Selling, The Southern way (Part 2)

(I'm sorry this is going to be a little bit rushed, I will elaborate on this at a later date)

Last Thursday we discussed the differences in selling and buying style from my personal experiences in Germany and in the deep south. (Article is here) today we are going to dive into the persona of the southern buyer and the southern sales person.

If you think of sales as a continuously escalating series of dates where you and the buyer feel each other out to see if you are good matches you'll notice that in the south there is a considerable 'getting to know you period' before you may ever get a sale. That is somewhat industry dependent but when discussing service contracts and capital expenses a good presentation is only going to get you this far in the south. The outsider derisively refers to this as the 'good ol' boy network' and uses this as an excuse for not getting the sale.

While that is a mindset, it is in my opinion the wrong mindset. People like buying from their friends, probably more in the south than anywhere else. What this simply means is that you have failed to establish the necessary report to properly pitch your product/services. Yes, it can be frustrating. But if you are a sales person in the south this is part of the process. This is the most important part of the process some might argue. You have to enjoy meeting people and building sincere friendships and you better believe that sincere part is important.

Selling, The Southern way

I had an interesting conversation with a sales director a couple of weeks ago. He was from New Jersey and had settled in the south. I'm sure you can guess where I am going with this: Differences between sales from north to south or in this case from country to country. 

Anyone that has read any of Jeffrey Gitomer's books (I recommend reading at least one of his books such as: The Sales Bible: The Ultimate Sales Resource, New Edition) know that he loves to speak on the differences in buyer and seller temperament in different parts of the country. He is a transplant from New York and had quite the culture shock moving to the Carolina's and experiencing a slower paced, much more relationship driven process than in the north. 

Being a transplant from Germany into Alabama I had a very similar culture shock when I started selling in the US. The sales process in Germany is much more process oriented than it is here. Sure, you go play golf with your customer, if you can, and you'll buy them dinner but that does not imply that much familiarity. Visitors to Germany will know that people that have done business for year together often still call each other by their surname. Case in point is my fathers own lawyer. They have been good friends and vacationed together for over 30 years, yet they still call each other by their full title and name. 

Possibly the biggest difference and also challenge to me has been the icebreakers. 

The tried and true go to method to establish common ground is the scan of the office for memorabilia,  family pictures, and other conversation starters. This is something that is simply not done, if I sat in the office of a potential buyer in Germany and I started asking him about his children or sports trophy that would actually be considered a sign of disrespect as our relationship isn't at that point. And for a lot of people doing business for years the relationship will never be to that point. It's a cultural thing. General politeness and a good value proposition will get you a sale more often than not. 

How is the south different? Find out tomorrow.

New Sales centric blog

One of the sales trainers that I had the privilege to work with in the past has started a blog on sales training. It's made it to my Google Reader feed and has some excellent information.

I know the information is excellent because Lorin has always been a boots on the ground person. His insight isn't based on theory, this is knowledge won in trial by fire customer encounters.

His blog is the Training Buffet. Check it out!

Access to Google App Inventor

I received access to Google App Inventor today. Stay tuned for a basic run down of features over the weekend.

Google's Don't Do Evil and a slippery slope (Part 1)

I remember my first interaction with Google. At this time it was still at google.stanford.edu. Slashdot was abuzz with praise and I started using it in conjunction with Altavista. 
The market was flooded with search engines: WebCrawler, Altavista, Excite & Yahoo just to name a few but Google had that scrappy feeling that big kids lacked. Clean user interface, no obvious in your face advertising and frankly a better page ranking algorithm even back then. But this post isn't about the free market and the formation of natural monopolies. 


Fast forward 3 years and everyone is using Google, still its clean... no annoying in your face ads etc. Then comes AdWords. It was revolutionary and didn't have flashy banners breaking up the clean lines of the the interface. 
So I didn't mind it, it wasn't intrusive to the experience and frankly they had to figure out a way to create revenue from their popularity. It was targeted on your query back then and maybe even a little helpful. Don't do evil was still the name of the game.


The problem is the vast array of data that Google has aggregated on everyone of its users. Their retention policy right now states: "We believe anonymizing IP addresses after 9 months and cookies in our search engine logs after 18 months strikes the right balance." I would imagine a psychologist given access to Google information could create a frighteningly realistic profile of almost anyone at this point. Also do they really anonymize your personal search results, or just their search logs? Google's Search logs would be a social science statisticians dream.


But hey there is always "Don't be Evil" right? I'm not so confident anymore. 


Google Advertising has now become intrusive with their retargeting abilities via Double Click and their own network. Retargeting is great for advertisers and a number of people I have spoken with swear by it for marketing purposes. The moral here is just because it works doesn't mean it's a good thing.


To me it highlights a very important need for any professional: browser and profile separation. 


I run Google Chrome for my normal day to day business activity, Firefox for my personal browsing logged into a different profile and another instance of Firefox for customer engagements and presentations.


There are several reason to do this:

1. You don't want your professional and personal profile linked on the Internet at all. Engines such as Pipl do a great job at looking up your information based on your email and your client really doesn't need to know that your music tastes include Xzibit, Eminem, Phil Collins and David Hasselhoff does he?
   
2. You want relevant ads to pop up to the mode your brain is it. When you are researching a new software option for a consulting customer you don't want an ad to pop up about this nifty new gadget you've been looking at for your kitchen. Limited time offer? Must click!
   
3. You are doing opposition research and are looking at your competitors website. The retargeting cookie is set in your browser.
   The next day, you are working with a client discussing some of his options with them and want to show of this great new blog post someone wrote about your product/company/work. Nothing builds confidence like an endorsement, right?
   You go to the blog which uses Google AdWords and Double Click to monetize its userbase.  There is a retargeting ad above the post and in conjunction with yesterdays cookie and the blog being on the related subject matter it shows an ad for your competitor. At best I would consider this bad form, at worst it might make my customer aware of an 'limited time offer' I'd probably end up having to match.
   
4. Even worse, imagine if a personal cookie of yours causes an ad to show in the exact same scenario for something personal. It could be a political campaign  or a store for model trains or whatever. None of your customers business right? Could this cost you your customers cost business? You bet!

Is this three browser infrastructure the optimum solution? If you want profile separation, yeah.

If you just want to avoid scenario 4 a quicker way would be enabling an Ad Blocker before you go to your client. I can definitely get behind that idea. I don't support constant use of Ad Blockers. The vast majority of Internet content is financed by advertising. The constant use of an Ad Blocker would be a form of stealing from the creators of the content you enjoy. Tread softly, or we will all be faced with a million pay walls in 3 years.

AdBlock for Chrome

and 

AdBlock Plus for FireFox

New Android Voicesearch

Google has premiered a new VoiceSearch application. It expands the capability of Voicesearch by a significant margin.
With this update Google has eliminated the Android platform market for Vlingo, Vlingo sells for $9.99 on the Android Market a pretty good app actually but essentially its capability is now a standard Android feature. Is this going to be a trend? Will Google adopt popular features that expand Android into its general product offering? As a consumer I'd love that but looking at it from a developer point of view it would scare the heck out of me.

New features include:

• send text to [contact] [message]
• listen to [artist/song/album]
• call [business]
• send email to [contact] [message]
• go to [website]
• note to self [note]

Full feature listing is here on the Google Mobile blog. 

As of right now if you are using CyanogenMod on your Android phone, you will have to do a little hackery to get this to work due to an apk signature issue that is being addressed. The walk through on how to it go work is here at the Cyanogen Forum.

Update: CyanogenMod 6 has updated to Release Candidate 3. This includes the new voice features. Get it here

Links in post:

• Vlingo Homepage at http://www.vlingo.com/
• Google Mobile Blog post on new VoiceSearch at http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/08/just-speak-it-introducing-voice-actions.html
• CyanogenMod Forum fix to install on modified phones at http://forum.cyanogenmod.com/topic/4237-new-voice-search/

Air Travel

Quick fact: I have spend at least two solid months of my life in an airplane at this point. 

Quick Fact 2: An updated Dante's Inferno would definitely include airplanes without air conditioning as a punishment

Where to host your site

After being a happy A2 hosting customer for a number of websites I maintain I've decided to see if the grass was really greener. The site I am working on promises to be the most resource intense site I've ever put together. Even with caching etc. there will be a fair amount of CPU intense operations. No bandwidth concerns but processor and memory requirements seemed higher.

So I started a FatCow account after reading some reviews on the net. I put my mock up site on a private domain on my server and started working on the site this way rather than using my trusty old (and I mean old) intranet server. It was slow, dynamic tasks crawled and the bandwidth wasn't great. Googling 'Drupal Fatcow slow' gave me a little bit more insight into what was going on here. FatCow simply didn't lend itself for Drupal. I'm not making any judgements on its ability to do anything else, but for Drupal I would definitely not recommend it. Their no-bull money back guarantee turns out to be full of bull and I received a partial refund. 

At this point I contacted my customer and asked him what type of budget was in the realm of the possible for the hosting part of it. Looking at their cost benefit matrix loosing even 1 customer per month to CPU or memory allotment issues wasn't an option. I spend the next couple of hours researching hosting. We didn't need a dedicated co-located box but a VPS seemed like the perfect solution. Now VPS servers can range from from as little as $10 per month for 128megs of ram to $800ish for around 15gb of ram. Thankfully due to a misspent youth and career using Linux for everything from file servers, pbx's, terminals to webhosts I felt like I really didn't need the hand holding a lot of the hosting companies give you. I'd rather have fewer safety wheels and more memory.

This left me with Slicehost which is owned by the famous RackSpace and Linode both of which allow you to install a Linux  flavor of your choice and leave you to your own devices after that.

Their entry level, which is all I required, offerings compare on 4 basis options: memory, hd space, bandwidth and our course price. 

Both entry packages cost ~$20 but Linode offers more paper bang for the buck 512m ram vs 256, 16gb of space vs 10gb, 200gb of bandwidth vs 100gb. So I ended up going with Linode and I really enjoyed the process, setup was quick, configuration was quick and after that it was just a matter of setting up the right repositories and some quick command line to get everything ready to go. Installing certificate based SSH authentication should enable me to avoid brute force annoyances, even though I may have to add some auto ip ban triggers soon. 

How does it compare to shared hosting? Well, obviously its more expensive but by the price of a lunch per month yet the speed improvements are amazing. Fast, responsive, complete control and most importantly if my customer where to outgrow this the upgrade path is very quick. Worst case scenario, we get another node and move the DB server to it. That should allow us to be one step ahead of our user base at all times.

I like it

Drupal Corporate Site from Scratch with all the helpings

In the last two months I have spend a fair amount of time looking at CMS solutions for a corporate/ecommerce websites. My old go to program was Joomla that I had used for two corporate websites in the past but had a love hate relationship with. 

The site had to be able to do the following:

• CMS Functions
• Blog Function
• eCommerce w/ affiliate & coupon functions
• newsletter sign up
• trouble ticket management 

As I've said in a previous post I had looked at the following

• Joomla
• Drupal
• SilverStripe CMS
• ModX

when I was asked to create a web presence for a start up from scratch. I actually ended up theming/coding/whateveryouwanttocallit a full mock up template/theme for each of these and then went on to fiddle with the backend.

Against my expectation Drupal came out the winner in my very limited testing. In hindsight that was an excellent choice. The user base is massive and that really helps with module availability. Sometimes there are six modules that claim to do the same thing and that can become annoying. Especially when you pick one and then find another module later in process you need for another task but it requires another module for the first task. Luckily, I've dodge most of these issues and trust me, its been purely luck.

Once the CMS is picked you get to do the fun part. Which is step away from the computer, or go to your favorite mindmap program and map out:

• Your basic page infrastructure. What are the top line pages/categories
• Which pages do you need to tell your story?
• Do you need career, investor relations etc etc etc

Then you go on to wireframe the first page of the site. This is where I pretty much pride myself of my work. I consider myself very user-centric in my layouts and designs. Pretty and user-friendly can co-exist. Once you get this together, do your mock up. I'd recommend using the Fusion starter theme as a beginning point. This allows you to do most of your work in CSS and makes changes easy to implement if you know what you are doing. 

Now before you show this to your client, you probably want to have a couple of friends take a look and critique it. More eyeballs is good in this situation. By the time your client sees the first functional mock up all menus, login etc. should be working and have lorem ipsum place holder text. Now you can do a very productive back and forth with the client and implement their changes while slowly enabling modules you may need for functions. 

WYSIWYG Programming for Android

Google has created a WYSIWYG editor for Android apps. I remember in the mid-90s WYSIWYG editors for HTML were all the rage but couldn't compare to a decent text based editor. I'm assuming that in this case its very much the same case. I'll be giving it a test run in the next couple of days to see how it holds up. I'll report back

[Google App Inventor via TechCrunch]

Alternative Birthday, a view of your own mortality

Found this on Download Squad earlier today.
It's a little script that calculates mile stones in your life based on seconds, minutes, hours, days and weeks elapsed. So if you'd like to take a slightly different view at your mortality this does.

For example did you know you are pretty lucky to see 30,000 weeks?

[Time and Date birthday calculator via DownloadSquad]

CMS Software and me... Speed Dating

I love trying out new technology. When a customer of mine contacted me to see if I could help them revamp their web infrastructure I was somewhat giddy. I had originally developed their webpage etc 3 years ago based on Joomla 1.0. I never really liked Joomla's backend and my customer wasn't the biggest fan either.

Joomla 1.5 promised to fix some concerns but low and behold: Templates developed for 1.0 were not compatible with 1.5. I had a hard time believing this as it borders on idiocy to throw out backward compatibility for no real reason. I would soon find out that this practice wasn't just Joomla's but was surprisingly common in the CMS field. It's almost as if the developers feel a need to artificially create work for web designers.

The result of this: We were no longer married to Joomla. If I was going to have to redo the template/theme to work with Joomla 1.5 I might as well shop around if there is a setup that my customer and I liked better.

I quickly scoured Google for some other options and selected Drupal, ModX and Silverstripe for testing.

I had worked with Drupal in the past and it had always reminded me of a quote I had heard about Git. It seemed like it was specifically designed to make people feel dumber than they actually are. 

Over four days I spend researching what CMS my customer would like the most I installed Drupal, ModX and Silverstrip on a test server and actually ported the design and a fair amount of site content to each of them for comparison. My personal favorite did emerge rather quickly and to my surprise it was Drupal. My customers had someone check out each backend and again somehow Drupal managed to win that one too.

It is a learning curve on both ends the content development and the design of a theme but it really does seem worth it after that. I'm somewhat curious if Drupal7 will break reverse compatibility, if it does I guess it means more work for me. That type of work is just not enjoyable rather than creating I'm doing busy work.

Software Mentioned:

• Joomla - http://www.joomla.org
• Drupal - http://www.drupal.org
• ModX - http://www.modxcms.org
• Silverstripe - http://www.silverstripe.org

Caffeine boost productivity

NewScientist has an article up on the effects of caffeine on productivity. I don't want to spoil the ending but it says exactly what you hoped it says. It shows some good boosts to short-term memory and improved reaction time. But as caffeine drinkers we already know that. The study is not yet far along enough to address the impact on long-term memory.


[via WebWorkerDaily]

In pursuit of the perfect green tea

Tea is possibly the most versatile food stuff humanity has cultivated. There is almost nothing you can't do with tea. It you can drink it cold, hot, luke warm, use it as seasoning, add sugar, add honey, or even add spice.

Additionally There are thousands of different teas sold through quality local retailers and places such as Adagio. I get quite a bit of my tea from Adagio. My love for tea increases every day and the vast variety out there can keep one entertained for a lifetime.

The Benefits of Green Tea
Green Tea has many tangible benefits. Luckily you don't have to be hippy to buy into most of the benefits. It is a good source of anti-oxidants and caffeine. The best aspect of tea in general is that it is more a mellow pick me up when compared to coffee. It doesn't spike with the immediate caffeine shock like coffee does but rather tea is absorbed in a uniform curve that allows for a more controlled pick me up and less of a crash. I like coffee but tea is in almost every way superior... just doesn't make as good a tiramisu. [more]

The Nexus One

Since February I'm the proud owner of a Nexus One. For the uninitiated the Nexus One is essentially Google blue print of an Android phone manufactured for them by HTC. It was the true first Android super phone and is a remarkable piece of hardware. It is an amazing data consumption device.

What really sold me on the Nexus One was the AOSP flavor Android. Rather than have to wait for HTC to do its magic with a Sense based distribution/rom AOSP is always going to be on the cutting edge. Some other aspects definitely helped too such as the Snapdragon that was long rumored to come to Android phones and is making a true offensive in a number of handsets.
This handset is also unique in that it is not sold via stores but simply via Google's on-line phone store. (http://google.com/phone)It is a bit of an experiment to use this exclusive distribution channel in the United States and it is keeping adoption from what I believe it could be. People like to hold things, they like to fall in love with the form factor and the beautiful display etc. [more]