This is the second in a series of articles discussing the most important skills of value sellers. The first article was on listening effectively to the prospect. The second skill, value assessment, like the first skill requires a very strong customer focus. <Complete Article>

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Top Skills of Value Sellers - Effective Listening

Solution Benefits That Impact Capital Budgets

This week I was reminded of how important things that effect us are not always under our own control. Of course there was the spectre of U.S. economic disaster due to a failure of our government to simply govern. But closer to home here at Cistek we had our own little disaster.

Since our inception we have relied on third party software to distribute our newsletters. It worked well until last week. Our distribution list or database is broken up into a number of categories such as "Healthcare IT", "Process Automation", etc. Two of the more than 24 categories have grown quite large which for a still unexplained reason caused our software to send our newsletter repeatedly to people in those categories. Some reported receiving the email up to 10 times. Some people patiently informed us of the problem while others immediately unsubscribed, some of whom have been on our list for years. To all, we apologize. This is embarrassing and at the same time frustrating. Our reputation has been damaged by errant software we did not directly control.

We have broken up our large categories into multiple categories and installed logic that will prevent emails from being sent to the same category more than once on the same day. This should prevent the problem from ever happening again. Hopefully, we have sufficient control now that our reputation will depend more on the content of our newsletters than the software we use to distribute it.