I strongly feel that selling is an art and one that is refined over time. Regardless of the product/concept/service being sold, there are certain key factors which I feel form the foundation for a successful sales drive.
1. Develop a 30 second elevator pitch, that sticks to the 30 second limit
The elevator pitch is meant to captivate an individual to such an extent that he/she is anxious to learn more about your product. It should serve as your opening statement and project a creative, yet factual representation of what your product stands for. That said, content from your sales collateral/brochures should not find their way to the elevator pitch.
For example, a web based application is supposed to run on the cloud, so making references to this in a 30 second pitch just doesn’t add any value. Rather, think about the positive emotions that the use of your product generates, regardless of what your product may be. Does it inspire creativity in those who design with it? Or does using your product deliver a smile on every end user’s face? Bring out these intangible benefits in your elevator pitch and connect with your prospective customers on a more personal level.
2. Know who your customer is before selling to them
A common trait displayed by Sales teams these days is to start selling a product/concept to a prospective customer without really delving into how it would benefit the end user. Your product may have a wide variety of amazing features that potentially serve every conceivable need but often, customers have a single pain point, which one of your standard, run of the mill features may address.
Learn more about your customer, their company and how they operate. Once you’re armed with all the details, paint a picture in their minds that makes it easier for them to relate to how your product fits their needs. You just might find that in responding to how their pain point can be solved by merely highlighting a single feature that your product offers, you’ve bagged the sale.
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Insights — 2 comments
Inbound marketing is one the best marketing tool for a startup. The easiest way to make that happen is by investing your time and effort in leveraging the internet (your website) to enable a sale.
Getting your first few customers is not a catch-22 situation. You also don’t need the biggest brands as your first few customer to prove that your product is great. Selling a SaaS-based application offline could be hard and expensive. Learn what your prospective customers are looking for and searching for. Get them when they want you. You’ll save yourself from out-of-scope feature requests and get real relevant feedback.
Focus on great customer service instead of cold-calling.
Our first customer for our help desk software, volunteered for translating it in German language out of the love for the product. This in a way is a true power of a good product and inbound marketing.
Insights — 1 comment
The best business lessons are learnt while not at business. The subconscious mind is continuously learning things from our day to day activity we perform and indirectly help us do better at work. I couldn’t help mulling over the hiring process while shopping for vegetables at a grocery store. My dad was instructing me how to handpick quality vegetables and I followed every single tip he gave me. So, there is more than just recipe to all the good food that mom cooks. Quality Ingredients.
A product is a collective effort of a group of people. Product is output, people are input. At a startup execution of an idea is key. There are no processes in place governing quality, people are entrusted. Hence, it is important to hire the right set of people. A good hire delivers, is easier to retain and attracts more people to join.
From what I learnt while picking up the right ingredients for a good recipe, I could connect some of those factors to the hiring process.
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Image handling is a common task in an application and for Ruby on Rails we have quite a few plugins like rmagick, minimagick, paperclip, attachment-fu etc available to effectively do the same. Paperclip is by far the most loved and popular plugin used to attach images to a model in a rails application. It makes life easy with good documentation and screencasts available to guide through. But at an advanced level, the challenge comes in when an api interface to upload and download images needs to be provided for the model. As paperclip does not support this by iteself, and there is not much help or guide available to help solve this problem, this post makes life easier for ROR api developers, who have to provide a way to attach images sent through xml to the model.
Programming — 1 comment
by abhishek on 11 Aug 2010
This post is a part of the series of articles about choices available to a rails developer. Previously we discussed about the choice of databases. This time it is about application and web servers. We can make the choice of an application and a web server separately, but as they are so closely related that it is better to look at them together.
Web Server
It is well known what a web server does, but for starters - the web server receives the HTTP requests first, and then responds by either serving the page requested or directing the request to our rails application server. The major web servers market-share wise (survey graph below) are Apache, IIS(Microsoft), nginx, GWS(Google) and lighttpd. We as rails developers are interested in all these except IIS and GWS. Not IIS because it is closed source and proprietary and not GWS because it is used internally by Google. Apache, nginx and lighttpd are all popular among rails developers.
Apache
The most popular web server in use. It supports a wide variety of features, and is reasonably fast as well. Many of the essential features are provided as compiled modules that extend the core. These include support for server side scripting languages like perl, php, tcl, python; support for authentication; support for ssl and tls and compression support.
The only issue with apache is that because it is process based, it spawns too many threads when there are too many simultaneous requests. This leads to excessive memory usage, so the performance can drop in restricted environments under heavy load.
Programming — No comments
by abhishek on 06 Aug 2010
This post is a part of the series of articles about choices available to a rails developer. It is inspired by a blog post by Josh Susser, where he asserts that there are too many choices available for a new ruby-on-rail developer now, which can get him scared/confused. This series is not about “choice or no choice?”, and not about “are the defaults correct?”. It just answers the newbie developer’s curiosity of what lies beyond the defaults. Lets begin with databases.
Database
Rails is used for writing database backed web applications using the MVC design pattern. The choice of database depends on the kind of capacity you expect from the database and the budget. If you are developing a large enterprise application, you might need to research Oracle/MS-SQL and the like, along with those described here. Another choice you might have to make is whether to go for a relational DBMS. The rails framework provides adapters (programs that connect your app to the database) for three popular open source relational database management systems – sqlite, mysql and postgresql. So if you are looking for an open source RDBMS, you have have the best to choose from.
Programming — 5 comments
Someone asked me what I do and I had to decide whether to say “I work for a small product development company” or “I work for a web based startup company”. Invariably, the former received “ho hum” replies and the latter received “aah ooh” replies. The kick of “aah ooh” replies not withstanding, the question is still very real in my head. Are we still a startup?
The way I see it, there are two definitions for startups. The term startup company according to Wikipedia :
“A startup company or startup is a company with a limited operating history. These companies, generally newly created, are in a phase of development and research for markets.“
This is the strict definition based on certain statistics about the company that many people consider as correct. Lets check its validity.
Take Google Apps for example, it was in beta (‘phase of development’) until July 2009. Does that mean it was a startup until then? The fact is that software these days is continuously under development. So that cannot be part of the criteria determining the definition of startups. Nor can age or size of the company because well, Steve Jobs described Apple as the “Biggest Startup on the Planet” at the D8 conference this year. Some say that once a startup becomes profitable, it becomes a company. Twitter has been ‘in operation’ since 2006, still has not figured out a business model and has a user base thats probably second only to Facebook. Now where does that leave Twitter? Lets face it. Definitions based on turnover, size and age just don’t work anymore.
The expression startup company now evokes an emotion that goes beyond numbers and figures.
Insights / Opinions — 7 comments
Prelude
In the previous article, we went through the basic architecture of Apache and Passenger. Now I’ve been told that its a bit too much to digest in one shot but it’ll all make sense when all the 3 articles are read together. If not, you’re always welcome to drop a question in the comments section and I’d be happy to help.
Assumptions
In this article, we will be looking at the primary directives in Apache and Passenger for optimization. The rest of the series is specific to the case where a single RoR application is running on the server (say, TweakMyApp).
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So here’s my problem. I’ve written an RoR application and I’ve managed to get a server up and running with Apache and Passenger. Im paying quite a bit for my server, but I have no idea if my application is effectively using the server’s resources. How do I gather metrics to make sure that I can configure my web server(Apache) and application server (Passenger) optimally to serve my application?
I realized that there are 3 parts in the answer to this question. First, we need to understand how Apache and Passenger are designed to handle incoming HTTP requests together. Second, we need to understand what the various directives available for Apache and Passenger mean. And finally, we need to see how we can gather metrics and tweak these directives to the optimal setting.
Im going to address each of these 3 parts in 3 blog posts. So lets get started with the first, how Apache and Passenger are setup to work together.
There is an explanation in the Passenger docs on Passenger’s Architecture but frankly, I could not digest it in one read. So I’m going to summarize it for our purposes here.
mod_passenger sits in the control process and every child process of Apache's
SaaS: Software As A Service has become widely accepted and is a popular choice among businesses. Businesses consuming SaaS applications favour the low upfront cost and zero infrastructure headaches. Also, SaaS applications being deployed online have the advantage of being available anywhere, anytime and even on any platform. Businesses developing software have embraced the SaaS model with open hands. The emergence of Cloud computing, subscription ready payment gateways and success stories of the likes of SalesForce and Google Apps makes it an easy model to follow.
Clearly SaaS applications have adopted a different pricing model than the traditional one-time license fee based desktop or web applications. There is a definite recurring cost per user in the hosted model that warrants the need for a different pricing approach. You not only provide an app but also manage users data.
Let’s dive into a few of the popular pricing strategies to understand the available models and what could fit your next SaaS application.
Insights — 5 comments
