It’s surprising how often companies lose track of this. Management has invested in a sales tool, and they expect you to use it. Sales says they don’t need to do this, but they’ve got to do that, but where are the sales to prove it? Not every opportunity is going to play out the same and at the end of the quarter, the only thing that really matters, to everyone at the company, is that you’ve closed the deals. Using these tools can help a team to discover what went wrong if they didn’t meet their goals, and give them insight into what went right if they did. Using software is just another tool to reach those goals, nothing more.

The comments on Mr. James’ article point out that there are many ways to measure success. (Mr. James’ short sighted ‘are they spending less money on sales?’ is one way. Either he was hoping no one would notice the flaw in that, or he isn’t wise enough to see it, but if reducing costs were a good measure of performance, every out-of-business company would be a perfect success). Our experience with CRM has given us the chance avoid some common obstacles (and we’ve personally set up a few ourselves!). We can help your team avoid them and maybe make sure that investment doesn’t leave you wondering where the money went.

CRM software will require some extra effort from the sales team. The more data collected the better the systems perform. The only way to encourage sales people to do that extra work is to make sure they’re getting something out of it. Poor Mr. James has decided that since he’s seen the systems fail and he doesn’t like entering all that data that they don’t work. He thinks you can’t automate the sales process (he’s right) but he denies that there are any similarities from one opportunity to the next. Implementation isn’t easy. It’s going to take some time, and investment, to get it, and it might even have to change over time (hint: it will) but if you really think a carpenter can build a house with only a hammer, then go ahead, and limit your sales people’s tools to voice-mail alone. The rest of use are going to use whatever we can to makes our jobs easier.

More than once in my career, I’ve been asked to help sales people to sell a product that just wasn’t as important to them as it was to me. The sales team was talented and motivated, but they still struggled to sell ‘my product’ no matter how much I’d done to ensure they understood the technology. During customer visits with them, I came to realize that the problem wasn’t that they weren’t talking to their customers enough, or that they didn’t know what the technology we were offering did. Instead, they just didn’t really know what questions to ask to discover if this customer really had a need or not. In each of these situations, the sales team was responsible for a wide range of products and part of what is commonly called a ‘matrix sales organization’.

It’s rare that smaller companies even have to worry about the complexity of matrix organizations, but, as soon as your company starts selling multiple products or adapting its offering to multiple markets, organizing a growing salesforce is a critical challenge. Small companies find themselves in pseudo-matrix sales style when they hire representatives in different geographical regions. Managing them will put up some of same roadblocks I encountered. Serious obstacles stand between you and a successful matrix organization, and many companies don’t get the most out of them. With liberties from a famous quote by Winston Churchill: ‘It has been said that a matrix organization is the worse form of selling except all the others that have been tried.’ (Sorry Mr. Churchill….)

In most every large company, the sales department is organized in some sort of a matrix. Here’s how it works: Acme Corporation sells so many different widgets that no sales person could be an expert in all of them. Acme could send a specialist to each customer, who really knows the right questions to ask to close a deal, but the customer is going to wind up meeting dozens of different Acme sales people, maybe one a week, and getting pretty tired of seeing Acme business cards. Plus, it’s embarrassing when the customer asks about a specific product or service and the sales person looks blankly back and states that it’s not his area. It’s not a good way to treat the customer and, likely, a pretty big waste of time for everyone involved.

Instead, Acme can hire product managers for each of their product lines and it becomes their job to train the sales team and go with them to appropriate sales meetings after the individual sales people have identified a lead. It’s called a matrix because the sales people will divide up geographical, or market-based territories, and the product managers will go the other direction, dividing up products or applications. Where the difficulties lie, like almost everything, is in the incentives. Typically, sales people are commissioned on sales volume. If one product, for example, sells for much more money than another, taking only a bit more work to sell, then the lower revenue product is going to have a difficult time getting much mind-share from the sales people.

Good product managers recognize that they have little control over the price and that really, they need to market to set prices anyway, not the sales team, so they have to come up with other ways to motivate sales people. Usually this will be somewhere around that ‘effort’ part mentioned above. If the product manager can make it so easy enough to sell his lower revenue product such that sales doesn’t find it a distraction, then there’s a good chance numbers will increase.

Sales managers and other members of the organization can address this problem as well, by adjusting incentives. Perhaps the lower revenue product is strategically important to the Acme Corporation. Sure they don’t make as much money on each one, but maybe selling that low revenue item might keep an important competitor out of the market. One losing way towards increasing these strategic sales is simply to explain this critical strategic decision to the sales team at a regular sales meeting.

Professional sales people aren’t stupid. Of course, they may very well understand why the company is so keen on this little orphan product, but they are there to earn money and feed their families. No matter how professional or generous a sales engineer might be with her time, when push comes to shove, she’s going to go where the opportunity is—and it’ll be the one that maximizes her commission.

Many options are available, and it will depend on the situation at each company. Incentives might kick in only after a minimum number of the strategic product is sold, or maybe specific sales work as a multiplier for commissions earned on more ‘interesting’ items. Alternatively, an aggressive product manager might be given more leeway to approach customers that normally would be the sales person’s responsibility. In some cases, it makes sense to just raise the price of a related offering and throw in this new feature as a differentiator. Whatever is appropriate, what we’re looking for is some system that takes advantage of the focus of a small company with a tiny offering, while using the reach of a vast network of sales people.

Sales people, whether they work for a small company, a separate division, or a separate representative company, want to be successful. They want to prove to themselves and to everyone else they’re selling better than anyone. The question is, do we all agree what “better” means? Understanding the incentive system, in detail, is the key to making sure the sales team has the same idea of success as the people paying their commissions.

It’s like the dot.com days all over again. Tech start-up LinkedIn just had their initial public offering (IPO) and pocketed something like $130 million for the company. The stock (LNKD) was set to open at $45 a share, but it opened closer to 85 and shot up to a high of around $120 before the day was out. (As of this writing it’s down around $90 again.) That sure sounds exciting, but who really profits when a stock pops like that on open? One thing’s for sure, it isn’t LinkedIn.

Morgan Stanley and Merril Lynch were the investment bankers who supposedly did the due diligence for the LinkedIn board. Lot’s of folks are taking note of these shenanigans, this oversight, but few are mentioning some of the reasons it is allowed to happen.

The investment banks are hardly incentivized to offer the maximum amount the stock will fetch to the newly traded company. If they don’t come up with that cash, it’s likely to come out of their pockets, and there won’t be much to reward their investors with before the IPO if those investors get the same price you and I get. The disturbing thing is that the executives at LinkedIn aren’t incentivized much either. When the company is valued very low and pops like this one did during it’s IPO, the stock options that executives hold shoot up like crazy and make them rich (on paper anyway; they can’t sell for a while) over night.

So where’s the harm? Who gets hurt? Well, LinkedIn for one. Instead of over $300 million to expand their business, they only get $130. Hardly pocket change, but missing out on all that value may be the make-or-break for them over the long run. You can bet that some of the better dot.com ideas might have survived if they’d actually gotten what they deserved on the stock market.

Of course, investors are hurt as well. They are led to believe they are investing in a company with a chance to grow, but the company is hampered from the first moment as $100 million of stock buyers cash is pocketed by pre-IPO investors on opening day. It’s buyer beware and savvy investors know it. Hopefully, they weigh their chances before acquiring the stock. Still, it certainly sounds like a flaw in the system, doesn’t it?

It’s the goal of many small tech firms to go public, and it’s a sound one at that. If your company’s goal is not only to get rich, but to ensure that your world-changing idea gets out in to the world, an IPO may be the only way to reach a big enough market. Just remember, people perform to their incentives. Think first about what’s motivating your board, your executives, and your investment bankers.