Fellow blogger Rob Walling and I were featured on the .NET Rocks podcast yesterday. You can check out the interview here. We’ve been featured on a few other podcasts for the Micropreneur Academy that we put together last year. When I get a chance, I’ll post the links to those podcast interviews.
Be Smart, Make a Ton of Money Doing Stupid Stuff
Posted by Mike Taber on January 8th, 2010
Several weeks ago, someone pointed me to an article on a blog I’d never read before. It was very profound it its simplicity. It was called Smart People should do Stupid Stuff. The basic concept of this blog post was that there are millions of dollars to be made doing things on the internet that anyone is capable of doing. I mean quite literally, anyone can do these things, regardless of how smart or how dumb you are. Here’s a very short excerpt, because I know you’re not going to go actually read the entire article.
Demote Your Product Manager, Release Better Software
Posted by Mike Taber on January 6th, 2010
When it comes to software, my second biggest pet peeve is software that doesn’t work. By that I mean software that blatantly doesn’t do things that it should fundamentally be able to do. For example, things like… I don’t know… like maybe changing the administrator password of the application to something other than “admin” without crashing the whole damned craplication until you reinstall it.
I don’t blame the developers. Sure, they write the code, but at the end of the day they’re not the ones who sign off on the release. I think it’s pretty rare that some junior developer says “We’re ready. Ship it!”, and only then will the product ship.
The Day the MicroISV Movement Died
Posted by Mike Taber on November 17th, 2009
I remember the day very clearly, although it was not apparent to me at the time. It was the day that the Micro-ISV movement died.
A Brief History
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the history of the Micro-ISV, I’ll provide it for you here. Eric Sink is widely credited with the creation of the term “MicroISV”. As far back as May 8, 2003, Eric was talking about what he referred to as “Small ISV’s“. The concept is rather simple in nature. An “ISV” is an independent software vendor, a phrase which is derived primarily from the Microsoft ecosystem and refers to software companies that are not Microsoft. As for the “Small” part, they’re small companies with anywhere from 3-100 employees. It’s a pretty simple definition, but definitive as well.
How to Make Developer Certifications That Matter
Posted by Mike Taber on November 12th, 2009
Last week, I was asked by a potential business partner what I thought of certifications. I immediately clapped my hands like a giddy 3 year old at Christmas and screamed out “It depends, it depends!!!”. Ok, so maybe I didn’t really get giddy, clap my hands or scream, but in standard consultant fashion, I did say that it depends. Then I launched into a spiel about the customers we were specifically talking about who might or might not actually care about certifications and why. This made me think about certifications for developers.
Unfortunately, certifications for developers don’t mean much to other developers. If you have just one certification, people will probably look past it. But if you have a laundry list of developer certifications, other developers are going to start asking what it is that you really know. In general, I’ve found that the number of certifications a developer has is usually inversely proportional to their actual skill. Most people I talk to would agree. But why is this? There’s one simple answer.
The certification system for developers is fundamentally broken.
Domain Name Change
Posted by Mike Taber on November 11th, 2009
This morning, I made several changes to the server that runs my blog and will continue to make tweaks over the next week or two. Essentially I’m transitioning everything to slowly use the singlefounder.com domain instead of miketaber.net, which is probably what you are used to seeing. Interestingly enough, my Google Page Rank is going to be a 3 either way.
I would make all of the changes all at once, but I need to be sure that things like my RSS feed and my FeedBurner stats are still working properly. If I change too many things at once, it will take me longer to figure out exactly what caused the issue. With things like my RSS feed at FeedBurner, I won’t find out anything is wrong for a full day and I’d rather avoid that if possible.
Unfortunately, one byproduct of the most recent change is that the Tweet counters for all of my posts have been reset. An apparent casualty of war, which is fitting I suppose on Veterans day. There are a few other byproducts of the domain change, such as image links which still point to the old domain which might break in the future, should I ever neglect to redirect those URL’s properly. I’m hoping that the main artifacts of change are not noticeable for the most part, but if you happen to see something, please let me know.
Thus far, as I’m sure you gathered from my last post, the domain name change and facelift to the site are largely complete. Next comes more frequent blog posts. It’s not the writing that’s difficult. It’s deciding what order to publish them in and whether they’re good enough for “prime time”.
Stay tuned.
Re-branding Products, Services and Companies
Posted by Mike Taber on November 9th, 2009
The past several weeks I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the work associated with and the consequences of re-branding something. In part, I’m talking about my Blog but also some of the products that I have developed and some of my services offerings through my consulting company. The process made me sit down, think about re-branding in general, and do some research. Here’s what I learned.
Why Should You Re-brand?
There are a few different reasons to re-brand a product, offering, or company. The first is to shed a negative image. On May 11th, 1996 a DC-9 flown crashed in the Everglades killing 110 people. The airline that owned the plane was ValuJet. They were grounded by the government for three months following the incident. When they were given permission to begin flying again, they found it very difficult to attract customers because the public perception was that their low fares lead to shoddy maintenance and ultimately the crash. In 1997, ValuJet purchased a competitor that was one-third their size and re-branded the entire company to use the name of their newly acquired competitor. That company was AirTran.
The second reason for re-branding is to attract new customers. Sometimes even the name for a product doesn’t quite make sense. It’s unwieldy and doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. In early 2007, a company called SimulScribe was selling voicemail-to-text software and felt the company name was holding them back. They received a lot of their business from word of mouth referrals, but the name was difficult to spell and didn’t roll off the tongue.
They hired a re-branding consultant which ultimately didn’t work out. Eventually, the founder came up with the new name while on his own during a flight from LA to New York City. That name was PhoneTag. They had some challenges, but the new name seemed to work out really well. Their daily sign up rate is up 40% and the number of customer referrals has tripled. The only downside to the re-branding effort was not doing it sooner.
The third reason to re-brand is to focus your efforts, either because you didn’t have focus in the past, or because you’re trying to appeal to a sub-market. Many manufacturers re-brand their products to enter a lower end segment because they don’t want to dilute the value of their core brand or don’t want the new brand to be dragged down by the old one. For example Lexus is well known as a luxury car, but it is owned by Toyota. Dexxa is the name on low priced computer mice, but is manufactured by Logitech. There are a lot of other examples, but the key component here is making sure that the new brand doesn’t have a negative effect on the old brand or be influenced by the old brand.
Problems With Re-branding
Re-branding is a difficult thing to do correctly. It’s easy to change the name of something. It’s much harder to make it work to your advantage and in exactly the way that you intend. One of the difficulties with re-branding is striking a balance between attracting new customers, and alienating old ones. This applies whether you’re re-branding a product, a service or a blog. In a way, readers of your blog are customers. They have been attracted to your site for one or more articles that were written and subscribed for the same reasons. Re-branding can alienate some of them because you might not be focused on what originally attracted them, so some attrition is going to occur.
The same is true for products or services. A balance must be struck between going too far in the re-branding effort, and not far enough. How far you should go is dictated by your reasons for re-branding. If it is to shed a negative image, you will need to do a complete overhaul. If your intent is to attract new customers, then a mid-level change is required to strike a balance. And if you simply want to reinforce your brand with the existing customer base, then perhaps a fresh coat of paint will suffice.
No matter what, you need to have a plan moving forward. Without a plan, the re-branding process will not be as effective as it needs to be to make it work.
Re-branding The Single Founder Blog
So all of that re-branding mumbo-jumbo was a lead in to this. What follows are the efforts I’ve taken thus far, and will take in the future to re-brand my blog. I’ll post about some of my other re-branding efforts in the future, but one thing at a time.
Subscription Methods
In the past, I only offered RSS as a subscription method, but within the last month or so, I added the ability to subscribe via via email using Google Feedburner as the back end. It’s worked out well enough so far, and I’ve only had one person unsubscribe since I implemented it at the end of September. He or she might have switched to RSS, but I don’t know for sure. Other email subscribers have trickled in, but I suspect that people prefer to use RSS to manage their subscriptions instead of email. I’ve gathered a lot more RSS subscribers in the past 4 weeks than email subscribers. I’ve also started using and in only a week with absolutely zero marketing, I have a modest following of about 20 people already, none of whom I’ve ever met face to face.
The reality is that I have no good way of tracking whether I’m really getting the message out about being a single founder and running your own company from the comfort of your own home. I know others are making taking a similar journey and making it work, but I feel that the journey itself is just as important as the destination. I’d like to share that journey with as many people as possible and measuring subscribers is a much better indicator than unique website visitors.
Face Lift
Next, is obviously the face lift itself. I implemented a new theme, but the categories need to be changed up a bit because the new theme has them listed across the top of the menu bar and doesn’t display all of them. There’s a few cleanup items to do concerning the excerpts on the main page and adding a few descriptive pages to the site, but it looks a lot better than the previous SimpleX Wordpress theme I was using. I have a list of things that I’m working through right now.
New Domain Name
Perhaps the most significant change I’m making is to focus the content of the site more on how to build a business consisting of a recurring revenue stream as a single founder company, which some refer to as a solopreneur. About 2 years ago, I blogged about trying to land the singlefounder.com domain, only to find that someone else registered it a few days before I had. It had been on my radar to snag the domain name for months, but I waited because I was an idiot. Actually, I felt that I didn’t have the time to go about doing something significant with it so wasn’t willing to shell out a mere $10 for a domain when I wasn’t ready to use it. That’s prudent for some things, but not domain names.
Anyway, I contacted Scott Preston, who had purchased the site immediately after he registered it. He is a fellow blogger based in Ohio, has written a book on programming robots using Java, and seems like my kind of techie. Unfortunately, he wasn’t terribly interested in selling the domain as he had some of the same ideas I did about building it out into a place where people could leverage it as a resource for building single founder companies. Fast forward two years and he still hadn’t done anything with it. In fact, it didn’t point to a server at all. I considered making him another offer, but decided against it. I don’t know what he would have sold it me for or whether he would have sold it at all. In the end, Scott didn’t bother to renew the domain and I ended up buying the domain name as it expired without forking over loads of cash.
I’ll give the story behind how to buy expiring domain names in the next couple of weeks, but I think you’ll find the process interesting. I also managed to snag miketaber.com using the same method. If you don’t want to miss that story, subscribe now using either RSS or email. *hint* *hint*
More Frequent Blog Posts
For those of you who have been following me for the past few years, you’ll have noticed that since 2007, I’ve been rather absent. I’ve had a lot going on. I’ve added two children to my family, expanded my company, contracted my company, ridden an economic boom, suffered through the economic slowdown, opened an office, closed an office, and finished a Masters degree, among other things. It’s a lot to deal with, but I think I’ve learned how to manage it all moving forward. This past month, I’ve started writing a lot more and you can expect more of the same as time goes on. If you’ve lost faith since 2007 that I would shed some light on running a business as a single founder company, my apologies. I aim to right that wrong ASAP.
On that note, leaving comments or questions helps keep me going. If you want to help keep this blog going and appreciate the advice, distraction from reality, and general edutainment that it gives you, just post to the comments. It’s virtually no effort on your part, but does a great deal for my motivation to continue.
This Time It Will Be Different
In any case, I intend to move forward with the singlefounder.com domain name to provide a real identity for my blog and to reflect my goals for the future. I’m still a tech geek at heart. I love writing software, I really like interfacing software and hardware; doing cool geeky things is fun, but doing fun stuff doesn’t provide the lifestyle that I want. At least not yet it hasn’t.
I’ve been self employed for more than 4 years now and I’m not quite where I want to be. I’ve come to realize that I know exactly why I’m not. It’s because I lost focus of my goals. I used to post my goals at the beginning of each year. I did it in 2006 and again in 2007. Somehow I got off track posting those goals in 2008 and 2009, but realistically I got off track long before then. You see, once the consulting business started to take off, I never reviewed the goals I had written to begin with. I just ran off into the weeds without looking at the map I laid out. Bad Single Founder, no donut! It’s time to change all that.
In a way, I feel like PC guy in the Mac commercials. “This time it will be different. Trust me.”
But this time it will be different and for one very important reason. My life has changed, and my new goals reflect that. Back in 2005 when I started my journey toward self employment, I had one goal in mind, which was to run my own company and not have to work for someone else. It’s been 4 years now and I’ve been largely successful with that. It hasn’t been quite as smooth as I would have liked, but it has worked out well enough so far. Now I have a new goal which simply builds on the previous one.
My Next Goal
To transition my situation from offering consulting services to offering software products.
Over the past several years, I’ve traveled a lot for work, averaging about 3 months of every year on the road. It was fun at first. I flew all over the US from Minneapolis to southern Texas. From Boston to Vegas. I even did work overseas, flying to Paris, Athens, San Juan and working with a client out of Australia. I’m married, but the money was great and the wife understood what I was doing. Then I had two kids.
It’s a lot harder to leave two kids at home when they’re so young, because they grow up so fast and I feel like I missed quite a few things; like rolling over for the first time, the first few steps, the first hand wave, the first high five, etc. I probably would have missed them anyway, regardless of how I was making ends meet. But at such a young age, they learn to do so much in a week that I felt like I missed a lot more than I should have due to my travels. Besides I really liked traveling at first. I loved it even. It’s very exciting to fly into a new city or country, explore it as much as you are able in the time that you have, and then go off to something new. It just doesn’t work for me anymore.
So my new focus is to run my business completely from home to spend more time with my family, while making what I hope will be a substantial living doing it. It’s going to take time to put all of the different pieces together, but this blog will serve as the place where I document the journey, my successes, my failures, and the tools I use to get there.
The nice part is that I have a much more substantial network of people to help me than I did several years ago. I have software and hardware infrastructures in place from my consulting company, and at this point, I understand what it takes to maintain a company and grow it.
I will post my concrete goals in a blog entry next week, so stay tuned for more detailed information. Just one other quick hint before I go. Subscribe to this blog. I promise that I’ll make it well worth your while as I describe in detail my successes and failures on this expanded journey.
Blog overhaul
Posted by Mike Taber on November 3rd, 2009
Today I did of an overhaul on my blog, giving it a facelift and a new theme. I’ll continue working on it over the next week or so. I’ve got a lot of other changes to make before I’m done, but should be finished by the end of the weekend. I expect to fix some UI elements here and there, but if you see anything that is blatantly broken, please let me know.
Startup Success Podcast Appearance
Posted by Mike Taber on October 29th, 2009
For anyone out there who is a Podcast fan, I was featured on a recent episode of the Startup Success Podcast with Rob Walling talking about the Micropreneur Academy. It’s one of several Podcasts I’ve been featured on with Rob over the past several weeks. I’ll highlight this and all of my other appearances on a separate page soon, but I thought I’d share this once since it’s the most recent and not everyone listens to or subscribes to the Podcasts I might be appearing on.
You can download an MP3 of the podcast for free right here.
How to Sell Enterprise Software
Posted by Mike Taber on October 29th, 2009
One of the biggest differences between selling software to small businesses versus selling into the Enterprise space is the price. Most people think that it has to do with how well the software scales and it’s ability to do its job on an “Enterprise” level, whatever that it supposed to mean. Others will say it has to do with the feature sets and whether you bought the Micro-ISV edition or the Enterprise Edition. Simply not true.
The one and only difference is the total price on the bottom of the bill. And it is this total price that dictates whether or not you need sales reps to sell your software.
First, let me quantify roughly what I consider to be the different market segments. This is mostly based on my experience as a Symantec partner, so your definitions may vary but I want to give you an idea of what I’m talking about. In my world, up to 1,000 client computers is considered small to medium business(SMB), up to 5,000 is the Enterprise, and above that is Large Enterprise.
The Problem
At any given company, managers and directors have a certain level of purchasing authority. Below a certain dollar amount, they have free reign and can buy whatever they feel is appropriate and within their yearly budget without getting a signature from their manager for approval. So $50 isn’t a problem. Spending $50,000 isn’t quite as easy.
The problem of selling “Enterprise” software comes about because of the size of the company making the purchase. If I’m selling widgets for $50 each, I can sell just one to an Enterprise level company and they won’t even think twice. But what if they want one for every employee?
Suddenly the price tag for your widgets went from $50 to $50,000 for a 1,000 employee company, and to $250,000 for a 5,000 employee company. These companies make millions, or even billions but they’re not stupid. They put spending controls in place to ensure that people aren’t wasting money on frivolous things. It’s just common sense.
Unfortunately for the vendor, this prolongs the sales process from what might have been a few minutes on the vendors’ website, to one that takes several weeks or even months to complete. This is why sales reps are hired to sell into Enterprise accounts. The sales process needs to be managed from beginning to end.
What does the sales rep do?
Well, they buy dinner, they buy drinks. They make sure you get drunk and have a good time at whatever event they happened to convince you to come to. Eventually, you like them enough, or are drunk enough to blow thousands of dollars of money that isn’t yours and everyone is happy.
I’ve seen that happen, but most companies don’t really work that way. Mainly, it is the job of the sales rep to manage the sale and try to close the deal. That means determining if there’s an opportunity for a sale, and then driving that sale to its Natural End. Note that I don’t say to completion. The Natural End of a sale can be one of four things.
- You won the deal
- A competitor won the deal
- The sale got pushed into the future
- The sale died somewhere along the way
Winning the deal or losing it to the competition are self-explanatory. Sales get pushed to the future for a variety of reasons. Some are budget related, some are concerns over the product or vendor, etc. We’re going to focus on the last outcome, which is that the sale died.
When a sale dies, it typically happens because you weren’t paying attention to something important. This tends to be the most painful outcome. If you are head to head with a competitor, at least you had a shot at it. When deals get pushed, you still have a shot, but you won’t receive a PO anytime soon.
The biggest problem with deals that die is that you wasted your time, money and effort chasing something that you never had a chance at winning. Everything you did was for something that wasn’t ever going to happen. Unfortunately, we’re all too human and think that because the customer is talking to us, we have a chance at winning.
Let me break you of that habit right now. Just because a customer is talking to you and likes you doesn’t mean they’re going to buy anything from you. In fact, it might be your best friend in the whole world on the other end of the phone who completely trusts you and it still might not happen.
Sales reps are typically compensated by the volume of sales they make, not the relationships they have with the customers they talk to. To be successful making sales at the Enterprise level, you need to spend your time working on deals that have a good chance of landing, and avoid talking to customers who are either unwilling, or unable to make a purchase. So how do you tell the difference? Enter the sales methodology BANT.
BANT
BANT is an acronym which stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. Without all four of these things, any deal you’re working on is going to die before you get a PO. This methodology technically is applicable to any sale, regardless of the price. But it becomes a lot more important at the Enterprise level where you are spending human resources chasing a small handful of customers. A sales rep can only talk to so many customers in a day, but a single website can “talk” to millions of customers all at the same time. So what do these terms mean and why are they important?
Budget – Make sure that whomever you’re talking to has a budget for whatever you’re selling or that they can get one. And remember that just because someone says they can get the money, doesn’t mean that they can. You can have all the ROI justifications you want in your back pocket, and if they don’t have the cash to spend, it’s just not going to happen. Spending $1 million now to save $10 million sounds great, but if they don’t have $1 million, it doesn’t matter.
Authority - Is the person you’re talking to the guy or gal who makes the final decision? Does he put his name on the PO? If not, you need to find out who does make the decision and talk to them instead. It’s ok to ask to talk to this other person. If you’re afraid of offending the person, then you’re in the wrong business. Always try to talk to the person in charge. You can convince every single one of his minions that what you’re selling will really help them out, but at the end of the day, they’re not the ones who have the authority to make the decision. Without speaking to him or her, you won’t know if there are other projects that take precedence.
Need - Is there a genuine need for what you’re selling? At the personal level, luxury items like chocolate and nice cars are not absolutely necessary. A Honda gets you to the same place as a Ferrari. It might be slower, but it gets the job done. Find out if what you’re selling is a necessity, or if they can get by with the way things are today.
Timeline - How long can things go on the way they are without addressing the issues that your product or service would address? If you sell RFID tags which help companies do inventory, ask how long they can do their inventory manually. If they can go forever, move on to the next lead. Remember that you can’t push a rope.
Summary
It’s important to make sure that the people you’re talking to have the ability to move forward and make a purchase. If they don’t have the ability to move forward, it doesn’t matter how badly they want what you have to offer. It’s a little unnatural to avoid calling people whom you’ve started to develop a relationship with, but it’s necessary if you want to make the best use of your time.
The fact of the matter is that this methodology applies whether you’re selling Enterprise software or dish detergent. Understanding the methodology behind the sales process is the key to being successful, no matter what it is that you’re actually selling or who you’re selling it to.
Do you have a favorite sales methodology that works for you? Leave a comment and let us know.
Sales reps are typically compensated by the volume of sales they make, not the “quality” of the customers they sell to.
