Living with the Dell Mini

“Honey, can I have one”  I said to my sweetie in my firm, yet begging voice,  when the Dell Mini was available.  I was looking at the eeePC, but it was too flimsy for me (my latitude has a missing “4″ key. I was able to put $250 in Amex points to it, so it was a good investment.

If you are a salesperson who needs to use Salesforce.com or SugarCRM on the road, then a Dell Mini will be a godsend. It’s small enough to avoid the “coach seat crush” and fit nicely on your plane’s tray table, and it has a very good battery life.

I went Windows. Much as I like Linux, (most of my servers are Linux), I chose to go with XP  because this is a work machine, and I don’t have to worry about working with my work applications.

The keyboard is nice sized. I had a bit of trouble touch-typing with it because some of the keys are smaller and placed in unique areas, but after a couple of weeks usage, I’m hitting the apostrophe key with my thumb,  and think I can type the longest of messages without adding an additional keyboard. When I do feel like  stretching out, I can always add a keyboard.

The Dell Mini is not without drawbacks, or rather the bloatware that we use every day isn’t optimal for the Mini. The memory and drive space on the Mini are limited through dell at 16 gigs of SD Drive space, and 1 gig of RAM.  Drive compression is on by default, something you’ll notice if you’re running Outlook. Good thing that Dell didn’t put Vista on this thing.

Dell ships the mini with a cdrom install disk, and the suggested way to do the restore is with a USB CD drive. They really should have put that stuff on a bootable USB drive.

This is the first time since EVDO modems that I can say a piece of technology is going to improve how a salesperson works.

I think a whole cottage industry could be built around making thinner and specialized apps for the Mini. I’d love to see a lightweight Outlook compatible app that worked on the desktop. Maybe with Google Gears or something

It’s Called Work For a Living, by Larry Winget, a Review

My usual rotation for reading follows a pattern of a business book, a religious book, and something else. Last time around, I was a little burned out on business books, so I went to the bookstore with the thought of getting a book that has some valuable insights, but is also a lot of fun to read.I ended up buying a copy of “It’s Called Work for a Reason”, by Larry Winget. Larry is a self- proclaimed “irritational speaker”, who gets in the readers’ face by pontifacting on things that you and I already know, and maybe are guilty of ignoring.
Some of Larry’s thoughts:

• Teamwork doesn’t work. Being a successful manager involves making stars out of your employees..
• You aren’t being paid to enjoy your job. You’re being paid to work.
• You’re responsible for your own results.

It sounds pretty simple, and it is, but Larry reinforces a good work ethic in a straight forward, humorous fashion, that I found very refreshing.

If you want a quick read, that will make you better at what you do, I’d suggest you take a look at Larry’s book.

When I Love My Competition

I love my competition when:

1) They ask you to call their cell phone number on their office voicemail, especially if it’s important. Anytime a customer wants to talk to me, it’s important. Important enough that I forward my calls. (The technology is only 10 years old or so, they might want to pick it up).  If I don’t answer your call, just leave voicemail. I’m with another customer, if it’s during business hours.  One number to call: 877-VPNDude (876-3833). It’s simple to remember too.

2) They keep their customers on hold, and have a taped recording that tells how great their company is, or try to sell you something. If their company was really great, someone would answer your call. At the very least, play music. Then you can put them on speakerphone, and get some work done while they finish up with the other customers.

3) They don’t read my website. There’s a lot of good information out there, things that could make them better salespeople. Don’t worry, I’m reading theirs. I know all about what they’re doing. I know where I’m better than them, and I know where they’re gaining on me. I know their financial picture and what the analysts are saying about them.  If you want to know about my competitors, call me. I’d be happy to give you a braindump.

4) They don’t read your website. Or Google your company.  I do my homework. It is a priviledge to have the opportunity to spend time with you, and I like being prepared. I check your website, Google your company, and Google your name.

5) They leave a voicemail, but don’t leave their phone number. If my competitor does that to you, remember that my phone number is easy to remember- 877-VPNDude. If they send you an email, and it doesn’t have their number, again call me, the number is 877-VPNDude.

6) They are consistantly late for meetings. Most of us live and commute in DC traffic, and we know that even the best of us will sometimes hit a snag. Many of us have kids, and they get bloody noses or fall when we’re just getting ready to leave the call. It happens, but not everytime.

I give myself one hour before my first appointment in DC in the morning. If I’m running late, 95% of the time, it’s because my earlier appointment is running late. I’ll call you if that happens.

7) Who are late for conference calls. If you have a team of people on a call, and you’re waiting for a salesperson, it’s just plain rude. I am on a conference call 5 minutes before it begins, and 10 minutes before a Webex begins.  If I’m on time, it means that my last customer call has run late.  I’ll do anything in my power to let you know that.
They don’t love their products, or their jobs. I have never taken a job with a company whose products I did not love. Here’s why. Because I’d know I’d suck, I’d waste my time and your time, and maybe do irreparable damage to my relationship with you. I’ve worked with products that were difficult to sell, that I couldn’t sell, but I believed in them, and still do.

And sales… I love it. I love getting on the phone, calling you, educating you, having you educate me, writing emails, doing my newsletter and website.  I work a whole lot, but have unbelievable freedom at the same time. My job uses all my creativity, I never run out of things to learn, and I get to talk to my true bosses, YOU, everyday. And you pay me very well, thank you.

9) Who don’t fight like madmen internally for their customers, when needed.  I learned this one the hard way, and it won’t ever happen again. I had a customer, Abrao G. with the World Bank, who I absolutely loved to work with, but who was having some problems with the product I was working with. Abrao knows more about Linux and Unix than I’d easily say 95% of us, and he probably knew more about my products than most of my first tier engineers at the time. He had a problem that I escalated to the head of support, who just sat on it, and sat on it, eventhough I called a couple of times ot follow up. By the time I was able to get an engineer to help him, it was too late. I lost the customer

Abrao, I can’t tell you how bad I felt losing you, but I can tell you that I’ll never lay down for anyone when I’m representing a customer.

10)  They waste their time trying to sell products that don’t work for your organization.  Guess what? I am always trying to find a reason that I can’t sell to you. I’ll let my product managers know that reason, and if they can’t or don’t want to fix it, I’ll be the first one in the conference room who says good-bye. And if I’m in that conference room, you better believe that I’ve done everything before my first call to you to see if I can’t sell to you.

Short Negotiations Review

I’ve created a short 18 minute course on negotiations, based on the Karrass book, Negotiate to Close. I’ve embedded the youtube version below, but if you want to see a better version or download the powerpoint or mp3, go tohttp://www.salespowwow.com/nego/nego.html

Book Review: Words that Word by Frank Luntz

A couple of pages into this book, I said to myself, “Oh, this is the guy.. Frank Luntz, who, for want of a better term, is the speech engineer of the Republican party, and is responsible for a number of terms that we are all now familiar with, such as “the death tax” (formerly known as “the estate tax” ), and “exploring for energy” (aka oil drilling).

Between the covers of this book are an overview of how to speak so that your audience will hear what you want them to say.
Drilled through the book is the subtitle, which should be placed on top of every desk in America.

It’s Not What You Read, it’s What People Hear.Dr. Luntz gives a detailed overview of 10 rules to effective speech, including:

• Simplicity
• Brevity
• Credibility
• Consistency
• Novelty
• Sound and Texture Matter
• Speak Aspirationally
• Visualize
• Ask a Question
• Provide Context and Explain Relevance

This book is for anyone who wants to communicate effectively. I felt that I got my money’s worth out of the first 20 pages, and that in total, reading this book provided me with more value than most of my courses in B-School.

If a business communications class was able to have a baby with a marketing class and a political science class, this it what it would look like.

I couldn’t put the book down, and my copy is filled with underlines and crease marks.

You do not to agree with Luntz politically to understand his methods, and pick up a few good pointers to make your own speech more effective.

Even if you totally abhor spin-masters like Luntz, it’s probably a good idea to learn his tactics. You can get the book from a library or a used book store, you won’t be directly filling his pockets.

World Orphan Week October 1-7

I’ve had a lot of good experiences working with WOW, and I hope that you’ll consider pitching in.

 World Orphan Week (WOW) began in 2005 to raise awareness of the needs of orphaned and abandoned children around the world, and to inspire and activate volunteers to raise funds for vital programs that can support these children.

This year, volunteers all over the country are organizing fundraisers on behalf of the children of SOS Children’s Villages, from bake sales and bike-a-thons to simply collecting donations from family and friends. WOW 2007 is calling attention to the causes of child abandonment: HIV/AIDS, war and extreme poverty, as illustrated through the personal stories of children from Botswana, Lebanon, Jamaica, and Cambodia.

more info at

http://www.wowusa.org

15 Minute CXO Meetings- The 3 Minute Abs of Sales.

I’ve been doing a very large number of calls at the CISO level lately, for a security product that they need.  I’ve been very successful doing something new, asking for, and getting a 15 minute appointment.

15 minutes? Why? Because that’s all the time you need to greet someone, give them an overview, and close. The closes for a 15 minute meeting are

1. to get a longer, secondary meeting.
2. to get myself in the consideration as one of the important people in this space
3. to see if there are any red flags in doing business with this customer, and if you I do business with them, abort the process right there.
4. to find out the who’s, when’s and and how’s of any evaluation process.
5. to feel out management, and see if I want to work with this account.

Many times, the meeting extends longer than 15 minutes, and that is my first buying signal.

If You Work at a Technology Company, You’d Better Learn Misner’s Theory of Open Source Competition part one

Here’s the law, really simple.

For every popular high priced application, over a period of time there will be an open source (free as in beer, not as in freedom, in this case) application that will have 80% functionality of that application within 1-4 years. So, in a period of at the most 4 years, you will have a free competitor in your space that at least 80% as good as your highly priced product.

Every salesforce.com will give us a sugarcrm.com.

Every Camtasia will have a Camstudio and a Microsoft Movie Maker

Netscape brought IE and Apache. IE brought Firefox.

Sure, there are exceptions to this rule, but they are so few that you really need to consider this theory in your product life-cycle. It’s not enough to add a couple of features every release date. You’ve got to take measures to make sure that what you sell remains relevant.

Let’s start out by what doesn’t work.

Not doing anything, or ignoring my theory,didn’t work for Netscape or Sun. Sun has changed it’s tune, by reaching out to the open source community. And the only remnants of Netscape are those bits of code that Frank Hecker memo’d to become open source.

Doing worthless, incremental changes, will only work until customers get wise to you. In the end adding unneeded features raises the complexity of end user operation, and the software company’s product costs.

I haven’t bought a copy of Mindjet’s Mindmanager since version 2002. Why? Because the product took on a bunch of features that had no value to me, and I wasn’t going to pay for them. It’s Mindmanager 2002 that’s competing against the free and low cost shareware products, and those alternatives, are just as good.

Putting out a “dumbed down” or “lite” version of your Enterprise Product. You are better off simplifying your pricing, or lowering your costs on the enterprise product. By having a lite product, you either take out needed components, which makes your product less competative than the free products, or you remove unneeded features that cannibalize your existing product.

What partially works?

Adopting a large market share in the beginning, will lengthen the amount of time before Computer Associates buys your product and puts it on the shelf with their other dead acquisitions, squeezing every little bit of life blood out of your remaining customers.

Locking your customers in with a proprietary solution will work once, but you can bet that once those customers are free from the chains you bound them with, they will look elsewhere.

Part 2 tomorrow.

If You Work at a Technology Company, You’d Better Learn Misner’s Theory of Open Source Competition part two

In Part One, I talked about my own theory about open source competition, and wrote about some ways of the ineffective and partially effective ways to deal with this issue.

So, what can a company do to deal with this inevitability?

The answer is simple to explain, but difficult to do.  STAY RELEVANT! (If you can)

This could be argued, but for the most part open source applications (free as in freedom, not as in beer) do not lead in innovation. Until they mature, they mimic existing features of commercial applications. Meanwhile there is new chaos, new opportunities in the marketplace that need to be addressed.  Just as it’s difficult for open source applications to do this (I know I know, there are exceptions), it’s even more difficult for fat and happy market leaders to do so. It threatens the status quo, and hurts short term profitability.

A recent HBR article gave some ideas on how large companies can foster innovation. One is the “Cisco approach”. Buy startups with an innovative culture, and add them to the product line.

Another way to keep relevant is to establish an R&D facility that works on new products, and has it’s own budget and goals separate from  the rest of the company. The article pointed out that new initiatives get favor because they are new and exciting, and existing cash cows get favor because they are important to the bottom line. The problem is that projects can’t make that chasm between the old and the new because they lack the support because they are no longer novel, and don’t yet contribute to the revenue picture.  The same project would have a better chance at a dedicated startup.

If your product can’t stay relevant at a delta sufficient to merit the additional costs, it probably means that you’ll need to adjust your pricing downward. The FUD associated with Open Source is pretty much extinct in most enterprise accounts. Smaller enterprises are looking for lower cost solutions.

Misner’s Theory of Open Source Competition should be something that consider with every company you invest in, in every potential employ, and should be a part of any technology business plan.

Gimmicks? Creativity? Manipulation? Direction?

I recently purchased a copy of Jeffrey Gitomer’s and Gerhard Gschwandtner’s C-Level Secrets CD/DVD Combo . Short review= Buy it.

BUT: Something smelt, and I couldn’t figure out what it was until about the 3rd time I watched it. Just something didn’t ring true. Then it dawned on me.

There’s a lot of good advice on the DVD/CDs about how to meet C-level folks. One of the main points is to provide value to your networks, to your customers, and to your prospects. That is worth  $99.  If you provide value by helping your network, writing books (or wonderful blogs), it will come back to you.  Jesus said it, Earl Nightingale said it, Harvey Mackay said it, and yet, to me, it’s worth $99 for a refresher.

But there’s also alot of, for want of a better word, gimmickry, on these CDs.

Gerhard and Jeff talk about ways to use lottery tickets, playing cards, and other ways to get into a C-level appointment. If someone invented it, it’s creative.  But it’s a gimmick. And if all the listeners to this media do it, it’s a gimmick without the benefit of creativity.

Prospecting with gimmickry is tacky and gimmicks quickly fall out of style. They are the “Pet Rocks” of sales.   Gimmickry is no where near as bad in the sales process as trying to use “Ben Franklin” and “either or” closes to get someone “in that car today.” That kind of manipulation makes things bad for the customer and the sales professional.

Is manipulation necessarily bad? No, but the term “manipulation” is bad. Direction is a much better term.  Going into a meeting with a plan, a way to direct the business process and all those involved with it, is a chief job of a sales professional. It’s our job to direct the resources, the people, and the processes to solve the customer’s needs in as efficient a manner as possible for our company.