crowdsourcing

What is Crowdsourcing?

Years before it was penned crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe in Wired Magazine I was involved with this concept and watched it work quite well. A friend’s small car dealership was looking for a new jingle for their radio ads. Instead of hiring a marketing company (or using an internal employee) they put the word out that anyone in Austin could submit a jingle and the winner would receive $1000 bucks! The response was incredible and the jingle is still being used 20+ years later. A key ingredient to this success was the location as Austin TX was/is packed full of singer songwriters. We’ll talk more about that later.

What Makes an Awesome Sales Engineer?

Sales engineering is truly an art-form. To be awesome, a sales engineer needs to invest effort into the technology, the business opportunity, and most importantly their personal style. I like to say they need to be left and right brained. Technical, creative, personable comes to mind. They also need to gain the trust of those they are partnered with and presenting to. Here are my 5 points of discussion of becoming an awesome sales engineer.

control

Micromanagers and Control Freaks.

We’ve all had them and maybe we were one ourselves. Maybe we still are? Managers that simply could not let go of any control. This goes for owners of businesses as well. You know the type… they’re pretty sure no one can do the job as well as them. They have the “If you want a job done right you have to do it yourself” philosophy. I wish I could tell you this applies to new managers only… unfortunately it doesn’t.

Social Media a Waste of Time.

Somewhere along the way sales professionals thought they had found the infamous “silver bullet” for sales success. “If I just Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin I will have thousands of sales easily!” Question… when has marketing using email, faxing, or mailers ever worked that way? Isn’t social media the same? You’re return will always be fractions of a percent for the effort. Always has, always will be… and you know what? That’s o.k. So, Is social media a waste of time?