The Sales Engineer

Yeah, we’re all watching it happen, trying to capitalize on it. More information is not better information. People more & more are lazy-ing themselves out of making any risky decisions. They want the same kind of assurances a conference room full of yes men and stakeholders would give them: Blame Management. As long as there is at least 1 person to blame if it is a bad decision (that is not you), then they say yes.

But now there is/are magnitudes more info (or rather data) for a single person to go through, and even the yes-men can’t go through it if pieced up-even if it could be pieced up. So what kind of decisions are there? 3 kinds, for us entrepreneur types:

1. Personal
2. Job/Productivity
3. Commercial

Personal: What products do I buy when filling up, or going to the grocery store? Think “consumer”.

Job/Productivity: What stock should I buy/sell? Which job is best for me to move to (a combination of Personal)? Where should I be investing? Is my 401k performing properly/well for this market?

Commercial: (think “provider”) Should I buy more widgets and stock-pile, or will their price go down in a few weeks and I should buy then? Is my company’s valuation going up or down? Where is productivity/efficiency (think “BI”, or “Green/Yellow/Red”, or “Executive Dashboard”, etc.)?

In all three “horizontals”, the data & information available to use in making these decisions is doubling every few months. It used to be that storage (cost) was the holdup, but now it is simply what some early adopters called “data mining”, which is a very poor way of going about it, but it is buzzword-worthy.

So what would you do (on any of the 3 levels) if you had all the information you needed, but it was somewhere in a mass of data that has more words than have ever been written by all humans across all time, and is getting bigger every day? You would want only one thing, and that one thing is the target of anyone ahead of this curve:

Making data into usable, actionable information.

If you didn’t know this 2-3 years ago, you’re already too late.

pat

:)

I was looking for a way to have all my tables have a unique GUID (Globally Unique ID) as well as a “Last Updated” column that would automatically update both on INSERT and on UPDATE.

Through a few hours of experimentation, I created the following:

CREATE TABLE dbo.testing
    (guid            uniqueidentifier    NOT NULL DEFAULT NEWID(),
     lastUpdated     datetime2(7)        NOT NULL DEFAULT GETDATE(),
     col1            nchar(10)           NULL,
     col2            nchar(10)           NULL)
GO
CREATE TRIGGER dbo.trLastUpdatedTesting
ON dbo.testing
AFTER UPDATE -- not insert!
AS
BEGIN

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I am going through an exercise where I’m trying to find a way to compute stock metrics (technical indicators). What I need is a way to iterate over the rows in a database, computing each technical indicator, then putting that value into the table’s row for that date.

I found an example, and modified it to work on SQL SERVER 2008 R2. I hope you, too, find this solution extremely interesting:

DROP TABLE #google_stock
GO
create table #google_stock
(
quote_date [datetime],
open_price [decimal](6,2),
close_price [decimal](6,2),
high_price [decimal](6,2),
low_price [decimal](6,2)
)
GO

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A colleague turned me on to an article here that talks about 5 stunningly awful mistakes for demos. I don’t think these are all that bad, and certainly not stunning, but I’ll include the 5 here, as we have a few more practical ones to add after:

1. Misunderstand the customer’s needs: Harbor Cruise Don’t make a demo in the hope that your customer will eventually see something of interest. Inexperienced salespeople often inflict these demos on their customers as a replacement for doing their homework. Jaded sales engineers offer these demos when they receive little or no pre-demo information from their sales colleagues. Do the research to figure out what your customers need in advance. More »

GMail recently took away the ability to have an RSS feed create signatures for us. Luckily I’ve been using Wisestamp (http://www.wisestamp.com) for years, and it is just the thing you need. With it, you can take the output of any RSS feed and put the text at the bottom of your signature in every email you send out.

http://blog.atcp.us/wp-admin/post.php?post=3049&action=edit&message=1

Above, I’ve created a simple signature in Wisestamp, and when you do this in the editor, you have some really diverse choices below. More »