In 2007, Apple gave us the iPhone, and salespeople saw that it was good.  Hailed by Time magazine as the “Invention of the Year”, the iPhone provided a leap forward in mobile communications and computing, with an extraordinarily intuitive interface, integrated multi-media support, and add-on applications.  However, as a mobile phone for salespeople, the iPhone is still less than perfect, even after taking the more powerful 3G version, introduced last summer, into account.  With exclusive availability in the U.S. only from AT&T, a closed architecture, and a spotty record of network and data synchronization performance, the iPhone is not the obvious choice for sales professionals who must have a powerful, flexible, absolutely reliable smartphone to do their jobs well.

Still, after Apple released their improved 3G version of the iPhone, I strongly considered purchasing one.  The exceptional multi-touch interface virtually oozes with that intangible “cool factor” that technology geeks salivate over, and I was no exception to the device’s appeal.  After playing with a friend’s iPhone for a while, my trusty BlackBerry, with its old fashioned physical keyboard, looked positively medieval in comparison.  In the end, however, I decided not to jump on the iPhone bandwagon, because it meant switching to AT&T (at significant cost), trying to get our highly territorial IT department to accept support of this strange alien device, and accepting Steve Jobs’ insular vision of an all-Apple, all-the-time universe.

And so I waited for my perfect mobile phone - one that would be just as easy to use as the iPhone, would run on my chosen carrier network (Verizon), and would be tailored to the unique needs of sales professionals.  Having used several BlackBerry phones (most recently, an extremely reliable 8830 World Edition), I hoped that RIM would produce a device that capitalized on the BlackBerry’s strong e-mail and messaging capabilities, but with an interface every bit as cool as the iPhone.

So it was great anticipation that I waited for RIM’s first device without a physical keyboard, the BlackBerry Storm 9530.  Now available in the U.S. from the top-rated mobile service provider, Verizon (and also from Vodafone, Telus and Bell Canada elsewhere in the world), I hoped that this new device might challenge the iPhone for ease of use and multi-media support, while also meeting the demanding telephone, e-mail, messaging, and mobile computing needs of sales pros on the go.  Could the BlackBerry Storm be the ideal mobile phone for salespeople?

The good, the bad and the ugly: the Storm’s screen

My hopes were high when I finally got my hands on a Storm.  My first impression was that the device feels great in your hands.  It’s about the same size (at 4.4 x 2.4 x 0.5 inches), but a little heavier (at 5.5 ounces) than the iPhone (which is 4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46 inches and weighs 4.7 ounces).  Like the iPhone, the front of the Storm is almost all touch screen - a large 3.3-inch, 360-by-480-pixel screen that is as slightly smaller than the iPhone 3G (3.5 inches diagonal), but at a higher resolution (the iPhone is 320 x 480 pixels).

The Storm’s touch screen looks great and works well, albeit with some minor annoyances.  First, it is very bright and clear - I had no trouble using it outdoors, even in bright sunlight, unlike my experience with the iPhone’s glassy reflective surface.  And unlike the iPhone, the Storm’s screen gives you some physical feedback when you press virtual buttons or the on-screen keyboard.  On the iPhone, you never really knew if you successfully pressed a key, other than seeing the effect on the screen.  On the Storm, the entire screen taps back at you with a reassuring click when you’ve successfully entered a keystroke - it feels like almost the same experience as using the physical keyboard on my old BlackBerry 8830.  Further, the Storm lets you use either a large QWERTY-style keyboard when you hold it in landscape orientation, or a version of the thinner BlackBerry SureType keyboard when held in portrait mode - and you can switch back and forth between the keyboards, even when in the middle of a message, just by turning the device.  For salespeople that use their mobile phone mostly for e-mail or text messaging, they are going to like the Storm’s virtual keyboards a lot.

However, while I love the Storm’s virtual keyboard, the user interface, which is based on the screen’s two qualities of touch sensitivity and physical feedback, will prove a challenge to most people, at least until they get used to it.  In contrast, the Apple iPhone’s multi-touch interface is based on single-tap selections, mostly - you find what function you want on the screen, tap it with your finger, and it does it.  But if you want to do something on the Storm, you tap the appropriate screen icon or virtual key with your finger, and then have to press down to execute your selection.  It’s an extra step that sometimes makes the Storm feel, for lack of a better word, “stuttery”, and even after a couple days, I never quite got the hang of it.

Below the Storm’s display are four keys: two for picking up and ending calls, a menu key, and one for backing up out of menu or screen selections.   Everything else is controlled by the screen interface, except for muting calls (located on the top of the device), and a function button on the side that adjusts to the context of the program you are running.

The (not quite) “Perfect Storm”

When I occasionally overcome the learning curve for the Storm’s on-screen user interface, I find that this smartphone operates quickly, powered by a 528 MHz processor - that is, when it doesn’t hit an annoying bug.  At first, I thought it was my lack of mastery over the user interface that was the problem, but then I realized that the Storm was hiccuping rudely at me from time to time.

Other reviewers, such as Sascha Segan at PC Magazine, have reported significant problems with the Storm’s sometimes spastic performance.  My experience was a little better than theirs - but not by much.  Three times I had to reboot the phone: once when the home screen vanished, once when it froze when I was using the otherwise excellent built-in camera and another time when trying to run video on the media player.

The Apple iPhone 3G also arrived with a plethora of problems when it was first introduced.  It’s almost impossible to squash all the bugs inherent in a new mobile device as complex as the iPhone or Storm when they are first introduced to the market.  Like new models of automobiles, the first units generally have glitches and problems that are solved as the line settles down after initial launch.  Fortunately, unlike automobiles, and like the iPhone, the Storm can receive updates and software fixes - and, in fact, the first such update has already been issued, and users are reporting some improvements in their new Storms’ performance and reliability.

With the latest fixes, is the Storm perfect yet?  No - but I’m optimistic that it can be, eventually.  More on this later.

But, is the Storm a good phone?

With all this talk of screens, tactile feedback and user interfaces, it’s easy to overlook that fact that the Storm is first and foremost a telephone.  And in this capacity, I find it excellent - although a lot of the credit here has to go to the device’s carrier in the U.S.: Verizon.

The phone sounds great, especially the speakerphone, which I found to be very clear and louder than I expected on such a compact device.  I never experienced a dropped call during my evaluation, and every call was crystal clear.  The Storm includes built-in noise cancellation, although I found it wasn’t as strong as when I used a Aliph New Jawbone Bluetooth headset, which was a snap to configure.

I occasionally travel abroad, which is why I use a BlackBerry 8830 World Edition phone, since it supports GSM networks overseas with an optional SIM card.  The Storm also operates on multiple networks, including Verizon’s EVDO network in the U.S., and on HSDPA networks abroad.

I found I had to charge the Storm nightly.  Other reviewers report between seven and eight hours of talk time on a single charge, and about half that when using the more power-hungry on-screen video player - which is about the same as the Apple iPhone.  During my testing, I used the Storm a lot for browsing the ‘net, and found that also drained the battery faster - enough to think about recharging every four hours or so.

Storming the ‘net

The Storm’s browser is, well, just okay, in my humble opinion.  It seems to run slowly on any site that uses JavaScript.  And the Storm’s web-browsing experience is clearly inferior to the Apple iPhone’s, which is more intuitive to use, thanks to its excellent multi-touch interface.  Some Storm users report better performance using the Opera Mini browser, although I didn’t have a chance to test that.  Still, for a quick search on Google or reviewing the latest news, I found the Storm’s web browsing experience to be acceptable - not great, not bad, just okay.

I tested the Storm as a USB tethered modem to my laptop PC (something the iPhone, as yet, cannot do), and got reasonable download speeds of about 750 kilobits per second.  Unlike the iPhone, the Storm lacks support for wi-fi connections to the ‘net.  I would have loved to see this feature on the device, since it would improve download speeds.  But if you can get to a 3G network - and I never had a problem finding Verizon’s EVDO network available - you can use the Storm as an acceptable connection to the web.

How else does the Storm stack up against the iPhone?

The Storm includes a number of other features that invite further comparison to the Apple iPhone 3G.  Here’s a quick summary of these capabilities:

• Applications support: the Storm includes a number of standard applications, familiar to anyone who has used a BlackBerry device: e-mail, contact management, a Web browser, etc.  It also now includes support for Microsoft Office document editing, although I can’t imagine using the Storm for doing this except in a pinch - you really want to do this on a PC.  The Apple iPhone’s functionality can be extended with the iTunes App Store, and there are now thousands of applications available there at nominal fees, albeit with Apple’s heavy copy protection.  RIM’s answer to the App Store is the BlackBerry Application Center, although for now its shelves are relatively sparse.  I have to give the nod here to the iPhone, but if RIM can get more third-party developers interested in contributing to the Application Center, this could even out over the next year.
• Cut and paste: oddly, this is one simple, oft-requested feature that still isn’t on the Apple iPhone - the ability to cut and paste text across applications.  The Storm clearly wins here - you can select lines of text with a touch of a finger and paste it into other programs.
• Media player: the iPhone clearly wins here, it is essentially a glorified iPod, the best media device in general.  You can drag and drop music and video files on your PC into your Storm, and even transfer music from iTunes (if unprotected).  But I found this to be a clunky experience, compared to using Apple’s iTunes program.  This is one advantage Apple has, thanks to its closed architecture.  But I suspect that most salespeople care little about the Storm’s multi-media abilities anyway, and like me, they will probably just bring along their iPod if they want to listen to music or watch a movie on the plane.  Still, music does sound great on the Storm, and the MP4 video playback quality is excellent.
• Data synchronization: enterprise salespeople need to be able to synch contacts, calendars and messages with their corporate systems, and the Storm clearly wins here.  RIM has a long record of integrating well with Microsoft Exchange servers, and the Storm carries on that tradition.  Apple stumbled badly with their MobileMe synchronization option, and it has not fully recovered from initial problems after release.  The iPhone 3G introduced better support for Microsoft Exchange, although some IT departments are still reluctant to support it.
• GPS: support for global positioning systems for navigation and directions is critical for traveling salespeople, and here the Storm wins over the iPhone handily for several reasons.  First, for another $10 a month, Verizon users can subscribe to VZNavigator, which provides audio turn-by-turn driving directions and maps.  The Storm’s GPS is fast, intuitive to use and very accurate - I found it comparable in performance to my built-in navigation system on my Acura.  Further, the GPS system on the Storm is unlocked, which means that third-party applications can use it to find locations.  The Apple iPhone offers no turn-by-turn navigation (as yet), and it is tied to the closed architecture - in fact, third-party developers are banned from using the iPhone’s GPS for navigation functionality.
• Camera: I’m often surprised how often I want a camera in sales meetings.  The ability to take a quick snapshot of a flip chart after a customer meeting is very useful.  The built-in 3.2 megapixel camera on the Storm, with an LED flash and video recording capability, will be perfect for this purpose - it is clearly superior to the iPhone’s camera, which is just 2 megapixels, and does not include an LED flash or video capture.  Both the iPhone and Storm support geo-tagging, which means that your photos will include location information from the GPS system - helpful for figuring out where you took those shots at that last meeting.

Sales Pro Value Score

The BlackBerry Storm is a great mobile phone, no doubt about that.  It’s well constructed, is packed with state-of-the-art features, and is a very good and highly reliable telephone, e-mail and messaging device.  It builds on RIM’s solid track record and strengths, with better data synchronization than similar offerings, including the venerable iPhone.  It also has a better GPS and camera than the iPhone.

The Storm’s virtual touchscreen interface, however, is a mixed bag.  I love the tactile feedback of the press-to-click screen, especially when entering text on the virtual keyboards.  But it is more difficult to use when selecting and interacting with other applications.  Here, the iPhone multi-touch interface is clearly simpler and easier to operate.

Verizon has priced the Storm attractively, with subsidized pricing and data plans comparable to AT&T’s plans for the iPhone 3G.  So there’s no obvious financial incentive to choose one over the other.

So, should sales pros run out and snatch up a BlackBerry Storm?  No - we would recommend caution, for now. Above all, sales professionals need their mobile phones to be absolutely rock-solid dependable, because they depend on them so much to do useful work.  For this reason, we suggest that salespeople watch and wait until RIM distributes enough online updates to squash the initial bugs.

Our first impression of the Storm is generally positive, and for that reason, we are awarding it a Sales Pro Value Score of 3.5 - but if RIM can get rid of the annoying glitches inherent in most new releases, we’d happily increase that rating to 4.5, and heartily endorse the BlackBerry Storm 9530 as the best all-around mobile device for sales pros.  We’ll continue to watch, and report…

Tags: Apple iPhone 3G, BlackBerry Storm 9530, Verizon

 

 Selling Geek 014-Dell Inspiron Mini 9 [21:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The tech blog Engadget recently pronounced: “The age of the netbook has indeed, arrived.” According to an Amazon.com list of the best-selling computers, nine of the top ten systems sold in September 2008 were ultra-portable devices. Popular netbooks like the ASUS EeePC 900, HP 2133 Mini-Note PC, Acer Aspire One, MSI Wind and Lenovo IdeaPad S10 are all designed principally for accessing the Internet, managing email, browsing websites, instant messaging, running hosted applications and other connected tasks. Designed to be lightweight, compact, easy to carry and simple to operate, netbooks have emerged as an affordable option for Internet-connected professionals, which of course include most salespeople.

Recognizing this accelerating trend, Dell has released their Inspiron Mini 9 netbook at comparatively low prices: US$349 for a model with 4 gigabytes (GB) of solid-state storage, $399 for 8GB and $449 for 16GB. Customers may select either the Ubunu Linux or Windows XP Home operating system to run on the Mini 9’s Intel Atom processor. The compact, lightweight unit weighs just less than 2.3 pounds, and features an 8.9-inch screen, all in a relatively tiny package approximately 1 by 9 by 7-inches - about the size and weight of a moderate-length hardback novel.

Dell describes the Mini 9 as a “communication device,” rather than as a computer, as this box is tailor-made for Internet-centric tasks. To supplement the relatively small amount of on-board storage, Dell bundles 2GB of free Internet-based storage from Box.net, providing users with an online resource to keep and retrieve files. The Mini 9 also includes wi-fi access with a wireless 802.11g adapter installed, and also offers optional Bluetooth connectivity for an additional $20. The Mini 9 supports video chatting with a built-in microphone and webcam.

Some people have experimented with using a netbook as their sole computing device, with decidedly mixed results. Ultra-portable computers are designed to be carried around and connected to the ‘net - and for these tasks, they are very well suited. But as a rule, they lack the processor power, storage capacity and ergonomic niceties needed for content creation tasks including graphics, audio, video, and intensive text editing.

I wondered if the Mini 9 would be suitable as a second computer, to be used for sales trips on the road. After lugging around a full-featured laptop for many years, which weighs 12 pounds, I dreamed of leaving that heavy-duty computer (in every sense of the phrase) at home, transferring only those files I needed for sales calls to a lighter unit. I’ve found that I rarely use all the storage and content creation power of my laptop when traveling - most of that work is usually done in the office. On the road, I typically use my computer for email, web browsing, light document editing, and to show PowerPoint presentations. Could the Mini 9 fill the bill as my traveling machine, and save my aching back?

Girls like netbooks!

I tested a 16GB Mini 9 with Windows XP, with Bluetooth and the higher-resolution 1.3 megapixel camera options. The first thing you notice about this machine when you take it out of the box is that it is indeed tiny, compared to its laptop cousins. My charming spouse, after seeing the Mini 9, remarked, “I like your little toy computer - it’s cute.” If you have insecure feelings about your masculinity, the Mini 9 won’t do much for your image, apparently.

At the risk of sounding a bit sexist, I’ve found that, in general, women seem to love the Mini 9. After seeing my new Dell netbook, one of my female co-workers commented, “Hey, I could put that in my purse – it’d be great for browsing at Starbucks,” and then she pressed me for details about how to order one. On my last plane flight, three attractive flight attendants descended upon me, literally cooing at my Mini 9 like it was some sort of cute electronic newborn – which, in a way, I guess it is. Just yesterday, a young lady stopped when she saw me working on my Mini 9 during lunch in a nearby deli – she was fascinated with my little netbook and practically begged for an on-the-spot demo.

Folks, I’m your average-looking, middle aged sales geek, and I long ago gave up trying to share my enthusiasm for gadgets with the fairer sex, realizing that they found such discourse boring in the extreme. So, I find this sudden female fascination with reduced-size technology a bit baffling. I leave it to you to think of your own clever innuendo regarding how size doesn’t matter – but clearly in this case it does, and in favor of the diminutive. Could the compact design of netbooks like the Mini 9 make them into items of fashion, attractive to women buyers? I wonder.

Small is beautiful - mostly…

Practically speaking, the Mini 9’s small size is both its greatest asset and its worst flaw. It is indeed easy to carry. My laptop bag strap no longer cuts into my shoulder like a scythe. The Mini 9 fits neatly in your hand, too - it really does feel like you are carrying a book, not a computing device. On a plane, the Mini 9 is so compact that it can share a seat-back tray table with a drink and peanuts, with room to spare.

But its small size does make the Mini 9 feel like a compromise in use. The 1024 x 600 resolution screen, although bright, crisp and very clear, doesn’t provide a lot of real estate for displaying information – so be prepared to scroll up and down a lot when web browsing.

And, as on all small netbooks, the keyboard is a challenge. The Mini 9’s letter keys are larger than on other netbooks, such as the ASUS EeePC 900, although certainly not full-sized. And less-used keys, such as Shift, Tab, Caps Lock, Escape, Page Up/Down and others, have been shrunk to half-sized mini-keys. Further, the function keys require simultaneous pressing of the “Fn” key with another key on the middle row of letters. Similarly, engaging other features, such as turning wi-fi on or off, muting the speaker, or switching display output to the VGA port, requires some finger-twisting concurrent pressing of Fn, Alt and number keys. Sometimes you feel like you’re playing a miniature version of Twister on the Mini 9’s keyboard.

You might not think that a 10 percent reduction from normal key size would make that much of a difference on the Mini 9’s letter keys, but if you are a touch typist, it’s just enough to slow you down significantly. My fat fingers have a hard time with the smaller shift keys, which means I have to stop, look, engage shift, then proceed. The same goes for the period key, too. And the key for apostrophe and quotation marks is wedged in at the bottom right, which is guaranteed to interrupt your creative flow if you use a lot of possessive contractions or write dialogue. Unless I ever think I deserve to pay a heavy penance for past sins, I will never write a novel on the Mini 9.

The integrated touchpad and mouse buttons, however, are very easy to use, and configurable to individual tastes. I usually attach an external mouse on my laptop, but I never felt the need to do that on the Mini 9.

Under the hood

Despite my spouse’s initial impression, the Mini 9 is no toy. I installed Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel and Word 2007 (using a third-party USB attached DVD/CD drive), and the Atom processor cranks through these applications quite easily. The lean XP Home OS runs multiple applications simultaneously, and it’s a breeze to switch from one task to the other with just a quick tap of the touchpad control. I did experience some degradation of processor responsiveness after I had a half-dozen application windows open, so don’t count on the Mini 9 for more than moderate multitasking. The on-board 1.6-GHz Intel Atom processor isn’t going to win any super-computing awards, but it’s more than enough horsepower for the kind of work that most sales pros need to do.

I also found file retrieval and storage on the solid-state drive to be very snappy and simple, although I found myself wishing for a 32GB or larger option. If you run any moderately hefty applications on the Mini 9 with only 4GB of storage, or even with 8GB, I‘m sure you‘ll bump your head on a disk drive ceiling in a hurry. Unless you plan to use your netbook only for web browsing, bite the bullet and pay the extra $50 for the largest 16GB drive.

With 3 USB ports, extending storage on the Mini 9 with connecting devices is easy to do. I tested several third-party USB 2.0 flash drives and they all worked flawlessly, as did a USB portable hard drive and the aforementioned DVD/CD drive. With all the extra room in my computer bag that the Mini 9 frees up, carrying a portable hard disk unit and a couple thumb drives isn’t a problem. The unit also includes standard headphone and microphone jacks, a VGA-out port, a 3-in-1 media card slot (supporting SD, MS/MS Pro, and MMC formats), and an Ethernet jack. I tested all of these by conducting Skype voice-over-IP calls, connecting to a projector and driving a PowerPoint presentation, transferring images from my digital camera, and hooking up to a hotel Internet service, respectively, and the Mini 9 performed perfectly on all of these tasks. Dell provides a video-conferencing client with the Mini 9, but I tested the built-in webcam using the latest Skype 4.0 beta, and had no problems at all.

Is the Mini 9 a cloud computer?

On his blog, tech pundit Om Malik outlined ten criteria for a perfect “cloud computer.” The Mini 9 comes close to meeting these qualifications, but not quite. Let’s run through each of these criteria, and see how the Mini 9 stacks up:

1. Instant On - I was disappointed that the Mini 9 did not include a Linux-on-a-chip “instant on” feature that Dell provides in some of its new Latitude E-series laptops. This feature enables you to do simple tasks immediately after switching your computer on, by loading a basic Linux operating system from firmware, rather than a full-featured OS from the hard drive. Instead, the Mini 9 loads its OS conventionally from storage. I timed the Mini 9’s boot-up time for XP, after powering on, at just over 30 seconds. Wondering if I might improve that, I uncompressed the hard drive, and that reduced the boot up time to just over 20 seconds, albeit by sacrificing a couple gigabytes of storage. It’s not “instant on,” but it’s pretty darned close.
2. Doesn’t generate too much heat - even after running for three hours, the bottom of the Mini 9 gets only slightly warm. You won’t find your thighs sweating after working with the Mini 9 for a while.
3. Minimum 5 hours of battery life - the Mini 9 gets close to this mark, but not quite. I timed battery life while doing word processing and spreadsheet work at just under four hours. Not bad.
4. At least four communications options - again, the Mini 9 comes close, as it includes WiFi, Ethernet, and Bluetooth. However, when you open the bottom of the device, you will find an empty slot that is clearly marked “WWAN”, and Dell has hinted that it is in discussion with several wireless service carriers for a Wireless Wide Area Network connection to an EVDO or HSPA network option, so perhaps we can expect a fourth connection option for the Mini 9 soon.
5. Less than three pounds (batteries included) – here, the Mini 9 shines, weighing only 2.3 pounds, even with a 4-cell 32WHr Lithium-Ion battery on board.
6. Screen size of 3.5-8 inches (wide-screen proportioned) – The Mini 9 is slightly larger than Om’s ideal criteria, at 8.9 inches, but I like it that way, and in fact, wish it was even a little bigger.
7. Cloud-based activity focused – Dell recognizes that netbooks are oriented for Internet-centric work by bundling in Box.net storage, which I found a snap to set up and easy to use. The 802.11g wireless adapter is also one of the most sensitive I’ve ever seen – I was able to pick up wi-fi hotspots from more than 300 feet away and make reliable connections. This box is clearly designed for connecting to the ‘net.
8. Cost no more than $300 – ah, here the Mini 9 stumbles. Even in its least expensive configuration, the Mini 9 is $350 – and my fully tricked-out version will cost you just over $500, not including any externally connected drives, if you need them. Compared to other competitive netbooks in the market, such as HP’s Mini-Note or the MSI Wind, the Dell is similarly priced, and still about half of what you’d expect to pay for a good fully-functional laptop. But make no mistake, it’s still not what I’d call cheap.
9. Ports and connections geared for Internet-based activities — as I’ve said before, the Mini 9 handles external peripherals with aplomb, and it supports ‘net-centric tasks, like Skype calls, very easily.
10. Touchscreen interface - not keyboard, touchpad focused – sorry, the Mini 9 is no iPhone.

So, in total, the Mini 9 meets five of the ten cloud computer criteria perfectly, with near-misses on another four. In short, if computing in the cloud is your goal, you’re going to be pretty happy with the Mini 9.

Although Dell is entering the crowded ultraportable market relatively late, the Mini 9’s release is a significant event. Dell is one of the last major computer manufacturers to embrace netbooks, and this should help to accelerate the acceptance of Internet-based cloud computing using lightweight, portable devices.

Sales Pro Value Score

In summary, the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 has indeed become my favorite road trip machine. Although it’s a bit more expensive than I hoped, the keyboard is more cramped than I’d like, and the memory options are limited, it fulfills all of my most important expectations for a traveling sales professional’s portable computing device. It’s easy to overlook the Mini 9’s few flaws after you’ve carried it to some sales calls – especially when you realize that your back doesn’t hurt anymore from lugging around a comparatively behemoth laptop. So, for its solid, lightweight design and good performance, though not without a few compromises, Selling Geek awards the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 a Sales Pro Value Score of 4.0 out of a possible 5.

Tags: Dell Inspiron Mini 9, Podcast, Review, selling geek, Timothy Sullivan

The popular voice-to-text service, Jott, which heretofore was completely free, announced that they are now “out of beta”, and they have introduced a tiered services pricing plan.  In other words, most users will now have to pay monthly fees to get Jott’s most desirable features.  (See our earlier review of Jott, posted here, for a full description of the handy transcription service.)

Users can still use Jott for free, but only in a very limited form, and only if they are willing to see advertisements on their Jott.com page.  The “Jott Basic” option allows unlimited voice-to-text note and reminder recordings of up to 15 seconds each.  However, Jott Basic will not support management of notes and lists via email - users will have to go to the Jott.com site to access their lists and notes directly, and they will see ads displayed there. Further, Jott Basic does not support sending emails or text messages to other people - users must upgrade to higher-tier services for this popular feature.

According to Doug Aley, Jott Networks’ VP of Marketing and Business Development, “While we may serve ads in Jott Feeds (the service that reads RSS feeds back to you) eventually on the phone, we will likely not mess with the voice user interface, even on the free service. We plan to serve ads on our web site.”

Also, Jott Basic will support only a limited number of external links to other web services, which are:

• Micro-blog messaging platforms: Twitter, Jaiku and Tumblr
• Blogging content management systems: Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress
• Third-party information sources: Amazon.com and Zillow

The regular Jott service tier is now US$3.95 per month, and includes:

• No advertising
• Unlimited 15-second messages (just like Jott Basic)
• Management of notes and lists either online at Jott.com or through e-mail
• The ability to send e-mail or text messages through Jott to other people
• Links to many more web services for calendar management, task management, and additional web-enabled information sources
• Automated voice-to-text transcription of tasks and appointments into Microsoft Outlook

The highest tier of service, Jott Pro, costs US$12.95 per month and includes all the features of the regular Jott service tier, plus:

• 30-second messages (instead of 15 seconds)
• The ability to reply to email on a BlackBerry device using Jott voice recordings

All tiers have access to Jott Feeds - which will read blog feeds to you over the phone - and they all also include Jott Express - an Adobe AIR-based desktop application that provides client-side management of Jott messages and reminders, and Jott for iPhone - a similar application for the Apple iPhone.  Users may cancel or change their Jott plans at any time without penalty.

What does this mean to sales professionals?

As we said in our earlier review, Jott is a very handy utility for salespeople on the go.  The ability to leave reminders and to-do items with a quick phone call, and then receive those messages in text form, almost immediately, is great for sales pros that need to keep track of myriad details without touching a keyboard.  Further, the ability to send emails or instant text messages to other users by leaving a quick voice recording on Jott is a godsend to mobile sales pros.

When the service was free, Jott was a no-brainer addition to any busy salesperson’s toolkit.  We think the free Jott Basic tier is now almost worthless - in other words, you get what you pay for.  However, getting all the functionality of the previously freebie Jott service for less than four bucks a month ain’t bad - in fact, we still think it’s a great bargain, and we still recommend it.

We only wish we didn’t have to pay more than three times the standard service fee, just to get BlackBerry integration.  That seems too big a step in Jott’s tiered pricing plan to recommend it, especially since BlackBerry users (and we are one of those) can get virtually all the voice-to-text functionality they need from the regular Jott service anyway.

We previously awarded the free Jott service a Sales Pro Value Score of 4.5 out of a possible 5.  With their recent change to a “for fee” service, and considering the enhancements they’ve made to Jott functionality, we’re downgrading that rating, but only slightly - to a 4 out of 5.

UPDATE: TechCrunch reports Jott has over 420,000 customers

Tags: Jott, Jott Basic, Jott Express, Jott Pro

 

 Selling Geek 009-PhoneTag [13:26m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I hate voice mail.

Oh, I remember back in the early 80’s when the software company I was working for first got an automated voice mail system, and we all thought it was cool. You can forward a phone message to group of people, all with a couple keystrokes? Cool. You can retrieve your phone messages anytime, from anywhere, whenever you want? Cool. No more mounds of little “when you were out” notes waiting on your desk when you got back from a trip? Cool.

Oh, yes, back in the 80’s, voice mail was great. We loved it.

But then, somewhere in the 90’s, something happened. Just about everyone started replacing their live operators and receptionists with automated systems, and suddenly, voice mail became voice mail hell. That’s when all of our calls to customers and prospects started to sound like this:

“Hello! Your call is very important to us. That’s why we’ve made it impossible to reach a live human being! Press 1 if you want to buy something, press 2 to leave a message for customer support. Press 3 if you find this mildly annoying. Press 4 if you think this is extremely irritating. Press 5 if you are starting to get angry and frustrated. Press 6 if you’d like to hear all these options over again. Or, just hang up and leave us alone. Have a great day!”

Also, by then, we were all carrying mobile phones, which was great – no more hunting for a pay phone anymore. But it also meant that we had multiple voice mailboxes to check – the mobile voice mail, office voice mail, and sometimes our home number voice mail.

It’s now 2008, and I must sadly confess that I am the proud possessor of no less than six voice mailboxes: my corporate office number, my home office number, my business mobile number, my personal mobile number, the Selling Geek US toll-free line, and our international SkypeIn number. Yep, that’s six numbers, all with their own voice mail system.

It takes me a long time to check six voice mailboxes. I have to dial each number, check status, listen to each message and then act on it. And, of course, all these voice mail systems don’t talk to each other. So if I get a message on my business mobile line, I can’t forward it to my office system, or vice versa. This means that I have to call my office line and leave another voice mail for my colleagues there – which takes even more time.

Like I said, I hate voice mail.

Enter: PhoneTag

So, when I first heard about PhoneTag, I was intrigued. Here’s a service that will pick up your unanswered calls, record messages, transcribes those recordings to text, and then forwards them to you as e-mail or text messages or both.

I was skeptical at first. Could PhoneTag transcribe messages accurately enough to be readable and useful? Would it be outrageously expensive? Would it work with all my different numbers and services? Could it really save me time?

I’ve been using PhoneTag for a few months now, and I’m delighted to report that it works superbly in every respect. If you are a sales professional, and you hate voice mail as much as me, do not delay – go, right now, and get PhoneTag. It is that good.

PhoneTag’s value and quality

Since adopting PhoneTag, I have saved between one and two working hours every week. I don’t have to dial in to six different voice mailboxes anymore – all the messages come to me. And it takes much, much less time to scan a text message than it does to listen to spoken voice. And because all my messages come to my Blackberry as email, I can forward them to anyone in seconds, or just highlight the phone number, and press one button to call the message sender back.

The call transcription quality is very good. It’s not perfect, by any means – sometimes PhoneTag transcribes proper nouns phonetically, and then indicates such with a “(?)” designation. But I’ve never had any trouble figuring out what PhoneTag is trying to tell me. I estimate that it gets about 98% of every message transcribed perfectly, and so far, it has correctly captured 100% of the all-important phone numbers left by my callers.

How does PhoneTag work?

PhoneTag is also easy to set up. I configure my phone services to “call forward / no answer” to a dedicated number that PhoneTag provided when I set up my account. This required some special combinations of phone keypad entries, which can vary according to your mobile service. PhoneTag sent me a detailed list of instructions when I registered, and all the required key sequences were included. With PhoneTag’s help, I set up forwarding from Verizon, Sprint, Skype, my toll-free number service, and my office system – each requiring only a few minutes.

When a caller dials one of my numbers, and if I don’t answer, they hear a typical “please leave a message” recording from me, but also a plea from PhoneTag that says, “Your message will be transcribed by PhoneTag.com – please speak clearly.” You can turn this feature off, but I’ve found it does help to prompt people to enunciate more carefully, and that means fewer transcription errors.

I then receive each message as an e-mail. You can also receive transcribed voice mail as text messages – but if it’s a long voice mail, it may be broken up into several text messages on your device. I’ve found that single e-mails sent to my Blackberry are much more convenient.

Recordings of messages, in WAV, MP3 or GSM format, are also appended to e-mails from PhoneTag, so you can hear the audio if you wish. I rarely need to do this unless I want to make sure I understand specific parts of a transcription.

PhoneTag also keeps copies of all your messages and recordings on their website, which you can access by logging in to your online account.

You can also upload your contacts to PhoneTag from Outlook, Apple Mail, Yahoo Mail, GMail, Hotmail or any application from which you can generate a properly formatted comma-separated value file. PhoneTag will search for each caller’s number in your contact list, and if it finds the matching contact name and/or the company name, it will send you a notification message from that contact name, e-mail and number, instead of from a generic PhoneTag address. This makes it easier to reply to messages.

What does PhoneTag cost?

PhoneTag offers three levels of service: an unlimited number of messages for just under US$30 per month, or up to 40 messages for just under $10 per month (plus 35 cents per message received over the 40^th every month), or a pure per-message charge of 35 cents per message.

(So, if you do the math, you should buy the per-message plan if you receive less than 28 messages a month. Buy the unlimited plan if you receive more than 98 messages per month. Otherwise, buy the 40 messages per month plan.)

There is also a variably priced Enterprise option for organizations that want a company-wide license.

Like mobile phone charges based on a designated number of minutes per month, PhoneTag can get a little pricey if you opt for one of the limited plans and go over those limits. Note that PhoneTag’s plans do not include any fees for data or text messaging that you may also incur from your wireless carrier, so you may want to change your mobile phone plan before investing in PhoneTag.

Other uses for PhoneTag

Besides saving time, I’ve found PhoneTag useful for all sorts of other reasons. For example:

• I can now access my most important messages first. PhoneTag brings “visual voicemail” capabilities to my Blackberry. Now, instead of having to listen to every message sequentially, I can jump immediately to the most critical messages from my customers and prospects.
• My voice mail is now searchable, copyable, pastable, printable and forwardable. Now I can use the Find command on my Blackberry or in Outlook to search my voice messages for specific phrases or keywords. I can also forward voice mails, from all of my voice mailboxes, to colleagues much easier in e-mail. And it’s a lot easier now to save phone numbers into my contact list.
• Ever try to listen to voice mail in a crowded airport or train station? And did you ever find yourself trying to memorize phone numbers left in voice mails because you couldn’t write it down at the moment? I no longer have these kinds of annoyances, thanks to PhoneTag.
• And the best thing of all: I am finally able to tactfully educate some of my co-workers about how to leave a proper voice mail message. Whenever anyone sends me a long, rambling, incoherent voice mail, I just forward the PhoneTag transcription to them in an email, and ask them to interpret the message for me. Nothing works better than seeing your unintelligible babblings in print to make you realize that you need to think first, then speak. It works.

Sales Pro Value Score

So, for liberating salespeople from the chains of voice mail, and for its easy set-up, usability, immediate productivity gains, moderate pricing, and value-added messaging and communication features, Selling Geek gives PhoneTag a Sales Pro Value Score of 4.5 out of a possible 5.

UPDATE: PhoneTag has generously provided a free 30-day trial for Selling Geek blog readers and podcast listeners!  Click this link for your free trial: https://apps.simulscribe.com/signup/a/sellinggeek

Tags: free PhoneTag 30-day trial, PhoneTag, Podcast, Timothy Sullivan, voice mail to text

 

 Selling Geek 008-Adobe Acrobat 9 [21:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sales professionals live and die by the quality of their communications with customers and prospects. Misunderstandings lead only to incorrect expectations – for the buyer, the seller, or both – which lead ultimately to bad feelings at best, or bad business at worst. And as a result, the best salespeople take extra care to keep their communications clear and well documented.

However, in this age of electronic file transfers and computer-based word processing, documents are easily changed. That’s great for accelerating negotiations and closing business, but it also means that misunderstandings can creep easily into proposals, price quotations, contracts and agreements.

I learned this lesson the hard way. I remember one potential buyer that I worked with several years ago. I’d provided them with a summary of pricing for my services, sent to them in a common word processing file. We quickly came to an agreement to do business together. And then the trouble started.

I wrote up a contract, using my original price quotation as a basis, and sent it to my prospect. But then I received an urgent phone call.

“What the *&%@ is this?!”, my prospect exclaimed.

“Uh, that’s the contract for services – is there a problem?”, I stammered.

“You bet your @$$ there is! This isn’t what we agreed to at all!”, he retorted.

After some investigation, I discovered that someone had edited my original quotation, inserting services they wanted me to provide – at no additional cost – and they had “forgotten” to send the amended quote back to me. Well, no wonder I’d thought that sale was so easy – someone had inserted a 50% discount into my original pricing, and neglected to tell me about it!

I tried to explain to my prospect that someone had changed my original quote, and that I couldn’t deliver the services they wanted at those prices. But they wouldn’t listen – their unreasonable expectations had been set, and no amount of diplomacy on my part would deter them from their position. In the end, we agreed not to agree – and I lost the business.

Behold: PDF, Protector of Sales Pros

I vowed henceforth never to let such a mistake happen again, and after a little research, I found a solution: Adobe Acrobat, which enables you to produce documents in the Portable Document Format, also known as PDF.

A PDF file retains all the graphics, fonts, illustrations, charts, pictures and formatting of the original document, and it can be viewed on virtually any platform. In other words, PDFs allow you to produce documents that will appear exactly as you produced them, no matter what kind of computer system your recipient uses.

Even more important to sales pros, PDFs can be made un-changeable. So, you can produce price quotations, RFP responses, proposals, contracts and agreements, secure in the knowledge that someone isn’t going to mess with your carefully worded content. For salespeople that depend on crisp, clear communications – and who among us doesn’t? – PDFs are a very cool thing indeed.

Now, Adobe has released a major update to Acrobat, version 9. And this latest version includes a lot of new features that enable document creators to get… well, very creative, if they are so inclined. But are the new enhancements in Acrobat 9 useful for sales professionals?

Don’t be stingy

Perhaps only to torment buyers with difficult choices, Acrobat 9 comes in three flavors: Standard, Pro, and Pro Extended, with progressively more features in each version. Although you’ll be tempted to save some money and acquire one of the cheaper versions of Acrobat 9, I recommend that you don’t do it. If you deliver presentation files to customers, and you use Microsoft PowerPoint 2007, you’ll want the Pro Extended version for that integration feature alone. Also, the Pro Extended version provides many more options for converting and embedding a wider variety of file formats into PDFs, which just flat-out makes it safer and simpler to use.

You’ll also need some pretty hefty hardware to run Acrobat 9 – if you don’t have at least a 1.3GHz processor running Windows Vista or XP, or a comparable Macintosh, then you’re going to find using Acrobat 9 to be a maddeningly slow experience.

Now, multimedia PDFs

Prior versions of PDF files were great for protecting static documents, or some limited interactive forms. But Acrobat 9 now includes support for embedded multi-media content. Now, if you wish, your PDFs can play convert movies in eight different formats into embedded Flash content.

Imagine what this means for your sales proposals. You could create a company introduction movie using a tool like Camtasia Studio 5, for example, and insert it into a clickable box inside your proposal. Your prospect only has to click on the movie box to watch your recording, all inside your protected proposal file.

That, as I’ve said before, is a very cool thing indeed.

You can embed all sorts of other useful multi-media content into PDFs with Acrobat 9. If you sell online products or services, for example, Acrobat 9 will take snapshots of Web pages and convert them to a PDF that includes links and screen animation. If you sell services that require communications about physical locations, you can insert interactive maps that allow users to mark locations and measure distances. For sellers of products requiring technical designs, you can embed interactive 3D models from CAD applications.

Online document collaboration and forms

Acrobat 9 also includes access to Adobe Systems’ online community, Acrobat.com. You can post documents to the community, and use it to collaboratively edit and comment on those documents with prospects. Now you can have one copy of a document and build it together with a prospect, and then mutually agree on the final result.

Oh, if only I had this when I had my earlier trouble with my edit-happy prospect.

You can also use Acrobat 9 to set up online intelligent forms, with full tracking capability. You could use this to set up marketing event registration, for example, and then use the data collected to send reminders or distribute supporting literature.

Acrobat’s best feature: document security

With all of these neat new features, it’d be easy to overlook Acrobat 9’s fundamental ability to lock down your carefully crafted documents. Acrobat 9 enables you to produce PDF documents from any application from which you can print, or from Acrobat 9 itself. Your document recipient does not need the full Adobe Acrobat 9 application to be able to view what you send to them. Rather, they only need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader program, which will now support viewing of all your embedded multi-media content, if you decide to include it.

In addition to using Acrobat to lock down price quotes and proposals, I’ve also found it to be very useful for protecting intellectual property. For example, I can use Acrobat to show samples of proprietary training program materials. It doesn’t completely prevent dedicated thieves from stealing my content, of course, but it makes it lot more difficult to copy than if I’d sent it in editable form, such as in Microsoft PowerPoint format.

Prepare to pay a lot for Acrobat 9

Adobe Acrobat 9 isn’t inexpensive: the Standard edition costs US$299, Pro costs $449, and Pro Extended costs $699. Also, Adobe’s tiered support plans are not cheap, ranging from US$175 to $1,200.

Sales Pro Value Score

Despite all of its new features, Acrobat 9 is still relatively easy to use. It includes very well documented help and tutorial videos to guide you if you get lost. But make no mistake, there is a lot of functionality here, and a lot of details as you get deeper into some of the more esoteric capabilities. To truly master Acrobat 9, you will need to study it and use it for several weeks, at least. But if all you want to do is produce protected PDF documents that look great, you can get good results in about 20 minutes after you first install the product.

So, although it is certainly not cheap, and has a long learning curve, Adobe Acrobat 9 is a valuable tool for sales pros who produce important documents. For its ability to embed multi-media content, excellent security, ease of use, and support for online collaborative document editing, Selling Geek gives Adobe Acrobat 9 a Sales Pro Value Score of 3.5 out of a possible 5.

Additional resources

• Even if you don’t buy the full Acrobat 9 product, everyone should at least download the free Acrobat Reader — see this review from CNET for more information.
• This list of PDF-related software applications provides some useful file converters, managers, creators and viewers.

UPDATE: Adobe Systems’ portable document format (PDF) has become the latest International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard.

Tags: Acrobat.com, Adobe Acrobat 9 review, PDF, Portable Document Format, selling geek, Timothy Sullivan

 

 Selling Geek 005-LinkedIn [24:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

One of the essential principles of good selling is: people buy from people. No matter how much we might like to live in a world where buyers make purchase decisions without human involvement – or on second thought, perhaps not – the fact of the matter is that person-to-person interaction is a requirement for most kinds of sales.

And as a result, for many sales professionals, success depends as much on who you know as it does on what you know. The best salespeople are expert social networkers – they develop relationships with customers and prospects, with suppliers and business partners, with anyone that might help them find new buyers. In the past, this was all done at industry conferences, trade shows, and business meetings, and also in civic organizations, social events, or on the golf course or tennis court.

But today, we live in a web-enabled world, and this provides sales pros with whole new ways to connect with people – ways that reach far beyond the physical limitations of the old network building standards. And one of the key web-based tools that has emerged to help foster interpersonal business connections is LinkedIn.

Today, more than 23 million registered users in more than 150 countries have joined the LinkedIn site. LinkedIn is arguably becoming the standard social network hub for business professionals all over the globe.

Why has LinkedIn become so popular with business people? And, more importantly, what value does this facility provide, if any, to sales professionals?

What is LinkedIn?

Basically, LinkedIn is an online facility for recording your connections with other people. It records those with whom you have developed trusted business relationships, and enables you to leverage the relationships with those to whom you are connected, thereby extending your network. Over time, through LinkedIn, you can develop an automated network of business contacts that enables you to reach out and interact with literally millions of people, all in a secure, well organized system.

This is a potential gold mine of interpersonal contacts for salespeople – but we’ll say more about that later.

Registering on LinkedIn is free, and after doing so, you can create a profile. Your profile is similar in structure to a typical business resume. Here you can put all of your professional credentials, background and experience. In fact, most LinkedIn profiles read exactly like their resume – my own included. Your profile is searchable, both to those in the LinkedIn network, and to those who aren’t members, too. This enables your profile to be found by current and former business colleagues, fellow employees, customers, and other industry contacts.

LinkedIn, in a word, is where you can build connections with other people. After establishing your profile, you can send invitations to record a connection on LinkedIn with other people. If the recipient of your invitation is a LinkedIn member, they just have to accept your invitation, and the system lists each of you on your respective profile as connected. If they are not a LinkedIn member, they are invited to register, and if they do, then your connection is forged. As people find your LinkedIn profile, they can likewise send you invitations to connect to their network.

You also have the option to upload your contacts from your personal information management system, if you wish – LinkedIn supports import of contacts from Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail and AOL. Or you can import contacts from Outlook, ACT!, Lotus Notes, Palm Desktop, or the Mac OS X Address Book, or from any contact file in the correct comma-separated or tab-separated format. LinkedIn will analyze these contacts and establish invitations for each.

You can also register to join Groups on LinkedIn, which gives you access to “networks within the network.” For example, I joined a couple Notre Dame fan groups (Go Irish!) and a few sales profession industry groups. Further, LinkedIn makes it easy to search for former colleagues or classmates, or for specific people inside the network, and you can then invite them to your list of connections. By importing my contact list, doing a few searches, and joining some relevant Groups, I expanded my immediate network to more than 500 people – through them, I have over 100,000 “friends of friends”– and through them, I can reach nearly 5 million professionals in LinkedIn.

Here is where the power of LinkedIn can be brought to useful purpose. Let’s say I want to make a sales call on… Xerox, for example. I may not know anyone that works there right now, but by going to the “Companies” tab in LinkedIn, I can search Xerox, and discover that 29 people who work there know someone that is in my direct network. I can then issue a request for an introduction to the appropriate contacts in my network, and they can forward my request to the person I want to reach. This is a great way to generate “warm” leads, instead of just cold calling.

Paying the LinkedIn Piper

Here is where we discover how LinkedIn makes money. In addition to some advertising displays in the LinkedIn system, which are presented in a fairly unobtrusive way, LinkedIn also charges for advanced access to their network. A free personal account allows only five network introductions at a time, and you can’t take advantage of some LinkedIn features, such as the ability to send mail messages directly to people in your network. A Business account costs US$19.95 per month or US $199.50 a year, and allows up to 15 introductions, and more in-network communication options. A Business Plus account costs $50 per month or $500 per year, and allows up to 25 introductions. And there is a variably priced Enterprise subscription as well, for large organizations. LinkedIn also charges other fees for services targeted mostly at corporate clients such as US$195 for a 30-day job posting.

Are these premium subscriptions worth the money? Well, that depends on the value of your network. As you add more connections, the ability to reach more business contacts grows geometrically. I had a free account for several years, before I discovered that I was hitting the introduction limits consistently, and then I decided to upgrade. If you use the LinkedIn network a lot, you won’t mind paying the small fees required. If you don’t, there’s always the free option.

The Answer is… 42!

If you get a premium LinkedIn subscription, you can use the Answers feature, which I have found interesting, and sometimes very useful. You can post a question to your network, and collect responses. For example, I asked a selected group from my network if anyone was using LinkedIn as a sales prospecting tool. Within one day I received over 40 responses, including these:

I did have a LinkedIn connection contact me recently asking for a referral to a company on my list. I didn’t even realize I had a connection with the company. I was able to make an email introduction and the two of them are now doing business. It was as simple as this guy searching his LinkedIn connections to see if anyone had a connection to his targeted prospect.

You have to be careful about using LinkedIn as a sales tool. Someone that prospects blatantly will quickly ruin their reputation and destroy their own efforts. There was a group on LinkedIn that went into hard-core sales mode and they quickly got squashed with complaints.

I use Linkedin to look for specific people to see if they are connected to anyone within my network. Linkedin provides the ability to become connected to a potential prospect through a “warm call.”

I use LinkedIn for qualifying sales opportunity, but not to identify them. When I have a qualified lead, I will usually see who else is at the company. If I happen to know somebody in the account, I reach out to them for information and guidance. I get “inside” information on how the company runs, and the potential issues, etc. This way I am usually much more informed than my competitors.

If you have a question, LinkedIn Answers capability is an interesting way to get some diverse perspectives quickly. But you have to be careful – if you use it for questions like, “Hey, anyone wanna buy something?”, you can get in trouble quickly. People don’t like being harassed in any medium.

A Little Trouble in Network Paradise

Although LinkedIn can be very valuable to aspiring salespeople, it is not a perfect solution for all sales problems. There are a few blemishes on LinkedIn that take away from the beauty of the system.

First, building a good network on LinkedIn takes time and effort. And the more connections you add, the more work it takes to maintain. I must admit that after reviewing some of my 500+ connections recently, I had no recollection who some of these people were. I had to view their profile to remind myself why I had added them – and for a few of them, I decided to disconnect them because we no longer had a real relationship. I now mark my calendar to review my LinkedIn contacts, import new ones, and cull out some of the old, stale connections, every quarter. It takes a few hours, but I think it’s worth the investment to keep the network current.

Second, as a LinkedIn user, you will discover that there are two types of network builders: I call them conservatives and liberals. Conservatives, like me, keep their networks limited only to those people with whom they have a real relationship. This is important to me as a sales professional, because I use my network for introductions, and I want those introductions to be of high quality, for both me and for the person I want to meet. On the other end of the spectrum are the liberals, who want to be “friends” with everyone – or, more precisely, they think everybody should be connected to everyone. These people drive me insane, as they care nothing about the quality of connections. Rather, they think only about the number of people with whom they can connect.

Here is where LinkedIn users discover the positive and negative aspects of recruiters, who use LinkedIn extensively, and who are all ultra-liberal connectors. There isn’t a week that goes by before someone I’ve never heard of invites me to connect to their LinkedIn network. Invariably, they are recruiters. When I first joined LinkedIn, I thought, “What the heck? Why not?” What a mistake. I was immediately deluged with repeated requests to pass on introductions through my network. Total time consumed: considerable. Total value to me: zero. I’m in sales – time wasted is money lost. So, goodbye connections to recruiters. (snip) Ahhhh, welcome back, peaceful, productive network.

I must admit, however, that my ultra-conservative stance on network purity made things a little too quiet. I found that without a few liberal connectors in my network, it was difficult to get introductions to some prospects without having to go through several degrees of people, and that made for some awkward introductions. So, I carefully reviewed some of the super-liberal recruiter connectors, and invited two of them to connect – they both immediately accepted, of course. Those two connections increased my network size by almost one-third, so I actively cultivate those relationships, helping them with their occasional recruiting requests, in exchange for introductions to key people. Indeed, I’ve learned that a little diversity goes a long way, when it comes to LinkedIn: a couple liberal friends I can tolerate – but more than that, and I start to get a headache. I leave it to your own sensibilities to determine how open you choose to be with your own LinkedIn connections. For me, a moderate conservative model works best.

I also discovered one of the problems with having a substantial network: poachers. You can, if you wish, leave your list of connections open on your public profile. This allows anyone that finds you to review all of your connections at their leisure. I figured that was the right thing to do, since the purpose of LinkedIn is to help grow business networks. But I didn’t take into consideration that some of my competitors are also LinkedIn users, and one of the brighter ones found my list of connections to be very, very interesting indeed. I suddenly found that my clients were getting calls from one of the “bad guys.” It took me a while to see the pattern, before I realized that he was trolling through my LinkedIn connections. I toyed with the idea of setting up a dummy connection and creating my own “sting” operation, but that seemed like too much work for dubious results – and besides, that is a violation of the LinkedIn user agreement, and I’ve found LinkedIn too useful to risk getting banned. Instead, I simply turned the visibility of my network off. People can still request introductions through my network, but they can’t browse it on my profile. That stopped the bad guys cold. So, learn two lessons from my experience, please: first, if you are a sales professional, guard your network, and second, if you know who your competitors are, check out their profile – you never know what you might find there, if you know what I’m saying. (nudge, nudge, wink, wink)

Sales Pro Value Score

Earlier, I asked why LinkedIn is so popular. The answer is clear – it’s darned useful, especially for sales pros who want to develop their network of valuable business connections. Is it the perfect social network for salespeople? No – it takes time and effort to become truly useful, and it has a few non-fatal but potentially annoying flaws. But if you are willing to make the effort, and if you are aware of the possible trouble spots, LinkedIn is fertile ground for development into an invaluable sales tool.

So, for it’s widespread user base, invaluable potential as a sales research and prospecting tool, a fair value-based pricing model, and interesting group networking features, despite a few minor flaws, Selling Geek gives LinkedIn a Sales Pro Value Score of 4 out of a possible 5.

UPDATE: LinkedIn starts new targeted advertising program.

UPDATE: LinkedIn and Moo form alliance to print business cards.

UPDATE: LinkedIn updates groups features, and breaks them

Some useful resources about LinkedIn and business networking

• Dave Stein gives a good example of what business networking is really all about on his blog…
  
• …and Dave also makes a good point about what salespeople should have on their LinkedIn profile
• Jill Konrath wrote a great post and a white paper on how LinkedIn can be used to sell better
• Jason Alba wrote a terrific  book on how to use LinkedIn, and has a very good related blog
• Sales Team Tools blog asks: “What does your LinkedIn profile tell others about you?”
• Blogger extraordinaire Chris Brogan advises: “Write your LinkedIn Profile for Your Future“

Tags: business network, LinkedIn, LinkedIn as a sales tool, Podcast, Review, selling geek, social networks

 

 Selling Geek 004-Twitter [19:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Let’s take a critical look at what is arguably becoming the biggest “Web 2.0” fad. Since it’s inception in 2007, Twitter now serves over 1.7 million users, and that number is growing by over 2,000 new users every day, and accelerating.

What is Twitter? Why is it generating so much buzz? And most importantly, does it have anything to offer salespeople? In this review, we hope to answer all things a-Twitter for the curious sales professional.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a very simple idea – so simple, it sounds trivial when you try to explain it. Imagine you have your own private billboard, but anyone can see it, if they care to look. You can put anything on your billboard, as long as it’s text, and as long as each addition is no more than 140 characters. Any time you add something to your billboard, anyone that is interested will see a copy of what you posted, instantly.

And that’s all Twitter is, really. Except that your billboard is a web page on the Internet, and it is called a Twitter feed.

Twitter users can update their Twitter feeds by browsing their page on the Twitter site, or by using their mobile phones to post through SMS text messages. Likewise, users can view the Twitter feeds of others with their computers or their phones, at their option. And there are a large number of independently developed Twitter applications that make it easy to post to your feed, or monitor other people’s feeds.

In order to get notification of updates from someone else’s Twitter feed, you have to become a “follower”. You do this by looking up their Twitter name in the search bar, going to their Twitter page, and clicking the “follow” button. Some Twitter users actively recruit large legions of followers. For example, as of June 2008, tech guru Leo Laporte had over 42,000 followers, all reading his 140-character posts about his observations on technology trends, people, and life in general.

UPDATE: As of July 8, 2008, Leo Laporte had garnered 46,473 followers on Twitter.

Twitter is Like Love, Gone Wrong

As a social networking phenomenon, Twitter sounds like a neat idea. What’s wrong with trying to bring people together, after all?

Perhaps the best way to summarize my evaluation of Twitter is to share a personal story, from many years ago…

Back in my single days, long ago – well, perhaps long, long, long ago – I dated a nice girl in college. She was great – still is great, as far as I know. She was attractive, and very popular. I felt I was definitely in the “in crowd” when we were together – there was always a party at her place, with lots of interesting, entertaining people around. But something was missing. I never felt like I really knew my girlfriend very well. There just wasn’t a lot of depth to our relationship. And those parties – while fun – always felt superficial and shallow. I never had a conversation there that lasted more than a few minutes.

At first I thought it must be me – perhaps I was the one that was odd. After all, she seemed to be extraordinarily popular – there had to be good reason, right?

Eventually, I came to realize that we just didn’t have much in common, really, and she didn’t have the means or desire to build anything deeper. So, we broke up. She took it well – in fact, I’m sure she didn’t really miss me at all.

I tell you this personal tale of love gone wrong because it echoes all my feelings about Twitter perfectly. It’s a very popular platform, and it has a lot of initial appeal. But there just isn’t a lot of depth there, and ultimately, it’s unsatisfying, especially when the suitor in this technological courtship is a sales professional. After trying to use Twitter for a while, I think that most salespeople will wonder what the fuss is all about, and go find something more productive to do.

If that sounds equivocal, you understand me perfectly. I want to like Twitter – after all, so many people do, there must be something good in it – but the more I use it, the more mystified I become as to why so many people are attracted to it. Sort of like Paris Hilton – I can’t figure out the popular appeal there, either.

Twitter Problems Galore

Although Twitter is admittedly trendy and fashionable, it has a number of critical flaws.

Too Much Information

First, Twitter is just too darn open. Just because you can put anything in your Twitter posts doesn’t mean that you should. But, unfortunately, some do. For example, I started following one Twitter feed from a well-known sales best practices expert, hoping he might have some interesting insights to share. Instead, I received a steady stream of messages like this:

• “Got up this morning, feeling good!”
• “Sitting on the back porch, enjoying life!”
• “Just realized what a lucky guy I am!”

I am all for having an optimistic outlook on life. However, I am not a fan of having that optimism forced upon me in an endless stream of greeting card platitudes. Every time I read one of these little gems of anti-depressant inspired wisdom, I thought, “Thanks for stealing another five seconds of my life, pal.” It adds up, after a while.

I stopped following this fellow, when I realized that he never really said anything important. Sort of like Paris Hilton, come to think of it.

As bad as this example is, there are other Twitter feeds that are worse. Does anyone really think that the entire world needs to know when they are heading for the bathroom, and what they do when they get there? Apparently, some Twitter users are so narcissistic that they feel compelled to share every aspect of their life with the world, in real time, no matter how mundane.

To these people, I say only this: no one wants to know you that well. Trust me.

A House Built on Sand

Second, Twitter’s infrastructure just doesn’t work very well. It goes offline, inexplicably, at frequent but random intervals. It stops working so often that there are websites dedicated to the frequent downtime of Twitter. When people start memorializing your failures, it’s not a good thing. During my evaluation, I observed that Twitter went down an average of at least once every other day, for intervals lasting between twenty minutes and more than two hours. It wouldn’t be so bad if it went down at scheduled times – Twitter’s outages are generally unpredictable.

Tech analysts speculate that Twitter’s unreliability is due to the underlying technology, which was never intended to support so many users. Also, no one predicted that nearly two million people would be running up the Twitter curve this quickly, further compounding the performance problem. Which means, most likely, that Twitter outages are going to get a lot worse until the system gets a complete overhaul. And Twitter isn’t saying when or if that might happen.

Who Are You, Really?

Third, Twitter is wide open to spoofing (and so is Jott, which we recently reviewed). Spoofing, for the uninitiated, is when other people masquerade as you by falsifying data. As Twitter is set up today, anyone that knows a Twitter user’s authorized cell phone number can update that person’s Twitter page, with relative ease. Imagine, for a moment, that one of your unscrupulous competitors gets your mobile number, goes to your Twitter page, and posts obscenities about your prospect or customer, and then directs them there. This is why I have not connected my mobile phone to my Twitter feed – I don’t want anyone else to put words in my mouth, especially in a public forum.

A Selling Time Vampire

Finally, Twitter offers almost nothing of value to sales professionals. Let’s walk through some essential elements of a salesperson’s job, and see if Twitter provides any utility:

• Can Twitter help us to find new prospects? Maybe, if you have a lot of followers, they might be able to refer you – but that sounds like a bit of stretch – and frankly, there are other services far better suited to build referrals than Twitter.
• Can Twitter help us to research accounts? Highly unlikely – and there are many other much better resources designed for account research, too.
• Can Twitter help us to qualify opportunities, provide proof of concept, justify our offering’s value, negotiate or close new business? No.
• Can Twitter help us to manage and improve account relationships? Well, maybe, if your customer follows your Twitter feed – but remember that most of the interaction on Twitter is public. Do you really want customer inquiries to you to be broadcast to anyone who cares to read them? That doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.
• Can Twitter reduce administration or help salespeople to be more efficient? No – in fact, it will consume precious selling time.

One Good Use for Twitter

You may notice that I maintain a Twitter account, and in fact show it on the SellingGeek.com website. That’s because I use my Twitter feed only to share updates from the Selling Geek blog, using a handy RSS-to-Twitter utility called Twitterfeed. You’ll find no posts on my Twitter page about my personal life – ever – I promise. So, if you use Twitter, feel free to follow me – my Twitter name is TimothySullivan.

Sales Pro Value Score

As a tool for sales professionals, the pretty, popular, and lightweight Twitter doesn’t have much to offer. So, because of its low sales utility, lack of identity security, annoying user practices, and yet, a significant “cool factor”, Selling Geek gives Twitter a Sales Pro Value Score of 1.5, out of a possible 5.

UPDATE: Twitter to get “fixed” by John Adams (the technologist, not the patriot…)

UPDATE: Twitter to abandon its unscalable architecture?

UPDATE: Open source Twitter competitor Identi.ca emerges

UPDATE: FriendFeed catching up to Twitter

UPDATE: Twitter to buy Summize for search

UPDATE: Apparently, people don’t care about Twitter downtime

UPDATE: Twitter testing new design

UPDATE: The case of the missing Twitter followers

UPDATE: Tweet your files with Drop.io

UPDATE: Twitter usage not as high as expected

Tags: Podcast, selling geek, Twitter as a sales tool, Twitter review, Twitterfeed

 

 Selling Geek 002-YouSendIt [9:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Last fall, I was working on a sales improvement project for a client in the UK. They asked me to develop several short videos for their team. This was a rush project – with a very short deadline. They couldn’t wait for me to burn the videos to a DVD disk, and ship the disk overseas – they wanted the files right now.

“No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just email these 150 megabyte files to them.” Ah, not so fast, grasshopper. Did you know that most corporate networks reject media attachments to emails, or at least block emails with attachments over 10 megabytes in size? For some reason, my usually geeky brain had forgotten that even Google mail and Yahoo mail have file attachment size limits. (Duh!)

“No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just set up a little FTP site on my home server using FileZilla. (A very cool file transfer protocol server program – but that’s another show…) And so I did. But, alas, my client was most displeased. I’d forgotten that my AT&T DSL broadband service provided lightning-fast 6 megabytes per second download transfer speeds, but my upload speed was limited to just 512 kilobytes per second – and so my client was pulling his hair out and cursing my now twice-demonstrated technical naiveté. (Argh!)

So, what was I to do? Enter, my savior… YouSendIt, the slickest file transfer service I’ve ever used, and clearly of immense value to any sales professional that has to send large files to prospects or customers.

YouSendIt enables you to send large electronic files to anyone with an e-mail address. And it’s a breeze to use. You simply use your Internet browser to log in to the YouSendIt.com website and upload your file, which is stored in a secure, private location. YouSendIt sends an email to your intended recipient, and provides them with a web link to your file. They simply click the link and download the file to their computer.

Also, YouSendIt can be used by your customers to send you large files, too. They simply upload their file to your private dropbox location on the YouSendIt website, and you receive a notification e-mail that it’s there, ready for you to transfer to your PC.

Costs

What does YouSendIt cost? Well, that depends. For most sales pros, the totally free Lite subscription will meet the needs of salespeople with occasional large file transfer requirements – the Lite plan allows file transfers up to 100 megabytes in size, with a monthly transfer bandwidth limit of 1 gigabyte, and a maximum number of 100 downloads per file. That means that you can send up to ten files per month if they are the maximum allowed 100 megabyte size.

If that’s not enough capacity for you, the next level subscription, called the Pro plan, costs US$9.99 per month, and allows file transfer sizes of up to 2 gigabytes each, with a monthly download bandwidth limit of 40 gigabytes, and up to 500 file downloads per month – it also gives you 2 gigabytes of online storage space, and more control over your file tracking and distribution.

For sales teams, YouSendIt also provides even more advanced subscription plans – the Business Plus plan at US$29.99 per month, and the variable tier priced Corporate Suite plan with unlimited bandwidth and downloads. These advanced subscriptions also provide the ability to brand your download pages with your company logo and colors, if you wish, or integrate YouSendIt capability into your own website, and other flexible features.

Even if you have the free Lite subscription, YouSendIt provides for exceptions, allowing you to transfer a file larger than 100 megabytes (up to the maximum of 2 gigabytes), for a one-time fee of US$8.99. That’s pretty pricey for a one-time exception fee – but it’s still cheaper than most overnight express shipping charges, and of course, the transfer is instantaneous. And, you can always upgrade your free Lite subscription, if your transfer needs grow beyond what you expected.

Add-Ins and Extensions

While most salespeople will be happy to use the simple-to-use website to transfer individual files, YouSendIt also provides optional software and plug-in extensions for Photoshop, CorelDRAW and Aperture, so you can upload multiple files from directly within those programs on your PC. There’s also an Outlook plug-in that adds a YouSendIt file transfer icon to Outlook’s toolbar. If you do a lot of file transfers, these special YouSendIt applications and extensions can save you time, as they increase transfer speed and do away with the need to access the YouSendIt website with your browser.

Minor Complaints

What’s not to like about YouSendIt? Well, if you need to send files that are larger than 2 gigabytes, this service isn’t for you – that’s the maximum file size allowed, even at the most advanced subscription levels. Also, one missing feature I would like to see is a notification email back to me, telling me that my intended file recipient successfully retrieved my file. There’s no way to do this automatically within the YouSendIt site, so when I send a file, I always tell my recipient to let me know when they got the file by reply email, which is a minor inconvenience for both of us.

Sales Pro Value

These small complaints aside, YouSendIt is a godsend to sales pros that need to transmit large files safely, securely, and with a minimum of fuss and bother, both for themselves and their customers. The next time you need to transmit a large proposal or RFQ response, YouSendIt might give you that small but important professional edge that helps you get ahead of your competitors – and all this at little or no cost.

By the way, using YouSendIt, I was able to transfer my large files to my UK client in just a few minutes, and they loved how easy it was to retrieve them. Their perception of me quickly changed from “blithering idiot” to “good reliable bloke”.

So, because of its ease of use, reliability, scalability (to a point) and low cost, Selling Geek gives the YouSendIt service a Sales Pro Value Score of 4, out of a possible 5.

UPDATE: YouSendIt secures additional venture capital funding

Tags: file transfer, Podcast, Review, sales tool, selling geek, YouSendIt

 

 Selling Geek 001-New Jawbone [9:51m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’ve sometimes had to take important calls with customers as I was driving from one sales appointment to another, but I’ve always cringed at the impression I was making – with all the background noise, I’m sure my in-transit calls made less than a completely professional impression. I also remember one teleconference with a hot prospect, which I made from my home office, just when my lawn maintenance guy fired up his mower right outside my office window, turning my call into a “how fast can I hit the mute button?” contest.

But for the past year, I never worried about background noise on mobile phone calls. That’s because I’ve been using a Jawbone noise-canceling Bluetooth headset, from Aliph. This amazing device screens out virtually all background noise, allowing only your voice to pass through. With my Jawbone connected, I confidently make calls from my car, from the street, from the airport terminal, wherever, all with perfect clarity – my call recipients all think I’m calling from my nice, quiet office.

And now, the New Jawbone

Now, Aliph has released its second generation of the Jawbone headset, which they appropriately but uninspiredly named the New Jawbone. I wonder what they will call the third generation someday – the New New Jawbone? Regardless of what you call it, the New Jawbone is indeed a significant improvement over the previously impressive original model, and well worth buying, even at its relatively hefty retail price of just under US$130.

The styling of the old model Jawbone was best described as Borg-like – an approximately one inch by two inch metal mesh rectangle hanging from your ear, it reminded me of that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation when Captain Picard was assimilated by an evil cyborg race – “I am Locutus, of Borg. Resistance is futile.”

The New Jawbone is half the size of the original model, and half of the weight at less than half an ounce, which makes it much more comfortable to wear. This lighter weight also gives you the option to wear the Jawbone as a purely in-ear headset, or with a flexible attached leather-covered earloop. I wear glasses, so an in-ear option is important to me – and yet I found the New Jawbone comfortable to wear both with or without the earloop. Aliph gives you four different earloop sizes, and three different earbud sizes, so you can find the perfect fit for your particular pinna.

Make no mistake, though – this headset’s styling is still clearly Jawbone-ish, albeit on a smaller rectangle with a new diamond-patterned metallic finish in black, gold or silver. Even better than the original model, this New Jawbone makes as strong a fashion statement as it does about performance.

Performance

And let’s talk about performance – the New Jawbone’s “NoiseAssassin” technology is even more amazing that the original model’s noise canceling capabilities. The best way to describe it is simply to listen to a demonstration. (Click on the player at the top of this article, and you’ll see what we mean.)

How does the New Jawbone cut out all the background noise? It’s all in the design, which features one important difference from other headsets. At the end closest to your mouth is a small plastic nub, which rests against your face. This nub picks up the vibrations from your voice, and the New Jawbone then compares these vibrations to all the sound waves coming through the microphones, and then filters the unwanted background noise in real-time. Aliph perfected this technology for the military, and it’s very impressive in its performance.

I tested the New Jawbone’s Bluetooth pairing capabilities against three different phones, a Blackberry 8830, Motorola Razr, and a Treo 630, and had no trouble connecting with any of them. Further, I found the range of the headset to be about 20 feet before I noticed any significant signal loss.

Any Downsides?

So, are there any downsides in the New Jawbone? Well, it is fairly pricey compared to other Bluetooth wireless headsets, for sure, but given its incredible performance, I think it’s more than worth the premium. I’ve had trouble with the flexible ear loops, too – they are easily bent, and can break off, making it impossible to fix. I now store my New Jawbone in a rigid eyeglass case, just to be safe. Also, the total talk time is now less than the old Jawbone – four hours compared to the original’s six, which still isn’t bad considering that the battery is now less than half the size of the original. Aliph includes a magnetically attached charging cable, which gives you the flexible option of recharging from an AC power adapter or from your USB port on your PC. I found it takes about an hour to fully recharge the New Jawbone, which is pretty fast.

I also don’t fully appreciate the two hidden buttons on the New Jawbone – one at the back of the unit that turns on the noise cancellation capability, and a second button further forward that answers and ends calls. While aesthetically stylish, these buttons are sometimes hard to find, and although the New Jawbone gives you an aural signal that they’ve been engaged, they still are not very intuitive to use. Fortunately, I simply keep the NoiseAssassin feature on all the time, and use my Blackberry 8830 to answer and end calls, so I never have to use the headset buttons. Also, it would be nice to have a volume button – the New Jawbone adjusts volume automatically based on background noise. A nice feature, but not always perfect, so a volume boost would have been welcome.

Sales Pro Value Score

Still, these are minor quibbles for what otherwise is a perfect addition to any sales professional’s arsenal of technology advantages. There are other Bluetooth noise canceling headsets out there that are very good – the Plantronics Voyager 520 and the strangely named nXZEN nX6000 are both cheaper and worth a close look – but in the end, the New Jawbone simply wins out in style and performance. There’s no doubt about it, the New Jawbone will boost your professional image, both in person or over the phone, and those whom you call will definitely appreciate it.

So, in summary, Selling Geek gives the New Jawbone a Sales Pro Value Score of 4.5 out of a possible five.

UPDATE: Another highly-rated noise-cancelling Bluetooth headset worth a look is the BlueAnt Z9i

Tags: Aliph, Bluetooth headset, bluetooth noise cancelling headset, Jawbone, New Jawbone, noise cancelling, Podcast, Review, selling geek, wireless headset