Sun Microsystems Remakes Its Sale Force
Wall Street Journal article By Christopher Lawton
Interesting... maybe my remarks to some folks at Sun back in December 2005 made a difference? I suggested that they may want to review the landmark book, To Catch a Mouse Make a Noise Like a Cheese by Lewis Kornfeld.
I was trying to buy one of their servers, during a promotion that they were running for the Sun Ultra 20. They were giving them away, if you bought the service contract for three years. As I recall, they required a credit card that had an expiration date at least three years into the future, then they would bill you monthly.
Great idea. As had become the case however, poor implementation. During the 1990s Sun hardware and the Sybase RDBMS was my preferred platform. Although I had pushed NeXT to implement NeXTstep (called OpenSTEP on non-NeXT hardware as I recall) on the HP PA-RISC platform... but I digress.
Sun also had a lousy video with poor sound qualities to promote the Ultra 20. I recommended that my contact look at Steve Job's (then) recent iPod video from apple dot com to learn how video promotions should be done by Fortune 1000 organizations.
I am not interested in helping a publicly traded company, but if I were, I would say focus on the sales function. But too little, maybe too late for Sun. The article quotes one customer of 10 years (not me) as saying "Sun had become a fairly complex organization." Too bad.
Wonder if I shared my classic "everyone is in sales" speech?
Oh well. I hope they make it. The products are exceptional.
Tell you what, if anyone in sales at Sun Microsystems attends the upcoming Purple Curve Workshop on January 19th, I will give them an extra copy of my book for Jonathan Schwartz.
Jeff 'SKI' Kinsey, Jonah
www.ThroughputPress.com
tag: sun microsystems
Friday, December 29, 2006
Sun Microsystems Sales Force
Sun Microsystems Remakes Its Sale Force
Wall Street Journal article By Christopher Lawton
Interesting... maybe my remarks to some folks at Sun back in December 2005 made a difference? I suggested that they may want to review the landmark book, To Catch a Mouse Make a Noise Like a Cheese by Lewis Kornfeld.
I was trying to buy one of their servers, during a promotion that they were running for the Sun Ultra 20. They were giving them away, if you bought the service contract for three years. As I recall, they required a credit card that had an expiration date at least three years into the future, then they would bill you monthly.
Great idea. As had become the case however, poor implementation. During the 1990s Sun hardware and the Sybase RDBMS was my preferred platform. Although I had pushed NeXT to implement NeXTstep (called OpenSTEP on non-NeXT hardware as I recall) on the HP PA-RISC platform... but I digress.
Sun also had a lousy video with poor sound qualities to promote the Ultra 20. I recommended that my contact look at Steve Job's (then) recent iPod video from apple dot com to learn how video promotions should be done by Fortune 1000 organizations.
I am not interested in helping a publicly traded company, but if I were, I would say focus on the sales function. But too little, maybe too late for Sun. The article quotes one customer of 10 years (not me) as saying "Sun had become a fairly complex organization." Too bad.
Wonder if I shared my classic "everyone is in sales" speech?
Oh well. I hope they make it. The products are exceptional.
Tell you what, if anyone in sales at Sun Microsystems attends the upcoming Purple Curve Workshop on January 19th, I will give them an extra copy of my book for Jonathan Schwartz.
Jeff 'SKI' Kinsey, Jonah
www.ThroughputPress.com
tag: sun microsystems
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