Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I spent yesterday consulting with a company whose salesforce is having trouble explaining exactly what its software does, a common problem with enterprise applications since software tends towards functionality sprawl in ways that, say, refrigerators and asphalt don't. Not to mention that this company's software is genuinely innovative.

The company's impulse is to address this need in the usual way: Build a PowerPoint "deck" (sorry, "deck" instead of "slide set" still sounds unnatural to me) with the sort of corporate overview appropriate for an industry analyst. But, the deck a salesperson needs is, of course, quite different. The rep isn't there to explain what the company is. She's there because