Web 2.0 New York: Is sales always this much fun?
It's been a couple of weeks since Web 2.0 New York. The event was a success and early reports indicated it exceeded expectations for the event organizers.
For Acquia it was a successful event. We met over 214 people who were running Drupal sites and gave out Acquia t-shirts to each of them until we ran out. We gathered over 400 leads that we qualified as interested in or likely to be building a social publishing site. What was new for Acquia was that those leads were closely followed up by our inside sales team. I'll touch more on that at the end of this post.
One of the key goals for my job with Acquia is to grow the Drupal community. My boss, Jeff, encourages me to not spend too much of my time getting existing Drupal users even more excited about Drupal. We need to focus on bringing new users to Drupal. Attending events like Web 2.0 New York was a good example of how we're doing that. We found many new prospects who have heard good things about Drupal from people they know and see it as a robust social publishing solution. The less experienced users we are talking to are itching to get help and are eager to get set up with Acquia Drupal. Not surprisingly, our technical support is considered the most valuable element of the Acquia Network.
Early feedback from our sales team, who have been following up on the leads, has been very positive. Telephone sales can be a tough job. Tenacity and a positive attitude are essential, because telesales professionals often have to deal with a lot of rejection. It's still early days, but our sales team is finding that Drupal users really want to talk to Acquia. They thank us for calling them. They call us back when we leave messages. It's amazing.
Alex Lindahl, a telesales rookie straight out of college, summed up our progress best. He asked Elaine, Elaine Archdeacon Director, Inside Sales, "Is sales always this much fun?". If you want to have a fun call with Alex you can reach him via: +1.978.296.5250, sales@acquia.com, or by web form http://acquia.com/about-us/contact/products-services . If you want to join the fun, apply for a position with our inside sales team.
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Bryan House
It is that phase of my life! I'm just turning 30 in a month, working with Drupal for 7 years and just had my third Acquia anniversary a week ago. Time to look back and evaluate how things went, all the good and bad things; even better if the wisdom can be shared with others. This was part of my thinking when I submitted the session titled "Come for the software, stay for the community" for Drupalcon Copenhagen.
Gábor Hojtsy
It sounded like a really simple request: "Is it easy to add a search filter for 'My posts'?". In other words, add a search result facet for posts by the current (logged in) user through the Apache Solr Search Integration module APIs?
But then the wheels start turning - we want not just one blind link, but a real facet link that tells us how many results we'll get. Also, if we are filtering by 'My posts' then we probably have an equal use case for the opposite filter 'Posts not by me'. So we really need a facet block with two links and facets counts.
Peter Wolanin
