Most companies have an Inside sales department whose job is to call up prospective customers and pitch them the product. Now when a sales rep calls a customer if the customer has never heard of the company or the product then it is a cold lead. Such calls are really difficult. They are no different from the calls you get from a credit card company offering you credit cards. Remember how you slam the telephone on those. Sales reps need to do these calls day in day out. What they are really looking for is a customer who has heard or recollects something about you company. This is a warm lead. Warm leads are much easier to convert to the next stage or at least willing to have a conversation about the product. Now it is the job of marketing to ensure that calls results in warm leads. So if you are investigating poor sales one of the important statistics is the warm call to cold call ratio. If this ratio is really low then the problem might be with marketing not with sales.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (attributed)

Recently I met my brother in law’s grandfather (affectionately called Anna). I was surprised that this 88 year old chess enthusiast was so fit at his age. He runs a chess club in Sangli and organizes a National level chess tournament every year. During chatting with him I discovered the secret of his good health. As a young 14 year old growing up in a village near Sangli he was fascinated by chess. The best chess player he knew was the local Brahmin priest. The priest had been undefeated for ages and demanded a rupee as a wager for every game. Now a rupee at that time in India (early 1930s) was a lot of money. An entire sack of rice was available for only 3 paisa. Anna found that local wrestling matches (kusti) would pay him quarter rupee per match. So he signed up at the local gym and trained to be a wrestler. Every morning he would do close to 1000 squats and 1000 push ups. Very soon he became one of the renowned wrestlers in the area winning up to 200 rupees in a match. However he kept spending most of his money on chess as he kept losing to the said priest.

I was really fascinated when I heard this story. What I found truly inspirational was Anna’s love for the game of chess. Many of us give up if we are not good at something. However to truly love something (be it a sport, a career or even a woman) there is a sense of self –abnegation. It is more about what you do for your love not what you get from it.

New word for the day. For many years I increased my vocabulary by tracking down the meanings of words I read. My way of learning new words is to first try and glean the meaning of the word from its context. If I found the word really interesting and its usage powerful then I would write it down. Once I was done with my reading for the day I would look up all these words in the dictionary. After a long time I came accross this word “autotelic” whose meaning I could not make out from its context.

I found that user creation on Windows 2003 takes a significant amount of time when we want to create a large number of users. So I decided to create a pool of 10,000 users. I am given to using long descriptive names for just about everything I do. So when I was creating these users with the long descriptive name I kept getting the error

“A device attached to the system is not responding.” after the 100th user. Some googling led me to this article which solved my problem. I really wonder how an error message like that got through the QA process at Microsoft.

Well this blog is going to have a companion blog valleygeek.org. I will post technically relevant content, interesting things I have had the privilege of seeing in the Silicon Valley there. This blog will still continue to host my rants and reviews.

For a day now I have had the music of Where’s The Party Tonight before I started the continuous play ;-). I tried to listen to Omkara after reading some of the accolades that it had received however none of the songs appealed to me.

I attended a great talk today by Ram Gupta. He is a great public speaker and the talk proceeded like a conversation with the audience. Some of his words that I quote here are just brilliant

• Vision without execution is just hallucination
• Execution without vision is a hamster running on a treadmill

The interesting part of this talk was a comment by a lady present. She said “Do not worry about becoming a CEO. Today it is more fun to be a founder, build cool stuff and then hire your CEO”

and all I got are these photos

“I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.”

I came accross this quote from my subscription to the quote of the day service. It is by John D Rockfeller the noted industrialist. There are a bunch of other quotes from him here. I am not sure what Rockfeller meant by the pursuit of pleasure. There is no greater pleasure than becoming better at something. Be it becoming a better programmer or working out to develop a better physique. I cannot imagine a life more pleasrable than one dedicated to these pleasures. Everyone has his/her own idea of what is pleasurable. At the same time there I see no point in living one’s life with someone else’s standards of what is pleasurable. Some people like to chat and gossip with friends others read thousands of blogs. I have found that it is easier to have close and meaningful relationships with people whose ideas of pleasure and outlook towards life in general match mine