Recruiters and “Agency”

If you’ve ever been involved with a real estate transaction in California (and perhaps most of the US) you have hopefully gotten to learn about Agency.  In at least California you have to sign a disclosure document that clears up who is representing who.  The typical way things work is…
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Are You Missing O’Reilly Too?

Today would have been the start of O’Reilly’s Infrastructure & Ops Conference 2020 in Santa Clara, California.   For those of you not familiar with the Infrastructure & Ops Conference, it was the rebranding of their Velocity Conferences.  I’ve worked booths at 5 Velocity Conferences during my time at Compuware and…
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Is LinkedIn Diluting Education?

When creating a profile on LinkedIn there are three places where you can enter your education.  “Adding” a “certificate” to your profile is too easy.  This dilutes education and how it is categorized.  The way LinkedIn has integrated Lynda.com is the cause. And if they have integrated these “certificates” into…
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Care and Feeding of a Sales Engineer

Sales Reps and Sales Engineers often come from very different personality types. The rep is responsible for finding the leads, frequently getting told “no” multiple times before finally getting a meeting setup. They handle the relationship building, negotiations and keeping things on track. (Yes, SEs build relationships, but it isn’t…
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The Best Conference Demo

There are three ways that firms create and/or maintain the environment(s) used to provide demos at tech conferences.  Each has their tradeoffs, and you must weigh them to find which is right for your company. Each for His/Her Own The most common I’ve seen since 2010 is that each SE…
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But What Kind of Demo Can YOU Give?

Sales Engineers need to give demos for almost all products or solutions that are technical to any level.  The problem is that there is no standard to define what constitutes a demo.  A naive VP might be satisfied with seeing a single integration as proof that you can do a…
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