5 Things You Should Not do in Customer Meetings

Here are 5 things that you should not do when meeting with a customer:

1. Never talk about politics.  I know it’s that time of year but who knows what position your customer may have.

2. Religion, same thing.  No one needs to know where you stand on politics or religion.  If the customer brings it up then try to move the conversation to the next topic quickly and don’t be drawn in.

3. I saw this one happen just a couple of weeks ago; answer emails or texts.   Laptops and texting devices should only be used when appropriate during a customer meeting.  If you have to text it must only be when you are trying to reach someone to answer a question needed for the meeting or, in the case of laptops, if you are using it during the meeting for the benefit of that customer.

4. Switch off your phone.  Not only will it distract you but it’ll distract your customer if it goes off.

5. Don’t pay attention – If you are paying attention then you probably won’t do any of the above.  If you are in a meeting then pay attention.  If you are not paying attention how do you expect the customer to do so??

These are some basic rules, but it’s surprising how many people still break them.

 

Airport Convenience for Laptop Users

I have not been travelling that much recently so I’ve noticed a proliferation of technological conveniences at airports when I do travel. This week I noticed at both Dulles and Midway that they provided free “charging stations” where you plug I’m your electronic device to the mains. The difference in the two implementations however was vast. At Midway they had comfortable armchair seating in abundance and power sockets one to each chair. Of course having said ” in abundance” they were typically all In use. I’m addition Midway had countertops and stools with electrical outlets also available there. I waited almost two hours for my flight and the time flew by. In comparison Washington Dulles had also charging stations but their implementation was much less effective if not more lucrative.

 

Getting Their Head Around The Cloud

VMWare is getting into the Cloud Computing business. Apparently are setting up a large data center in Oregon in readiness for their cloud computing product. Watch this space.

 

VMWare Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire?

Word has it that early on 2009 the tax breaks that EMC has benifited from by owning 87% of VMWare will come to an end, and at that time VMWare will be primed for sale. Rumour has it that Cisco is the current favorite to buy them. That’s just what I’m being told. I’ m not sure I see a fit for VMWare in the Cisco stable. Cisco has never done a very good job with their software. You just have to look at CiscoWorks to see that. CiscoWorks is Cisco’s NMS solution and it’s basically a bunch of software products they’ve acquired over the years and marketed under an umbrella and there’s really nothing else that would indicate they’ve done anything else to make those apps work well together. If it’s Cisco or some other company though just keep an eye on VMWare in 2009.

 

Dell Exodus

Every week I hear new horror stories about Dell’s situation. Between their recent 17% drop in stock value and the word that they are now looking for buyer for their manufacturing divisions I truly think the Dell ship has lost it’s way. Dell’s manufacturing prowess was once their crownimg glory; the one thing that the other PC makers wished they had and now they want to divest themselves of it?! What’s the goal here? This really has me stumped. Once manufacturing Is gone they effectively become like any other reseller. As I have talked about before Dell is not a strong sales company infact I would go as far to say they are near the bottom of the barrel. They can’t win in that mud pit. I see lots of people using Dell laptops and they just look so old in comparison to their competitors machines. It seem’s that the fire is really gone from the belly of Dell.

 

Uber-Wireless

It’s so refreshing to hear about clever, useful technologies that bring benefits to consumers; sliced bread, the remote control, etc.  Then I read this article the other day about a technology called Wireless Energy Resonant Link that Intel is working on.  This technology would eliminate the needs for any wires to provide electricity.  No more power bricks; no more dangling cables.  Gone and not just for computers but for everything but do we really have to wait 42 years for it?  Click here for the full story.

 

Dell Decelerates

Dell in another move of irrationality has apparently been using “decelerators” in it’s commission plans for a while.  This astonishing lack of foresight is as shocking today as it probably was to it’s sales people when it was introduced. Just the negative connotation of the word “decelerator” is enough to know this is not a good move.

At Dell a decelerator works like this; if you reach 100% of your quota you get 100%; if you reach 90% you earn 80%; 80% of quota earns you 70%, etc.    It’s another cockeyed effort to reduce costs that will result in reduced sales, more transition in their sales organization and less than stellar motivation in the sales people who remain.

 

VMware Rattled

I talked a few weeks back about VMware’s untested ability to weather a storm and how I believe their mostly ex-Dell sales team will have problems fighting their way out of the current troubles. Well the signs are not getting any better for the high flying virtualization company.

According to the Motley Fool ESX and ESXi updates pushed out recently were inadvertently shipped with time bombs and when they went of this week it took VMware 20 hours to produce a patch. It seems that VMware is rattled and have taken their eye off the ball.

In addition sales are down. This could be seasonal. We are in the middle of the vacation season after all, but the drop is substantial. Mr. Maritz moved fast to get a free product to market to head off the Microsoft threat but in reality it was still a little late.

That’s not all though, sales quota’s have been increased substantially (40% according to some reports) and now their sales people have been tasked with hitting two numbers, one for bookings (orders received in-house) and one for actuals (revenue received in-house). Many of the ex-Dell contingent are probably already looking for jobs and this will be a test of the intestinal fortitude of their sales organization. VMware is still the leader in the virtualization market and are backed by the juggernaut power of EMC so they won’t be going away anytime soon but if things don’t improve expect to see a top down change in the sales organization.

 

Another Dimension of Dell

Living in Austin, Texas it’s hard not to find yourself in the company of either current or former Dell employees and being in sales my ear is tuned to pick up on sales related issues.  Of late I’ve bumped into a significant number of ex-Dell employees. It seems that times are tough at Dell and the measures they are turning to go beyond laying people off.  I have heard through the grapevine that Dell sales people who find themselves on travel are not being paid per diem unless they have a customer with them. What is Dell thinking??  Not only is this creating bad will with their own frontline employees but it’s completely ineffective.  Their sales people end up taking customers to as many lunches, breakfasts and dinners as possible which ends up costing Dell more.  Is that really the best thing for the customer?

I wonder if this has all been driven by their former CFO, Donald Carty.  Here’s the entry in his Wikipedia page that mentions the scandal at AMR that caused him to leave his post there:
“Carty was CEO and chairman of American Airlines and its parent, AMR Corp., until being ousted in early 2003 during a fight with labor unions over secret pension perks paid to senior executives. He has been a Dell director since 1992, and joined the company as CFO on Jan. 1, 2007.”
In June of 2008 only 18 months after becoming Dell’s CFO Carty was replaced but it looks like his legacy lives on, again.

 

3 Free Great Road Warrior Links

Here are three interesting free sites for you if you are a road warrior:

Laptop Stolen?

http://adeona.cs.washington.edu/

Adeona is open source software that allows you to track down your laptop if it gets stolen. Here’s how they describe it on their website. “Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on an owner’s laptop. The client continually monitors the current location of the laptop, gathering information (such as IP addresses and local network topology) that can be used to identify its current location. The client then uses strong cryptographic mechanisms to not only encrypt the location data, but also ensure that the ciphertexts stored within OpenDHT are anonymous and unlinkable. At the same time, it is easy for an owner to retrieve location information.” The best part about it is that it’s free.

Ships in the Night, No Longer

http://www.dopplr.com/

“Dopplr is an online service for intelligent business travelers. Dopplr lets you share your future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues. The service then highlights coincidence, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Paris when you will be there too. You can use Dopplr on your personal computer and mobile phone. It links with online calendars and social networks…

The service has attracted a following among business travelers around the globe. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia recently named Dopplr his “favorite non-wiki website” in The New York Times Sunday Magazine: “You put in your travel schedule and link to your friends. It allows you to see where everyone is. I love it.”

Bookmarks Out of Sync?

http://foxmarks.com/

“Never lose a bookmark again. Foxmarks backs up your bookmarks every time you make changes.” Then it syncs those bookmarks with your other computers. So the bookmarks you have on the road are the bookmarks you have at home, are the bookmarks you have in the office. Leave it to Foxmarks to do it all for you. This is a completely hands-off tool once it’s set up. It synchronizes automatically and again it’s free!