I posted some thoughts on business cards awhile back, had used up the ones I had and was time to get some more, especially with the PASS Summit coming up and a greater emphasis on networking. I’m breaking with tradition, sorta, this time!
First, I decided to order some cards from Moo.com. I ordered the mini-Moo, $20 for 100 of them. Not cheap, but the interesting part is that you can customize the back of each card. If you want, you can do 100 different images or messages. Makes sense it that it doesn’t cost them any to print various images, the customer is doing the work! On the ‘front’ side I went with my name, email address, and LinkedIn URL, plus a short tag line. No phone no address. On the back, with more time I might (might!) have done something fancier, but instead I opted to create 20 different ‘backs’, each a quote about time management or leadership in assorted fonts and patterns. Took maybe 15 minutes to do it, UI is very usable. Got the cards, they are small – will that both people? Will the quote on the other side make me more memorable? At worst I tried something new.
On the traditional side I ordered 500 plain-ish cards with logo, my name, email, LinkedIn info – skipping address and phone. Does it matter? We shall see. I looked at few places and business cards are definitely a hot market, everyone selling them, everyone upselling stuff like crazy. Better paper – more money. Upload an image – more money. Custom two sides – more money. It’s easy to do something and have a set of $50 business cards. Of course I spent that much at Moo, but for plain cards…just seems excessive. Finally used 123Print.com, still $28. Still too much I think, but it went from fun to a pain in about 9 minutes.
So I don’t yet, did I waste time, or give myself a bit of an edge? Or both! I’m going to try both sets and try to watch reactions, see if anything seems to work or not work.
Over the past few years we’ve had a number of recruiters and staffing firms visit oPASS as sponsors, and we always give them a few minutes to make their pitch. I don’t envy them the task, they get 5-10 minutes to talk to a crowd that is mildly receptive, sitting through the presentation to get to the good stuff – pizza and tech talk. Few stay for the entire meeting because to a non-technical person (and most recruiters are) it’s just not very exciting – we’d be no more excited about sitting through a sales meeting!
Their first goal is a good one, put their name in the heads of the audience so the next time (maybe right then) they need a recruiter…bam! Easy enough to do, and supplement with some pens and business cards. Where I think they struggle is in two related areas; their sales pitch and their presentation skills.
Starting with the latter, talking to a crowd just isn’t easy. Talking to a crowd while sort of delivering a sales pitch is, I would say, harder. But it’s 10 minutes or less, and I’m usually not surprised to hear a rambling and not really compelling presentation. Not all their fault, they are doing what they’ve been asked to do, or what seems like is the right thing to do as far as marketing, but it’s not the most reassuring thing to a potential customer to see someone struggle through 10 minutes about their business. The lesson for them – and us, is that if we’re selling something, or giving any type of presentation, it’s worth practicing. I wish that was some brand new idea!
The sales pitch usually focuses on the idea that they are better than their competitors. Now I like someone that believes in their products and services and is proud of their company, anything less…well, that’s not going to drive me to them for business. But, the hard part is, they all say they are the best. Again, I get that, it’s pride of company, but to a somewhat cynical crowd (us), show us the money!
I’m not exactly the king of marketing myself, and really all companies have the same dilemma. It’s rare that one company is light years better than another, more often it’s the little things that drive sales and brand loyalty. But…it’s not bad to give your potential customers some real reasons to keep you in mind. I think if I were in the staffing business speaking to a SQL group, I’d want to tailor my pitch:
The hint: The first bullet point is the key, it shows specific market knowledge and competency. I think not all are those good points to tell potential candidates, I think they are all questions potential candidates should be asking their recruiter. Just because someone hasn’t placed any SQL Server positions doesn’t mean they (and their company) aren’t good, but it’s not what we’d hope to hear either.
It’s probably a key stereotype of our business that the sales team doesn’t really get along with those in operations/production. Sales teams seem to insist on selling features and timelines without asking if it’s even close to possible, and operations wants to solve problems elegantly without regard to the realities of paying the bills. Now I know it’s a generalization, that’s what stereotypes are after all, but I find it to be true more often than not, to varying degrees.
Sales people are not literal people. When they say “100%” they rarely mean 100%, it’s more like 95% from 8-5 pm. They live to make deals. Selling something and being well paid for it is what drives them. Much of their behavior is driven by a compensation plan that you don’t see, and you have to to think about that to make sense of their behavior. If you were paid solely on the number of lines of code you wrote, I wager not only would that become your predominant focus, you’d find creative ways to generate code. As much as we may not like their behavior at times, realize that most of it is quietly endorsed by the big boss, the one that built the compensation plan.
On the other side, operations people – us – are literal people. We try to do exactly what is asked, we like solving problems, and we really really fear failing to deliver, whether it be the 97th report of the year or a huge data migration. We tend to believe that if we fail bad thing will happen. When sales promises things that we don’t have, we end up volunteering (or being forced) to work a lot of extra hours to deliver the goods, and rarely get a bonus for that extra effort. We also tend to dislike product marketing that focuses on features that are just for show or don’t exist yet and we don’t like the idea of sales people much beyond the clerk at Wal-Mart. If we sold something, our pitch would be something like “I’m selling this product for x dollars, would you like to buy it?”. Some more thoughts:
I don’t know if it’s genetic or a result of how you were raised or how you spent your early adult years, but there is clearly a difference between the people that build and the people that sell.
I don’t have any magic answers either. I think it’s obvious that at times we’re going to have to push hard to deliver a feature to land a customer, and that at times sales is going to have to be told to back off because they are promising things that cannot be delivered. I think most of the tension happens due to poor leadership:
In general if it a bridge it to be built, it’s from operations to sales. Over time you learn that by building that relationship – something they understand – you have a chance to provide some insight and feedback about the sales cycle in an unofficial way. Sales people aren’t evil or dumb. If they can make money and make it easier for you, they will. But if it’s a choice of making money or making it easier for you, they go for the money. It’s human and real, they work to support family just like we do.
Too cynical? Tell me about your experiences with sales.
I saw this post by Neil Davidson about sales people being different that discusses how sales people are compensated and why he is moving to a salary model instead of commission. I’ve never been a sales person, but I’ve had the interesting time of working with them at a mid sized company as well as having a sales person of our own – yes, interesting is the word!
At the mid sized company the compensation plan for sales people changed each year. Basically they were able to “draw” against earnings to provide them with a reasonably stable revenue stream, and they would get x percent of sales. If they went long enough without selling they’d be let go and the company would be out whatever draw had not be recouped to date. It’s the percentage of things piece that was a pain. After you work with anyone that is paid commission only for about 15 minutes you’ll understand that they will only do things that lead to revenue. Anything else is either postponed or just not done, including customer service that doesn’t benefit them. That leads the company to tweak the plan to encourage various behaviors; finding new clients, growing existing clients, increasing the bill rate, etc. Where I worked it wasn’t just a one time sale, it was a relationship that could easily continue 10 years or more, so there was a phase out of commission. Sales person might get 5% of sales the first year, then 4%, then 3%, then it would be become a “house” account and a sales assistant would do all except the most important conversations with the client.
As you might imagine the formula was a little more complex than that, and I was lucky enough to have one developer who owned that process each year, it could easily take 45 days as they came up with a new formula, tested it, back tested it, and then the standard pain when payments changed to the sales people. You think you scrutinize your dinner bill? It’s their money, they really look over their commission statement!
As I look back I think it was just a little uglier and complex than it needed to be, but the overall process was healthy. Businesses change, rates change, what sells changes. Nothing wrong with revisiting the compensation plan once a year and adjusting to fit the needs of the company while still making it interesting for the sales team.
My more direct experience with a sales person was similar. Because he was paid a straight percentage, he tended to only work the big clients and the big deals. Profitable for both sides, but over times led to only a couple very large eggs in the basket. Not much interest in smaller clients because it was a lot of work for not early the same amount of money. That’s short term thinking, and the only way we started to fix it was tweaking the compensation plan. Of course it’s short term from my side of the fence, from the other side – well, I still think it is, if you’re planning to stay in one place for a while and want to keep things moving and growing.
Not all sales people are created equal, and you can’t pay them equal, whether it’s salary, commission, or both. A great sales person is probably 2-3x more effective than a good one – and they know it! They can bring in the money but only if you pay them. Otherwise, they move, because there are always jobs for sales people.
If you read Neil’s post – and you should – he’s got some good reasons for changing to a salary plan. Not clear if that includes a bonus plan and if it does, I’m not sure it’s really a true change, but fair enough to try. I’m not sure it will work, because for salespeople….it is ALL about the money. That’s how they keep score, how they feel validated. Different for geeks, for us it’s being paid a salary in the range that people with our skills, but it’s really about solving problems and shipping software.
My friend Kevin had sent this to me after I wrote The Boss Is Always Right but before it was released here on the blog, and it’s an interesting and deeper look at the IT specifics of some of what goes into the boss being right or wrong. Little different focus, but I think you’ll find it worth reading.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137708/Opinion_The_unspoken_truth_about_managing_geeks?taxonomyId=14&pageNumber=1
Bet you’re ready to disagree, right? I’ve had this on my list to write about for a while. One trend I see in business is a tendency for subordinates (often managers themselves) to ignore or actually try to undermine the agenda of a person higher up the corporate ladder.
In practice we all know that the boss isn’t always right. Not because we know better (sometimes we do, more often we think we do) but because the universe just isn’t that simple. If anyone could make the right call every time it would be a much simpler world!
There’s nothing wrong with arguing your case, making sure they see both your side of things and why you don’t like the other options. Good managers don’t want people that just say YES. So, once the discussion is done, the boss gets to decide. May not pick the right decision in hindsight, but it’s the one that needs to be executed with the best you have to offer. The only fair alternative (short of legal/ethical situations) is to leave.
As employees we’re not always going to be happy with decisions, that’s the nature of being human. But we can try hard(er) to support those tasked with making decisions, we can learn from their “mistakes”, and we can try to be a positive force rather than a negative one by supporting decisions that have been made.
Not sure I got my thoughts down well this time, but I’m looking forward to the discussion!
Alas, this isn’t really a SQL post, but thoughts on efforts to share work that has been previously done by one person! For the past two years I’ve handled almost all of the work leading up to SQLSaturday Orlando, bringing in volunteers close to the event to help with logistics. It works pretty well because I have all the pieces of the puzzle and know that I have to get it done. The downside of course is that I add more work to a list that is already larger than it should be, and I’m not training anyone to take over sometime in the future.
The latter is a fundamental challenge of most businesses, and most fail badly at it. Ideally every leader should be grooming someone to be their replacement, just as they themselves should be preparing to move into the job that their boss does (note that I’m not suggesting a coup!). It doesn’t happen for a lot of reasons; lack of time, lack of candidates, fear of being replaced.
For me, my excuse has been lack of time. Dividing up tasks takes time, explaining how to do them takes time, checking on them takes time, doing them yourself when they don’t get done…takes time!
This year I’m trying harder to share, and I started that by including some of the key volunteers on all the email related to the event. It lets them see how I communicate, what kind of responses I get back from speakers and sponsors, and start to feel like they understand what is going on. Last week we met at lunch for a planning meeting and to divide up more tasks, and it’s quite a dance. Volunteers want to own tasks, but aren’t sure what is involved – is it really an hour task? Or the “how” worries them, what should a message to a sponsor who isn’t responding look like? For me, there are some things that I’m not ready to let go of – key sponsors is one – and there are other tasks that are critical path and require some faith to let go!
In one case I asked Jack Corbett to request funding for the event via UGSS. First I had to add him as an admin, then he emailed back that he didn’t see the funding option. That required an email to our MS guy to fix that, then back to Jack, then finally get the request done. I’m worried that I’m annoying the daylights out of Jack, and he’s thinking the same – trying to help just added work! Some of it had to be done anyway, but it feels slow at times.
Management 101, right?
it’s the nature of managing anything that delegating takes time and adds complexity, but you hope you benefit from it in the long term. For volunteer events the more people that have ownership of it the better the event becomes, so it’s worth some pain to share the work and the knowledge.
I’ve had this link about four kinds of free (and this link too) on my list for awhile, today seems like a good to write about it. It’s a post by Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, and it defines four kinds of free; buy something get something free, ad supported, freemium, and gifts. He’s gone through a couple of variations, but you get the idea – most things that are free aren’t really free. I get “free” long distance on my work phone, but it’s built into the bill somewhere.
Some of it is just good marketing. Fair enough. But there seems to be a category of people that think information should be free, and that most things online should be free. Right now that just doesn’t happen much. I’m willing to commit to writing this blog and letting people read it for free, though you could argue (and I’d agree) that it’s a marketing tool for my personal brand. I could probably afford to pay the hosting of it as well if needed. But what happens when the cost starts to be a $100 a month? Do I still provide it for “free”, or do I throw up some ads to try to defray the cost…or even make a profit?
We’ve evolved into a game where everything is “free” but paid for by advertising. Maybe that will work long term, I don’t know. The problem is that you get a fair percentage that mentally block the ads unless really intrusive (which I understand), and a smaller percentage that use technology to just remove the ads. So here are a couple questions:
I’d say in the first case, yes – it’s stealing. Petty theft no doubt, but it’s wanting to be all take and no give. The second one – there I think the challenge is on the ad designer and the site owner to make it interesting and not overload the ads presented. On the third, in most cases the content would disappear, because without a financial incentive no one would want to keep doing it at anything beyond the blog level.
Remember TANSTAAFL?
I'm not here to be ad police, but there are two interesting points. One is to step back from the marketing messages and make sure we're happy with the overall cost - just being a smart consumer. The other is to consider if your expectations of what should be free are realistic and fair.
I was having a discussion with Brian Knight yesterday about whitepapers and thought I’d share some of it – from my view point of course. I went to Wikipedia for their definition of whitepapers and they describe it as an authoritative report or guide, but goes on to say that they have evolved into primarily marketing tools of three types; business case, technical, and hybrid.
So first, do we need whitepapers? I think they fill a valuable niche between the blog/article style and size and that of a full fledged book. Its a good way to share some deep domain knowledge with a smaller investment of time and money. For most of us the challenge has become whether the content value of the whitepaper exceeds the marketing noise.
That said, it’s all about the money – someone has to write them and they expect (and deserve) to be paid. Most vendors want to draw traffic to their sites so you’ll at least see their products and services and I have no quibble with that. They invest in having a whitepaper created as a marketing expense, but to what extent should the whitepaper be tailored to their products and services? I guess that depends on how it’s framed – clearly one on SQL statistics implies a requirement to use SQL Server!
I think the problem is that we’ve come to expect a heavy vendor bias in these things, which leads to some interesting behaviors:
I vote for one percent marketing, Brian thinks that’s unrealistic – but we agree that it’s a slider, as the person paying for it you can move the slider from gift to the world to totally sales push as you decide is appropriate. Brian says they still work despite my distaste for them and thinks I take a harsher view than most – thus the post today!
Things I’m ok with:
Things I’d prefer:
Things that ain’t happening:
Direct mail and spam works because a small percentage of people think that they really have to order in the next 15 minutes. What about the rest of us? Do they only market to the non-cynical?
I’ll blog more about marketing soon because it’s the weakest point of my game (or one of them anyway) and I probably don’t have a realistic world view of what it takes to sell things, but I still think it can be done in a way that provides value to both sides and ultimately drives paying business without resorting to anything close to a questionable practice.
So what do you think? Am I taking too tough a view? Do you read and value whitepapers? What kind of filter do you apply?
I think the hardest part about the job search is interviewing and not being selected. You keep saying “why” with rarely a good answer. It’s not fun to be rejected. I don’t think I can change that with any spin, but it helps if you understand that there are a lot of factors at work and your technical skills are just one small part of them. To show this, let’s imagine that you have decided to hire a lawn service. We start with a job description:
“cut the grass!”
You’d think that anyone could do that, but in truth what you want is probably a little more complex than that. For me, I want:
I’d like to think all of that is fairly reasonable! I also expect to pay somewhere in a range of x to y dollars. Above Y and I might give up something to keep the price where I wanted it.
Then I post the job to Craiglist or the local paper or bulletin board, and I get five applicants. I schedule interviews, and here are the results:
Now to be fair you might list different attributes about them, but the goal is to show you that the decision is pretty arbitrary. Who would you pick and why?
If you think about how you arrived at the decision, you could go back and amend the job description. Here’s mine:
Now imagine that I had posted that to start with. If you were the commercial companies, would you still apply? What about the teenager who can’t get/afford insurance? I might get one interview, or I might get all five, but odds are that I get less than five. As a consumer I want some choice, do I really want to just have one interview?
That’s how it works. Job descriptions rarely include everything, and sometimes they discover more as they go from the very people they interview. All you can do is show them that you have the ability and willingness to solve their problem, and how your skills would help them. Looking back at the above, what if:
Would those change your mind? For some of us they would, for others it wouldn’t. See how damned arbitrary it is? None of the 5 candidates lacked the core skill, and maybe they even interviewed equally well. One or two things tipped the balance, and it might have been something you would never see or guess. Now stack on how my might feel if you got follow up emails from some – but not all. Maybe one person offered a slightly different price, or a free pressure wash – would that alter your decision? Maybe?
None of them is going to win by telling you how great they cut the grass, or how long they’ve been cutting it – for our purposes they are all equal. We need to validate skills, but we assume that whoever we hire has the skills – it’s the other stuff that matters!
I’ll be curious what you think about my scenario. I can see places where I might improve it, and it might make a heck of a good training video! But hopefully what you see is that it’s skills + presentation + follow through + luck that lead to a job. You do the things you can do.
Getting a job is hard. If you’ve been lucky enough not to struggle for a job, don’t make the mistake of thinking it will always be easy. Equally, finding a good job is harder still. Some more tips for you to consider:
One more post on this tomorrow!
Part 1 discussed ways to find opportunities, Part 2 was about how to get more interviews, and today we’ll cover some tips from the employer perspective.
It’s important to understand that interviewing and hiring is painful for a manager. They have an obligation to try to hire well, they have budget constraints, it takes a lot of time to review resumes, do phone screens, and then first and often second interviews. Plus, if hiring from a staffing company there is usually a fee of 15-30% of your first year salary – they don’t get that back if you leave or don’t work out, just a promise that they will place someone else at no cost. On top of that, having tried any number of technical questions and interview techniques my own success rate at hiring “good” employees is about 50%. Knowing that just increases the pain and dread. Can you change that? No. But you can do all the things expected by the system and that keeps their time investment to a minimum.
As far as screening, HR often makes the first cut. Staffing companies have to walk the fine line, because they are only supposed to send qualified candidates. Sending someone who isn’t can cause them to lose that position and future ones too. Managers spend about 1 minute per resume doing their initial cut, throwing all out the ones they don’t like for whatever reason. Then a slightly longer second pass where they informally rate the remainder to reduce the pool size further and to prioritize who to interview first.
Yesterday I posted Part 1 containing five ideas for those looking for work. Today I’m going to focus on what to do when you’re struggling to get interviews. Your chances of getting hired for any given job once you interview are perhaps 1 in 10 (an unscientific estimate). If you’re not interviewing, you’re not in the game.
Remember, if you’re not interviewing, you have just about zero chance of getting hired. Interviewing and not getting a job doesn’t hurt you, no black mark on your resume!
Tomorrow some tips from the employer perspective.
I was recently asked for advice about seeking a job, a request we all get from time to time. In this case it was someone who had been very technical for most of their career, but then changed direction and was now seeking to return to technology. Nothing wrong with that, but it does present it’s challenges and a slow economy doesn’t help. I’ve got a few tips to share that maybe go beyond checking your resume for spelling errors.
Nothing very original there, but I rarely see candidates doing all five of them. Given the small amount of time required, are there any you would not do?
More tomorrow!
We'll all heard about or lived with outsourcing, and hopefully we know it's good and bad. Outsourcing the janitorial services is a good idea, outsourcing the help desk...maybe not such a good idea. We outsource for a variety of reasons, but usually it's to save money or to leverage skill sets we don't have or want to maintain. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and that all depends on everything - so many things go into making it work out on both sides.
I was chatting with a friend over lunch lately and outsourcing came up in the context of having a parent company provide certain functions instead of having them handled by each subsidiary. The cost savings is not hard to see. Imagine you have six companies all under one umbrella company, and each one has an HR team, a payroll solution, etc, etc. Not all of that is duplication of effort, but there is some. So, the parent company takes over function X and saves some amount of dollars each year. It this outsourcing? And if so, what are the dangers?
I think it's absolutely outsourcing, and it can be better or worse than normal outsourcing. It can be better because you are saving money, and you get more control and smarter investments than you might with someone who is trying to make a profit - my presumption being that when doing this internally you're trying to cover costs only. It could be worse because you don't get much of a vote, it's usually a decree, and worse than that, you may not like the service level agreement that goes with it.
I only have limited experience with this, but it never seems to work out. First, it's human nature that those in immediate contact with those providing the service hear only one side - their side - of the story, and that's powerful, especially when you're trying to convince the main office that they are causing you pain. Next, unless you have the outsourcing run by an extraordinary leader, they will tend to grow and extend their kingdom without regard to what is good for you or your business. Finally, they aren't part of the team - their measure of success isn't the same as yours. Imagine that you have a problem with the building and you need to quickly relocate a few hundred workstations. Your team jumps in to get it done because it needs to be done. Will the outsourcers?
Every business should control it's own destiny with full profit and loss accountability. Hire a leader, monitor them lightly but carefully, and let them do the job. If they aren't doing the job then it's a tough decision to figure out is it external factors or is it bad decisions? If outsourcing - internal or external - looks like a good idea, they should be free to do that too, as long as they can implement it under a service level agreement that provides the means to end the relationship if it's not working OR they just want to go in a different direction.
