[jacquesm]

People don't do it because they don't loath cold callers themselves they do it because it works.

One example: when I was selling licensed software I don't think I ever managed more than $100K in annual sales (which to me seemed easy money). Enter Marco, my first employee.

Before the year was out we had nice sales documentation to go with the products, the beginnings of a brand and $600K in sales...

[dgudkov]

Can you please share a bit more details what exactly Marco did? I'm about to hire our first sales/marketing person so anything that helps understand what such people do is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[jacquesm]

He sat me down for three days to interview me what the product(s) did (there were three of them: webcam, rtslave and webpay), made an A4 sheet with notes about market, product, USPs and features. Then each of those became a little brochure and a web-page to go with it.

He then found out where our potential customers hung out and started a conversation with them, asked if he could mail them an information package and when given permission did so.

Everything looked pretty spiffy (for the time), website and documentation linked up in a very recognizable way (a little family of buttons with a common theme adapted for each product).

before Marco:

http://web.archive.org/web/19961229205008/http://mattheij.nl...

After:

http://web.archive.org/web/19980507122555/http://mattheij.nl...

I don't have any samples of that documentation any more, but it's long ago.

Essentially Marco 'packaged' the product in a way that made sense to potential users, where I was totally relying on happy customers telling other potential customers (which worked, but I failed to recognize that many of our customers saw our product as their competitive edge and they would rather keep that to themselves).

Interesting turn to the story: we still work together.

[dgudkov]

Thank you! PS. The point about keeping to themselves is spot on.

[vram22]

Interesting, what was your product?

[jacquesm]

I pioneered streaming video to the browser, so the primordial 'webcam' server software (initially SGI only, later also on the PC), a piece of software to 'reflect' a single stream to many users (which you could cascade, sort of a primitive CDN for video) and a module that allowed pay-per view and a system to do the actual pay-per-view transactions. All this happened between 1995 and 1998, at which point the product became free by tying it to a service (camarades.com), which I shut down on Jan. 1st this year.

[marktangotango]

Oh, so that's who you are! I had only noticed high quality posts from your account, thanks for sharing you're knowledge all this time :)

[vram22]

Fantastic.