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The worst sales email I ever received

Sales is hard. There, I said it. You have to have eternal optimism, patience, persistence, a thick skin and (ideally) a range of skills from personal organisation, relationship building and presentation to negotiation and commercial writing. Oh, and maths.

But the first skill you need is to know how to NOT TURN OFF YOUR PROSPECTS. Yes, I’m shouting.

If your first contact is with a phone call, don’t lie to get through to me.

If it’s by email, you have so many more opportunities to get me to discard your contact. A couple of weeks ago I received the worst sales email I’d ever seen. Actually, it was the last in a series of emails from the same guy, but this one took the biscuit (details changed to protect the guilty):

Hi {First Name},

I figured I will try you one last time. We’ve helped 100’s of customers just like you using CrapCart to increase their overall revenue from 5% to 40%. To show you what kind of return on investment you can achieve with SuperThing, we have created this tool: BluSkyIdeas – ROI Calculator.

Do you have 5 minutes for a phone call?

Best,

Homer

Let’s analyse this:

Firstly, my first name is not {First Name}. Buying lists of contacts is fair enough, but at least test your template.

“I figured I will try you one last time” – I don’t care what you “figured”. You also just told me if I ignore you again, you’ll go away. Victory!

“We’ve helped 100’s of customers just like you using CrapCart” – we’re not using CrapCart. Actually, a few seconds on our web site would tell anyone there’s no online shop at all. DO SOME RESEARCH! Oh, and “100’s” shouldn’t have an apostrophe.

“…increase their overall revenue from 5% to 40%” – 5% to 40% of what? This is meaningless. Message: “I don’t understand what I’m talking about”. I assume he meant conversion rates from visitors to buyers, but that’s not “overall revenue”.

Then he mentions “SuperThing”, his product. At no point does he tell me what it is, or what it does. Not “SuperThing, a plugin for CrapCart” – I have to guess. And the tool he linked to was just some demo slides.

Although this was the end of a 3-email campaign, he’d previously sent me lots of mails, the first of which I’d replied to saying we didn’t use CrapCart. I sent him this reply:

{greeting} {first name},

{non-committal comment} {time period}

I suspect your {mailmerge platform} failed.

{never going to be a customer name}

{signature}

He replied with a grudging apology, I reiterated why we weren’t interested. Hopefully he won’t waste my time or his.

By ifinlay | March 3, 2016 | Uncategorized |

iMovie on iPhone can’t see video clips on iCloud Drive – a fix

Here’s an odd one… there are at least two ways to get an MP4 clip into iMovie on your iPhone (and presumably iPad). I’m not talking about moving a video so you can watch it with the videos app, but into an iMovie project.

The first way is to use the app-specific storage in iTunes, but I needed something faster and more generic. So the second way is to put the clip into your iCloud Drive storage, then iMovie is supposed to be able to add it to a project.

The first time I tried this, it just didn’t work. The folder list in Drive didn’t even match the list in iMovie! Adding a folder to try to force a refresh made no difference.

So here’s the fix: Take a quick movie clip on the iPhone, bring it into iMovie and save the movie (or project) in iCloud Drive. Magically, an iMovie folder gets created in Drive and it all starts to work!

Hope this helps you.

By ifinlay | February 19, 2016 | Cloud, Tech tips, Tools and utilities |

Is Amazon making a loss from cloud?

A quote from me on PCR Online (original article here)

 

It’s rumoured that Amazon is not making any money out of its enterprise cloud computing offering.

However, cloud management platform Abiquo says it looks like Amazon is instead reinvesting heavily rather than returning dividends to shareholders.

Amazon is aiming to take a bigger bite out of the enterprise market with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Speaking at the 2013 CRN Channel Conference, Abiquo’s VP of products Ian Finlay said: “We’ve heard those rumours too. It look like they’re making profit from AWS, but are reinvesting heavily rather than returning dividends to shareholders. Managed Service Providers need to look at how they can use Amazon’s services as part of their offering, rather than going head-to-head.”

PCR asked Ian where this rumour may have stemmed from, and he said much of it is from Amazon themselves.

This year, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, said in a letter to shareholders: “Our heavy investments in Prime, AWS, Kindle, digital media, and customer experience in general strike some as too generous, shareholder indifferent, or even at odds with being a for-profit company”.

Furthermore, Amazon competitor Profitbricks calculated that Amazon’s margins on cloud services are over 80 per cent.

Finlay added: “Putting these together, it looks like Amazon is doing well from AWS, but reinvests all the profits in new and better services, while the rest of the market risks a race to the bottom in an attempt to take on Amazon directly.

“The question for the channel, and for more niche MSPs, is how can they compete with this? Abiquo’s answer is that they don’t need to, and that they can help them to leverage Amazon’s investment, add their own services to it, and take it to their own market.”

Other managed service/IT experts spoke at the conference, including The 2112 Group’s Larry Walsh, who said that ‘US managed service providers are killing themselves’.

By ifinlay | November 19, 2013 | Cloud |

Top 5 tips for recruitment companies

So here I am, now CIO for an ISP/managed hosting company, and I occasionally recruit staff. It’s never an easy process – apart from finding the right skills, I have to find the right cultural fit, the right attitude and so on. Some recruiters make this easy and do a great job. Those are the people I use. I’ve used them across 2,3 or even 4 companies, recruiting all sorts of technical, BA and PM roles.

Inevitably, I get cold-called from my LinkedIn profile by other recruiters, or from times when I’ve contacted them – maybe to apply for a role myself. It’s these companies who are the target for the advice I give freely here.

Do comment and let me know your experiences too!

So, to my pearls of wisdom:

  1. If you got my name from your CV database, and your records show you didn’t call me back, or email me back, or respond to my enquiry, DO NOT BOTHER TO CALL ME. You are on my “do not deal with” list. Contrary to what your ego is now telling you, this is not personal pique. If that’s how you treated me as a candidate, that’s how you’ll treat the candidates for roles I’m recruiting. I don’t want to be tarred with your brush.
  2. If you got my name from LinkedIn, and my profile doesn’t say that I’m recruiting and inviting CVs from recruiters, I will just delete your email. If you find my number and call, I will politely listen to you, then ignore anything you’ve said. This is simply because if you can’t read my LinkedIn profile, you can’t read a job spec or a CV. While I’m at it, don’t link to be on LinkedIn until we’ve done business. It’s even more desperate than people with 10,000 Facebook “friends”.
  3. When you ask me what my company does, you’ve just ruled yourself out. There’s a link to my company web site on LinkedIn. Use it. Trust me, you won’t sell anything to anybody unless you understand what they do and what they’re likely to be looking for.
  4. So you specialise in technical recruiting? Please learn why Solaris is not the same as Ubuntu, or why MySQL is not Postgres (or worse, SQL Server). Oh, and a CCNA doesn’t mean a candidate “knows all about networks”, sorry. You earn your fees by understanding this and filtering CVs, not by being a mail relay.
  5. If you send me a six line email with over 900K of clever graphical signature, it’s getting deleted. I have one in my inbox now. Click. Now I don’t. That was strangely satisfying.

So that was five tips. Here’s a bonus tip. Bet you won’t read it….

I worked for a great manager in my last role. His mantra was that the number one job of any manager is to recruit the right team, not just a bunch of skilled individuals. As a recruitment company, if you haven’t met me or my hiring managers, you have NO hope of sending the right candidates to me. THAT’s why I have built long-lasting relationships with a limited number of recruiters, and unless you can be bothered to figure our my company, my team and me you won’t get on my list of trusted partners.

Because the guys I use are just that.

By ifinlay | December 10, 2010 | Recruiting |

The drawbacks of Agile vs Waterfall

So all of us in tech-land have been very keen on Agile development recently. I even presented at a conference on the subject. So what’s in it for those of us responsible for delivering software solutions – and when should we decide when NOT to use it?

What’s in it for me?

From the delivery side of the deal, Agile helps a great deal. For a start, there’s much less pesky requirements gathering, arguments over price (I’ll come back to fixed-price contracts for Agile soon!), and constant moving of delivery timescales. The relationship with the customer, internal or external, is very close and the solution development and testing becomes a true team effort. I’m quite a fan of Test Driven Development, since customers are usually more interested in answering the question “what will it do” than the somewhat more abstract “what are your requirements” – the latter seems to result in long wish lists rather than maintaining a true focus on business benefits. Project scope and it’s attendant success factors are also important for management confidence.

And the drawbacks?

Without the discipline of defining requirements, whether in the form of a specification, user stories or tests, the subject matter experts from the client can fall into the habit of attempting to provide every possible feature – and it’s very hard for us suppliers to rein this in. This can result in escalations to the client management which, while being good stakeholder management practise, can take a long time while the detail is explained, and upset the SMEs in the process.

So…

In my (very) humble opinion, outsourced development could;

Use Agile when:

  • The SME in the client is authoritative, and ideally has budget and delivery responsibility
  • The “must have” feature list for the first release is small
  • A fixed price/fixed delivery is not required
  • The customer’s senior management understand what Agile is, and what is is not

And don’t use Agile when:

  • A fixed price and fixed delivery are required
  • The customer knows exactly what they want
  • The customer’s management needs to signoff on spec, price, timescale and change control
  • The SMEs are the functional experts, but not aware of the overall business processes and practises
  • The company has a variety of regional processes, managers, budgets etc.

Hope this helps someone!

By ifinlay | March 29, 2010 | Development |