Article: Improving Sales: The Excuse Department Is Closed ( @ldubost , read it!!)

The whole article is worth a read. This quote is very true:

Also, don’t give your sales teams too much authority on price negotiations. Given them small authority to discount, give the sales leader a slightly larger level and anything above that comes to your desk for negotiation. Too big of a discount authority will lead to price drops because it’s easier than selling value and doing the hard business-case work. Losing on price is for losers. The excuse department is closed.

From: "Improving Sales: The Excuse Department Is Closed" at: http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/05/the-excuse-department-is-closed/

As a sales guy, I've been falling for this more than once. Happily enough, my boss (@ldubost) won't let me do it too often :-)

(via Instapaper)

UPDATE: I'll make sure to read all articles on http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/on-selling/ as well

The importance of a killer feature: XWiki's WYSIWYG rich text editor

This article caught my eye:

One killer feature


When working with startups, Ferriss sees one problem popping up over and over. “The biggest weakness I see is companies getting focused on implementing new features,” he says. “That’s the biggest waste of time that I see. They have a viable product that people are paying for and instead of identifying their cheapest avenue for acquiring profitable customers or focusing on polishing the product they already have, they focus on adding ten new features.

From: "Tim Ferriss on tolerable mediocrity, false idols, diversifying your identity, and the advice he gives startups" at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/37signals/beMH/~3/Na2KchIan7E/2734-tim-ferriss-on-tolerable-mediocrity-false-idols-diversifying-your-identity-and-the-advice-he-gives-startups

As XWiki SAS' sales guy, I see this daily from customers who always ask us to make the WYSIWYG better and have it work seamlessly with existing tools, specifically with Word. All the bevy of advanced features XWiki Enterprise has to offer interests them only in the context of having a great text editor to begin with.

That's the reason why we've been working on and polishing our rich text editor for more than 2 years in order to make it ever smoother to use and better integrated with the Office suite.

Deciding to switch from TinyMCE to our own custom-built WYSIWYG editor was a tough choice back then. It took months of customer feedback and lengthy executive discussions in order to make the choice to invest time in it. Yet in retrospect, this decision was probably one of the best we ever made product-wise. Our editor is a key feature of the wiki and we have total control over it to improve it as we see fit.

Now I'll make sure to tell our tech team to make it even better :-) Keep up the good work Marius (@mflorea)!!

(via Instapaper)