For the last few years, it has been a privilege to work with folks leveraging viddler technology such as Gary Vaynerchuk.
It’s also been a privileged to work with such a great team that’s focused at delivering the best video technology.
The latest hire, Billy Disney, is first full-time hire outside that development/support workflow, and with the Viddler Spotlight series, has begun highlighting the love affair and “privelegedness” we have with our customers:
And with this amazingness, Billy humbly bakes himself as folks to be privileged to work with.
At Viddler, we are working on HTML5 feverishly but allow me to do a quick brain dump on personal thoughts on HTML5. It’s guaranteed that this list will change over time.
The Good:
- Lower CPU requirements
- Open standard
- Works great in mobile environments, keeps power usage low
The Bad
- No support for closed captioning
- Javascript based when you want to design the player
- Javascript is a security risk for hosted environments, like Tumblr, Facebook, WordPress.com, RSS Readers
- No Internet Explorer support (coming in IE9)
- Lack of Security on Stream. tags need open access to streams.
- Ad Serving Not Possible, initial implementations include giving out Javascript tags
- Autoplays randomly when loading pages using default tag
- No Room for Interactive Experiences – Overlays/Sharing functionality/
As of today, support HTML5, it’s great in mobile experiences, but it has a long way to go before coming the default in desktop browsers.
In one of my early college internships when working inside sales and cold calling, someone told me “Sales is getting as close to a lie, without ever telling one”
Having aged a few years, and having helped make many of the buying decisions for Viddler, I could never disagree more.
It’s all about authenticity.
What traits does an authentic sales person have? I came up with a list of things that I would suggest to all future salespeople that contact me and other entrepreneurs like me:
1. Listen
If you are going to read a sales card and spew off facts for 10 minutes without asking my needs, maybe that will work on people that you are cold calling, but dude. I called you. I don’t need everything I read on your site reiterated again. Take a few minutes and ask “what are you looking for?”.
2. Respond like you listened
This is a good dating rule too! But not only respond like you listened, meet me on my level. If I am not talking big-game corporate wiz, don’t talk big-game corporate wiz.
3. I don’t care
I don’t care if you got your SVP of global operations to approve a deal.
I don’t care how great your CEO is.
I don’t care if you climbed 5 levels up the chain to get authority to get a discount.
I don’t care if you are going to get the VP of product on the line to reiterate what you just said.
I don’t care if you tell me how much you love my product, especially when you don’t use it
Not only do I not care but these “big company” things but they make me kinda worried you are not the right fit for my company.
4. I do care
I do care if you say I am going to need a few days to work this out with people on your side.
I do care if you shoot me an email during downtime that you may have noticed.
I do care if you noticed another Tweet about Viddler.
I do care if you actually use the site, and have insightful feedback on it
5. Respect your competition
Having respect for competition says alot about someone and character of the company. Saying “they may be good for this, but this is how we differentiate” is an authentic answer. Just remember the competition has references to offset anything myths that may be said.
6. Don’t repeat my name
“Well Rob, this is how much I know your name, Rob. And you know what Rob, I have salesforce pulled up and am reading our entire history of our calls…. Rob” This is what I interpret if you say my name over and over again. It’s just tacky. May work with others, but not me. Sorry.
It should be noted my inspiration for this post was when choosing a Managed DNS provider to help add another layer of Viddler redundancy. We ended up going with DynDNS and sales talent, Josh Delisle.
Viddler has not hired any sales people outside of the original team. When Viddler does hire this person, my hope is that we can find people, like Josh, that know how to talk on this authentic level with customers.
A few Viddlers have asked me why this can’t be free for everyone, as Youtube does.
This is a good question, giving away everything for free is a very expensive business decision to pursue. We are focused on profitability and are certainly turning a little 37signal’ish.
To give you a little sniffy sniff.. check out what analytics looks like for me:
Hello and welcome to my personal blog. My name is Robert Sandie, a digital entrepreneur, co-founder and President of Viddler. Join me as I update this blog on the daily challenges of startup.
In one of my early college internships when working inside sales and cold calling, someone told me “Sales is getting as close to a lie, without ever telling one”
