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.

Photo by   Finn Gross Maurer   on   Unsplash         There are loads of super hero movies these days. Most blogs would take advantage of the super hero movie craze and talk about how to be that super hero, but I thought of giving it a new spin to look at how to avoid being a villain in one. The Evil Post Box The first advice I was given by a manager was “I didn't hire you to be a post box. Post box just take letters and wait for them to be picked up. I hired you to value add to the company.” This stuck to my head since. From every job and role I took, I look I could value add to that position. For example, one of my jobs required me to read tech publications daily. I had this bright idea then that if we were reading all this publications and reporting them, why don't we provide media monitoring services too. Soon the media monitoring business grew. One of the challenges though was how to purchase less expensive publications from overseas...

The latest season 7 of Game of Thrones (GoT) just ended with all the twists and turns you can imagine. For those in IT, and fans of the series, you can take this opportunity to look at 5 ways the fight for the Iron Throne can teach us lessons about the need for IT monitoring. Be warned, spoilers are ahead. Lesson #1: Winter Is Coming The phrase “Winter is coming” was used in the series since the first episode which screened in April and its the slogan for the Starks, who are the lords of the North. The phrase serves as warning, constant vigilance, and the strive to always be prepared for the coming of Winter. Some say it also serve to remind the whole of Westeros of the first White Walker attack thousands of years ago. As Westeros have been enjoying peace for thousands of years, most of Westeros citizens have taken the warning for granted. Even Cersi Lannister, the evil queen, had to see a real White Walker in person to believe the existence of the Night King. The same ...

Singapore Prime Minister Lee, in his National Day Rally, asked why Singaporeans, when it came to the adoption of cashless payments by means of digital or mobile, were so “Suaku” behind that of adoption of China. “Suaku” is a local dialect slang used to described someone who is “behind the times”. Though Singaporeans have the technology know-how and are mostly digitally literate, pick up of digital payments have been rather behind the times. For example, when a local food center was opened after renovation, it was touted to be one of the first food center to full accept payment via the NETS Flashpay or EZlink card. Both are stored valued card payment often used for taking public transport in Singapore. However, after a year, many of the stalls gave up the NETS Flashpay POS (Point-of-Sale) machines. I have asked some of the stalls and they replied low usage which didn't justify the monthly rental payment for the POS machines. Singaporeans are a bunch of pragmatic group of fol...

Screenshot from https://www.facebook.com/ComfortDelGroTaxi/ ComfortDelgro Taxi launched a contest on Sunday 23 July 2017 to get its taxi riders to upload ComfortDelgro's Taxi flat fares and 1 other fixed fare and is giving away a total prize of $54 promo codes to the top three highest savings. In comparison, when Grab ran a contest to introduce its JustGrab service, which connects both taxis and private hire vehicles, Grab gave out 10,000 free rides. If each ride average out to $10, 10,000 free rides would have cost Grab $100,000. In their tertiary Grab-off challenge, Grab was offering $10,000 worth of ride credits to the students. Image from https://www.grab.com/sg/ballinwithgrab/ ComfortDelgro Taxi's low total prize value seems ridiculously low given that its taxi business recorded $167.5 million end of 2016 (Source: http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/comfortdelgro-chalks-record-profit-of-317m). One would expect that a conglomerate like ComfortDe...