Skip to main content

An Open Letter to My Friends in Sales and Biz Dev

To my Friends in Sales:

I get a lot of sales calls, and I don't mind it, but it means that I've got to keep them quick or they quickly take up too much time. So I created this list of tips for you so we can make the best of your time and mine:
  1. I will ask questions on the introductory call about features and prices. Please be ready to answer those. I want that information so I can decide if it would be worth your and my time for a demo. If you don't have the information or can't give it to me, then that's probably as far as the call will go.
  2. I appreciate that you are trying to be friendly by talking sports and weather etc., but I'd rather get to the point. Keep it on topic please.
  3. Please don't use leading questions like: "If you could succeed in this difficulty, how would that help you?" and such. I know my own situation just fine, what I don't know is your product. So let's keep the conversation on that please.
  4. If I decide to get your product, please make sure I can order it when I call the first time. Having to wait for somebody who is out for the day to return to the office might change my mind since I suspect your support will likely be similar.
  5. Don't spend time trying to figure out if I'm the right person to talk to or what my budget is like. If you are going to call me, just assume that I am the right person. And let me decide if my budget has room or not (which I can do because you told me the price). 
Thank you for working with me on this. I know some people just don't answer the phone when sales people call. I don't want to be like that, but I do want to be efficient on our call.

Thanks!
BJ Taylor
Labels:

Comments

  1. devinMay 1, 2017 at 10:42 AM

    I love your thoughts. I started a new gig about 5 months ago where I occasionally have to call people I don't know yet. I have always done what homework I can ahead of time to increase the likelihood that they would be interested in what I want to talk about. I like your thoughts here as they mirror what I hope to achieve on a first call.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Remote two-factor authentication, with ssh public keys, and google authenticator

Installing and using the Google Authenticator was pretty easy. I give credit to howtogeek.com  for their straight forward instructions on using it. However, I wanted to change some things about their setup. You'll find my instructions to be similar to theirs, but with some important differences. This was done on Ubuntu 14.04. Install the google auth pam module: sudo apt-get install libpam-google-authenticator Login as the user you will be using the authenticator with, and run the following command: google-authenticator Set up Google Authenticator on your phone using either the QR code it generates, or manually type it in. Now, this is where I diverge a little from the howtogeek version. Open up the /etc/pam.d/sshd file on your machine. Put this at the very top of the file: auth sufficient pam_access.so accessfile=/etc/security/access-local.conf auth sufficient pam_google_authenticator.so And then comment out the following line in the same file: #@include common-au
2 comments
Read more

Strengthening the Weakest Link

Employees are frequently cited as being the weakest link in security. Rather than argue this point, I'm just going to reference a few articles here and move on ( Fortune , Fraud-magazine , Forbes ). Now, in general, employees are considered the weakest link because they don't always make smart decisions. For example, in one company I was at, a phishing email was sent out to many of the employees. The email was from "Emily", the subject was "New Pics" and the body was simply "Check out my latest pics" with a link. I was amazed at how many people clicked on that link and consequently installed a virus. A similar attack came a few months later, but spread over chat instead. I felt that we needed to train our employees better. I should note here that there is a good argument for security software that is idiot proof, that prevents employees from hurting their networks or losing information. I entirely believe in using such software, but hacker
1 comment
Read more