Keys to an effective software sales presentation

1. A big freakin' power point presentation. Everyone loves a lengthy power point presentation, so drag it out for hours, even days.

2. Make sure your slides are as unreadable to the naked eye as microfiche. Cram as much useless and distracting data as you can on each slide, using small fonts and a high resolution if necessary. It's best to exhaust your audience with eye strain so they associate headaches with your product early on in the process.

2. Do not stop your power point presentation for any reason. If anyone interrupts your presentation, tell them "that's a very good question, we'll get back to it" and then don't.

3. Don't run your demo off your local hard drive, run your software on an old laptop with an external drive so the prospects see it run as slow as possible.

4. Don't bother testing your demo before your presentation. If your product blue screens during the demo, no one will mind waiting while you spend several minutes troubleshooting it.

5. Sell software that is so unintuitive that no one, not even you, can figure it out during the demo.

6. Write your emails and IM while the other members of your sales team make their presentations. Don't bother sitting in the back of the room, neither the presenter nor the prospects will be distracted by your incessant typing and LOLing.

7. Do not ask your prospects what they need, you tell them what they need. If they tell you flat out that they have no possible current or future need for one of your software's features, spend several minutes explaining how cool it is anyways. Remember you're not here to solve their problems, you're here to make your sales presentation.

How to (really) get phonegap to work

I updated the phonegap getting-started wiki with these notes:

Make sure android sdk and ant are not installed in directories that have a space in the name (i.e. do not install in c:\Program Files).

After installing java jdk (NOT the jre), eclipse, android sdk (following all their directions and getting a helloworld app working), rubyinstall, ant, and phonegap, make sure you have these environment variables set up:
WINDOWS: (Right-click My Computer (or Computer), Properties, Advanced tab, Environment Variables button)
• ANDROID_HOME (for example: C:/android-sdk-windows)
• ANT_HOME (for example: C:\apache-ant-1.8.1)
• JAVA_HOME (for example: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_20)
• Path = (includes these) (for example: C:\Ruby191\bin; C:\apache-ant-1.8.1\bin; C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_20\bin; C:\android-sdk-windows\tools)

Once you have all that set up, you’ll start to have meaningful errors when you try to build the example phonegap project.

Random notes:
• The droidgap script in your phonegap folder is set to target_id 8, but you need to run "android.bat list targets" from your phonegap folder to get your list of target_ids for each platform you have installed. For example if I only have 1.6 and 2.2, then the target_id in the droidgap script for 1.6 would be set to "1" and 2.2 would be "2".
• In the build command, the package name can not be just the app name, you’ll need to add “com.” or something to make the phonegap compiler happy (i.e. “example” “com.example”).

How to show nested entity's properties in an RDLC report

If you have a entity with a nested entity, you can show the nested entity’s properties with a little trick.

For example if you have these business objects:

If you want to show a field from MyProperty (e.g. MyOtherObj.SomeProperty), and MyObj is your report’s datasource, your report fieldbox will need to look like this:

(NOTE: do not add ".Value" onto the end of the property name as normal, it will produce a #error at runtime).

How to display checkboxes in RDLC report that exports to PDF

Shows X-checked box or empty box in your RDLC report and displays correctly when exported to PDF:

=IIf( Fields!MyBooleanField.Value, Chr(83), Chr(163))

How to motivate your team without really trying (or paying a penny in bonuses)

Hundreds of experiments and studies have shown that for inventive/creative tasks (such as most kinds of software development), extrinsic rewards (such as bonuses) actually decrease performance. In other words: Bonuses not only don’t help, they make things worse.

Engineers and other creative types instead seek autonomy, mastery, and purpose in their jobs. You still have to pay top dollar to attract and keep the best people, but “if-then” rewards like “If you finish this project by X, you get Y” actually slow down the project and produce lame results. However, “now-that” rewards do not stifle productivity and can improve later performance. For example, “Now that we’ve achieved this milestone, let’s spend the afternoon goofing off” work well at improving morale and boosting future performance.

Here's an outstanding whiteboard animation where Dan Pink neatly explains the science behind intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation:



Here’s a great video of Dan Pink speaking at TED last year where he explains the hard-core science more fully:



Here’s the book where he explains the principles further (I finished reading it last week, it’s even better than the TED talk, it really drills down into the hows, whys, and gotchas discovered in the research):
http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates/dp/1594484805/ref=tmm_pap_title_0