Mark Richman provides expert advice, strategy, and software solutions to businesses worldwide. His clients range from the Fortune 500 to small businesses to startups seeking dramatic results. Mark creates and improves business-critical web applications, increasing productivity and maximizing profits.
Here’s a quandary – we, as value-based IT consultants, aspire to charge value-based fees for our services (how obvious!). We know that doing so requires tight scope control. As such, this often requires a detailed specification. However, this is the very waterfall model that the agile movement shuns. How do you reconcile scope control, customer [...]
A phenomenally inspiring presentation by Whitney Hess from IA Summit 2009. This really hits home for me, as I’m also a self-promoting introvert.
View more documents from Whitney Hess.
Situation A: Is Faster Service Worth More?
Your computer is not working properly. You have tried to understand the problem and find a solution that you can implement yourself. Yet, after trying, you are no closer to a solution, you find the situation aggravating, and you decide that there’s no point in continuing to attempt fixing [...]
By Alan Weiss
Copyright 2009. All rights reserved.
Source: http://www.contrarianconsulting.com/101-questions-for-any-sales-situation/
Reprinted with permission
I. Qualifying the Prospect
This is the process of determining whether the inquiry is appropriate for your business in terms of size, relevance, seriousness, and related factors. In other words, you don’t want to pursue a lead which can’t result in legitimate—and worthwhile—business.
Questions:
1. Why do you think [...]
If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know that I’m an advocate of Value-Based Fees. In a nutshell, here is the value proposition to the prospective client:
There is a cap on your investment. You know exactly what is to be spent and there are no surprises.
There is never a “meter [...]
Mark Richman has over 15 years experience in Information Technology. Mark has a BS in Computer Science and an MBA with a specialization in Technology Management
Mark has held senior technical and management positions at several global firms. He has started two consulting companies, Empire Software which specializes in Ruby on Rails application development, and Maximize Consulting Group which focuses on interim CIO and executive IT management.
Clients have included small startup firms and large Fortune 500 accounts.
Mark is also an accomplished author, having published for Wrox Press and XML Developer's Journal.
Please join me on the following social networks:
Copyright © 2009 Mark Richman. All Rights Reserved.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Best viewed in Safari or Firefox; looks like crap in IE6 or older.