Randy Weber

Dare Obasanjo posted a great article on how “Early Adopters are not the Mass Market”.

If you work in the technology industry it pays to be familiar with the ideas from Geoffrey Moore’s insightful book Crossing the Chasm. In the book he takes a look at the classic marketing bell curve that segments customers into Early Adopters, Pragmatists, Conservatives and Laggards then points out that there is a large chasm to cross when it comes to becoming popular beyond an initial set of early adopters.

Folks out on the West Coast seem to have a real hard time with this concept. Every little company that I’ve ever tried to do business with that had gotten a little press from TechCrunch or one of the other A-List bloggers seem to think that they’ve hit the big time and expect you to bend over backwards to do business with them. Then 12 months later, they’re no where to be seen.

The Kelsey Group wrote about something that was best left dead: the CueCat. In Quick Response Bar Codes Invade Yellow Pages the concept is that small bar codes can be inserted into print ads and scanned by mobile phones to link users to information over the Internet. The problem is that this has been tried and failed. I still have an old CueCat lying around the house. My former employer, Verizon Directories, actually participated in the CueCat debacle.

Slow Leadership discusses research out of Wharton about how treating partners fairly matters. No kidding. Any good business development person can tell you this. Yet many executives don’t get it. So here’s how it works: if your partner feels like you screwed them, then they won’t put any effort into the relationship and both parties end up losing. So the lesson for today is DON’T SCREW YOUR PARTNERS!

John Mariotti posted a guest article on Small Business Trends on Ten Reasons I Won’t Use Social Media Sites. In it he comes off as a stubborn, grumpy old man. Note to John - not everyone gets to spend all their time going from conference to conference shaking hands.

While I’ve founds sites like MySpace and FaceBook to be useless for business networking purposes, Linkedin has proven to be very useful. I’ve gotten many interviews through invitations to link up and through introductions. In my past role at Match.com, I reached multiple leads via Linkedin that I otherwise would not have been able to locate. So my experience is that social networking can be very effective both in finding a job and in finding a lead.

Bernard Lunn on ReadWriteWeb gave a list of 11 Biz Dev 1.0 Tips. Of particular interest are items number 3 and 4:

3. Wait until you hear the screams. If you have a fire engine, you are not needed until the house is on fire. The best sales people wait until they see a real need before applying a lot of effort…

4. Two ears, one mouth. …People don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems. Find the problem and show a solution based on your product…

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been sent after people to get a deal when there was no reason for them to want to work with us. It never works. We had nothing to offer. I can’t sell ice to an Eskimo. Nor can I tell you how many times I’ve been contacted by people with nothing to offer us but still wanting to do a deal. They either talk about the technology or, even worse, they expect me to come up with a way to work with them. My first question to everyone that calls is always - “What did you have in mind?” If they don’t have an answer, then we’re done.