Sales In Shorts

One of our new colleagues asked me about the type of salesperson that I am. Q: Are you a hunter or a farmer? A: I am more of a farmer than a hunter. The upside of being a farmer is that you build long term relationships. The downside is that the sales cycle can be longer. Saying these, it is because of the relationship building that I have closed deals over a phone call. Q: Can you sell ice to Eskimos? A: I probably won't sell them ice. I would sell them a refrigerator if it makes sense to them. A refrigerator provides more value than ice. You can control the temperature of a refrigerator to accommodate your needs. By the way, do you need a generator to power your refrigerator? (for those who don't get it, I just added a up sell product)

If you start thinking like a machine, you will mostly be replaced by one. There is current fear mongering that says automation will replace thousand of jobs. Yet, if you do a in depth analysis of this, replacement of human jobs by machines or robots happens only if you start thinking and acting like one. There are some IT managers who have, surprisingly, resisted using IT monitoring software for fear that they will lose their job to the IT monitoring software. Why? The simplest of answer is because IT monitoring takes aways the nitty gritty process of going into a system to monitor the health status of the device. Take for example your Windows machine. You can constantly monitor the hard disk space or memory utilization through the task manager. But would you do checks every 5 mins. Imagine doing that for 10 Windows machines or 100 Windows machine. Such dull repetition of manual work will make any IT manager a dull boy/girl. Yet the IT managers who fear such automation because...

I was asked today what was the strangest thing a customer ever asked us if we could a monitor. "A IT manager in a legal firm asked if we could monitor his copier/printer," I replied. Apparently, when the lawyers are photocopying or printing and they run out of paper, they blame the IT manager because his is in charge of the IT devices. Interestingly, the first thing we can discover and monitor in the offices are usually those copier printers type. Apparently the printer SNMP is able to show paper levels. So now with a IT monitoring software, when the paper levels run low, it will send a email to the admin staff and the admin staff will top up the papers. The legal firm also saw less cursing and swearing at the copier printer.