I’m no expert on how to name a new product or company. But I can certainly spot a bad name when I see it. Here’s one sign that your name is going to be trouble: there are three or more ways to spell it, and none of them looks “right” to the average customer. In […]

If you ask a customer a question and they refuse to answer, it probably means something. Here are a few possible explanations: 1.) You haven’t earned the right to an answer, e.g. you’re asking them to fill out a 50 question survey when you routinely ignore their tech support requests. 2.) They feel nothing good […]

I placed an order at Amazon.com last weekend and they shipped it the following business day. When I got the shipping confirmation, it said the package was sent UPS ground to arrive in… 21 days. Sounds a bit sluggish to me. I knew the order was being fulfilled by a different merchant (rather than Amazon […]

Sometimes we get so used to dealing with bugs in the products we use that we forget these defects even exist. In other cases, we’re acutely aware of the issue but we stop using that feature for other reasons, so the problem fades from view. For me, the file upload window in Salesforce.com is a […]

If you’ve ever sold products to large companies, you’re probably quite familiar with Request for Proposal documents, or RFP’s. I could write volumes about how much I dislike the RFP approach to procurement, but that’s not my focus today. Rather, I want to talk about a peculiar feature of a recent RFP that we received. […]

We’ve all been there: You’re typing a bunch of text into a website or application program and you’re just about ready to press Save. At that very moment, the computer crashes or you accidentally hit the secret key combination for “quit now without asking”. Sometimes, the program is smart enough to recover where you left […]

Inspired by a brochure I saw yesterday, here is some text to look out for before publishing your new documentation or product specs: 1.) “Need this updated.” 2.) “This can’t be right. Didn’t we fix this before?” 3.) “Clean this up before anyone sees it.” If you’ve ever let this sort of thing leak out […]

When I was in college, I took my car in for some body work. You see, some idiot keyed the whole side of it when it was parked, so they had to repaint the door and fenders. When I got the car back, the damaged area looked great. But the excitement wore off quickly when […]