Beeing a contractor and an entrepreneur

[Pickle2]

If anyone wants to PM me about how to sell a product or service then please go ahead and ask.

DA. I have a general interest to learn more about sales, but nothing specific to ask you. There are tons of "how to sell" type books on amazon. Have you read anything that you would recommend as good basic grounding?

[DodgyAgent]

DA. I have a general interest to learn more about sales, but nothing specific to ask you. There are tons of "how to sell" type books on amazon. Have you read anything that you would recommend as good basic grounding?

Stephen Covey will teach you how to gain influence. As far as sales itself is concerned Just ask the question "If I can will you?" This question will test to see if the buyer:

1. Has the authority to buy
2. wants to buy
3. Is ready to buy.

If the client says yes then just go ahead and show him how, if he at any stage objects go back to the original question "if I can -overcome the objection- will you?" This will stop you getting sidetracked by what may well not be a real objection.

There is no great mystery to sales, most of us do it all the time. These books will help you to understand the psycholgy behind sales. The rest is you.

[Pickle2]

Cheers DA. Looking at amazon, Mr covey has been pretty prolific it seems. I will check some of them out.

[BarbarianAtTheDoor]

You've never noticed in 8 years of real-time performance system work that doing too much locking (overlocking) badly impact your system performances and that to have a "smart approach" on locking is recommended?
Here's an example of how important it is to think twice before putting locks all over the place for the sake of thread safety.
Simple example based around the singleton concept.
http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/singleton.html

Now, I typed out a very dismissive reply to your snobbish remark regarding a very basic principle (that's the word they used instead of "pattern" when I started programming for a living) but I honestly understand that you don't mean anything bad, you are just the way you are.

Kiddo, I've been dabbling in singletons for the last 8 (more like 9 ) years, and implemented semaphores in java way before they came out with a later release as part of the language. You either invented sthing in parallel computing recently, or have no clue whatsoever.

But. I'm not trying to compete with you, I have no need to do so, I have a contract which will run for another 18 months supposedly, we're not even on the same market.

What does concern me slightly is that we might have to work together, and that no matter what I show about your "smart locks" to my manager or anyone technical above me, they won't fire you, for reasons which are far beyond me. They never fire them. Not even if they hold everyone back. This has always been one of the greatest mysteries of the City for me, what's wrong with terminating an incompetent contractor's terms?

And that is exactly why I welcome this downturn. Will weed out the wheat from the chaff, already seeing significant improvement.