Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Truth in IT Blog

Internal Sales Position Available

Truth in IT is now ready for our first inside salesperson.  PLEASE READ THIS WHOLE POST AND THE ENTIRE CRAIGSLIST POST BEFORE REPLYING TO IT.

Here are the good things about this position:

  1. I don't care where you live or what hours you work.  If you have a phone and an Internet connection you can do the job.
  2. This is a very unique idea that a lot of people are excited about and we've gotten lots of response from end-users.
  3. It's a totally untapped market and you have virtually no competition for what we will be doing.
  4. I'm willing to talk about options in the company for the right candidate, maybe even significantly more options for one who comes in and kicks butt.
  5. My name (W. Curtis Preston) has a lot of brand recognition and trust with 10s of thousands of end-users out there who have bought my three books.  Tapping into that should really help the sale.

Here are the challenges with this position:

  1. We are a bootstrapped company who is, how shall we say, strapped. ;)  Your compensation (for now) will be pure commission w/no draw via an independent contractor arrangement.  We can talk about changing that once we get off the ground, but right now we can't afford to pay you if you're not selling.  Dig?
  2. "It's a totally untapped market" is another way of saying "you're going to have to explain what we do and why they should pay."  I'm not going to say it'll be all wine and roses, although I'm more than willing to send as much of both of those to the right candidate.
  3. With a service that costs $1,000 per year, we're talking volume sales here.  The good news is that we think it should be a pretty short sales cycle.  You like it?  Great, here's the URL where you can sign up and pay us $1,000. You don't like it?  We're moving on.  We're not talking about doing onsite visits and hours and hours of presentations to close the sale.
  4. There will be some incoming leads (I have over 500 in my pocket right now), but let's face it.  We're talking a lot of cold-calling and direct-mail type deals here.  If you're not down with cold-calling then this is not going to be the place for you.

Info on how to respond to this offer can be found in our Craigslist post.  PLEASE READ THE WHOLE POST BEFORE REPLYING -- I'M ASKING SOMETHING UNIQUE.

Thanks for your interest and happy hunting.

 

We unveiled Truth in IT today

We unveiled Truth in IT today at Gestalt IT's Tech Field Day in San Jose CA.  In attendance were several bloggers, many of which were very interested in what I had to say.  There were plenty of questions and excitement.  I hope the bloggers go back and say nice things on their blogs.  I'll be watching the traffic of the next several days to see what happens.

 

An Example of Why I'm Starting Truth in IT

I'm trying not to say "I told you so" too loudly regarding the EOL announcement of the EMC 3DL line.  But I think it's important to mention that we were advising people against this product several months ago.  I saw trouble in the relationship long before anyone at EMC or Quantum would admit it publicly, and I advised my clients to buy just about anything but the EMC 3DL products, because I felt they were not long for this world.

The only problem with this is that I only got to do that for a few clients, based on the usual cost of my services.  Truth in IT will change that.  If we see products that are moving in a positive or negative way, we can advise our subscribers simultaneously at no extra charge.

For example, right now we know of a product update that is probably (almost surely) not going to release when all of its customers think it is.  Our subscribers will know about this in advance and adjust their project schedules accordingly.

Wouldn't it be nice to have an expert in your corner?

   

A voice of truth in a misleading world

Where do you go to find out if the product you’re considering actually works, or which product is best for your environment? Consulting companies are very expensive and their advice is often run through the “what will our partner think” filter. The bigger the partner, the thicker the filter. Industry analysts are an inexpensive source of information, but they rarely say anything but good about the products their clients offer. All of their revenue comes from vendors; therefore, they should be thought of as an extension of their clients’ marketing departments, not an independent source of information. Technical publications are often a good source of information, but that industry does not have the budget to do the kind of product testing and research that we will be doing.

Truth in IT derives no revenue from the vendors who make, resell, or outsource hardware or software for the IT industry. Our only revenue comes from the people using the technology: end-user subscribers who pay a modest fee to be part of a very unique community of formal product research and testing, and freely-exchanged information.

We are starting with backup & recovery and will expand to other areas (e.g. primary storage, security, etc.) as our customer base dictates. We started in backup for two reasons. The first reason is that most everyone wants to purchase or upgrade something in their backup environment every year; they might do it even more often if they could do so with the knowledge that what they were upgrading to actually worked! The second reason is that our founder, W. Curtis Preston, is Mr. Backup – the most trusted independent expert in backup & recovery. Backup seemed like an obvious place to start.

Click here to learn about our Backup Concierge service: an industry first.

   

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