How does your customer find you? What marketing or promotion activities are your competitors finding success with? Which medium do they find you through; retail, web search, a package insert, TV advertising, magazine article, newspaper article?
These are all important questions to answer to have hopes of growing your company. If you don’t answer them you will wind up wasting time and money chasing the wrong channels.
For an established market many of these questions have been answered. Let’s say you sell backup software. Selling backup software is like selling insurance. The market has been molded through PR, magazine articles, newspapers, etc. Backup software customers are essentially everyone with a computer. The software backup shopper can be found at retail, web search and word-of-mouth.
Entering a new market is tougher. You will have a few starts-and-stops and although it will be more expensive and take more time to find the customer than an established market, the payoff is generally greater as you will be a bigger fish in a (hopefully) big pond.
Finding your customer and how to sell to them is key to growth. Once you find success here you can continue to leverage that with further time and investment.
Software sales reps are good at selling given the right product, tools, direction, experience, leverage, autonomy, expense account, etc…. Ok, a lot of things need to go right to have success in sales.
You need to know how your customer buys.
As an employer many times you can’t just hire a sales rep and send them off without perspective. They may think they can sell your product the same way they sold the last, but this generally ends in failure and possibly a hurt relationship.
The rep has strength and confidence in previous success, connections, and managing the process. But they’ve never sold a product just like yours in your market. That is why you need to test the waters initially. The best way to do this is with commission or base pay + commission for someone you feel very confident in.
You won’t find success by hiring a rep and sending them out in the wild Day 1. A 6 month trial run is enough time to train the rep on your product and market. You’ll know quickly by checking your bank account if the rep is doing a good job!
Recently I received a RAID for data-recovery. Should be easy, the tech said… its just a ‘lost configuration’ situation. He said the RAID had an error so he rebuilt and swapped the bad drive – but when he rebooted – the RAID was gone…. uh-oh. So should easy, right… just a lost-RAID-configuration.
Whats this configuration you ask? A RAID is composed of multiple drives, that are setup up in 1 of many optional configurations. If that config information is lost then you can’t access the array. In reality a lost-RAID-configuration can be very complicated to fix. There can be many permutations of possible answers:
Are there hot spares?
Is it RAID-0? RAID-1? RAID-5? RAID-50?
Which drives are current and which may be stale?
Are the data clues from the current OS or ghosts from a previous life?
Did they rebuild the array? Reset parity? or rebuild a spare?
This was 5 x 320 gb hard drives, possibly from a Buffalo NAS box, ( it doesn’t matter to me because I always analyze the bare drives and then figure out the truth…) Lucky for them they stopped playing when it didn’t work – many techs will just keep swapping drives and start rebuilding and cause more damage.
I wrote my RAID recovery utilities years ago. The scans told me that there should be a 960 gb volume. Three drives were in their own metal cage. So it could be a 3×320= 960gb RAID-0 stripe set. However, when I tried to assemble it that way I found that it wouldn’t line up. Hmmm…could it be that its really a 4 x 320gb RAID-5 ? You see a 4-drive RAID-5 and 3-drive RAID-0 are the same size. Yep – thats what it turned out to be – a 4 x 320 RAID-5.
But the RAID wasn’t done with me yet….
One drive had a broken board that needed fixing.
Then there were bad sectors on another drive.
…and it was out-of-sync – which meant that only 3 drives out of the 5 drive set would give the best result.
The take-aways from this are:
Easy lost configuration problems can be anything but..
If you or your techs have a problem STOP – you are in real serious danger of making it unrecoverable.
Utilities are helpful – but tools but have their limits.
Experience and a complete understanding of RAID levels and layouts are required (can you look at hex dump and tell parity from data?).
Understanding low-level on-disk file-system structures are required (can you interpret a MFT or XFS superblock – in hex?).
The customer got his data back 100% – but only because his tech stopped while he was ahead, and sent it to a professional.
At the same time we were working through a list of names for our company we were also looking for proper domain names. We landed on FreshCrop and naturally wanted the .com address. Going to the address we ran in to a typcial squatter landing page…loaded with Adsense ads.
It follows that a good domain name should be short, easy to remember and hopefully not already taken. In 2010 this is getting harder everyday as domain squatters buy up hundreds of domains at a time in the hopes of selling them for profit. One big sale can pay for thousands of domains.
The FreshCrop.com landing page had a “This Domain is for sale” link. I clicked that and ran in to a domain squatter who wanted $5,555.00 for FreshCrop.com. Ouch.
If you want the domain in question you have to approach this carefully. Don’t come in lessening the value of the domain. This is what I did and was immediately sent packing. I didn’t think it was worth much more than a few hundred dollars.
Many employers are forced or make the decision to lay off or fire long term and costly employees.
Then seemingly days later add those same roles to their jobs list online in hopes of getting a ‘deal’ from some unemployed person with a lot of experience and talent or graduate fresh out of college, but pay them half of what they should be getting for the work they will do.
This type of business is short term and yields a high turnover as soon as those new hires find a better job somewhere else. In the end the employer who takes this approach loses their original talented staff, the trust and dedication of the remaining employees and productivity goes down.
The best way to avoid these kinds of problems is to do the following:
1) Use a lot of common sense and have plenty of understanding.
2) Give credit and praise where it is due.
3) Pay close attention to what all of your employees are doing for you and think deeply about what will be lost if they are gone one day for whatever reason.
4) Never do anything to anyone that you would not feel is right to do to yourself or people you know. There is nearly always other options available.
5) Always keep communication open as to troubles the company may be facing so that your dedicated team is prepared to support the company.
May 10th 
Posted by Korey
