I was interviewed recently for Ottawa Business Journal regarding newly formed local organization named Sales Leadership Initiative. The concept behind it is that Ottawa’s local Technology and R&D talent is lacking selling skills and expertise – and that’s what SLE will be attempting to fix. I do agree with that. “I have great idea -  let’s do it” syndrome was responsible for as many startups as many failures and tons of cash burned to ashes in relatively short periods of time. We all need extra sales and marketing education. How to find potential customer, how to approach potential customer, how to educate customer, how to establish lasting mutually beneficial relationships – those are the skills that greatly help to converts idea, product, service and technology to cash.
So I hope to see great sales, marketing and educational events, speakers and materials to be available to local tech companies soon.

The Missing Link?

Although there is one thing that I didn’t find anywhere on SLE website (at least at the time of writing this post) – anything about educating local techies on specifics of Internet Marketing.

I currently working for

[Epiphan Systems->http://www.epiphan.com/] – company that markets their niche hardware products almost exclusively through the internet channels. We sell products to 70 countries all over the world. Only about half of our sales are from North America – so this made us somewhat resilient to US economic downturns and rollercoaster credit crunch rides. Without internet – we as technology company would have really hard time to do business and survive, even if we’d have the best local sales team at hands. Only about 1% of our sales coming from Ottawa and only 5% from Canada.

So, how about educating local technology companies on how to wisely use internet to propell their business and sales?{+++}

I’d love to see more Internet Marketing and Sales education available to local technology companies. This would make them stronger and make our local economy stronger.

Gleb Esman