Alec Saunders SquawkBox

It looks like there will be a happy ending to my RIM tale of woe.  This morning, my friend Jim Courtney pinged me on Skype and asked what number I could be reached at in San Francisco.  A few minutes later, the phone rang.  "Hi, I’m Mike.  I’m your RIM Fairy Godfather."  We had a quick look at what was wrong with the Blackberry, after which he told me he would replace the unit at no charge, and have a RIM tech phone my office in Ottawa to walk somebody from our office through re-initializing the new unit on our Blackberry Exchange Server.

I should be up and running in the next 48 hours.  Woo hoo!

Thank you Mike.  Every company should have folks like you willing to go the extra mile for the customer.  And thank you Jim for facilitating.

Wendy Kennedy has a good reminder on her blog this morning to understand (amongst the many things you need to understand about your customer) ship cycles.  Many industries have fairly rigid ship cycles, and you need to be ready to insert yourself into them during the short windows that open up.  For instance,

Telecom players (in Canada, anyway) tend to introduce new products in the 3rd quarter.  They don’t touch their networks at all during the last quarter, because the holiday season is their heaviest selling season.  They conduct trials of new products in the first quarter.  Armed with that knowledge, you know that you need to be educating them about your product in the second / third quarter, negotiating the trial deal in the 4th, and getting the trial started in Q1 of the following year.  It’s a minimum 12 month cycle to bring a new product to market with these guys.

Similarly, PC manufacturers introduce new products in the third quarter (for the back to school season).  You need to negotiate any OEM deals in Q1, and deliver code before the end of Q2.

Keep your eyes open for Wendy’s new book, by the way. She’s been dropping hints about it on her blog.