Everything is sales.
When you’re telling your boss what you think should be done, you’re selling. When you’re explaining to your spouse what big-ticket item you want to buy, you’re selling. And when you’re talking to a client and negotiating new features, you’re selling.
So, don’t you want to be good at it? I do, and this article is good enough and a big enough help that I wanted to remember it by posting the key points here:
8 Sales Questions You Can’t Live (and Sell) Without!
- The Who Question
Who’s deciding?
- The When Question
When are you deciding?
- The Scenario Question
Find the needs
- The Net Impact Question
Understand the impact of the needs
- The Explain Question
Get input
- The Make Sense Question
Get feedback
- The Removal Question
Trial close
- The Try Question
Closing
There’s a lot here, and some of it I’m not sure how I’ll use. But I love (and use) the “make sense” question a lot, especially since I’m often working with people whose native language is not English. And many of the others are great tips.
If you have five minutes, I highly recommend checking out the entire article.
There’s been a very interesting little “discussion” going around what we used to call the blogosphere.
TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington spent the previous week at LeWeb, in Paris, where in response to some questions, he said that Europeans love life too much to generate the biggest technology success stories. They have too many 2-hour lunches and too few late-night coding sessions. LeWeb’s organizer Loic Le Meur responded by asking – on his blog – whether Arrington should be invited back.
Meanwhile, Zoho Office blogger Sridhar reflects that Japanese work even harder … often 12 or more hours daily.
This issue is bulls-eye topical for me, as I’ve been working 12 to 14 hour days lately in my new job.
But … let’s be honest.
There can be times when you go way overboard and work mega-hours to pass critical checkpoints. But 99% of people will not be long-term successful (or happy) being out of balance all the time. The old saw about no-one wishing on their deathbed that they’d spent more time at the office is true. And realistically, almost no-one is actually effective spending that many hours for very many days.
As I mentioned on the Zoho Office blog …
I’ve also read first-hand accounts from ex-pat workers in Japan who said that a LOT of the office time was actually just face time … there was not a lot more work actually getting done. But people couldn’t leave, because that would have been see as slacking. So they stayed at their desks, doing a little online shopping, doing a little of this and a little of that.
Here’s the deal: I’d much rather work smart than work hard. That is where you’re actually going to make the major difference – where you’re going to leap-frog the competition.
But to succeed, often you have to do both.
Recently posted on Flickr …
Wondering why this bottle of kid’s vitamins is less than half full, straight from the store. Annoying, wasteful, unethical.
As someone who’s recently been promoted, I need to be extremely self-aware about what I’m doing, what I’m saying, why, how, and how others are perceiving it.
As Bob Sutton quotes Dacher Keltner’s The Power Paradox, positional power is a very dangerous thing:
He argues that — contrary to the claims of many experts, going back to Machiavelli — that people who are selected for powerful positions and are able to hold them are characterized by modesty and empathy. BUT he shows that being put in a position of power turns people into them into worse decision-makers, makes them more likely to act on their whims and desires, and makes them more likely to interrupt others, to to speak out of turn, to fail to look at others when they are speaking, and to tease others in hostile ways.
I think the key is being open to criticism, not closing your mind to new learning, and having people around you that will call you on BS behavior and actions. That’s something I don’t think I can ever stop working on.
Just saw this great quote at Bob Sutton’s blog:
Learn how to fight as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong: It helps you develop strong opinions that are weakly held.
That is a great, great strategy. I also like another quote of his:
Indifference is as important as passion.
I guess the key is knowing what to be passionate about, what to be indifferent about … and when to switch.
There’s a reason why SMS is a hundred billion dollar industry … and it’s simply that phones companies are unbelievably greedy.
Note: the three examples cited are, respectively: from your internet service provider via high-speed modem, over standard text messaging systems, and snail mail via the United States Postal Service. All are assuming that data is transmitted digitally (in the case of the snail mail, the bits are written on paper.)
COSTS OF TRANSFERING 2,560 MP3s:
TCP/IP: $1
TCP/SMS: $61,356,851.20
USPS: $307,072.00 (Bits written out on paper)
So getting a SMS delivered is bit for bit 200x more expensive than getting a message hand delivered to your doorstep anywhere in the United States.
What exactly justifies making SMS messages sixty one million times more expensive than ISP data and 200x more expensive than TCP/USPS? How come technology, communication, and infrastructure is getting cheaper while the costs of SMS messages are increasing exponentially? My theory: SMS messages are transfered over air made of solid gold.
Full article here. Well worth the read!
(I originally saw this at Slashdot. As noted at Digg, here seems to be a technical issue with that page – if you don’t see the article at that link, try the home page. It should be the top story there for a while.)
Just saw this in a comment posted by “T-Boy” at Scott Adam’s Dilbert blog
“Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.” – Dee Hocks
Pickthebrain has a post on selling yourself. I can personally attest that, after getting the qualifications and knowledge you need to succeed in your chosen field, being able to “sell yourself” is the most critical part of professional success. The highlights:
- Be Sold on Yourself
- Have a Saleable Package
- Be Positive and Enthusiastic
- Be Real and Authentic
I’d have to say the most important one, though, is not there. To me, it’s that day in and day out, you have to work hard, put your best foot forward, make those around you look good, and not care (too much) about who gets the credit.
If only public companies understood this:
In fact, sometimes, as the Grammy-award winning Orpheus Chamber orchestra shows, the best leadership is less leadership. No seed can grow if it is dug up and examined every week, and for people to innovate and get things done, sometimes they need some time and space and resources.
Seen today in Guy Kawasaki’s interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer.
In my experience, publicly-traded companies are the worst at ignoring this, as they continually dig up the seeds and check them, while managing for the quarter.
Note: this is a paid review – ReviewMe is paying me $50 for posting this. However, all thoughts are my own, and I’m saying only what I decide to say. The payment part is so that I say *something* about Iceberg on Demand.
Iceberg on Demand is one of a new class of development tools designed for the web. They kinda make me think of GUI RAD environments, but they’re for the web, and they’re typically much, much easier to use. Similar tools include Sidewalk (which I’ve mentioned before), The Form Assembly, and WyaCracker.
The difference
The difference appears to be that Iceberg on Demand is orders of magnitude more powerful than these other solutions, that pretty much focus on simple web forms to gather data. It’s billed as allowing non-technical users to create “enterprise applications,” which is a major, major claim.
I wanted to personally try it before reviewing the application, so I signed up at their home page for a beta account. However, they appear to be in limited beta, as I haven’t received any access privileges in the 48 hours since I signed up.
The promise
The basic premise – giving non-programmers the tools to create full-functionality business applications – is incredibly compelling: use the business process mapping tool to map a process, create your business forms via drag-and-drop, integrate simply into already-built apps such as HR, CRM, project management, and bug tracking … and voila … you have a working enterprise system to run your business on. It reminds me somewhat of Sigurd Rinde’s thingamy.
I’m sure the reality is a little different: I don’t yet see accounting apps that you need to run a business and I’m sure there’s a number of other missing pieces, but wow … if this takes off and they increase the number of built-in apps over time, this could be very, very exciting.
The reality is, most of what businesses need to function is to get, store, retrieve, and modify data. It’s not rocket science. It’s data that follows business process rules.
If Iceberg on Demand can essentially automate creation of enterprise systems, look out IBM, Oracle, Infosys, and all the other “business services” tech shops out there: the billions you’re hoovering out of clients’ pockets is in danger.
OK, back to reality for a moment.
Right now, this looks like a great tool for start-ups, young companies, anyone with not much budget but need for real business systems.
In the future? Who knows.
Whoa. I wonder what this would do to government corruption around the world:
The former head of China’s State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, has been executed for corruption, the state-run Xinhua news agency reports.
He was convicted of taking 6.5m yuan ($850,000; £425,400) in bribes and of dereliction of duty at a trial in May.
The bribes were linked to sub-standard medicines, blamed for several deaths.
I’m not condoning it or advocating for it in any way, but on a purely amoral the-ends-justify-the-means level, I bet it would get very good results.
Just wanted to call attention to the fact that my buddies at Agile Media have started up a blog: Personally Speaking.
Agile is a really interesting confluence of traditional printing and modern media, nicely combined in a unified marketing package that is personal, personal, personal.
I’m looking for more great things from you, Peter & Rick!
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
