This Business and Moment...

Thanks Basher! That's exactly it, it's like a rollercoaster. You get this buzz as things start, but then the week later it's like ugh?! I just keep going, analyzing, measuring, testing things and most importantly keep pushing.

Definitely about calling too. We've become so bad at it. People are like "I've emailed him 5 times" just pick up the phone... I'm one for falling into this, too. So I can't say I'm not, but that's why I'm going direct. Like you say, you stand out much more.

I don't suppose that company was AppDynamics was it? EDIT, can't be. Well, if it was it went for $3.7Bil so you know lol
 
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That's it though, it doesn't have to be a poorer experience! I don't want to have 7 tabs open with my emails on! It's all just clunky. Making it a better user experience is the key.

And yea Phate, it's true a lot of promise around it but never specialises and delivers on it. We'll knock it up and see if I can sway you guys :)
 
Basher said:
You got it! I love listening to various sales podcasts and reading sales leaders blogs and it's amazing how many people still just don't get it. It's not even cold calling. It's doing your research, being relevant and having a real life conversation.

Yep, it was AppD. I'm lucky enough to be part of that now, too (I work in sales at Cisco).
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**** me. I know a guy who works there, hence me thinking it was them. That's mega crazy.

:eek: :eek: Who's the guy you know?
 
toshj said:
Slow start for us this calendar year. Normally is anyway, but having met with the accountant last week and him building/projecting a 16/17 cash book based upon our strong performance in the latter half of last year, I got very excited about what the company will look like by the end of summer. Unfortunately, half of our pipeline has just fallen through the floor without us being able to have any impact on it whatsoever. Very frustrating.

Going to try to be more level-headed in 2017. Was far too guilty of being equally bearish/bullish when things swayed last year, so I'm going to settle on the fact the firm is in a very safe place at present and it'll either get a little better or worse over the next 12 months, but nothing dramatic will happen (...hopefully!).
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One of those things where the best ones are in the game are always the ones who build lasting relationships over the long term, but that doesn't always help when the bills need paying! Hopefully you have a good year though!
 
It's a valid point to raise though, and something I should spend more time digging in to. I'll let them technically mock something up first.

I think, for me, the value prop of having one place for all your photos is a more common problem and would be a nice sell.
 
Good luck! Everything crossed for you on this one.

I've had a really busy weekend with some good things in there...

- Created a follow up mail campaign around the active tab feature in custom html email template

- Sent it to ~450 people. Monitoring their responses - going to follow up this week with my new favourite old school phone people!

- Tweaked keywords on an adwords campaign I'm running - it's a cheap one, but running it around student engagement - added / changed some key words.

- Was adapting our sites SEO in all the posts and pages to match the keywords people are using in Google. (still have a fair bit to do on this, but got about 50% of all site content done)
- Sorted a post/ video on the new feature too, I love recording myself sounding like a ****: https://www.emotuit.com/lms-analytics-bad

- typed up a software disclaimer of sorts for the link from our software. It'll cover it for now, I'll always add more to it mind.

- Posted a job posting looking for someone to take on the DB/ ML / algorithm stuff, see if we can find anyone interesting for that at this point I think it'd just be too much for our Dev to do as well as everything else I am getting him to do on integrations and this is important, obviously.

- Spoke to someone about that job actually, the previous CV I put up. I have another guy lined up, too.

- Typed up a template for sales agreement for the Brazilian place, they want a "trial" period, so I said 30 days.

- Had an interesting guy drop me an email yesterday (from here: http://www.learningandemotionlab.org/ ) - he'd like to talk about working with us. He's a professor, could work on an advisory role sort of thing, I think, but useful to publish papers etc. help with emotion / learning data

Full on phone sales this week as I have no demos lined up. Need to follow up with previous interested people and try and balance shifting this cold and work.
I'm so over this contract, but needs must. I just really struggle to motivate myself to do anything, it's just got beyond frustrating here, so it's all out push this now. If I do this for 6 months it might kill me, but I am hoping it hits perpetual motion!

/long post. Pancake.
 
I think around stuff like this, it really is a rollercoaster of emotions. I'm up and down daily. You think you're there, you think you're way off... you think you've caught a break, next day you feel bottom again. Job searching is the same, it's so taxing on the emotions. Great place here to vent and people aren't bad either :p
 
Great news! Im hoping it all goes well and doesn't fall down now. Not to be a pessimistic **** lol I just really think you deserve the job and want it to work out! :D

Got everything crossed you hear soon, but massive congratulations for getting it!
 
Thanks man, massively appreciated I'll 100% read it! Always good to get advice. I always need it! I need to sell more :p

Kol;30483614 said:
Well done Phate, that's ace news! Many many congrats.

OT, I know I don't post in this thread very often (I'm too busy with work as it is to then talk about it), I spend most of the time reading it but I know a few of you guys have to demo your product, as do I (usually three face to face meetings per day), though I'm presenting to my own clients. I came across this piece earlier and have to say as someone who has a very high client renewal rate- it is spot on.

Randomshenans, I've read quite a lot about you having to demo your platform to your prospects so while I can see it's exploding in popularity and you are experiencing tremendous success, this might help with getting a fraction more of those on board:

http://firstround.com/review/Your-Product-Demos-Suck-Because-Theyre-Focused-on-Your-Product/
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So we've closed out another sprint. We've made some changes on a bit of UI, added nice templates to our system sent emails, added the active time out feature and so the sprint comes to an end.
The next one is fairly minor; internal dashboard for us to view activity of customers and analyze their use. Enhance the customer area, make it nice and shiny so they know how many licenses they're using out of their allowance, when they need to renew their license, what their extra monthly costs are etc.
Few refactoring of CSS so it's all pushed out as one, adding some unit testing updates, and a good little feature is prompts to advise the people on what to potentially do to make a change/ improve their courses. That'll take the longest I think.

I've been hammering trying to get meeting at the moment, only have 2 in next week. It's like a cycle going from loads to not many, to loads, to trying to follow up. Ugh. Need a constant. Never happens. So hard to manage. Destroys me emotionally.

Talking to that professor guy tomorrow, he's really ******* good on paper. Like, he's studied what we're doing with emotion/ engagement and learning for 10yrs and written papers/ built something similar but small scale. We want him on our board to help give us the scientific documented edge as well as improve our work as we go. He really wants to get his work out of academia and into the world. Touchwood we can get him in.
An interesting Indian guy emailed me today about the big data and machine learning role, too. On paper he's excellent. Has both Cassandra and Spark experience and building good systems. I'm going to see if we can talk and if he'd be interested in what we're doing. If I can get those 2 working together on building out our new DB clusters, it is the start of some really amazing things.

That's had me flat out all week really and I'm tired. But I had some time Weds lunch to meet my great friends and extremely talented ones about the Yksi mail project. I got a business model canvas done, we ironed it out, I got a survey completed and sent out to 150 people to do two things: validate that people would use it and also understand more about their behaviours with accounts/ social etc. etc.
We sat and went through those results and dug into what MVP looks like, then what Beta could look like after. We've nailed it all down and they're already building things. It's amazing.

I'm now just hammering through some follow up emails for emotuit having put together the email templates for our system mails, then I'll hit the sack. My meeting was cancelled tonight due to the snow so bit of a bummer.

tl;dr - stuff, just needed to get it out, make me feel better saying it.
 
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