This email may be worth millions of dollars in sales • Hacker News Board

Re: This email may be worth millions of dollars in sales

#71

Post by derefr » Wed, Sep 24, 2014, 5:04 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #58

drdaeman wrote: post #43

Maybe this is due to lack of context, but with all that "designed to improve your company performance in the critical area" and "investing heavily in great customer service and innovation" that email sounds terribly enterpriesey to me. It all could be boiled down to a one-liner in spirit of "Sorry, but we can't offer our services any cheaper. Our prices are indeed higher, but the services are better than competitors…

> Just my opinion. I'm not a businessman. It shows :) No offense, but this is an engineer's mindset. Great for building products; terrible for selling them. A businessperson's mindset is "if they don't understand their value proposition well enough to explain it to me, their product likely isn't any better than the competition and they know it." Better still, by explaining your value proposition in terms of a prospec…

> A businessperson's mindset is "if they don't understand their value proposition well enough to explain it to me, their product likely isn't any better than the competition and they know it."

You'd think a consequentialist businessman would be more interested in buying good things that go unrecognized/undervalued/un-understood by those who have them for sale. He can use the information asymmetry to make a profit, after all.

Re: This email may be worth millions of dollars in sales

#72

Post by exelius » Wed, Sep 24, 2014, 5:18 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #71

exelius wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just my opinion. I'm not a businessman. It shows :) No offense, but this is an engineer's mindset. Great for building products; terrible for selling them. A businessperson's mindset is "if they don't understand their value proposition well enough to explain it to me, their product likely isn't any better than the competition and they know it." Better still, by explaining your value proposition in terms of a prospec…

> A businessperson's mindset is "if they don't understand their value proposition well enough to explain it to me, their product likely isn't any better than the competition and they know it." You'd think a consequentialist businessman would be more interested in buying good things that go unrecognized/undervalued/un-understood by those who have them for sale. He can use the information asymmetry to make a profit, af…

Maybe if you're buying widgets, but not services. Just like you may be ok with buying a car from a person who doesn't understand the value of his product, but would be more leery of hiring an accountant who didn't understand the value of his services. SaaS solutions are truly a service in this regard.

Re: This email may be worth millions of dollars in sales

#73

Post by exelius » Wed, Sep 24, 2014, 5:20 PM UTC

Kurtz79 wrote: post #63

exelius wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a proactive move that turned out quite well for them. They saw that the consumer PC business was going to shrink significantly over the next 10 years, so they sold off while the price was still high. I don't think anyone in their right mind is second guessing IBM's decision to get out of the PC business. In hindsight, it was a great move executed with perfect timing.

Completely agree. But they took this decision because they saw that the superior quality of their product(which having owned older Thinkpads I can say it's true) wasn't profitable enough when competing with lower cost "good enough" alternatives.

IBM's core strategy is one of technological differentiation through R&D; not price leadership. It's absolutely part of that strategy to exit commoditizing markets (which is why they got out of x86 servers as well) where product differentiation is difficult.

Re: This email may be worth millions of dollars in sales

#74

Post by corny » Wed, Sep 24, 2014, 5:34 PM UTC

stevewepay wrote: post #26

Sales 101 is being able to take the conversation away from "price" and change it to "value". 20 years ago, my friend was selling IBM desktops and servers to educational institutes and I learned this from him. There was no way IBM could compete against the prices of those small computer stores, so he had to actively show how buying IBM would save money over the long run, etc. He was a very good salesman so it worked p…

IBM used FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) to sell computers. Not unlike the sales tactics in this email. The actual positive "value" is only vaguely described.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt#Def...

Re: This email may be worth millions of dollars in sales

#75

Post by notahacker » Wed, Sep 24, 2014, 6:21 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #58

drdaeman wrote: post #43

Maybe this is due to lack of context, but with all that "designed to improve your company performance in the critical area" and "investing heavily in great customer service and innovation" that email sounds terribly enterpriesey to me. It all could be boiled down to a one-liner in spirit of "Sorry, but we can't offer our services any cheaper. Our prices are indeed higher, but the services are better than competitors…

> Just my opinion. I'm not a businessman. It shows :) No offense, but this is an engineer's mindset. Great for building products; terrible for selling them. A businessperson's mindset is "if they don't understand their value proposition well enough to explain it to me, their product likely isn't any better than the competition and they know it." Better still, by explaining your value proposition in terms of a prospec…

One can only hope the flaws are due to anonymisation. The bigger flaw in the email (as is) is that it includes only one short paragraph about HelloSign's explicit benefit sandwiched right in the middle of some very generic comparison between the brands.

And when if does come to referencing the competition and they're not universally-derided, you get a lot more props for commending the competition's relative strengths in areas you know the customer doesn't care about before highlighting the relevance of your strengths than you do from badmouthing them and treating the customer like an idiot for raising them. Unless it's a really transparent negotiation gambit in which case you may as well call them on it.

Re: This email may be worth millions of dollars in sales

#76

Post by derefr » Wed, Sep 24, 2014, 6:59 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #72

derefr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A businessperson's mindset is "if they don't understand their value proposition well enough to explain it to me, their product likely isn't any better than the competition and they know it." You'd think a consequentialist businessman would be more interested in buying good things that go unrecognized/undervalued/un-understood by those who have them for sale. He can use the information asymmetry to make a profit, af…

Maybe if you're buying widgets, but not services. Just like you may be ok with buying a car from a person who doesn't understand the value of his product, but would be more leery of hiring an accountant who didn't understand the value of his services. SaaS solutions are truly a service in this regard.

I guess I'm thinking of things like "Internet companies who don't realize that they're providing SLA-ed synchronous links with their IP video-conferencing service." They're selling you one thing, but you're getting most of the benefit from a part of it they don't even realize is worth anything.