Hiring Salespeople

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I’ve been asked by an entrepreneur friend to talk about hiring sales people. My friend, like a lot of high-tech entrepreneurs, is a technical person who also has the role of CEO and Sole Salesperson, and they feel it is time for them to "bring in a professional" to "take the company to the next level."

Here’s where I think a lot of entrepreneurs, particularly those that are bootstrapping, make a big mistake. They hire a VP of Sales and Marketing, capable of growing a large sales force. Maybe. The New VP spends a lot of time thinking about Positioning. They talk about Executive Selling, Leadership Alignment and Developing Value Propositions. What they probably won’t talk about during the interview or after being hired is how many phone calls they are going to make to new prospects every day. When the sales don’t happen, it’s a product or market problem. (They say)

If you are leading a Rocket-fueled, VC-Backed Start-Up, maybe it makes sense to go right for the leadership who will then build out a real sales force. But if you are just hoping to get some sales help so that you can focus on the job of building your business, then you need someone who can first and foremost, SELL STUFF.

I’m not an expert at hiring sales people, but I can tell you what doesn’t work from experience and I can pass on some things I’ve observed about the people who can sell.

The best sales people jumped right in soon after they arrived.  My company sells a complicated product so new people do have a lot to learn, but the best people were on the phone and planning visits pretty quickly.  If they are too afraid to make the calls then they may not have what it takes.  The biggest failures obsessed over learning every last detail of the product and industry at the expense of just getting out there and working with customers.  The successful people were quick to admit that they weren’t experts yet and they were good at getting other people (engineers, sales support, the CEO) to help them fill in the gaps.  And the successful sales people don’t try to fake it with customers.  We sell to smart, technical people and they can smell a fake a mile away.

Great sales people know how to establish relationships, and it starts before they even walk in the door for the interview.  They try to get introductions from people we know and respect.  They research our company and even if they are from outside the industry, they walk in with a decent knowledge of what we do.  They try to connect with everyone that they meet here, starting with the person who greets them at the front door.  (As a sales person, you need to understand that EVERYONE you talk to at a company has the potential to kill your sale.  If you act like a jerk in the lobby, you’ll never get to the board room.)

I have said that one of our best sales people walks the line between persistence and annoyance.  I’ve never had a complaint from a customer saying he was pushing too hard, but I know that he is not afraid to tell a customer that it is time to sign.

The hard part about hiring sales people is that if they are any good at all, they will generally interview well.  If they can’t sell themselves well, how are they going to sell your product?  If they don’t do a good job preparing for the interview, if they haven’t researched your company and if they haven’t cared enough to find an introduction (and this is their career they are pitching) then they probably aren’t going to do a good job selling your product.

Someone said "Past performance is the best indicator of future success".  If a sales person is unemployed then they need to have a really good reason for it, like they made so much money in their last job that they quit to travel the world.  Companies don’t usually fire or lay off great sales people so you have to be skeptical when a sales person is not employed I think.  I know, everyone experiences set backs and may find themselves in tough positions, I’m just saying you need to be very thoughtful about this.  (One of our best sales people was unemployed when we hired them, so there are exceptions to the rule.)

My entrepreneur friend is at a critical point and I see a lot of companies get stuck here.  It’s easy to hire someone with a great resume who is more interested in managing than doing.  In a small company you just can’t afford that.  The one nice thing about sales people is that there is an objective measure of their success.  They sell stuff.  It may take a while for them to get started, but at some point they have to sell.

I welcome any comments about hiring sales people.  Please share your thoughts if you have figured it out, or if you just want to share some of your mistakes. 

Lookout

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I just saved enough time looking for a document in one of my many email folders, that I now have time to write this tip.

I’ve tried Google Desktop, MSN Search and a couple of other products, but the one I use daily to find stuff in my email, on my computer and on my network is a strange little Outlook add-in called Lookout.  I say it is strange, because while the company was acquired some time ago by Microsoft, it also seems to remain available as a stand-alone tool.

If you are still using the built-in search capabilities of Outlook, you’ve got to try this.  It is lightning fast, reliable and will save you hours of hunting for that old email or file.  If you want a simple search tool, that doesn’t bring along a lot of other capabilities, give Lookout a try.

Doing good in the world

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The press seems to be in love with writing stories about jack-ass entrepreneurs and CEOs who abuse their positions to try to make the world cater to their own needs.  It’s hard enough as it is without the bad guys giving the entire capitalistic system a bad name.

Here is a counter-example – an entrepreneur who is making the world a better place.  Donna Auguste has started a blog to try to shine a light on projects that are making a difference.  Mind you, she isn’t just writing about it, she’s traveling around the world, getting her hands dirty and doing the hard work.  I first met Donna when she was CEO of Freshwater Software.  Even then she was involved in a lot of great works while creating an awesome company.  (I can hear her now – SHE didn’t create it, her team created it.  Even after selling the company she remains a humble person.)

Donna is also leading a discussion about how to get more kids interesting in science and engineering.  Again, she isn’t just talking about it.  For example, if you like robots, look at this and tell me that you wouldn’t have been more interested in school with people like Donna dropping by.

Check it out, and the next time someone says "Aren’t blogs just a bunch of drivel?", point them to Donna’s blog.

speech conference

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I’m at speech tek west this week.     people often ask me, what is the best dictation software?  It depends, I answer.  If you just want to play around with it, and you’re running Windows XP, you already have a speech recognition engine installed on your computer. simply go to the control panel and turn it on. according to most reviews, though, if you want to do serious speech recogniti,     You should look at Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8.

by now you may have guessed that I’m doing this post using just speech recognition.  I am using nuance is Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8.  To be fair, I spent about 10 minutes training it, and I’m also watching Groundhog Day on the TV.  I’m really amazed it’s working at all.  I haven’t opened the manual, and I spent very little time training the speech engine.

I really think that with a little practice, I could use this instead of a keyboard.I think this has great potential and I’m going to keep working with it.  Good night!

Terry   

Assistant 1.0

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It still feels funny to say I have an assistant.  Most entrepreneurs probably wait too long to find someone to help them.  I waited almost 10 years, which was about 8 years too long.

Suzanne joined Gold Systems as my first assistant and trained me to be more effective, and she took on jobs that I didn’t even know needed to be done.  We became a better company, and my life was easier. Then she got married, moved to Alaska and I was fortunate (thanks Judy!) to have a chance to hire Angela.  Angela is doing a fantastic job and like Suzanne, when I adopt new technology, she has to adapt to it.  Angela has been thinking about how my new Treo 700w is changing her job, and she wishes for a new product to go along with it.  Here is Angela’s first "guest blog."

Terry
—————————————–

If you normally read Terry’s blog, then you know that he recently retired both his Nokia 3650 cell phone and Axim X30 Pocket PC and upgraded to the new Palm 700w. My life as his assistant has not been the same since!

This morning I received three calls from Terry first thing in the morning, each time he told me something new, but then claimed there was something else that he forgot. Within a few seconds, the phone was ringing again with the forgotten thought. Secretly, I knew he was driving in his car playing with his new phone and saying “Dial Angela Watson Office” using the voice recognition feature because it’s just cool!

Its funny how gadget driven this man I work for is, but I’ve got to admit, that thing really is cool. Terry has been teasing me with the idea of getting another one for my own use. (Mind you, I would opt for a more stylish carrying case other than the leather belt clip, maybe something pink.)

As much fun as having a 700w of my very own would be, it misses the most valuable tool that all portable devices miss in order to aid the professional executive assistant. The capability to pull up your executive’s schedule!

50% of my day is spent combing over Terry’s calendar, contacts and tasks and making sure I’ve allowed enough time for him to eat and sleep. Assistants struggle with the problem of not having their executive’s calendar while working remote, and we either carry a tickler file with a print-out of their schedule, or we bribe the company IT wizard to come to our home to set up the VPN.

I luckily do have the ability to work in full force at home. (Jerry likes home cooked meals.) But until Microsoft comes out with Windows Mobile – Assistant Version 1.0, the best I can do for a mobile devise is still the good ol’ laptop and separate cell phone.

Respectfully Submitted by:

Angela Watson

Senior Executive Assistant to Terry Gold

Gold Systems

——————-

Terry here – Jerry, the IT wizard that Angela bribed in the story above, has just discovered that Angela can in fact get to my schedule or anyone else’s that she has access to.  We run Exchange Server here with OWA (Outlook Web Access) enabled.  That means that we can use any web browser, including the web browser on the 700w or my old Axim, to access the Exchange Server.  Since Angela has permission to access my calender, she can use OWA to check my schedule.  It’s not as nice as a client on her PocketPC, but it is a step in the right direction.

This is the last post (for awhile) about my new phone.  I expect I’ll be reviewing some new speech recognition products in the next few weeks as I continue to try to surround myself with the technology.

Voice Command Cheat Sheet

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I’ve lived with my Treo 700w phone for almost two weeks now, and despite having to do a hard reset yesterday, I’m loving it.  I’ve quit carrying my Pocket PC, and even gave it away a few days ago, so you know I’m serious about this new device.

Right now I’m in an airport using my phone as a high-speed modem.  Despite what Verizon says, it can be done, you just need a little piece of software called pdaNet.  I’m connected with a USB cable, but I expect the software will evolve to do the trick over Bluetooth.

Last week I mentioned that a lot of speech recognition applications suffer from a lack of documentation and "cheat sheets".  Piyush Dogra from Microsoft forwarded this cheat sheet to me the very next day.  Eric Badger, one of the developers of the product created it and has given me permission to share it.  Thank you Eric!  This is one of coolest pieces of software I’ve seen in a long time.  As you point out "Knowing what to say makes all the difference when using Voice Command."  As of today I have 829 contacts in Outlook, and Voice Command never misses when I say a person’s name.

I also find myself saying "What’s my next appointment" because it is just easier than opening the schedule and scrolling around the screen.  Speech recognition really shines when you have deep trees of information that you need to directly access.  It’s a long story, but even though my phone came with Voice Command, I ended up buying a copy at the local computer store.  The retail product does come with very good documentation that should get you going.  If you have Voice Command or a Windows Mobile phone, you’ve got to give it a chance.  Learn a few commands and you will wonder how you got by without it.

Here’s Eric’s Cheat Sheet – Enjoy!

Terry

Voice Command Cheat Sheet for Treo 700w

Knowing what you can say makes all the difference when using Voice Command.

===== CALLING A CONTACT =====

Commands:

Call <contact>
Call <contact> at home
Call <contact> at work
Call <contact> on mobile
Call <contact> on cell
Call <contact> on cellular
Call <contact> at home two
Call <contact> at work two
Call <contact> at car
Call <contact> on radio
Call <contact> on pager
Call <contact> at assistant

To confirm that you want to make the call after Voice Command responds:

You can say "Yes" or "Correct" to call.
You can say "No" or "Incorrect" to try again.

If Voice Command asks you which location, you can:

Repeat one of the locations that Voice Command offers to call.
Say "No" to try again.

Related commands:

You can say "Call back" to call back the last call that you received.
You can say "Redial" to call back the last call that you made.

Examples:

Call Karen Archer on cell
Call Frank Miller
Call City Light and Power
Call Barbara Sparrow Home

Notes:

Voice Command indexes by the Contact’s first and last name if it exists. If you have a nickname entered, you can use that

too. Voice Command will only let you call by company name if there is no first or last name.

You must prefix contact calling with the "call" keyword. If you use "dial", it won’t work!

===== DIALING A NUMBER ======

Commands:

Dial <7-digit number>
Dial <10-digit number>
Dial <1+10-digits>
Dial <N-1-1>

Examples:

Dial 555-0200
Dial 800-555-1212
Dial 1-800-555-1212
Dial 411

You must prefix digit dialing with the "dial" keyword. If you use "call", it won’t work!

===== CHECKING CALENDAR =====

Commands:

What are my appointments today?
What are my appointments tomorrow?
What’s my next appointment?

===== START MENU =====

Commands:

Start <program>

Example:

Start Solitare
Start Messaging
Start Internet Explorer
Start Pictures and Video

Notes:

Voice Command will index any file that is in or inside of \windows\program files
You have to say the file name exactly as it is written. It may be helpful to rename shortcuts.
Also, you can put links to web pages here and go straight to a saved web page this way.

===== MEDIA =====

Commands:

Play music
Play media
Play artist
Play album
Play genre

Play <artist name>
Play <album name>
Play <genre name>
Play <everything>

Play
Pause
Stop
Next
Previous (track)
Shuffle on
Shuffle off
What song is this?
What track is this?

Examples:

Play The Beatles
Play The White Album
Play Rock
Play Everything

Notes:

You cannot play individual tracks using voice
Voice Command will index the media based on the metadata. You can use a metadata editor to groom the fields.

Speech Recognition and the trough of disillusionment

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In 1995 Gartner came up with what they call The Hype Cycle to explain how new technologies get hyped, fall out of favor with the press, and then ultimately (sometimes) go on to be mainstream.  One phase is the Trough of Disillusionment, and I believe that Speech Recognition may be in the trough now.  All great technologies must go through it.  Even as the technology continues to improve and some amazing things are happening, it seems to me that some people are getting tired of hearing how great it is going to be and they just want it to understand everything they say with little tolerance for errors.

There are two issues that have little to do with the science of speech recognition.  The first is Human Factors.  (I capitalize it because I believe it is so important.)  No one would disagree with me that Human Factors is important, but we still see applications being built that seem to go out of their way to make life difficult for the user.  That’s another soap box for another time – I’ll just say that it is very hard to make something very simple, but it is worth the effort.

The other issue is documentation, or at least expectation setting.  If you encounter speech recognition on the telephone, there is almost never documentation in hand for what the system can understand, and since we’re years away from a system that can understand everything a person might say (hey, people can’t even do it!) you have to guess at what you might be able to say, or you have to wait for the system to prompt you.

Lately I’ve been trying to surround myself with speech recognition, just to live with it and understand what works and what doesn’t work.  I have "Wise Crackin’ Shrek and Donkey" Shrek_and_donkeyand all sorts of gadgets that do speech recognition.  My latest is the new Palm  700W, which is a Palm Trio  phone that runs Windows Mobile.  Sort of like an Intel based Apple – they both came out this month, causing many people to wonder if in fact Hell has frozen over.  My very first Palm was made by U.S. Robotics and until switching to the Pocket PC a few years ago I always liked the Palms, so I was happy to have the best of both worlds when the Trio came out last week.

I quickly loaded a cool little application called Microsoft Voice Command.  (I think it comes with it – not sure)

It’s been around for awhile and runs on Windows Mobile and Pocket PC Phone Edition.  You push a button on the phone and then speak to it.  You can say "Call Terry Gold at work", or anyone else that is in your contacts.  No training required.  I tried 20 different names and it got every one right except for "Dan DeGolier".  I have over 900 contacts, so there were a lot to differentiate.  Now, I just looked in my contacts and I had Dan in as "Daniel B. DeGolier".  When I changed it to "Dan DeGolier" and let it automatically sync, it  immediately got it right.  (Sorry Dan, the text-to-speech still makes a mess of your last name.)

It isn’t just for speed dialing though.  You can say things like "What are my appointments", "What calls have I missed", and even "Start Program", where Program is any program you have loaded on your phone.  I’m going to see if I can do most of the command and control using just speech recognition.  This is what Bill Joy once called "prototyping the future."  You figure out some way to live with the technology of the future, and that lets you think even farther ahead.

But back to the second challenge of great speech recognition.  The one thing it couldn’t recognize was me saying  "Display Terry Gold".  According to the website, it is supposed to bring up my contact.  In fact it wouldn’t work on any other name.  Determined to make it work, I kept at it.  No matter how carefully I spoke it, up would pop Media Player and Bill Monroe would start to sing "Long Black Veil".  Bill Monroe is the Father of Bluegrass music and I’m an amateur Bluegrass mandolin player, so I took it as a great compliment that Voice Command was getting us confused.  After all, we did grow up only 37 miles and 50 years apart.

Since Voice Command had worked so well up to this point, I didn’t give up.  After figuring out that I could say "Help" and then "Contacts", I realized that the software was actually looking for me to say "Show Terry Gold", not "Display Terry Gold."

My guess is that the developers realized that "Display" and "Play" were too similar late in the product life cycle, especially for guys like me who pronounce "Display" as two words – "Dis" "Play".  "Terry Gold" sounds enough like "Bill Monroe" that I can see that mistake.  The documentation on the web didn’t get changed, and now some people are having a bad experience through no fault of the technology.  The product is so great though, that hopefully this won’t turn anyone off.  I’ll see if I can get to them to point out the typo.

Simply having a cheat sheet is a great help with speech recognition devices.  That’s how I found this mistake – I was making my own little cheat sheet.  It is easy enough to just ask for help, but I wanted something on paper that I could have on my desk until I figured out the common commands that I would be using.

I have another application that can recognize hundreds of commands, and it does a great job, but the documentation listed all of the commands in alphabetical order.  Again I made my own cheat sheet of the ten commands that I cared about, and now I can’t imagine not using the product.  I’ll bet most people tried it, didn’t know exactly what to say, and gave up on it.  I’ll write about that one another day.

When I first learned the vi editor, someone gave me a dog-eared card of the most common commands.  It made all the difference in the world and I was soon raving about how superior vi was to any other editor in the world, especially Emacs.  All because of that card.  Until speech recognition advances to the point where we really can just say anything, let’s see more cheat sheets, more obvious commands and help prompts that don’t make the user feel like an idiot.

Back to work!

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This year a lot of people had inflatable snowmen, santas, grinches and what not in their yard.  Am I the only one who finds it a little strange to see so many that look like this during the day?  I hope everyone feels better than this guy on the first official workday of 2006.

Snowman_1

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Help Wanted

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Gold Systems is looking for a few great people.  In particular we’re looking for a Regional Sales Manager for our Northwest territory.  We need someone who either already lives in the Pacific Northwest or is willing to relocate at their own expense.  The details are here.  We’re also looking for an experienced Support Engineer, and we’re not going to trust our customers to just anybody, so we need somebody really, really good with the right ideas about customer service.

Some of the best people at Gold Systems have come from referrals, either from people who work here or people in the community who know something about our culture.  I’d love to hear from you if you have the qualifications or know someone who does.

We’re not for everybody.  We’re customer focused to a fault sometimes.  We work in a niche that is exciting (Speech Recognition) but everyone is surprised at how different it is from other areas of technology.  If you already are in the business, or you really like a steep learning curve with a cool technology, then it might be the right place for you.

If you like the high-energy excitement of a cube farm where you know all about your neighbor’s medical problems and their troubles finding a good baby-sitter, because you can hear everything going on in a five-cube radius, then Gold Systems isn’t for you because everyone here gets their own office.  (Except for Lori, and she has her own skylight.)  Of course, remote people usually work out of their homes, so in a way they still get their own office and no one cares how they dress.  Not that we care very much anyway.  Ties are only worn under duress when we visit customers who are also forced to wear ties, so we wear them to show our support for their plight.  Otherwise shorts and t-shirts are just fine.

We hire nice people who get their jobs done.  When we screw up and hire someone who just pretends to be nice in the interview, they don’t tend to last long.  We have a lot of people who have been here five years and even ten years, so we don’t expect people to work 80 hours a week until they burn out and quit.  People do work hard, and sometimes late nights and weekends are required, because our customers tend to pick strange hours to try out new software.  But we give a generous amount of vacation and we do our best to maintain some balance in our lives.

We have an amazing customer list, and with a few exceptions, they love us.  If this sounds interesting, check out the link above or our general help wanted page.  And I don’t know who’s photo that is on the "Letter from the CEO" page.  I interviewed for the part, but I guess they decided I didn’t look enough like the typical CEO.  That’s fine, I never aspired to that anyway.

Video iPod

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It seems to me that
there are more than the usual number of new technologies coming to market that
could make the next few years really interesting.  I’m writing this on my way
back from visiting customers in New Jersey and I’m listing to my newest toy, a
video iPod.  Apple isn’t the first to make it possible to watch video on a
handheld device, but they’ve made it easy.  First some stats. 
  • My iPod has a 60 GB
    hard drive in it. That’s the same size as the hard drive in my fairly-new Dell
    laptop.
  • Right now my iPod has
    3238 songs on it.  I buy more CDs than ever and I purchase music from artists
    that will never have a real recording contract.  I enjoy my music more too
    because of how I can easily create playlists that capture exactly what I want to
    listen to at the moment.
  • 13 videos (I said I
    just got it!)
  • 12,540 photos.  That
    is every single digital photo I’ve ever taken and my first digital camera was a
    Sony that wrote to floppy disks.  My niece Lisa looked at every single one of
    the photos the day after Thanksgiving.  It took her about an hour, so she was
    speeding through, but it was fun to see photos I had forgot about when one would
    catch her eye and she would ask about it. I did the math, that’s about 4 a
    second.  I just tried it myself and it is easy to go that fast and still get
    some idea of the photos.
  • 38 unabridged audio
    books from Audible (two are Stephen King books so these are not small
    books)
  • 4 podcast
    subscriptions – I’m not really into podcasts.  One of these is really a video
    podcast.
With all of that,
there is still 29 GB of space left, which is quite a bit more than is available
on my laptop.  If I need more space on the laptop, I could always mount the iPod
as a second hard disk.  (No, my laptop is not an Apple.  Windows XP and the
iTunes synchronization software works great together.)
 
You can
already buy a few TV episodes and music videos from iTunes, but in a very short
time much if not most of what is available on the TV will be available as
easy-to-sync content for the iPod and other players.  Trust me on this, the
introduction of the video iPod is going to be a big part of the move to make it
possible to watch whatever you want, whenever you want it and not just on little
screens but also on your regular internet-connected TV.  USA Today had at least
3 or 4 stories today about the changes that are sweeping the entertainment
industry and what it means for the studios and
networks.
 
Speaking of
the little screen, I haven’t tried to watch a movie on it yet, but everyone who
has played with it has commented on how great the screen looks.  For about $20 I
bought a cable that makes connecting to a TV as easy as plugging in a DVD
player.  The image scales nicely but again I haven’t tried to watch a movie this
way.
 
Someday this
device will end up in my Museum of Cool but Obsolete Technology, but for now it
is making me think a lot about how the world is changing, and I’m getting to
listen to some great Bluegrass in the process.