On an entirely separate blog I have a full write up on seduction. The other posts contain steps for how a guy would seduce a girl, I think it’s actually quite pertinent to selling sighing business. Before you start making to many assumptions about the other post let me explain a little further, but dorm the selling side within business.

You see in selling something there’s usually a lot of sides to what you’re selling, just as there are to a person. The real key to this is to know which features are relevant, while you might like the option of mind reading, a more likely one is to become friendly early. Become buddy and friendly with them quickly, commiserate with their woes and try to bond with them over similar experiences. This will make the initial conversation over what they’re looking for much more constructive. And while I say this is a conversation about what they’re looking for, what you should be asking is what their pains are.

For every pain that exists, theres 5 to 10 ways to solve it. However if you miss the pain points and problems they’re having, you’re more than likely to miss on the pitch. IF you are able to get the pain points correctly it simple becomes a process of guiding them in ways to solve their problem. This process usually starts with dissecting the fundamental issues in the process, then building it back up with your product or solution being the backbone. In the same way it’s hard to win someone over on a 1 on 1 personal level without knowing what they want, you can’t sell to someone that doesn’t have a problem, and won’t be able to pitch well without knowing it.

A coworker (@danfarina) and I were recently having conversations over employee compensation. We covered the gambit around employee feedback, evals, and compensation. He mentioned Joel Spolsky, and his format of being very open about where individuals were ranked. He also pointed me to: http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200904#05 which provided good insight, though I most like his final point. The end goal with evaluating your employees and compensation for them is to make sure they’re happy. Sure the business should make sure they feel like you’re worth what you’re being paid, but usually there is no question about this, or if there is you’re quickly escorted out the door. While this is an interesting model, I think it can be much simpler, but companies usually confine themselves too much in giving credit to employees.

There was another recent occasion where a statement was made of ‘no more playing stick them up, until next year’. When I first thought about this, I knew I didn’t like the statement, but was unsure of why. The reason is that there can be several reasons why employees leave. Only one of which is compensation. If you feel you’re being adequately compensated for the job you’re doing it makes sense.

But there’s another reason thats very clear in the valley but less clear in other parts of the country. Paul Buchheit at Startup School this weekend in Berkeley said it very well: If you’ve been at your job too long, QUIT. Meaning if you’re comfortable, you know the people, you know how to do your job, and you’re not being challenged, then you should go somewhere where you are challenged.

So what does this have to do in regards to playing stick em up? Well if you’re at a comfortable place you should be compensate appropriately that’s fair. However if you’re at a comfortable place, you should either find ways to be challenged there or move on. If you’re challenged there it means your role over time will change, there’s not a standard guide for how quickly you become experienced in that role. It it’s two weeks, then salary should be re-evaluated then, if it’s 3 years salary should perhaps be re-evaluated yearly to keep up with changes in value to the dollar, but nothing more substantial to that.

At the end of the day it means you have to deliver value to an employer, and as long as your doing that the employer should recognize you for the value you deliver, based on merit, not based on policies laid out. Whether you jump to an extreme of merit/value being very clear such as a Joel Spolsky method, or follow something more traditional of a large company, the bottom line is you should give your employees what they’re worth, and as an employee its what you should expect.

Facebook is where I have more noise than any other social site, twitter may even tie facebook at amount of sheer content I receive in my feed. With regards to the ratio of what I care about to what I see facebook is a lot better, due to their news feed versus live feed. However, their news feed is still very often off. I wrote some time back about web 3.0, and how essentially showing what I want to see is what the web will become. You’ll take the vast amount of content and distill it into what I want to see. People seem to be taking very half-hazard shots at it and its quite a let down.

I’ll start with twitter, twitter gives no filtering on the content based on their view. Instead they put the control in the users hands for me to create filters based on friends. This means I have to take time to go through all of my 600+ people I follow and group them into lists, then navigate each list when I want to view such topics. This is not only time intensive it still doesn’t accomplish what I want which is information by topic in a lot of cases, especially on twitter.

Moving on to facebook, they at least take care of the process (almost transparently) of who I want to see. If someone shows up, I can simply say hide from the news feed. I have a strong hunch that when I click out of the news feed and go to someone’s profile it weights that person to be more frequent. This is a very logical deduction to make, and in most cases I’m pretty pleased with the result. The big problem with this is it’s still all about the people, not about the content. If I clicked on someone because they mentioned coming to visit California, I may have not talked to them in 2 years, but would simply like to offer up my help when they visit. This doesn’t mean I want to get updates about them after they visit.

Facebook is definitely a leader in this space, first they’re one of the few with enough content in a feed that filtering even matters. Then the fact that they get a user beyond analysis-paralysis it’s a positive move, however the classification is wrong. Whether it’s twitter, facebook, or some other service that hasn’t emerged yet, filtering a mass of information to what a user cares about will be huge.

Amazon and Netflix have done this for products, why has no one tried this for information?

I often encounter people whether at my office or at other places of employment that are distraught after getting an earful from a manager from some problem arising. The problem usually isn’t in their control, and therefore they don’t understand why they get heat for this. Most managers though do actually understand when issues come up, however what they don’t appreciate is late notice, lack of problem solving, and dictating what should be done next.

Managers typically want individuals to take control of a situation and work towards resolving it.

One thing you can do to ease the backlash that may occur for issues coming up is to communicate proactively as things develop/occur or lack there of. Keep in mind this should relate well to your managers style, some managers only want details when they absolutely have to have them. In that case you’ll want to gradually give your manager a heads up, but not burden him with too much information. I would venture to say however that most managers appreciate details, details are great to give them insight into how things are going and allow them to feel engaged at a lower level.

So assume you’ve communicated regularly to your manager, this still does not prevent any issues from happening, but rather reduces the shock when something does. At this point a manager still does not want a fact stated that there’s a problem. In every case I’ve encountered the manager wants you to take ownership of the issue, meaning to give some options. Once the problem has arisen you should instantly start looking for ways to solve it. Often time these ways are not within your power to make the final decision, though you do have a great deal of control in presenting the case to a manager.

Finally if you want brownie points, take less credit for any of the work you’ve done and give your manager more. If you’ve communicated early, laid out various options for how to resolve the issue with pros and cons of each you’ve done what you can. This should make it very easy on your manager to simple say, go with Option B, and follow back up with me on Monday. At this point if you give your manager most of the credit for helping the issue, it will only come back to you. While this is potentially the least critical of the three points, it can often pay off equally as much.

This is easier to do as you pay attention to issues and start to become pro-active. Taking ownership may not be in your job title or description, but it will definitely get you less earfuls from managers, and likely move you through the ranks faster.

I have a tendency of really latching onto very simple ideas. Typically these ideas don’t require complex engineering to make them happen. This is not to say the engineering is not important, but more so that it is some variation of engineering feats that have been done before. The reason I tend to like these over more complex engineering that really makes something better is that making something better is typically a marginal improvement. When it’s a marginal improvement it’s a lot harder to sell.

With marginal improvements you have to:

1. Convince the customer it’s not good enough today
2. Convince the customer that you’re better
3. Convince the customer you’re worth the headache of changing

While a lot of companies focus solely on taking an existing problem and solving it better than someone else has, I have my doubts about how reproducible this model is. If I’m a large company with lots of resources I’m going to keep iterating and improving myself, which means a smaller company really has to have some magic bullet that will displace me.

In contrast if I address a problem that hasn’t been solved my life instantly becomes a lot easier. I no longer have an argument of something not being good enough today, it becomes a question of value and how much its worth to solve the problem. Haggling over price is a conversation I’d rather have than trying to justify value and convince a customer they’ve been wrong in their choice for so many years.

Over the coming days I’m going to be posting a few of these examples/ideas and why I like them. Many of them are still being thought through, and while as I sort them out, I’m generally happy to publish high points about them. The even bigger key here is that success is typically in the execution and less so in the idea, though even then I’d prefer to execute on something that has less battles than something that from the onset has more. By doing something that is being done today you get no advantages of penetrating the market.

The web is becoming saturated. It’s no longer the pimply faced 20 somethings living in their mom’s basements that are the key users and the source of most of the traffic on the web. Now you have communities for pregnant moms, sites for elderly widows looking to date, and social sites for kids from the time they’re able to talk. So now that the web is hitting its saturation point of types of people interacting it becomes a critical issue to take advantage of those users and get them to do more.

Up until this point it’s been about getting more users, more people, that easily translated into more hits of course. But now what people want is richer engagement, they want users to be active, then to contribute the content. When users are more active it means just as many hits, but more engagement is a harder issue than more users. More users usually meant more marketing budget and a piece of allowing the market to mature. More engagement means you actually have to be more methodical about what you’re doing. It means you have to more closely balance the quality of what is one your site versus how you manage the ad’s which equate to revenue.

The news that facebook is exposing how many impressions a page gets versus the amount of feedback has been received is a driver in this direction. Fortunately for facebook, they don’t have control over Fan Pages so it’s not their job to drive up engagement on a per page basis. Unfortunately for other major publishers this is a very unscientific science, and what works and doesn’t work can only be a result of trying out new options. There’s a lot of opportunity here for those that really figure out what key drivers are of engagement, it’s one thing to measure it, it’s another to be able to readily define out to improve it, and no one has repeatedly done that on the web yet.

There’s a continual shift that seems to be happening on whether contextual advertising is better than behavioral. It seems that most people are becoming bigger and bigger on behavioral, and assuming that contextual has reached it’s peak. After meeting with a company that at first started to do both, blurring the lines, taking advantage of each when they had appropriate data it started to become clear that they more so have their place and time. Behavioral and Contextual shouldn’t be direct competitors.

I’ve thought for some considerable time now about Twitter and how I feel it actually has more value than facebook with regards to advertising. The difference is context. However, I want to take a moment to look at it from a different angle. There is another key factor that drives the value of the network and the way you can monetize it, The authenticity of the network.

Facebook is as authentic of a network as you can have, you have you, you are you, you’re not FunChick21, or MotorcycleGuy42, You’re Craig Kerstiens. You have a birthdate, which is likely you’re birthdate, you have a job that is your job, you have friends that are you’re friends. Facebook is probably as close to a virtual representation of your true life as you can get on a social network.

Then you have Twitter. Twitter is probably as inauthentic as they come. You ARE FunChick21 or MotorcycleGuy42. You have that name, and that’s it. You have friends, but they’re up to you, it’s a one way relationship, not confirmation of friendship. For that reason you have 1,000,000 people following Ashton Kutcher, and he follows under 100. You’re friends could be celebrities, they could be friends, they could be random people that you liked their tweets.

Facebook from an ad perspective I know almost everything I could want to about you from an ad targeting perspective. Few sites could give much more demographic info that I’d want to target effectively. Twitter I have next to nothing, I have a user name, and the content of what you say.

So there’s an advantage to facebook. But then you have the context of what I’m trying to do. If you’re facebook, you have users engaged in the site not wanting to leave. If you’re Twitter you have users that won’t be on the site for beyond 60 seconds. Getting them to leave shouldn’t be an issue, which means if you can drive where they are leaving to it should work out well for you.

But there’s a final piece. It’s a heavily growing marketplace, that really neither of the major communities picks up on, and it’s virtual goods. Virtual goods exist in either form of network, but neither seems to take advantage, meanwhile it’s the entire basis behinds such communities as World of Warcraft. How will they start to roll into mainstream networks, that’s yet to be seen, but I’ll be curious if virtual goods can become dominant in authentic networks or if they’ll primarily reside in inauthentic networks as they do today.