"An entrepreneur is an enterprising individual who builds capital through risk and/or initiative."
According to this definition, a VC is an entrepreneur. If that is the case, then it would seem entrepreneurs would have more power to change the world as VC's are a subset of entrepreneurs. :)
1. Knowledge: This may be useful if you have a highly technical product but I have always found it easier to teach someone about a product than to teach them how to sell.
2. Skills: a skill that may be more useful than building a plan would be the ability to close. Assign some leads and see if the person can actually close. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVQPY4LlbJ4
3. Accountability: Often the worst part about great salesmen is that they are great salesmen. They will sell themselves and you on doing as little work as possible. A basic CRM to monitor his progress may provide an equal or better ROI than the salesman himself.
Imho accountability through CRM works only for large companies. In early stage startups accountability has to be an intrinsic value in the hire. If the founders have to measure accountability through CRM then they have hired the wrong person.
1. I agree, as an organization grows, the value of a CRM increases.
2. I did not mean to imply that a CRM is the only form of accountability, more that in an early stage start up with tech founders, it may be the easiest/most cost effective way to implement a system of organization and accountability. The value of a CRM at any stage cannot be underestimated, not only does it give accountability but it gives instant prioritization so that the sales person's time is maximized and they can reach buyers at the exact moment they are most ready, willing, and able to buy.
3. Many studies have shown that when human performance is measured, productivity increases. In real life, I cannot remember one nationally ranked salesperson that did not have system of organization and accountability. The Hawthorne Effect is probably the most quoted research on this subject, although it may not be the most on-point. "Researchers concluded that the workers worked harder because they thought that they were being monitored individually."
From my view, sales is often a numbers game. In order to get x sales, y appointments must be set, z connections made. I am yet to find a good method for measuring this outside a CRM. Excel is good for about 50 contacts.. After that, it's a mess.
Apollo. CRM is great for organizing and tracking but if you find yourself going to a CRM to figure out deal flow...your sales guy isnt doing a good enough job. Just like code repositories are important but not the first place you would go to for checking code quality (you probably would look at exceptions alerts).
There needs to be an international version of English designed so that it is simple to learn. For instance: one sound = one letter and all verbs conjugate the same.
You would enjoy Bill Bryson's book Mother Tongue. At one point (several hundred years ago) English was going through a period of simplification and rationalization but it was also during that period that dictionaries, newspapers etc become popular. Consequently some words had already become consistent and some hadn't and we are somewhat stuck with poor timing. http://www.amazon.com/The-Mother-Tongue-English-That/dp/0380...
Because English and English speakers are happy to adapt and change, the simplification is happening. Look at text messaging where superfluous extra words and letters get dropped, as does case. Even Hollywood is careful to keep language simple in their popular movies aimed at a worldwide audience.
Thank you for the recommendations. How do you think English speaker would respond to a version of English which had changes like: Each sound had its own letter and all spelling was phonetic?
There have been lots of attempts to reform English. There is also Simple English Wikipedia which just simplifies structure not pronounciation https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
The idea is glorious but if you skim random pages ("Show any page"), most of pages are neigher complete nor about important topics nor written in simple language.
An incompatible variant of English would have none of the network advantages, at which point you might as well use a fully designed conlang like lojban.
An alternative, phonemic alphabet for foreigners might have more hope, though even then the use case is narrow.
I was thinking it could be designed initially to be 80% compatible with English, in order to gain a high rate of adoption. then introduce changes every 5 years.
For a "tenant find" service, agents normally charge landlords between 5% and 15% of the annual rent. They will then add on charges for deposit handling, contract drafting, referencing, etc... All fixed charges at the £30-£150 mark each.
To tenants, agents will charge similar fees, normally in the region of hundreds of pounds. This will cover referencing and general "admin".
It is these fees we are combating against - and will hopefully be able to eradicate.
Agents will also offer a "fully managed service" for between 5% and 15% of the rent per month, but that is not something we're tackling at the moment...
Thanks for your elaborate answers. here in Germany the fees are sometimes in the range of 1 - 2 monthly rates. The last one is the maximum allowed value by law. But, as you have to pay a damage deposit to your new landlord as well, this might add up in cost around 5 monthly rents. OK, if everything goes well, the damage deposit returns to your valet, once you move again, but that is a lot of money to have at hand upfront.
So a service like this will help a lot of people - as said before.
