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Marketing speak.
Mar. 2nd, 2014 07:22 pmI like standing at a booth at technical conferences. Very often I can meet cool guys there like this startup I met at EW'14.
I have to admit that I spent most of the time preparing a demo for Mobile World Congress, and working on an actual product. So my demo for EW'14 I coded on a train to Nuremberg.
I plugged a Galileo board to a power source they have in ICE trains, booted our latest sd-card image with all development bells and whistles, plugged in a screen and a webcam, telnetted to the board from my laptop, sketched two simple apps (and their makefiles) in vi, compiled with g++ on the board, and debugged them a little. During the first day of the fair I had to restart one of the apps every ~20 minutes because I've forgotten about synchronization for the screen output, so next day I've added a semaphore.
It was very good that this time there was always a marketing person standing next to me. First, he could answer the questions on marketing programs. I could too, but when I speak about that things it just sounds silly. Second, this gentleman was great at building rapport with anybody approaching, while I was more comfortable with engineers, students and some times product ppl.
Third, he taught me a great trick in visitor's badge scanning. Very often at a conference after a conversation you can scan a visitor's badge, which then goes to some database. (Not that I care much, I get a business card when I feel like I wish to follow up)
Still, I have to ask a visitor if he would like to be in that database. Some refuse.
What are the options when asking?
"May I scan your badge so we can send you info on new products?"
"Would you mind if I scan your badge, and we can send you emails with follow-ups?"
When I was asking these questions, I got positive responses from ~80% of the visitors. The marketing guy came up with a sentence that got him 100% of positive responses...
( His phrase was: )
I have to admit that I spent most of the time preparing a demo for Mobile World Congress, and working on an actual product. So my demo for EW'14 I coded on a train to Nuremberg.
I plugged a Galileo board to a power source they have in ICE trains, booted our latest sd-card image with all development bells and whistles, plugged in a screen and a webcam, telnetted to the board from my laptop, sketched two simple apps (and their makefiles) in vi, compiled with g++ on the board, and debugged them a little. During the first day of the fair I had to restart one of the apps every ~20 minutes because I've forgotten about synchronization for the screen output, so next day I've added a semaphore.
It was very good that this time there was always a marketing person standing next to me. First, he could answer the questions on marketing programs. I could too, but when I speak about that things it just sounds silly. Second, this gentleman was great at building rapport with anybody approaching, while I was more comfortable with engineers, students and some times product ppl.
Third, he taught me a great trick in visitor's badge scanning. Very often at a conference after a conversation you can scan a visitor's badge, which then goes to some database. (Not that I care much, I get a business card when I feel like I wish to follow up)
Still, I have to ask a visitor if he would like to be in that database. Some refuse.
What are the options when asking?
"May I scan your badge so we can send you info on new products?"
"Would you mind if I scan your badge, and we can send you emails with follow-ups?"
When I was asking these questions, I got positive responses from ~80% of the visitors. The marketing guy came up with a sentence that got him 100% of positive responses...
( His phrase was: )
