Some of my colleagues were talking about a standing desk and how nice it would be to not sit all day long. Long lists of random studies about sitting were quoted, although not corroborated, in an attempt to get a standing desk at the office. This was perpetrated by exactly two of my twelve colleagues, so the numbers were not on their side . Regardless, we had an empty cubicle station that could very easily be converted to a standing desk in about 15 minutes. Read more
Evangelizing what you do is fun and makes you feel good, but often creates a false sense of sales accomplishment. In general, people are nice and won’t outright tell you they don’t need your product or service, which is too bad because that would save us all a lot of time. Instead, they offer to follow up in a few weeks or ask for more information which starts the process of you wasting time on prospects with zero chance of ever closing on them. Read more
In previous blog posts I discussed how our development team operates an Agile development process leveraging SCRUM meetings. Lately I have been working hard to optimize our sales process and I wanted to share with you some of our techniques. While this isn’t rocket science, I feel that if we don’t document the process, it won’t be followed and we lose accountability. With a policy document, you can always just point to it and say “do it that way.”
Read more
Our development team has been leveraging SCRUM meetings for about a year with great success. We have gone through three major revisions over that time and we’re very happy with our current process. In previous blog posts I discussed how our development team implements our Agile process through SCRUM meetings. As a follow-up to that post, I wanted to share our template and framework which can be adapted for your development team.
Our development group is small, and as such doesn’t need a ton of “process” to keep projects moving forward. However, since having no process is never a good idea either, we have adopted various Agile methodologies and added our own spins. At the heart of Agile are daily meetings call SCRUMs.
Sally Hogshead released “How the World Sees You: Discover Your Highest Value Through the Science of Fascination” in July 2014 and it quickly make its way to the New York Times’ and Wall Street Journal’s bestseller lists. I’ve been a huge fan of Sally’s work ever since she was a speaker at the first OTA Sessions back in 2011. So when I heard she had a new book out, I pre-ordered it and cracked the cover the day it arrived. Read more