Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Monday, July 23, 2007

Business improvement specialist

http://blog.ivytechpartners.com/2007/01/dont_be_a_sales.html

by: IT Sales Ideas


Don't be a Sales Person

A couple of great posts by the usual suspects (for great posts on sales subjects), Jill Konrath and Jim Logan, reminded me that sales people should not think like sales people.

We've all heard the terms "consultative selling" and "solution selling" but we often forget to practice what we believe. Both these philosophies implore us to offer solutions to our clients and prospects not push product. But sometimes we just get carried away and start harping on about how great we and our products are.

Start thinking like a consultant or a business person trying to help a peer and now you have the right mindset for solution (or consultative) selling. Consultants and business people prepare for meetings, they research markets, they develop ideas and they write thought leadership pieces.

In all the markets I experience there are always more suppliers than there are clients. Sales people need to stand out from the crowd. One way still open to us is to think like consultants or business people and add our own personal value to our prospects.

Jim Logan says:

Corporate executives, business owners, investors, and senior management rarely have time for sales people; they always have time for businesspeople. The reason is businesspeople address issues of their primary concern - enabling business. Salespeople generally talk about their products and services.

Jill Konrath says:

Stop putting on your sales hat! Stop thinking of yourself as a seller. You are a business improvement specialist. As a result of your work to improve your customer's operation, they will buy your product or service. Sales is the outcome of what you do, but it is not your purpose.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Startup: Zero Cash, Zero Experience but Created Product

http://hitechstartups.wordpress.com/2007/07/20/startup-zero-cash-zero-experience-but-created-product/

Jul 20th, 2007 by Mahesh M Piddshetti

FoundRead as an Inpiring article about How an Idea can be executed without

1 Money/VC

2 Experience

3 No Business Plan, etc.

Excerpts:

- We had next to no experience in developing a startup. (or some but not enough.)
- We had no working product to confirm we have a market and a clear proposition.
- We didn’t have the right team yet since we were just fresh.

We came to these 5 Conclusions (Some may not apply to your business, but they were for ours):

No Business Plan: Don’t start by writing a business plan, a short executive summary and a presentation is what people will look at or read.

Registration: We went to register our company and went to a lawyer from day one, they usually charge less when you’re just 2 guys in a garage developing a prototype.

Start from Day one: And we don’t mean start prototyping your product because this should be CLEAR that developing your product is a must. But when we registered our company, we defined Octabox as a separate entity than Lionite (Our design firm), since we started to take gigs in consulting and designing medium and large scale web application.

Bootstrap your life: your startup is at this stage that everything that happen in your life will be reflected in your startup, if you live an expensive life and can’t afford to put some money and time in your startup instead, my best advice for you would be to check if this is right for you.

Hire people : I told my partner that sometimes it’s better to hire someone with 0 experience and little knowledge and that the true things that matters are: trust, ability to learn, ethics. This will not only let you learn to how to handle human resources before getting investments but also let you grow the people you need and want. People will less experience and knowledge sometime tends to be more loyal to your business and enthusiastic.

The Secret... to talking to customers before you have a product -- or even a company

http://www.foundread.com/view/the-secret

By mike simonsen, July 20, 2007

Everyone founder knows they need to “talk to customers” and “get customer feedback” before they get too far. The other day on FOUND|READ Wil Schroter pointed out that you should talk to customers as one of the first five things to do.

What’s less well understood is that customers often give lousy feedback. They’re unimaginative, stuck in the status quo, and distracted. They already manage their day without your product, and life will go on if you don’t exist. Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers, they’d have said they wanted faster horses.”

How to guarantee that you’re getting good information out of your customer conversations?

It took me many years of pitching vaporware for venture-backed startups, and then co-foundig my own firm to discover The Secret: Use the Present Tense.

When conducting reconnaissance with customers for your as-yet-unbuilt product, speak about it in the present tense. This is what the product does. This is how much it costs. (Even though it doesn’t, yet.) And be specific.

Definitely never ask: “What do you want the product to do?” or “How much would you pay?” Customers have no idea what they want. But they know they don’t want to pay for it.

Rather, when you use the present tense, you get immediate, usable feedback. In fact, the more specific you are about what your product “does” now, the better your results will be.

Compare the two techniques: Hypothetical v. Present Tense

Hypothetical:
You: “What what would you like our product to do?”
Customer: “What I’ve been thinking about is…X, Y, Z.” (Read: something totally wacky and way outside your vision or expertise.)

Present Tense:
You: “We’re building our company, here’s the problem we saw. So we built Product X. It does this and this and this.”
Customer: “But does it do X, Y, Z?” (Read: completely obvious incremental feature that you’ve totally missed so far.)
You: “Not yet, but that’s a great idea. Tell me more. How/when/why do you need that?”
(By your next customer meeting you can decide if the product “does” that too!)

The corollary is that describing your product this way, using the present tense draws out important pricing information you need, too. When a customer has a product that meets at least some of his needs, his next question is, “How much does it cost?”

Again, the right way to handle this is not, “How much would you spend?” He wants it to be free. The right way is to say, “It costs $X.” Your most valuable insight is in his reaction. Did he jump out of his chair? Cringe? Write it down? (Now we’re getting somewhere!) Again, specificity implies action-ability to the customer. Usable insights come from actions.

By the way, it’s perfectly OK to say the product isn’t yet available. Because the absolute best result you’ll get when talking to early customers is a question –”When can I get it?” (Bingo! Stop the Release 1 feature set right there.)

The present tense gives the customer a concrete object to grab onto. Using the present tense shows you’re for real. Customers don’t buy ideas, they buy things. Once he has the thing, you’ll learn what you came to learn. What his needs are, how your product fits his needs, and how much he pays for these types of things. Mission Accomplished.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Hosted support business model

Simula Labs becomes DevZuz
DevZuz, formerly Simula Labs is now in this business direction.

Business model in open source

Winston Damarillo and Simula Labs
(Simula Labs is now DevZuz)

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Empower people to become prosperity creators, true good relations

Rethinking the Revolving Door for Immigration
The Brookings Institution, April 23, 2007

Neil G. Ruiz, Research Fellow, Global Economy and Development
Jeffrey D. Manns, Lawyer, Washington, D.C

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Thoughts for Company

  • real plan for employees
  • client: we want to implement a lot of things, but not enough manpower
  • know how to better package and present a well-invested good product and technology
  • seeking what value to create based on what may be the needs of clients. always maintain this foresight in every company endeavors.
  • improve in manpower skill by doing *not yet done seemingly difficult technologies*