So how do you decide upon the correct strategy?  In many cases, it perfectly obvious what the correct stategy.   In other cases, it may come down to a choice between two strategies, and with a little research, you can figure it out.

However, in war and political games, the picture is not at all clear.  You only have a dim idea of the goal, and you have no clue of  the correct way to get there.  This is where another fundemental comes in: Find out your current position.  Most people, I think, have no clue of there current position.  The kid going to school doesn’t realize he a) is a kid, and b) is going to school so he can later get a job and pay for the things he wants in life.   He instead thinks he is master of the universe and will live forever.  It’s a great attitude, but when he finds himself flipping burgers at McD’s he again will not realize why he is there.

Employees often have the idea that they are irreplacible and can get away with anything.  Until the boss finally can’t let it go any longer.  The employee has no idea of the strength of his current position, or even of where he is going.

The person walking into a casino in Las Vegas thinks life is great – free drinks, food and his luck is good today.  No, his position in relation to the Casino – he, with $200 in his pocket is going to beat a 200 million dollar corporation with thousands of employees.  He is not going to win.  But there are millions who think otherwise. 

When I am confronted with a situation, socially, politically or otherwise, I fist evaluate my position in relation to the other party.  If the other party is the government or some such unbeatable opponent, I don’t fight.  I simply work to limit my losses. That is strategy at work. 

If I am the big guy against the little guy, I know I don’t have to fight either – it’s usually counterproductive – let him have a small win and be done with it.   It’s not worth my time. 

If I suddenly find myself confronting an equal in business, that is when I really have to stop and think.  What is my position in the matter, and what is the other persons position?  By finding a strength on my side, and a weakness on the other, I can play the two together to win.

If I find myself in a weak position, I will work to strenghen that position before the confrontation.  If I am not going to win, I won’t confront them at all.

The strategy and implementation is going to be different every time, but you start by asking yourself?  What is my position in relation to the other party?  What is the other parties position right now?   It’s easy to overestimate, and even underestimate your current position.  Sometimes I will test the waters to find out.  For example, you want to become the boss.  You may think your are in great with the boss.  But others may be in great with him too – you need to find out.  Ask him a general questions – have you ever thought about having a Lead Accountant?  If he looks at you and laughs, and least you won’t be in for a surpise when your passed over.  On the other hand, you may find him very interested and then you can proceed from there.

I find this stuff very interesting as it can help you achieve those goals you have sought your whole life.  When you plan and strategize and start winning, it’s the greatest feeling ever.

Basic Tenets:

Sales is the art or science of getting someone to make a decision to purchase a product or service.  If the person already wants the product, no sales activity is needed.  The salesperson in this case is simply an order-taker or cashier.  But we are talking here about the larger sale.  Again, it may be the prospect has already learned all he needs to know about your product from the company website, but in technology especially, he is going to need some help making the decision.

But lets step back further for a moment and look at what the basic buyer process is (not sales process, this is customer oriented.)  Fundamentally, the reason a person makes a purchase is because it is going to benefit the person, his family, or his company.  The key word there is “benefit.”  Now, of course we know that our product is going to benefit the person, but the person doesn’t know this yet, or has only a hazy idea of the benefit or how it gets realized.

Sale trainers have know this for ages, and it is common practice to talk about the benefits of a product to induce the buyer to sell.  And while this sometimes works, there is a step prior to talking about benefits, and that of course is talking about problems.  If you can communicate well enough with your prospect to uncover what the actual probem is that he is trying to solve, you will have the key to make the close.  Furthermore, the problem must be significant enough to “hurt” – and he must want to change that pain.

The book SPIN SELLING published “way back” in 1988 lays this out very clearly.  It lays out the four stages of A. Preliminaries, B. Investigation, C. Demonstrating Capability, D. Obtaining Commitment. 

Stage A, is fairly simply – making the initial contact.

Stage B. Investigation is the critical step.  Failure to fully complete this step and doing on to Demonstration or Commitment will result in a failed sale.

For example, a Salesman throws out his best close ”Would you like that car in red or green?”  If that prospect has already decided on purchasing a car, and is only left with the decision of color, that IS going to work.  But if the prospect has a lot of other questions on his mind, the sales person is only going to irritate and annoy the buyer.

An  important point is that a Salesperson is there to help the buyer make the correct decision.   The correct decision may or may not be to buy what the sales person is offering.  This is a wide departure from the idea that a Salesperson is there to sell.  He is of course, but if he is misleading the buyer to make him think that what he has for sale is the correct decision when in fact it is not, he is going to ultimately fail as a salesperson (as soon  as the  buyer finds out he has been duped, he may return the item or …)

The essential skill then of a salesperson then is determining where the prospect is in the buying process.  There are a multitude of small decisions that a person makes along the way to a purchase.  The salesman helps the prospect with each of these decisions all the way to the end at which time he CAN employ a closing technique and make the sale.

Here, roughly are the major decisions leading to the sale:

1.  “It hurts, and I want to make the hurt go away.”  The prospect, before this decision, may not have even realized that something was hurting, or it hurts but not enough to do something about it.  The prospect will ask questions such as “”Is it possible to make this hurt go away?”  “What would it be like it not have this hurt?”  The salesman action then is to make the person aware of the hurt, and aware of the fact that there IS a solution to it. 

2. “What will make the hurt go away?”  This is a learning stage.  He is learning about the general subject that will address his concern.  Say, for example, he has never used a Sales Management Software solution.  He doesn’t even really know what one is.  The Salesman now educates the prospect, being careful NOT to push his product.  He only wants to sell the person on the general category of solution.  The prospect will ask questions like ‘Why is it called CRM?”  and other such questions about the subject as a whole.  When the prospect has made the decision that the subject will resolve the pain, he will move onto the next phase.

3. “What are the available products and companies?”  This is actually a continuation of the learning phase.  He knows enough about the broad subject to now address the specific alternatives.  He is not yet making a choice about which alternative is best, he just needs to know what is available so he can then make an informed choice.  At this point, the prospect will ask questions such as “Is there a comparison between your product and a competitors?”  Note that at this stage, it is not about alternative products that YOU are offering, it is about alternatives between you and your competitor.  In other words, he has not made the decision that YOUR COMPANY is the right answer.  He MUST make this decision before you can get to the next stage.  The salesperson job is to show the alternatives, including comparing the competition.  If you don’t make such a comparison, the prospect is going to go home and find out about the alternatives whether you like it or not, so it is better for you to bring it up and put it on the table now.  This gives you the chance to show how your company is better.  When the prospect has made the decision to use your company, you are past this phase.

4.  ”What alternatives are available from your company?”  The prospect now recognizes that he wants to do business with you, and  now needs to make the decision on which one he is going to go with.  This is done with more education, showing the benefits of each of the different solutions.  I think that companies sometimes go to far with the available choices.  The prospect is forced to learn and understand each of them and the pros and cons.  So if you offer too many, you may end up with a prospect who ends up with “analysis paralysis”.   Thus go with two options, three at the most.

5.  “When do I need this product?”, “How much is it.”  When the prospects starts asking implementation questions, you know you are getting close to the close.  Questions such as when can it be delivered, what color etc shows you this.  What you are looking for are questions that show that he has decided to go with your product.  Often, he will not tell you this out loud, but his line of questioning shows that he has decided to go with you.  The deal isn’t closed yet, but it is imminent.  Sometimes these types questions go along with the above when viewing alternatives.  In this case, he has already decided that you as a company are acceptable, but not necessarily the only option.  So four and five can get blended together.

6.  “How do I finance this?”  This means the person has decided to go with your product.  This is very good!  Financing may already be in hand and a no issue.  Or the prospect needs education from the Salesperson in how it could be financed.

7. “What are the risks?”  A prospect may or may not verbalize or consider the risks in purchasing your product.  But he may and the Salesperson must be aware of this.  The prospect may ask, “Can I get out of the contract?”, “Is there a cancellation fee?”, “What is the return policy?”   These are usually very easily handled.

8. “Is this product a good value?”  This concern may or may not come up verbally.  Yet it is present in most sales situations.  The concern for the prospect is simple, “Am I getting the best value for my money?”  No-one want to buy something and then find it elsewhere on sale for half-price.  In same cases, the value proposition is such that even if they don’t need it or want it, it’s such a great value that they couldn’t pass it up.  I recall my father buying several cases of canned nuts while we were on vacation with the Grandparents 500 miles from home.  I wasn’t there for the sale, but he obviously thought it was such a great value that he had to have them.

9.  At this point, the prospect has run out of questions.  The final decision to be made is, “Lets do it”.  It may be a perfect product,  he needs it, he wants it, but fear from whatever source is sitting there in the way.  Make no mistake, the prospect wants to make the decision, he just can’t bring himself to say the words.  Here is where you bring out your closing techniques.  “Would you like that in red or blue?”  They answer Blue and you say, ok, sign on the dotted line.  For him not to would make him feel like a fool after having come all this way, so he does the right thing, and you get the close!

Note that I haven’t said anything about the Sales process.  You cannot omit things like qualifying the prospect.  But don’t let this get in the way of the above phases.  You quietly slip in a question such as “Are you authorized to make such a purchase for your company?” but let the buyer appear to be in control of the situation by following the above phases.  Buyers LOVE to be in control. Or at least they think they are.  And they will think so if you are following their process, not yours.  It would be great of we could just sit the buyer down and march him through our sales process.  But this is where Salesmen get a bad name.  We want name, rank and serial number and sign on the dotted line please.  But our prospect just starts putting up his brick overcoat to such techniques and if the prospect can’t get through his buyer process, he will simply go elsewhere.  I think this happens most of the time out of ignorance by the Salesperson.  He just doesn’t see where the prospect is by his questioning and give him the correct guidance.  At least it has been that way for me!

The whole point of the above is the all sales techniques fit into one or more of the above phases.  Make sure you are applying the correct technique to the correct phase, be consultative with your prospect, and suddenly you will be one of the great closers in your organization.

Greg

-        Providing Data across boundaries such as the internet.

-        Shortens time of development as it hides a considerable amount of plumbing complexity.

-        A framework of tools and classes to make building and deploying RIA applications faster and easier.

-        It reduces the amount of knowledge required of the various technologies that go together to make up a Rich Internet Application.

How does it do it?

-        It starts with Visual Studio project templates to get your started.

-        It works with the Entity Framework to define the data that is to be passed over the wire.

-        It provides code generation to do the plumbing of your services.

-        It provides even more code generation to build classes that work with your entities.

What do I need to know to use Ria Services?

-        You need to have a basic knowledge of a programming language such as C#/VB.

-        You need a basic understanding of the Entity Framework.

-        You need a basic understanding of WCF services (Ria Services are WCF services.)

-        You need a basic understanding of how to construct Linq queries.

-        You need to know enough about database in order to create the database you are connecting to.

The thing is that you do not need a deep understanding of any of these technologies.  Walking through a basic Ria Services powered application is a 10 minute task.  However, at some point, your going to need to dig deeper to get the power that you require for your applications.  How deep to get is up to you.

I have found through experiance that there are three basic steps to learning any particular piece of technology. Unfortunately, technology is often not presented with these steps in mind, so I have to take by own byways and highways, but it’s the only way to get there.

To illustrate this, let us take an example of teaching someone a brand new (to them) technology.  This is a silly example of teaching someone how to use a telephone.  Let’s pretend this person has been out in the Outback and has simply never seen or heard of a telephone.  How do we get this person to see the benefit of a telephone and start them on the road of a technophile?

Teach them the benefit first.  “Have you ever wanted to talk with someone who is far away?  Wouldn’t it be great to be able to communicate with them without a 2 day walk?”  Once they see the benefit (that’s marketing speak by the way, what we are really doing is marketing the technology to them.)

Teach them the concept next.  “What we have here,” showing them the phone, ” is a device that allows you to do just that.  You speak into it, and your voice comes out the other end.  They speak into it, and their voice comes out at this end.”  Here is where you get an “ahaa” moment. Once you do, you’r ready to move on.

Structure comes next:  “This is a telephone.  It’s got a speaker here, and a microphone hear, it’s got some buttons so you can connect to the right phone.  There is a wire that goes from here to there.”

And finally comes function:  “This is how you place a phone call – you punch in the numbers, put it up to your ear, listen for the ringtone and for the other person to answer, and then start talking.  And when your done, you press the end button to hang up.”

If you went through all of these steps, the person would understand and use that telephone.  Now, how many people do you know that still don’t use their computer for anything beyond email or surfing a few web sites.  Realize that these people have never been through the above steps.  Maybe they know it’s use, but still don’t know what a hard drive is and don’t understand the file system of their computer.  If these people knew how to learn, they would take it upon themselves to get through the above steps for each piece of new technology and they would be able to use it to benefit their own lives.

I think this is important.  I am currently working on a book which introduces Ria Services and I am using the above steps in teaching this technology, and I hope readers find it useful.

To summarize:  

• Benefit (why use it, “what if we could…”)
• Concept (the idea)
• Structure (the physical pieces of the puzzel)
• Function (how the pieces of the puzzle fit together)
• Application (the technology in use).

All five must be present in the education or we get graduates who still work at the gas station.  I have many many computer books.  Some good, some not so good.  The difference I find is that some of them get stuck on structure.  (“These are the 42 properties and functions of the DomainWidget.”) or on use only.  The key point is that all of the points above must be present for education to occur.

Greg

Here is a simple Linq query:

static void QueryOverStrings()
        {
            string[] myStrings = { “One”, “Two”, “Three”, “Four”, “Five”, “Six”, “Seven” };
            IEnumerable<string> subset =
                from g in myStrings where g.Length > 3 orderby g select g;

            foreach (string s in subset)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(“Items: {0}”, s);
            }
        }

And here it is again, the actual code that runs the above, courtesy of Red Gate’s .NET Reflector.

        private static void QueryOverStrings()
        {
            string[] myStrings = new string[] { “One”, “Two”, “Three”, “Four”, “Five”, “Six”, “Seven” };
            IEnumerable<string> subset = myStrings.Where<string>(delegate(string g)
            {
                return (g.Length > 3);
            }).OrderBy<string, string>(delegate(string g)
            {
                return g;
            });
            foreach (string s in subset)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(“Items: {0}”, s);
            }
       

Happy Linqing!

Just add a LocalSqlServer connection string to your web.config file.  For example, here is what I use to connect to Sql Server.

<connectionStrings>
  <remove name=”LocalSqlServer”/>
  <add name=”LocalSqlServer” connectionString=”Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=ASPNETDB;Integrated Security=True” providerName=”System.Data.SqlClient”/>
 </connectionStrings>

It’s almost too easy!

If you are using SqlExpress on your dev machine, it gets even easier.  You don’t have to do anything.  Just create a new Silverlight Business App and fire it up.  Go to the log-on page and register.  It will be slow, but in the background, your ASPNETDB was just created and attached, and you will be logged in.  If you then look in the Web.config file, you won’t see a connection string anywhere, as the defaults are used for this piece of magic.  Of course, a real world connection is going to need it’s own connection string like the above.

Greg

Given the lack of available books, there are a few good links that have been the most helpful to me:

Brand Abrams Blog (He’s one of the product managers of the product). http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/

MSDev.com has a free 45 min video that shows the a good example of creating a Ria Service. http://www.msdev.com/Directory/Description.aspx?eventId=1449

The most comprehensive write-up is found with the download of the July Preview:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=76BB3A07-3846-4564-B0C3-27972BCAABCE&displaylang=en  When you install Ria Services, it includes a PDF called Ria Services Overview Preview and it does a pretty good job of covering the basics of creating a Ria Service, and what is going on under the hood.

If you find any other good links, leave them as comment so I can check them out.

Greg

The reason has to do with CAS (Code Access Security). As of the July 22 2009 release, Ria requires full trust, but your web host probably only allows partial trust.  So your service is a bust. 

At least for now.  There are promises to fix this in the next release.  The workaround is to find a web host that does allow full trust for ASP.net applications.

Update: I just signed up with ASPHostCentral.com which uses the Plesk Control Panel.  This CP allows you to set the CAS level to Full Trust.  I just tested this out, and the test Ria Service now successfully connects. Yee-haw as we say down here in Dallas Texas.

See this post for more info:  http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/07/22/business-apps-example-for-silverlight-3-rtm-and-net-ria-services-july-update-part-6-poco-and-authentication-provider.aspx

Greg

You can keep the same design pattern with WPF using the Canvas.  It allows you to do the same drag and drop operation, and you get precise positioning.  There are many times when this is all you need.  However, this throws out the window a major feature of WPF; the ability to autoresize when Localizing Applications.

We all know that when an app is localized, the length of text strings usually get longer by a factor of up to 25-50%.  If you have not allowed for this in your initial form design, your going to be in for a lot of work.  But WPF makes this easy and this is the basic procedure for a simple data entry form:

1.  On paper, lay out the form with labels and text boxes drawn by hand.  Draw up a grid so you know how many rows and columns you need.

2.  Create a new Window.  Set the SizeToContent property to WidthAndHeight. 

3.  Create your grid with a margin of 25 or so, drop in the labels and textboxes and any buttons you need.

4.  Now go back and remove the hardcoded Width properties from the grid, and well as any margins that the designer input automatically.  (The only Width properties that should remain are from “spacer” columns or rows that don’t have any content.)

5.  As Height does not need to change with localization, I do hardcode height so if the form is resizable, you don’t have textboxes stretched vertically.

Now you have a form that will automatically re-size itself to fit the text elements.  For example, try changing the button content to a long string, and the button will re-size itself to show the full string.  It’s a nice piece of work.

Here is the XAML to show the example:

<Window x:Class="MyApplication.Window1"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Title="Window1"
VerticalAlignment="Center" WindowStartupLocation="CenterScreen"
SizeToContent="WidthAndHeight" ResizeMode="NoResize" MaxHeight="200" MinHeight="200" MinWidth="400">
     <Grid Margin="25" >
          <Grid.RowDefinitions>
               <RowDefinition Height="30" />
               <RowDefinition Height="20" />
               <RowDefinition Height="30" />
               <RowDefinition Height="30" />
          </Grid.RowDefinitions>
          <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
               <ColumnDefinition MinWidth="100" />
               <ColumnDefinition Width="20"/>
               <ColumnDefinition MinWidth="125" />
               <ColumnDefinition Width="20" />
               <ColumnDefinition MinWidth="50" />
          </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
          <Label Name="label1" Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="0" VerticalAlignment="Center">Please Log       In</Label>
          <Label Name="label2" Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="2" HorizontalAlignment="Right"    VerticalAlignment="Center">Username:</Label>
          <Label Name="label3" Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="3" HorizontalAlignment="Right" VerticalAlignment="Center">Password:</Label>
          <TextBox Grid.Column="2" Grid.Row="2" Margin="5" Name="textBox1" />
          <TextBox Grid.Column="2" Grid.Row="3" Margin="5" Name="textBox2" />
          <Button Grid.Column="4" Grid.Row="2" Margin="5" Name="button1">_OK</Button>
          <Button Grid.Column="4" Grid.Row="3" Margin="5" Name="button2">_ReallyLongCancelText</Button>
     </Grid>
</Window>