Smalltalk with James Robertson

Best Buy is the latest entrant in the "when sales metrics run the show, everyone loses" sweepstakes:

As a sometime business school professor, I could just imagine the conversation with the TV department manager the day before. “Corporate says we have to work on what’s called up-selling and cross-selling,” the clerk was informed in lieu of actual training on either the products or effective sales. “Whenever you aren’t with a customer, you need to be roaming the floor pushing our deal with CinemaNow. At the end of the day, I want to know how many people you’ve approached.”

This is the sort of thing sales people think is effective. Why, I'm not sure, since nearly everyone I've ever met finds it irritating beyond belief. It sure is a widespread business meme though....

This is the sort of thing that really, really makes you wonder. First, HP dropped Windows for their tablets, bought Palm, and announced that WebOS was the future. Then they promoted the heck out of the TouchPad. Now... this:

In a dramatic turn of events, Hewlett-Packard said on Thursday that it will stop selling hardware based on the webOS it acquired from Palm. As part of its broad statement on Thursday regarding plans to consider spinning out its PC business, HP said “that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones.”

That is one heck of a lot of wasted money...

Technorati Tags: webos, touchpad, palm

You can always tell when company gets too big - it starts having internal wars that bleed out into public. Witness the internal enemies that the webspam team at Google seems to be making....

Technorati Tags: google, search

It's no wonder the NY Times has been having financial difficulties - what kind of idiots spend this kind of money on a paywall?

The New York-based company is spending $40 million to $50 million on the project and has said it plans to debut it by March.

That's just... weird.

Technorati Tags: stupidity, media

Here's an idea I've been hammering on for years - complicated pricing kills sales:

One thing many companies — in any industry — can learn from Apple is the importance of simple pricing. If you make it easy for people to understand how much they’re paying, and what they’re paying for, it is more likely that they’ll buy it. Or perhaps this is driven more by the converse: if people are confused about how much they have to pay, they’re more likely not to.

That's obvious, and yet so many companies miss it. You'll often hear that "the Enterprise is different", but remember - purchasing agents are just people too, and if they can't follow your pricing they'll get every bit as jumpy as anyone else.

Also, clear pricing doesn't have to mean low pricing. Apple certainly isn't found in the bargain aisle at the Dollar store...

Update: Along the same lines as this post, I got an email this morning that had this in it:

I’m shocked at how difficult it is to buy a copy of VisualWorks! I couldn’t find a link on the site: “Buy this software” I ended up leaving a generic message.

Make it hard to buy your software, and you'll needlessly limit the size of your user base.

Technorati Tags: sales

It looks like the multi-decade trend towards bigger and bigger "box store" outlets is coming to an end. It's harder to have more inventory than an online entity like Amazon:

U.S. retailers of all stripes super-sized their stores over the past two decades after big-box chains demonstrated the benefits of being larger than the competition. But many outsized outlets now look like dinosaurs in an age when Amazon.com's offerings dwarf even the most bountiful in-store selection, and advances in supply-chain management let retailers replenish shelves quickly without keeping heaps of merchandise handy in the back of the stores.

For most stuff I'd find at a big box store, it's easier to go to my browser and order it. Unless I need something right now, it's hard for me to justify the slog out to the box and the inevitable waiting in line. That even goes for the big grocery stores - I get over half of my groceries via Peapod now. I'd be much happier with a new specialist store (perhaps a real butcher?) than I would be in a new super store. The WSJ article indicates that I'm hardly the only person thinking that way.

That begs this question: what happens to all of those strip malls that are filled with huge box stores?

Technorati Tags: big box, retail

Apple has managed to keep the iPad available at a lower price than any (current) rival, and also has high profit margins. How? Vertical Integration:

Apple is the most vertically integrated company in the world. In addition to operating its own retail chains, all Apple hardware and software are designed in-house, and Apple also runs its own digital content store, iTunes.

Given all that, I wonder just how much higher their costs would be if they set up highly automated assembly plants in the lower cost parts of the US? Sure, labor is cheaper in China, but the shipping costs are much higher. It would be interesting to know, especially if fuel costs rise.

Technorati Tags: manufacturing

After yesterday's post on who software is sold to (the people who use it, not the people who sign the checks) - I ran across this post from James Governor via the comments:

Salesforce avoids IT to sell to the business, while Heroku avoids IT to sell to developers

Exacty right. If you try to sell to the management team, all you have to offer is price - and in that arena, it had better be a low price. If, on the other hand, you get the developers (or end users) sold, there's virtually no limit to the upselling possibilities, because there, you're selling on emotion.

Technorati Tags: sales

Kevin Hoctor talks about pricing for software (but the argument has value beyond software). It's specifically in the context of the new Mac App store, but I found this point interesting:

Because our software is worth the price I charge. I also owe it to my customer base to make sure my company is well-funded and continues to provide excellent software and support in the future. The profit curve is not negatively affected by higher prices until you are significantly out of the range of your competition—and by competition, I mean software that matches your software in quality. I've seen too many companies go out of business because they try to compete on price.

That's a point I made a lot while I was at Cincom, and to a large extent it's true - but it depends on where you've set that price. Note the middle section, which I'll repeat: "The profit curve is not negatively affected by higher prices until you are significantly out of the range of your competition"

The problem isn't competing on price; it's deciding on what the price should be without any input from reality. Ask any small vendor who has tried to keep prices up once a Walmart or Target showed up, for instance. You don't have to drop your prices in a constant race to the bottom - but you also can't stubbornly persist in pricing that is completely out of whack with what's going on in the marketplace.

To grow any business, you need to set pricing into what can broadly be called the "fair" range. If you find that there are always questions about your pricing, and that you need to come up with an entire sales spiel explaining your value relative to that pricing - then you have a problem. It's one thing to be Apple, where the prices are higher, but the perceived quality is also higher. It's something else again when only the pricing is higher.

Technorati Tags: sales, pricing

This is the kind of mistake that hidebound management makes a lot - something new comes along, and there's an instant "no":

Three of the biggest U.S. television broadcasters have blocked the Web-based versions of their shows from Google's new Web TV service, throwing a wrench into the company's plans to expand from computers to the living room.

Now think about that for a minute - you have Google TV, and you want to watch a show via the network's website. The network blocks your access. Why? You'll still have to watch the ads, so that's not the reason. This is just unreasoning fear. Supposedly they are worried about Google extending their web ad model to tv but I can't see how that would happen without the acquiescence of the network - the stream originates there. No, this is a bunch of guys who just fear the future.

Technorati Tags: tv, google