Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for June, 2005
How to hook a client with the toehold strategy
The previous blog entry (about upselling) has an important corrollary that is the subject of this blog:
The easiest way to get a client is with a toehold. If you can propose a small, initial piece of work, that is often a great way to land a long-term client. Here’s why:
1. It gives the client a safe way to review your work. A client is often more likely to go for a small assignment than a huge one.
2. It gives you the chance to prove what you can do.
3. Once you prove your value, trust goes up exponentially compared to when you were selling to a prospect (vs. working for a client).
When I was a consultant at Computer Sciences, we would offer clients a $75,000 diagnostic, which almost always led to multi-million dollar projects. That’s a large-scale example of the idea here.
This is only one strategy to land clients, but it has usually proven to be a great one. Once you have a toehold, you can continue to get more work and expand your presence/visibility.
The art of the upsell
This blog entry suggests that whenever you close a sale, you have in your back pocket some sort of request for an upsell. The prospect is in a buying mode and sees your value. So long as your upsell isn’t ridiculous in scope or cost, and so long as your offer isn’t something that should automatically be in your original proposal, you have an excellent chance of being successful.
For instance:
- If you offer an ebook, on sale of ebook offer an upsell for consulting or one-on-one coaching.
- If you design a web site, on sale of design, offer an upsell to integrate it with an e-commerce engine or autoresponder. Or, offer an additional feature that the buyer might not have considered earlier. Or, offer a contract for ongoing maintenance and upgrades over time.
- If you develop software, offer an additional module. Or, offer a contract for ongoing maintenance. Or, offer to staff their IT department with a part-time coder after the project is done. Or, offer to set up the software so that your client can license it out.
There are all sorts of options. What has been your experience with successful upsells?
Quick Review - PPC Search Engine Marketing Handbook
A few weeks ago, Boris Mordkovich was kind enough to send me a copy of his book, the “Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing Handbook.” It took me a few weeks to read it - not because it’s hard to read, but because I am very very busy these days.
As a book junkie, I read a lot, and pretty much everything I can find on SEM will get at least a quick skim. Overall, I was quite pleased with this little paperback gem - at $19.97, it’s a nice introduction to PPC, with clear and concise discussions of the standard strategy & tactics.
Where I have a concern about the book is with the large number of pay-per-click services which are listed and recommended, as if they had actually been reviewed and tested. The links to PPC providers are all through the author’s web site, and it’s not clear if they are in fact affiliate links.
Several of the PPC providers listed did not pass my own simple click fraud tests over the past couple years, so I can’t honestly recommend that readers use this section of the book as a reviewed guide to the best PPC providers, because it’s not. …
OpenSolaris Open for Business
Though this has been brewing and in the light for some time, a solid base of source code and the first release of the now free operating system from Sun opened its doors today.
The company has been stating this is part of its strategy to build its business hoping to see an increase in sales of hardware and services (translated - IBM Business Model - not an unsuccessful one at that). What is perhaps more unspoken is its hope to compete with already established Linux distributors like RedHat.
Sun has chosen a fairly open method by starting with a group of independent developers from around the world who have worked quietly with Sun for much of the past year leading up to this release. The company hopes open source developers and Solaris aficionados will immediately begin contributing through testing, bug reporting and other quality assurance contributions. A majority of the board overseeing OpenSolaris is also non-Sun, including an original Apache author (Roy Fielding).
I have seen Solaris in action within the financial services sector and many know it has a robust and authoritative reputation. I am planning to build the new OS and start exploring how it will …
example.com vs. www.example.com… trouble!
If you had the SitePoint SEM Kit you’d already know about this, but since some folks haven’t actually bought it yet, here’s something important you should know.
Most web servers (therefore most web sites) are configured to show the same content whether visitors request a page with or without the www in the address. So h t t p : / /example.com is likely to give you the same content as h t t p : / / www.example.com.
If your website does this, that’s not good, because you are showing the same content to the search engines under more than one URL. In other words, your site is serving up duplicate content.
Now, some folks hear “duplicate content” and assume that there’s some kind of penalty involved, but that’s not really the problem. The problem is that search engines have to choose *one* of those copies, and declare it to be the official “canonical” URL. If you’ve put all of your effort into promoting www.example.com, you’d hope that the search engines would see that as the canonical version… but will they?
Maybe, but if God doesn’t play dice with the Universe, you definitely shouldn’t play dice with the search engines. Especially when a …
Using the 80/20 rule to make more money
The 80/20 rule is a crucial rule to follow to run any business. Here are some examples:
- 20% of your clients typically bring in 80% of your revenue. Go out of your way to delight them, while still keeping an eye out for any clients in the remaining 80% who could, with proper nurturing, move into the top 20%. Gracefully “fire” the bottom of the 80% of clients bringing in miniscule income over time, or who are really tough customers.
- 20% of your efforts creating sites get your clients 80% of the impact. Focus your project management on getting that 80% of impact early.
- 20% of your referral sources bring in 80% of your referrals. See the first point.
- 20% of your marketing dollars bring in 80% of your revenues. Build on what works. Stop doing what doesn’t.
- 20% of your employees get 80% of results. Remove the 80% who get 20% of the results, and keep looking for new people who can make it to the top 20%.
- 20% of your tasks in a given day get you 80% of the value of your time. I like to never have more than 3 tasks or priorities on my list …
Swing Renaissance - Cool Java UI Examples
These days, there are two popular toolkits for building graphical user interfaces in Java: Swing (from Sun) and the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) (from IBM/Eclipse). Different developers often have strong opinions about which is best, but in truth they both have their strengths.
Swing
Swing, part of the Java Foundation Classes (JFC) first introduced with Java 2 (J2SE 1.2), is the “official” (if you will) GUI framework for Java. It’s built into the desktop version of Java (J2SE). Swing’s approach is to make user interface components (widgets) as customizable and extensible as possible without sacrificing cross-platform consistency.
To do this, it avoids using the operating system’s built-in widgets and instead uses pure Java code to draw the user interface in blank windows and respond to interface events.
The upshot of this is that all of its components are fully skinnable, and can be extended with custom appearance and behaviour. The downside is that the user interface often doesn’t quite match the look and feel of the native operating system (although Sun is getting better and better at this). Additionally, the API can get quite complex as soon as you want to do something not-quite-standard, because of Swing’s amazing flexibility.
Also, because of Swing’s complexity, it’s …
Microsoft releases Acrylic beta
A few weeks back we were pondering what ever happened to ‘Creature House’s Expression’ after Microsoft assimilated it 18 months ago. There was some talk about an upcoming beta, but in the software business the ‘upcoming beta’ can often be akin to the dragon, the mermaid and the unicorn. Fun to think about.
However in this case the talk appears to well-founded. At the old Expression URL there’s now a page telling us about ‘Microsoft Acrylic’ and offering a free download.
I haven’t had time to really put it through it’s paces yet, but it appears pretty similar to Expression 3. They’ve cleaned up the icons and interface a little, but it’s still very idiosyncratic. Most of the old brush strokes seem to still be there, with a few extra.
Expression 3 had a panel specifically for exporting Flash buttons which seems to have disappeared — no great loss there. Acrylic has a new ‘Web’ menu that contains ‘Exports to HTML’ (dodgy tables that don’t look particularly useful to anyone) and a ‘Live Rollover Mode’ that I never quite figured out.
Anyway, it’s free and approx. 70Mb to download (you’ll need a Passport login), so if you have some playtime, …
What’s new in PHP 5.1?
PHP.net announced over the weekend that the first public beta of PHP 5.1 (5.1.0) is now available for download on PHP.net.
So what’s changed?
- The PCRE library (providing Perl-style regular expression support) has been updated to version 5.0.
- Several performance improvements, including changes to garbage collection, the switch statement, and several array functions.
- Several improvements in the PostgreSQL and Improved MySQL support.
- Several new functions including array_diff_key, array_diff_ukey, array_intersect_key and array_intersect_ukey.
PHP 5.1 can be downloaded from PHP website.
As of now there is an entry PHP.net’s RSS feed about the release but no word about it on the front page of http://www.php.net/.
How accessible are you?
It is important in selling services to provide differing degrees of access to people based on how valuable they are to you.
Give the most access to your best clients, including response to emails and voice mail within 20 minutes, and perhaps even a dedicated phone line. They are your best source of current dollars, future work, and referrals. Treat them preferentially, and delight them with incredible service. I work with a bunch of web professionals, and generally am much less inclined to negotiate hard with those whom I know will get back to me and do the job. It is important for clients to feel special.
Give excellent access to prospects with pressing needs who have a high chance of hiring you. They are judging you now, knowing that how you respond to them during the selling process is a good indicator of how you’ll respond once you hire them. I’m working with one team now who was extremely responsive during the sales process, and continues to be responsive now. It’s a pleasure.
Also give top access to your best referral sources, the 20% that brings in 80% of your referrals.
As for the rest, you have to make some …
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