Evan Bartlett ‘s blog

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Wonder how much they A/B tested this? Too much time looking at deal sites!

In case you guys missed it, Sean Black from Salescrunch (the company behind SalesSchool ) lead a great panel last night on Building a Sales Machine.

What did I learn?

NYC really really wants to talk about Sales!

Startups in particular turned out in force to talk about the “four-letter-word” that so few seem to understand. Sales, revenue, inbound marketing, conversion metrics, and comp plans where the topics of discussion. This is just the tip of the iceberg, so I’m looking forward to future events!
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One of the greatest indicators of whether or not I end up being a long time user of certain piece of software is PERSISTENCE.  Is this piece of software accessible everywhere I want to be?

These are the places I spend my time, and these are the places I need to access my apps

1. web
2. mobile (apps & web apps)
3. desktop
4. email

Example 1: Evernote

They’ve got a web app, an iphone app, a blackberry app, a bookmarklet to clip content from the browser (firefox & safari), and desktop apps for mac and windows.  They are covered from almost every angle, and for those moments in between I can still send in notes via email.

Example 2: Posterous

For Posterous, publishing directly from their web app was almost an after thought.  They know its a lot to ask to require someone to come to your site just to create content, so their main focus is e-mail.  E-mail is a shortcut to accessibility, and saves them the time and effort of creating apps for different platforms (even though they have a great iphone app for posting pics)

I can create posts from Gmail, or from my mobile phone, and then I have the option to send these posts to any of the services that you see in the list here on the right.  You can set it up to auto post for to every service in your list, or you can choose on the fly by indicating the destination in the email address you use ” flickr+twitter+vimeo@xxxx.posterous.com” or “posterous+flickr@xxxx.posterous.com”.

Not only is Posterous accessible from almost anywhere, but it actually increase your reach by tying into all these extra services.

Example 3: Remember The Milk

RTM ( Remember the Milk) is a todo or task application, and what makes it so great is that I have access from anywhere.  Not only can I view my todos from their iphone app, mobile web app, web app, and even a few 3rd party desktop apps, but I can also add tasks via email.

No matter where I go, I know I can quickly jott (yes, they integrate with jott too, so you can create tasks via voicemail) down reminders to do things, or look at my list of todos, which is what makes RTM so sticky.  If i needed to jot something down, and i wasn’t able to get access to the app, that would be the first step in making me into a non-user.

So how are you making your apps accessible from everywhere?  Is this tough to do with a small team because of the resources required to build for so many platforms?

The last thing I needed was another distraction, but google didn’t give me much choice.  They dropped this little buzz bomb right into my inbox.

First off, buzz is a great idea, and I can already tell it’s going to get massive traction just because of it’s location. Gmail may be the only thing I use significantly more than Facebook, so anything you insert into Gmail is going to get some eyeballs.

It’s biggest advantage is also my biggest frustration. Besides being a distraction to my already growing inbox problem, it also presents a clash of my public and private worlds. Up until now gmail has remained a private safe haven. Conversations with any new acquainances take place on Twitter and Facebook, but only progress to gmail once they’ve reached a certain threshold ( yes getting someone email on Facebook or Twitter before moving to gmail can be a barrier). Point being, buzz blows my private gmail world wide open.

The default settings for buzz are SUPER public, and the options for private sharing are confusing at best:

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Even if I did want to make a post private, how would I choose who to share it with?  Why isn’t it an option to share with just the people you follow? Am I really going to put in the work of going through my gmail contacts to break them up into subgroups based on location, interests, or each person is a work friend, highschool friend, etc? I’ve been down that road before on Facebook and it’s a mess.

To make matters worse, I can’t seem to separate buzz from my public google profile and I can’t seem to turn the profile off either.  In the end, I would have preferred a buzz that operates much more like the old Facebook, just for the people I accepted as friends. Then they could have given me the option to go public with certain material, a la Twitter.

So who do these 3 stack up? Facebook, buzz, and Twitter?

Facebook is clearly in the lead. As I recently overheard someone say; “Facebook is the new cell phone, you can’t have a social life without it”. Facebook has a strangle hold on users, and they are not leaving for any other services anytime soon… Except buzz.

By catching users at the one place they go before Facebook, Google has a chance to siphon off a bunch of activity, and become an equally critical platform.  The uphill battle both of these services face is whether or not people will trade their privacy to help bring in ad revnues.  Will the new public default scare away more people than they could have gained by keeping the warm and fuzzy “friends only” settings of the early facebook days?

Twitter chose to “go public” from day one, so they don’t face these privacy issues, but I don’t think anyone can make the case that twitter carries the same value to individual users, or is growing nearly as fast.

Will public win or will people find some other refuge to have their social chats in a more private setting?

Everyone from ReadWriteWeb to Huffpo seems to be focused on what the iPad doesn’t have.  Thats not the point.  What we should really be talking about how the iPad stacks up to its nearest relatives, and how the ipad will do a better job of giving people what they want.

Kindle

These two devices are not competitive. The Kindle is simply new book format, one that drastically shrinks the physical size of the book and makes it much easier to buy.  These are great features, but the kindle is too slow with its monochromatic screen to make it a good email, photo browsing or RSS reading device.

In a previous post,  “Kindle: reshaping the computer industry” , I wrote about how much I liked the form factor, and despite the Kindle not delivering on all the potential (email, blogging, commenting, rss),  I could see this mid size range become its own device category.  In the end, the Kindle offers a decent niche devices for book lovers AND it makes a great case for the tablet form factor or ipad.

iPhone / Ipod touch

Next, let’s talk about the iPad’s little brother, the iPhone/iPod touch. After two previous attempts to use the phone, and a full switch two months ago (I’m in Paris, where I’ve got the choice of 4 carriers), I still don’t like the device as a phone.

I you break the functionality breaks down into two parts

1) the phone (calling, sms, email)
2) the reader (everything on the ipod touch).

The reader experience is the real game changer.  On the phone side of things, the experience is still clumsy compared to my blackberry. The reader on the other hand, is a joy to use, and I use it so much I never have any juice left for phone calls.   Even with just wifi access, I’m hooked on the apps. I read rss feeds with mobile rss , surf the web with safari, catch up with friends on Facebook, and read the NYTimes, Le Monde, etc.  The only thing I could ask for, is a bigger screen….. which yet again points to the ipad.

Netbooks

Last, let’s look at the booming netbook category. Is anyone really happy with their netbook? Everyone ran out to buy one of these tiny devices with visions of no strings attached web surfing, emailing, writing, etc …. But what they got was compromise. The keyboards turn out to be tiny, the processors underpowered even for basic use,  and at arms length the 9-10inch screen seems much smaller than you thought. It’s almost as if you would be better off holding it in your hands, like a book or like an….

Yes, ipad. Not only do all 3 of these devices make the case for the ipad, but they also make the case that it doesn’t really need any fancy extra features to succeed.  What good is multitasking if its slow?  Or flash if it crashes?  The ipad just needs to deliver on a good screen, iPhone / iPod touch like ease of use, and reasonable battery life.  Everything else, from the enhanced processor, to the ipad specific apps , and the 3g connectivity are just the icing on the cake.

( Ok, they should just throw in a camera to get everyone to shut up about it )

An amazing article from Sherry Buffington came across my inbox (by way of Alltop through a Posterous subscription email) a few days ago, and I couldn’t get over how accurate she was with her 8 essential attributes of sales people.  I don’t imagine you’re familiar with her work, as its in the self help space, and she’s on rocking 30 followers on Twitter, but the article really stuck with me:

Its a bit cheesy, but after a little reflection, I had a lot of questions.  Do these attributes apply to early stage companies? Why do startups think sales is a four letter word?  Why isn’t revenue required to have a “company”?  Otherwise isn’t it just a hobby? Would startups even want to read this article because its copywrited 2006 (which is old new for them)?

To help bridge the gap, here’s an analysis of how each of the attributes from Sherry’s list maps out to the early stage startup world:

1)  Achievement Drive

This may mean something in big business talk, but to us this means EXECUTION OBSESSED.

Sales people are fast talking fast acting deal closing machines.  They’re going to be more aggressive than your average startup hire, and they’ll be just as goal focused as your google analytics addicted user conversion team.  Like everyone else in the startup space, don’t be afraid to let sales people learn on the job, because they should be more than comfortable jumping into a new industry head first!

You need to be careful not to hire the time share selling Gordon Gecko that would sell his own mother to protect your startup’s culture, but this extra “edge” is what you need to close big deals for big $.

2) Empathy

A big part of the web2.0 / social media trend is about making companies more personal.  Think Whole Foods having a facebook page.  Sales people working for a startup need to reflect that as well.

They need to know what problems their products solve, and how they can help their customers.  The cold hard sell does not work anymore because most people can sniff it out, and becaues they expect more from companies these days.

Empathize too much, and you won’t close the deal.  You’ll spend all your time worrying about the features that have yet to be built, and not enough time closing what you currently have.

3) Self Confidence

90% of all startups fail… so yes, sales people at startups have to be EVEN more comfortable with failure.  Their obsession with execution and strong belief or faith tha the startup is game changing (we’ll touch on faith in a future post) has to keep them going in the worst of times.

After 100 phone calls, 20 touches/contacts,  and 20 rejects, a good sales person will pick up the phone and close a deal on the 21 st call.  A great sales person will close a deal on the 21st call AND give you a full analysis based on what they learned during the 20 calls in which they made contact.

• 10 of the calls were to this profile of customer, and this type of customer won’t buy until they’ve reached X in revenue
• 5 of the calls were to the wrong person in the organization, and for 2 of them they told me the product manager was the decision maker
• 4 of the calls where to potential customers that were already using a competitors product, we need to follow up in 6 months once they’re feeling the pain again
• 1 call came from a legitimate objection, he was an educated customer, and wants a demo with a product team to go through the details

With so much to say on the subject, and so little time, I’m going to break this up into several posts…

First, lets start with the assumption that you use more than a couple of social web apps, and each time you sign up for a new social service you find yourself wishing that all your friends were already connected to you on this new account.  Enter the term “Social Graph”, and the dilemna of ownership and portability.  You can read in depth about it here and you can learn more about general social graph 1.0 problem here.

To solve the first Social Graph problem, solutions like Facebook connect popped up.  Many services let you log in via gmail or twitter to import your address books.  You could register for a new service, or just log in using facebook connect, and within a few minutes you could have a your whole social graph, or at least enough to get started, connected to you. Enter Social Graph Problem 2.0:

Not only do I want to take my social graph with me, but now I want to break it down and carry that meta data with me.

Facebook, in 2006, launched a “news feed” feature dumping all your friends actions into a long stream and immediately overwhelming users across the platform.  The natural reaction (besides futile protesting) was to group friends into little subgroups, to break the data down into more consumable chunks.  This way Facebook could serve as a feed reader from your friends from “college”, “work”, or even “highschool” through their “Friends Lists” feature.

Now, I’ve got 600 + friends, its going to be a huge pain to do this manually.  And worse, what if I want my friends categorized like this on other services? Is facebook going to let me take these lists (categories, subgroups, etc) to another service?  Seesmic, Tweetdeck, and most recently Twitter have all added the ability to create lists, while services such 37 Signal’s Highrise CRM sofware have powerful tagging features to categorize your contacts.  Things get even more confusing when you bring in new services like, Friendfeed, Threadsy and Gist, where you can group your friends and they communications across all your services (twitter, facebook, etc)

In summary, we’re pushing the envelope of data portability, and I think its exposing a bigger problem.  These are my friends.  These are my contacts in life, and to stay in touch with them I need a better way to organize them.  These categories and lists are rapidly going to become important across all the services you use, and right now they’re stuck in one place.

To some up this year’s TC50 experience I wanted to write about the most exciting company there, AnyClip (full disclosure, Nate and I are good friends).

1) The product looks damn good

First and foremost, the product looked damn good for only four months of work.  Within a few seconds of looking at it, even from the back of the room, you could tell what it did.  Compare that to all the “realtime web” applications that just had long cluttered pages of “lifestreaming” data, this one really stands out.

2) The pitch was smooth, slow, and confident

Aaron’s spoke about his company and the space they’re in with AUTHORITY.  Not something you see from the first timers.  He spoke slowly, and described the product in simple terms everyone could understand, while keeping them entertained with an exciting demo (and some crass jokes).

More importantly he didn’t cram in 2000 details about the features, and he got straight to the important issues that the judges wanted to discuss

3) They’re taking a huge risk, and thats what startups are about

There was no sneaking around the licensing issue.  Its the 1000lb gorilla in the room.  Everyone knows it, and everyone wants to see them suceed.

4) Like I just said, EVERYONE wants this to happen

Who hasn’t said to themselves “oh shit, what movie was that,” in a conversation with their friends.  Its something that everyone from my grandma to girlfriend or sister (people that don’t fall into the uber nerd category) can understand.