It took me a while1 to find the perfect job, but I did it.
My challenge was finding a (reasonable) local company that sold something complicated that I could get interested in. I found many companies selling cool things and many non-local selling complicated things. As an additional challenge was that I would prefer a company were I could work from home several days of the week.
Finding a company like this was much harder than I thought. And finding this company is a neat little story on its own.
When I left InTouch I contemplated starting up my own sales consulting firm for startups. I quickly figured out that while startups do need help selling, there isn’t really a market for consulting there2. Instead, I began the Vancouver Sales Meetup, a monthly meeting where folks could come and discuss their sales challenges and get help from their peers.
The fine folks at Brewhouse, especially Kalv, offered to host. After I had run a few of these, I got an email from Kalv introducing me to Peter. Peter wanted to connect with great sales people in Vancouver and Kalv very kindly thought of me. Turns out that Peter and I are very similar and hit it off right away. When I mentioned that I was looking for a new challenge, he mentioned that he was trying to work with this Victoria-based company and to keep in touch.
All of that leads me to…
I am extremely excited to begin helping Sockeye own the Work Order Scheduling space. We provide amazing benefits to any company struggling with ERP/Work Order scheduling3.
What I love about Sockeye:
This company is going places and I can’t wait to see where we end up!
The last Vancouver Sales Meetup was the best attended one since my first one in September, so I’m hoping I can keep the momentum going over the next few months.
Kris Constable has a good write-up so I won’t repeat that, but I will add some context.
Topics we covered:
The two most interested discussions to me, were around trials and shipping. For the trial discussion, we discussed the benefits of a resource-based vs time-based trial. For example, instead of a 2 week trial, where people might not engage or not even sign up because of the trial length, make it based on the number of events the customer can do. i.e. first 3 events are free. That way people can start whenever they want and take as long as they like to engage.
Second discussion was around whether or not to include shipping when quoting prices. This particular company, sells access to customers on a per product basis and must ship the product to the end user (who isn’t the customer). So the customer wants to know the pricing before deciding on the level of engagement. But because the shipping costs depend on a few factors (quantity, product) it is very hard to quote up front. Kind of a stalemate.
Two things we came up with:
Everyone said they learned something they could use in their business, so I consider the meetup a huge success!
If you’d like to continue chatting about it, please come to the #sales channel on the PixelCrafter’s Slack board.
Next one March 19.
It’s the reason I love complex products/services.
Be a challenger!
A timely article