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Technology Stocks : Vantive Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Melissa McAuliffe who wrote (1854)	4/17/1998 11:38:00 AM
From: seth thomas	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 3033

Off topic - Hey Melis - here's a tip for you: Become wealthy and permanently independent. Then you can enjoy being really opinionated and don't have to worry about what anyone else thinks, or how they listen to you. It doesn't matter anymore if anyone pays attention or not - if you want to, fine. If not, fine. Since you asked about sales, I had two modes. Either the people I met with were really excited by what I had to say - and we'd get moving together on the sales cycle, or they were not. I'd figure this out in the first 15 minutes (literally), cut my losses, and move on. It worked spectacularly well for me. I'd win virtually 100% of the deals that I spent time on and wasted zero time on the deals that I wasn't gonna win anyway. Maybe there was a deal or two in there that I would have won at the end of the year, but since I wasn't spending any time on those, I had time to go after 10 more deals that were a sure thing. Same thing worked for hiring and managing people. This is consistent with what salespeople do who are in the top .1% of their industry - they realize they have some combination of very special or unique traits, abilities, characteristics (whatever they might be) and figure out how to exploit them. These traits range from unusual charm and good looks (definitely not me!), to an uncanny knack for understanding the customer's motivation, to exceptional organizational skills and personal motivation, to an ability to prey on a customer's emotions. Many do this subconciously. The best ones recognize that you can't win every deal that is out there - because there's not enough time in the day, or days in the year. You have to figure out which ones are winnable, and spend no time on the others. It takes a while to build up the confidence to walk away - and damn hard, in the early stages of a career, to convince your manager that you know what you are doing! OK - back to VNTV & SEBL! Why do you think that VNTV does not impact SEBL? If VNTV tanked, for say a bad revenue quarter, don't you would think it would have a sector impact?