Category Archives: Business

Building a Sales Team

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Just read a nice summary from OpenView on hiring your first sales manager. This is, far and away, one of the most daunting things that any technically minded startup CEO faces. If you come from an engineering or science background, it’s easy to think of the sales team as, if not actually an enemy, as something a little bit alien. I know a lot of engineers who simply don’t get on people in sales – they regard them either as ineffective suit-fillers who can’t do “work that matters” or as the latest embodiment of the obnoxious popular kid from high school.

Some companies try to get around this by making sales people out of people who aren’t naturally sales people. In the Healthcare IT space, that’s often former nurses or physicians who want a career change. In software, it’s often software engineers. There’s potential in all three groups, but it takes a certain type.

If all goes well, I’ll be going through this process again in the near future. If so, I’ll post what I learn.

 

 

Learning to Code

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Knowing how to code is a really useful skill for anybody in business. For an entrepreneur, it means you can validate your high-tech startup idea without having to out and recruit a CTO or spend a lot of money on an external software development shop. But even if you’re running a pizza place, a little bit of coding experience can save you a lot of time when you’re playing with Excel spreadsheets late at night trying to figure out how much money all that fancy pepperoni is costing you.  Most people are in the middle. I have a lot of friends who went into management consulting – the ones who know how to write little bits of software to help them do their jobs tend to get a lot more sleep at night.

The other reason to learn programming – even a little bit of programming – is that it makes the whole process of interacting with technology a lot less scary. Computers are black boxes, and people don’t trust black boxes.

So I thought CodeAcademy was pretty cool. It’s a web site that takes you through some simple programming exercises in JavaScript, which is one of the most common programming languages on the web. In half an hour you can go from no experience at all to writing simple programs. They don’t do that much, and to solve real problems you’ll have to do more. But it’s a nice way to start out – and even if the student doesn’t go any further they’ll benefit from a more visceral understanding of how computers work. In the best case, it will teach them to recognize the kinds of patterns that can be solved with a little code.

Having written that, I suppose I should consider the opposite extreme. Just because you can write simple programs after half an hour of interactive lessons doesn’t mean that software development is either easy or low-value. It’s not. A top-tier software engineer took thousands of hours to get that way.

What’s Worth Copying: Junk Removal

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Since I’ve always been interested in the mechanics of customer experiences, when I try a new service I like to break down what works and what doesn’t. I’m going to do this on the blog periodically under the title “What’s Worth Copying”.

So here’s WWC #1. The other day I had to get rid of a bunch of old furniture that was living in my wife’s soon-to-be-former garage. We’d arranged for a charity to come pick it up, but they screwed it up twice, and we were left with just a few days left on the lease and a big pile stuff we were never going to use. If I had all the time in the world I’d have tried to get rid of it on FreeCycle or Craigslist, but that’s not realistic when you’re also trying to launch a startup.

I know nothing about junk removal, but I had seen the ads for 1-800-Got-Junk. Here’s how it went:

What worked well:

  • It was extremely easy to schedule. I went on the web site, picked a time slot (for just six hours later) and got a confirmation of my time slot.
  • The web site signup gathered the minimum information necessary. They didn’t try to get me to create an account, for instance – they created it for me and sent me a randomly generated password by email. All they asked for was name, email address, cell phone and the address where the junk was.
  • Pricing was transparent. They charge by volume, and have a nice little widget on the reservation page that lets you see how much furniture can be crammed in a given amount of truck. It’s very well done, and highly accurate – I was able to tell exactly how much things would cost.
  • The people who do the work were very polite and efficient – they called ahead of time as they were running early, and were willing to wait until the scheduled window if I needed them to. They also spoke excellent English and could clearly communicate the service and understand the instructions I’d given them.We’ve gotten a lot of deliveries recently and this has been a real problem.
  • Payment was easy and flexible.

What didn’t:

  • There wasn’t an obvious tipping policy. At the end of the transaction I realized that I probably should tip, but since I barely ever carry cash anymore, I didn’t have anything to give them. I should say that the guys did not hit me up for a tip or in any way act as if they expected one, which is one of the reasons felt like they deserved one. Since this is a service that most people don’t use on a regular basis, it’s not immediately obvious what you’re supposed to do. I tip movers, right?

So overall, it was a very smooth experience. I feel like I got a good deal – even though I probably could have found the same service for less money if I really looked. So here’s what I think applies to other businesses:

  1. Make it very easy for people to get in and start engaging with your service. When I’m asked to create a password I don’t feel like I’m accomplishing my primary task (in this case, getting rid of a pile of junk). Entering my address does feel productive because I know the truck is going to have to find the house.
  2. Don’t let customers be unpleasantly surprised. Transparent pricing is even more helpful when the customer doesn’t use the service very often. The “how much fits” applet on the reservation page is a really nice touch, since it meant that I didn’t have to spend the day worrying that I’d be charged $1,000 for rubbish removal.
  3. If people are a vital part of the service delivery loop, make sure that they’re trained well enough to avoid frustrating the customer. In this case, there was a pile of stuff in the garage that wasn’t supposed to go, and I felt comfortable pointing that out and then going upstairs to do something else while they loaded the truck. And lo, they didn’t screw it up.  I suspect I paid a premium for this.

At this point, the temptation is to sign off the post with “And that’s What’s Worth Copying.” But I won’t.