They still haven’t gotten over losing their monopolistic hold on domain name registrations. In a futile attempt to retain customers (at their exorbitant registration and renewal costs), they make it wholeheartedly painful to transfer names out of their system.

To transfer out your domain, you need an authorization code. This is provided INSTANTLY by all registrars. Network Solutions takes 3 days. With a caveat, IF THE TRANSFER IS APPROVED.

WTF???? – Who are they to approve / disapprove my wanting to transfer my name out???

Anyway, here are the steps. And remember, do this at least 4 days prior to expiration.

• Log in to your Network Solutions Account Manager.
• Under the My Products and Services tab, select My Domain Names.
• If you have more than 1 domain, click Manage next to the desired domain. Otherwise, skip to the next step.
• Manage should take you to a screen which contains a ‘ Transfer ‘ option. Follow the steps from there on to Request an Authorization Code

• 

  Request Authorization Code – Use the code emailed to you on your new registrar.

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Upwork Review – The Messaging App  

To say that their messaging app is buggy is an understatement. I have had MULTIPLE contractors report that they never got messages I sent them. This is true across the board – whether your contractor is sitting in North America or somewhere across the globe.

Initially, this caused me a LOT of grief – it delayed deliverables – and I wasn’t sure of what progress was being made (Imagine sitting in waiting mode – assuming your latest messages had cleared up all the doubts the contractor may have had)…

The Solution

Always ask  for a written confirmation on the messaging app. Like – ‘Can you confirm if you have what you need?’ Or ‘Will you be providing this document in the next 24 hours?’..

That way, if they haven’t read (received ) your message, you will be able to decipher their non response.

Honestly, this is such a BIG issue (and has been – for the last 5 years), that I am surprised Upwork hasn’t cleared this up.

Upwork Review – The File Attachments Feature

Just like the messaging app cannot be relied upon, their file attachment function is equally buggy. I’ve gotten into situations where contractors have sworn to have attached the latest version of a file – and I only see an older (previously uploaded) version.

This is all very frustrating for both parties – and often, you end up having to exchange email addresses or ftp locations as an alternative way to get  files back and forth.

Upwork Tips – Other Tips for Clients  – Breakdown larger tasks

Try and always break down your SINGLE large task into  smaller tasks. Say you need a HUGE spreadsheet created. Instead of having the entire sheet as the deliverable, ask for the most important columns as part of the first deliverable. And so on. You get the idea.

What happens with distant contractors is the whole ‘boiling the ocean’ phenomenon. They try to do too much at once (no fault of theirs…). This is something that can easily be resolved with better communication.

Upwork Tips – Other Tips for Clients  – NEVER give out your website or app store or any other credentials

Sometimes, in order to save time, we just relay our login credentials to a developer / contractor. The thought process is that we can always change it down the road, once they are done.

I will relate a story that will make you revise this thought process.

I had a guy – in Bangladesh – working a on a wordpress site. Once done with his updates, he refused to ‘show me the proof’ until I released payment. I told him that upwork policy was to let the client review for a period of a week to ensure satisfaction. He was having none of it. I asked for time to think it over.

When I woke up the next morning, my wordpress site was down. At first, I reached out to the web host. They informed me that it was a user initiated takedown. Someone had literally DELETED the entire contents of the public_html folder.

What to do in such a situation?

Do NOT reach out to the contractor. At this point, that would be negotiating with a terrorist.

What I did was reach out to the web host to see if they had a backup (they did – from a week ago). That last week’s backup was good enough for my purposes. I restored the site – obviously changed all passwords – and deleted the upwork user altogether. I also saved the ftp access logs (the web host should have these) to present to upwork later.

Next, I launched an official complaint with Upwork. They reached out to the contractor – who immediately denied anything to do with the site takedown. When the ftp access logs were revealed to him, he simply disappeared (deactivated his upwork account).

Anyway, moral of the story, DO NOT  EVER give our any meaningful access credential. LEARN the ropes of how to apply updates to your own app / your website / whatever.

Summary

With internationally based contractors, time zone differences, linguistic differences – there’s enough challenges to begin with. Upwork does have some amazing talent – and is probably the only place to find the exact skills you might be looking for. However, the platform itself leaves a lot to be desired (I used them back in 2016 – and then again in 2021 – and it STILL has some of the same issues that it did back then). The messaging unreliability is a real sore thumb issue. I’ve lost a lot of hours just around that single upwork feature.

This post also provides some tips (especially for US based clients) to work more effectively with upwork contractors. All based on my personal experience.

How was your experience with Upwork?

The post Upwork Review – My experience with Upwork – and some tips for US clients appeared first on Anuj Varma, Hands-On Technology Architect, Clean Air Activist.

Every sales person understands that selling is a process. This post is about what can wrong during this process — and the ONE thing you can do to ensure that you not only close your current sale, but have the customer begging for more. That’s right, the customer will want you to do other projects that you weren’t even being considered for!

Disclaimer — I am NOT officially in ‘sales’, nor have I ever been in sales. However, running your own technical consulting practice, automatically involves wearing the ‘sales cap’. To that end, this post builds on over 20 years of conversations with prospects and repeat customers. With that disclaimer out of the way….

Focus on the tech part of your cloud sales conversation .  Be a nerd (or take one with you)!

Customers are more sophisticated than we give them credit for. They may not understand the latest advances in tech, but they understand their own I.T. landscape better than most.

Once you get a customer talking about their specific technology landscape, you are half way done with your sales process. If you are able to respond with a few broad options (Some of my past clients have used this service on this cloud to accomplish this…), you are ready to close (more appropriately, you DO NOT need to close, as explained below).

In fact, the closing has already occurred in the customer’s mind. You just don’t know it. Only the logistics around getting started remain.

How, you ask, did that happen? Because you focused on the technology part of the sales. And that showed the customer two things:

a) That you were listening and

b) That you have the chops to navigate their difficult landscape

You showed your competence without talking about budgets, timelines or scopes.

It bears repetition — focus on the technology part of the sale and the business part will take care of itself.

But EVERY sales book I’ve read talks about focusing on the 3 BIG items (Budget, Timeline and Scope)

True. Budget, Timeline and Scope are all crucial. So crucial that you want to do your best to turn them from a ‘fixed budget’ to a ‘flexible budget’ (or a fixed timeline to a malleable timeline).

Think about the last handyman/repairman that you hired. Did you pick the candidate that said they could fix your problem (ALL of them promise they can do that), or did you go with the person who thought beyond your immediate issue? And perhaps, made you think about things that you HADN’T considered? And were you willing to expand your budget (and even stretch your timeline) to get those additional items addressed?

In the same way, if you have conceptually won over your prospect, all of the big 3 business items will take care of themselves. The timeline will expand. The budget will flex. And the scope can widen.

The ONLY way I know of stretching all these business objectives is by going deep technically. Go deep into their technical challenge. As deep as you can.

The Closing (you don’t need  one)!

As mentioned earlier, the closing is not a physical event.

The closing is something that happens in the mind of a prospect. You DO NOT have to actually close anything.

If you were successful in getting the customer talking about their specific problems, and were able to offer a couple of potential solutions, the closing has already taken place.

If the customer actually pulled in their I.T. staff to further the conversation, you can rest assured that you can start the paperwork to get the logistics moving.

The deeper the conversation gets into their tech, the closer you are to NOT worrying about ‘the close’. The ‘close’ is already happening in your customer’s mind.

Doesn’t that require that I stay up to date with ALL recent technologies?

Yes. Especially those that are meaningful for your customer’s biggest pain point.

For e.g. — they may be considering hosting some key apps in the public cloud. They know all the benefits (cost savings, elasticity…). Their main concern is the security of their hosted app.

Will they have the same level of infrastructure monitoring, threat detection and event alerting that they are accustomed to on premises? What will the security guardrails look like and how granular can those guardrails get? Can you restrict access to a specific set of IP addresses…can you log and audit every single resource that is accessed?

You don’t need to be an expert on all the 160 plus services that the public cloud offers. But you DO NEED to be an expert on the options centered around infrastructure security, cloud native monitoring and alerting.

To assist you in your quest, there are plenty of youtube videos, hands-on labs and other training resources. In today’s day and age, high quality training is inexpensive and readily streamable (yea, I made that word up).

More importantly, your new found security knowledge, like any other knowledge base, is reusable.

Your deep security knowledge should allow you to get your prospect talking — and should get them excited to find ‘you’ — the ONE guy or gal that knows the MOST about THEIR specific security concerns!

What’s wrong with a canned sales script? Or a canned close?

A canned script is the exact opposite of ‘getting the customer talking’. YOU are doing all the talking and none of the listening.

Apart from sounding like a ‘know it all’, you also make the customer feel like an outsider.

I still encounter sales folks who want me to ‘compile a canned list of scoping questions’. Their rationale is that it will save them time and also the customer time.

My response is that you DON’T want to save the customer time!

Not when they are talking about their problems. You WANT to PROLONG and STRETCH that one on one time as much as possible. The more they talk, the more business you are potentially getting.

So, in brief, eliminate every bit of canned pitch or material or closing pitch that you have used in the past. Simply go in armed with your technical knowledge and a listening attitude.

Summary and why cloud sales pitches fail

The public cloud is a $250 billion market (as I write this today, Microsoft’s Azure cloud grew by 40% Y.o.Y. 40 percent! And that’s typical — both AWS and GCP are also experiencing similar growth spurts). There’s a LOT of business to be done!

The trouble is that, if you simply approach it like any other sale, you will lose to the competition.

Most people selling in this space are both business savvy AND technically literate. (I am using the public cloud as an example, but this applies to any other technical arena, including packaged software, bigdata analytics, machine learning, AI etc.).

Ensure that you are able to keep both those checkboxes checked — the technical depth and the business savvy — and prep (I mean, prep like you did before taking that killer final exam in college), before meeting with any prospect.

Even if you were to not win this particular encounter, you will come away with the chops to land your next client.

Do you need help with your cloud sales efforts? Would you benefit from taking a seasoned cloud architect along with you?

Do you need assistance with your next cloud sales or technical sales effort?

The post Why Cloud Sales Pitches Fail appeared first on Anuj Varma, Hands-On Technology Architect, Clean Air Activist.

CIOs have their hands full keeping existing applications running. Maintaining an app portfolio is a full time job. Managing development teams, production support teams, vendors and contractors – how is it even humanly possible?

Anuj has been a CxO advisor for over 15 years.

In this unique presentation, Anuj Varma takes a deep dive into mindful practices that can ease the task and even eliminate over 50% of the clutter that CIOs deal with. Originally presented in a private setting, this leadership seminar is now available as a custom, in-house presentation for your C level executives.

Anuj provides examples from actual Production System Failures and Recovery – when conducted with a mindful presence.

Anuj Varma is the founder of anuj.com, a CxO technology and leadership advisory.

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XP (Pair programming and unit testing = code refactoring) versus Scrum – Scrum – A Fundamental Shift

Scrum is a well-defined process framework for structuring your work. Introducing Scrum is quite a change for a team not used to agile software development: They have to start working in iterations, build cross-functional teams, appoint a product owner and a Scrum master, as well as introducing regular meetings for iteration planning, daily status updates and sprint reviews. The benefits of the Scrum methodology are well understood: Less superfluous specifications and fewer handovers due to cross-functional teams and more flexibility in roadmap planning due to short sprints. Switching your organization to use Scrum is a fundamental shift which will shake up old habits and transform them into more effective ones.

Business Continuity – How does Project Management Help?

• GAP analysis (for emergency response etc..)

Scrum Leverages Commitment As Change Agent

The initial introduction of Scrum is not an end in itself. Working with Scrum you want to change your teams’ habits: Take more responsibility, raise code quality, increase speed. As your teams commit to sprint goals, they are intrinsically motivated to get better and faster in order to deliver what they promised. Scrum leverages team commitment as change agent. It’s amazing to see how much teams demand from themselves – often way more you as a manager ever dared ask for.

Scrum versus Kanban – Incremental Improvements

The Kanban methodology is way less structured than Scrum. It’s no process framework at all, but a model for introducing change through incremental improvements. You can apply Kanban principles to any process you are already running (even to Scrum  ). In Kanban, you organize your work on a Kanban board. The board has states as columns, which every work item passes through – from left to right. You pull your work items along through the in progress, testing, ready for release, and released columns. And you may have various swim lanes – horizontal “pipelines” for different types of work. The only management criteria introduced by Kanban is the so called “Work In Progress (WIP)”. By managing WIP you can optimize flow of work items. Besides visualizing work on a Kanban board and monitoring WIP, nothing else needs to be changed to get started with Kanban.

Kanban Leverages Work In Progress (WIP) Limits as Change Agent

Sprint Burndown and Scope Creep

• The team finishes early sprint after sprint because they aren’t committing to enough work. 
• The team misses their forecast sprint after sprint because they’re committing to too much work.

Scope creep” is the injection of more requirements into a previously-defined project. For example, if the team is delivering a new website for the company, scope creep would be asking for new features after the initial requirements had been sketched out. While tolerating scope creep during a sprint is bad practice, scope change within epics and versions is a natural consequence of agile development.

Project Velocity

Let’s say the product owner wants to complete 500 story points in the backlog. We know that the development team generally completes 50 story points per iteration. The product owner can reasonably assume the team will need 10 iterations (give or take) to complete the required work.

It’s important to monitor how velocity evolves over time. New teams can expect to see an increase in velocity as the team optimizes relationships and the work process. Existing teams can track their velocity to ensure consistent performance over time, and can confirm that a

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Here are some creative Coin domain names, Crypto Domain names, Bitcoin domain names

Websites with ICO geared Crypto Names

For quality Coin Domain Names,  For Quality Crypto Domain Names

For Initial Coin Offering names,  try  Coin and Crypto Domain Names

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In-Display requires the user to click and select your ad – basically an additional step to switch their video.

The post In Stream vs. In Display appeared first on Anuj Varma, Hands-On Technology Architect, Clean Air Activist.

In all ads, you can pay for either impressions (CPM) or clicks (CPC). An Impression – as the term implies – is every time the ad is served. Usually, you are billed per 1000 impressions. A CLICK – is when a user actually CLICKS on the ad.

Here’s the rub. If your ad is not getting any clicks, and you have set it to CPC (that is, the advertiser only gets paid on a click), it is no longer in the advertiser’s (Google, FB) interest to keep the ad running. Since it is not getting clicks – and clicks are the only way they get revenue, they will take your ad out of rotation.

With CPM, they will ALWAYS keep the ad running – since they are getting some revenue regardless of the clicks.

Google Video Ads,  CTR vs. Impressions

• Impressions – How many times your ad appeared in the search results
• Clicks – How many times users actually clicked on the ad
• Ratio of the two – Click through Rate (CTR)
• Aim for CTR   – Above 1% (For every 100 impressions, get at least ONE click)

Facebook Video Ads

• Instead of the default option (3 seconds counts as a ‘watch’ on a video),  choose Option 2: CPV for 10 second video views. You will only be charged for those who watch 10 seconds of your video

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A techie walks into a sales meeting…

Selling is an art form. An art form that requires constant creativity and figuring out what works, what doesn’t, what needs a little tweaking and what is best left untouched.  As a self employed technology professional, I was also required to serve as my own ‘sales team’. This meant putting myself out there, taking risks, getting rejected and taking those risks again and again.

What I learnt though, was that techies can and do make great salesman (think Bill Gates, Sergei Brin, Mark Zuckerberg…just to name a few).  They are already blessed with certain skills that   translate well into the sales world. This post summarizes how techies can leverage their innate skills to become effective salespersons. It also presents two sales principles that are often, underappreciated.

Tip #1 – Pick up the damn phone

As a techie, I would spend hours building the perfect online contact system, a fancy responsive website, SEO for search engines that would get my site ranked higher than others in the same category.

In the hope that ‘If I build it, they will come’. No one came .  Which leads us to the first sales principle

The First Sales Principle

There was a  simple reason why no one came. I have encapsulated that reason into The First Under-Appreciated Sales Principle

While technology has changed rapidly, people haven’t !

People still like to deal with people, not with computer systems. People still believe a phone call is superior to an email, and an in-person meeting is way better than a phone call. In fact, are you aware of any large deal that has been settled without several in-person meetings? I’m drawing a blank.

Tip #2 – Ditch Online Methods, Either Cold Call or Knock On Doors

Your website is ranked number one on google (thanks to your tweaking of inbound links, SEO and all your super techie meddling…). Yet,  you find that you are not getting any calls. Zero. Zilch.  Think about that for a moment.  Now thin, if YOU were the buyer (a large tech services buyer), would you choose a vendor through their web presence?

No big buyer is going to come solely through your web site or online presence, regardless of how high it is ranked or how many inbound links it possesses.

This leaves you with two options to land big buyers – Either call them or meet them in person. You may wonder how someone you’ve never called or spoken to, will be ready to meet you in person. You would be surprised at how often this works  – again because of the first principle (People haven’t changed)

This is all a game of confidence. If you are confident in the service you are selling , you will get an audience. It might not be on the same day that you knock on the door, it might be a future appointment, but you will get an audience! Knocking on doors takes guts,  and even the gatekeeper (receptionist) will grant you that much.

Which leads me to my next tip:

Tip #3 – A preemptive Thank You will get you past any receptionist

Here’s two different sales people talking to the same receptionist.

1. Hi. This is Bob. Is Bill (the CEO) in the office? I would like to speak with him, please.

2. Hi. This is Bob. Is Bill (the CEO) in today? If possible, I would like to speak with him. Thank you.

Which one do you think the receptionist will allow to get through? The Thank You is a pleasant surprise for the receptionist (how many people thank her for just speaking to them?).  In addition, it shows humility.

The Second Sales Principle – Try the Teaching Mode as opposed to the Selling Mode

I started my career as a Physics teacher. Every week, I stood in front of 3 sections of 50 students each and was required to field whatever was thrown at me by these 150+  eager students.  One learns to think on one’s feet, but more importantly,  one learns that there is an ideal teaching tempo.   A tempo is the pace at which you speak combined with the volume at which you speak combined with the confidence with which you speak. A confident voice is not too soft and not too loud. It is not too fast paced. Unfortunately, a lot of people mistake fast speech for confident speech, when usually, it is just the opposite. It is not too slow paced (think about that boring teacher in college – it wasn’t that the subject was boring, it was the slow pace at which he/she presented the subject).

The correct pace and volume denotes confidence. And, if you have any experience standing in front of a group and speaking, chances are you already possess this confident pace.

And that is the second under-recognized sales principle :

The Sales Call has to be indistinguishable from a teaching session  –> The Second Under-Recognized Sales Principle

As a teacher, you learn a few critical skills:

1. Thinking on your feet
2. Being able to distill complex information and translate it into simple English
3. Listening to concerns well enough

And here’s the rub:

Most techies, whether they realize it or not, are natural teachers.

Think about it. As a techie, you are constantly required to dissect complex concepts and present them in a sentence or two. You are constantly required to stand in front of a dozen people and explain what you did – as well as field tough questions (aka Daily Scrum). You are often required to mentor junior level team members as well as new comers to your team. You already have the ‘teaching’ tempo mastered, you just need to possibly brush the dust off, by practicing in front of a camera. And that leads me to the Third Sales Principle

The Third Sales Principle – Eliminate Enemy Number One (Fear)

The Fourth Sales Principle – Discipline works better than luck

The Fifth Sales Principle – The less you are talking, the better your sale is going

The Final Sales Principle – Close without fear

The close is what separates the men from the boys.  In reality, you do not need to do anything different than what you have been doing throughout your conversation. Keep in mind that by ‘closing’ , I do not mean that you get something signed there and then. A close is a verbal agreement between two parties that they will do  their part.

There are only two aspects to closing;

1. Keep it simple – The simplest closing is ‘If I were to…, would you be able to….’ For example  – If I were to  throw together an estimate for the first phase, would you promise to look at it?’
2. Stay confident – Keep the same tempo as your original sales/teaching tempo. Just because you are drawing closer to a big sale is no reason to get excited. No reason to change your tone or your tempo. Simply state the closing statement with the same tone and volume that you were using throughout the conversation.  Most importantly, do not let fear creep in (The third sales principle).

Some closing (no pun intended) thoughts. Selling ice to an eskimo, getting run over by a bus…

Americans have a knack for simplifying the complex. Hit the ground running, the jury is still out, the whole nine-yards, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, level the playing field….These are all clever, almost self-descriptive, American catchphrases that have caught on across the world.

The two catchphrases that I always pondered over were Selling Ice to an Eskimo  and In case you get run over by a bus….

Selling Ice to an Eskimo is regarded as one of the highest forms of compliment to a salesperson. After all, if you can make that sale, there isn’t anything you can’t sell.  True, but what about the poor eskimo who is stuck with a slab of ice that he has no use for?  Why not sell him a warm jacket or a new furnace instead? Why sell ice to an eskimo, just because you can?

My point here is that some salespeople sell just for the sake of making the sale. They are not overly concerned about providing actual, tangible value to their customer. Taken to an extreme, the real-estate mortgage crisis was a result of just such overly ambitious sales tactics.  People were sold something (sub prime mortgages) that they should not have been sold in the first place (like ice to an eskimo).

A techie, in my humble opinion, is far too naïve to even conjure up something like that.  Years of wrestling with 1s and 0s, so that a single missing semicolon could cause an all-nighter,  techies have learnt to get things right by taking the shortest and straightest path. They neither overpromise nor do they underpromise anything. They only promise what they can deliver. It is true that they may promise something they do not have yet (think of Bill Gates selling Operating Systems before they were even fully written), but they are confident they can deliver on their promise.

My other least favorite catchphrase is In case you get run over by a bus. .  I mean, surely, the same message can be conveyed with less drastic verbiage.  How about In case you are sent into space as part of the next interstellar mission…or In case you are called out to jury duty… ?  I still wince whenever someone says ‘ In case you get run over by a bus…’

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