ZoomerOne Refines Internet Surfing
Corrections or additions?
This article by Kathleen McGinn Spring was prepared for the November 27, 2002 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Good Salespeople Should Prosper in a Bad Economy
The word on the street is that this is a terrible time
to be a salesperson. The economy is down. Capital spending is down.
Whole industries (think telecom or IT) are on skids. Pennies —
not to mention dollars — are being held in reserve as a bulwark
against an uncertain future.
All of this is just noise, and totally irrelevant to good salespeople,
according to Kevin Shulman, principal in Iselin-based sales
training company Shulman Turrisi (732-767-5351). In fact, says Shulman,
the negative chatter can actually work in favor of the smart salesperson.
He explains how this is so when he speaks on “Why Salespeople
Fail and What to Do about It” on Tuesday, December 3, at 1 p.m.
at a free seminar sponsored by the Trenton Minority Business Incubation
Initiative. Call 609-393-8898 for more information.
Shulman, who grew up in Millburn and in Short Hills, graduated from
the University of Southern California with a degree in psychology
in 1977. He then obtained an advanced degree in industrial psychology
from Wayne State University and taught for a couple of years. “Then,”
he recounts, “I realized I had two choices in life. I could teach
or I could make a living.”
Opting for the latter course, he founded Shulman Steel, a company
that sold steel products, mainly to the automotive and construction
industries. “I had grown up in the steel business,” he says
of his choice of industry. His father and mother, Al and Florence
Shulman, had owned a similar company in Newark while he was growing
up, and his father joined him in his company.
After a while, however, Shulman became bored with the steel business
and closed his company down. Casting about for his next career move,
he met Dave Sandler of Sandler Sales. “The sparks flew,” he
says. In an instant he saw that his background in psychology, teaching,
business development, an entrepreneurial venture, and sales
could all fit together in a new career in sales training. “I had
found a way to teach and to make a living,” he says.
In addition to sales training, his company, which is 10 years old,
is involved in sales force evaluation, client development training,
and private entrepreneurial coaching. Much of his work is with
individuals, professional firms, and small to mid-sized companies.
Advice applicable to all includes:
Let the negative buzz work for you. The more the talkof a down economy heats up, the more most salespeople retreat. Useothers’ fearfulness to your advantage, Shulman urges. “If youbelieve the competition is running scared,” he says, “youwill realize there is an opportunity for you.”Put the bad news into perspective. “Bad economy?”says Shulman skeptically. “For the most part, that problem isbetween salespeople’s ears. People who believe it is real are peoplewho are influenced by it.”But, wait, wait! What about all those reports — sometimes a dozenin a single day — detailing slowdowns, downsizings, slashed profitestimates, and bankruptcies? Okay, Shulman admits, everything is notrosy. Still, he insists, let’s put this into perspective.”Here’s an example,” he says. “Let’s say you know allthe stats show that software buying in New Jersey will be down 20percent in the next 12 months. In a macro perspective, that meanscompanies will be buying $800 million rather than $1 billion. Buton a micro level, if you have to sell $2 million or $3 million tomake your $200,000 this year, that means you have to sell one-thirdof 1 percent of that instead of one-quarter of 1 percent. The differenceis only slightly larger.”Learn a new way of selling. The salespeople having themost difficulty, says Shulman, are those who are “stuck in oldways.” He defines “old ways” as allowing prospects tocontrol the selling situation. Be brave enough to take charge, andyou will be a more efficient salesperson, he says.Don’t let “No” scare you. In the old sales paradigm,says Shulman, salespeople did anything they could to avoid hearingthe word “No,” despite knowing on some level that the wordconveys information it is vital for them to have.He tests his hypothesis in his seminars, asking two questions. Thefirst is: If you could know at any point that the buyer was not goingto buy when would you want to know? The answer he gets 100 percentof the time is some variable of “yesterday” or “in thefirst five minutes.”Then he asks the second question: Knowing that it is so valuable tohave this information, do you do as much as possible to find out assoon as possible? Here the answer is a universal no.The result is a drawn-out process through which the salesperson allowsthe prospect to enter into a series of stalling maneuvers, until,says Shulman, “he is eventually lost in voice mail.” For asmuch as salespeople hate to hear “no,” their prospects oftenhate to say the word even more. “We’re brought up hearing it isnot polite to say no,” explains Shulman. This being the case, a salespersonnot willing to give his prospects clear permission to turn him downwill waste a lot of time in a courtship pre-destined to go nowhere.In this economy, as in all economies, says Shulman, salespeople needto forget about macro trends and concentrate on getting customersto say “yes” or “no.” His most important piece ofadvice is simply to “take away the maybe.”Top Of PageZoomerOne Refines Internet SurfingYou can not let young children on the Internet by themselves.You must sit down with them,” says Wei-hsing Wang, the fatherof a second grader and a fourth grader, and the founder of NicheUSA,a Princeton-based software company that takes the mistakes and dangerout of ‘Net surfing (www.nicheusa.com).Wang’s three-year old company has begun marketing a family of Internetsearching tools called ZoomerOne. The `One’ is in the name, he explains,because each search tool in the Zoomer family performs just one typeof search. This contrasts with common search engines such as Googleor Yahoo!, which can be used for any search at any level.Wang has created a ZoomerOne just for the Princeton Public Library— and for its users. He talks about how to use his gift on Tuesday,December 3, at 6:30 p.m. at “Extreme Searching: Tips from Prosin the Trenches,” one of the library’s monthly Tech Talks. Internetsearch experts Janie Hermann, Robert Lackie, and JoanneMullowney also speak at the free event. Call 609-924-9529.Wang says his children, knowing he holds three degrees in computerscience, including a Ph.D. from Boston University, often ask him forhelp in using the Internet. Doing so efficiently is not so easy foryoung children, he says, pointing out that even a slight misspellingcan thwart a search, or far worse, lead a youngster to a violent orpornographic site. Searching is not a breeze for adults either. Forone thing, there is a whole “hidden Internet,” a vast areainto which most search engines do not go.Often databases and materials within scholarly journals cannot beaccessed through a query in a search engine. Even materials a searchengine finds are returned in the form of URLs, each of which has tobe opened.Anyone who has spent more than a nanosecond searching knows that manyof the sites brought up on a query for, say, “travel bargainsGreat Britain” will be a waste of time. In opening the sites’home pages to see if the information they offer is on point, surfersare often met with pop-up ads, which are a minor annoyance at bestand often go beyond annoyance to freeze up the computer. All of thisleads to seriously subpar search results and, says Wang, a huge wasteof time.ZoomerOne operates differently from other search engines. Feed ita query and it goes off, looking only at reliable sites, to retrievea folder full of information. Most searches take between 30 and 60seconds, and Wang says the longest he has seen is two minutes.The ZoomerOne Wang has created for the Princeton Public Library allows‘Net searches to feed a query to all of the databases the librarymakes available to card holders for access from their homes —or from any other location where they happen to be. These databasesinclude Alt-Health Watch, Biography Resource Center, Funk & WagnallsEncyclopedia, Image Collections, Infotrac Newspapers, D&B CompanyDirectory, MagillOnLiterature, Literature Resource Center, FictionCatalog, Essay Finder, and more.Before ZoomerOne, library card holders would have to type in a longstring of digits to access each database, and then, says Wang, wouldhave to worry about the database timing out if they stepped away fromtheir computer. Searching five databases would require five log-ins.ZoomerOne, on the other hand, allows users to enter a search queryjust once. Given the query, ZoomerOne is off and running. It searcheseach and every one of the databases available for home use and presentsa folder containing pertinent information gathered from all of them.While the ZoomerOne for the Princeton Public Library is suitable forsearches by patrons of all ages, other ZoomerOnes typically are designedby age group. There is a ZoomerOne for astronomy searches by studentsin the third through the sixth grades, for instance. The company alsois conducting a trial run of a ZoomerOne with the University of Pennsylvania’sbiology department.Wang, who worked for Broadvision and for AT&T Bell Labs before foundingNicheUSA, sees uses for ZoomerOne not only in schools at all levels,but also in research facilities, at newspapers, and in companies ofall kinds. It could be useful, he says, in company intranets, perhapsby allowing employees to access data held by different departments.A ZoomerOne search can rest on a desktop, ready to be called up againand again for updates on queries a surfer makes often.The company’s original business plan called for signing up individualsfor ZoomerOne subscriptions, but Wang says the thinking now is thatthat approach would be too time-consuming. So the company, which hasfour employees, is concentrating on signing up organizations. Thecompany, says Wang, is on the look-out for partners, investors, andgood employees.It is now working on a ZoomerOne for Mercer County public schools.Once in place, it will be one more tool to assure that youngstersget the most out of an Internet search, and at the same time are safefrom the more pernicious elements of the ‘Net.Next StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
