Michael, I take this to heart. You are right, no matter how compelling real life stories, it’s better to start with e.g. it is a complimentary to the business environment. Top. Thank You.
I regularly post examples of that in a blog section showing latest of IBM blockchain in central and eastern Europe if you like to check: http:// ibm.biz/IBMServicesPortal
Thank you! I will check it out!
TL;DR: Effective sales, internally, requires allies.
Being a Senior Auditor at a Big 4 accounting firm, at first it wasn’t easy to get an audience with enough influence to make a difference internally. I had approached multiple partners asking about what our blockchain initiatives are, only to get shrugs, "I’m not sure"s and the occasional “what’s blockchain?”
What I found to be a huge help was to eventually identify allies that would help make the sale for blockchain-related services more appealing. This meant finding a Partner who knew about blockchain already and who already believed that the firm should put an emphasis on learning about blockchain as soon as possible, to be better prepared to accept clients in this industry.
Long story short, a few of us, together, were able to onboard our first blockchain client. It took convincing our National office that it was worth the risk and that it would be a vital learning experience for our geography.
Firms are still hesitant, to this day, to accept blockchain-related clients. The slow pace is why I decided to change companies and now work in a very large and growing crypto-mining business 
Really great story @FaierPlay, I am working in the financial service industry and there you find the same situations…a handful of people are talking about blockchain and trying to implement some kind of prototypes, but the majority is looking at you with a big questionmark in the face when you talk about blockchain and cryptos.
In most cases even at the C-Level they are interested and want you to make some kind of pre-study but afterwards nothing will happen - they truely are not that agile to adept new technology that is so groundbreaking for their business models.
@filip you mention in the video to get in contact with the CEO or influencers in order to promote yourself and the pitch you want to make. Any further ideas how to accomplish that? In general it is not that easy for a “normal” guy to get in touch with these people and get them to listen to you…so I was wondering if you could elaborate on this…
In our experience conferences and events are good places to be at. I think I talked about this in the video as well. And in our experience business leaders, entrepreneurs and influencers are rather open to discussion when found in these places. Everyone is there to network and meet new people.
If you do it online, it’s way more difficult to reach out to people, DM’ing CEO’s usually doesn’t work out very well. Maybe if they are small to medium sized companies.
We have had great success with conferences as well as hosting our own local events and inviting VIPs and so on.
I really like the idea of hosting your own event and sending out invites. I think this would be a great way to get bright minds in a room together.
@MattK84, if you go this route, I suggest inviting a guest speaker for the evening so as to attract attendees. This will also set the tone and topic of the evening afterwards for networking.
Hi @filip Many thanks for this interesting discussion about Sales.
I’m currently working as senior project manager in RTS Geneva (State Swiss Television), we are 2000 employees in the French speaking area.
During the cocktail after a professional lecture, I have spoken with our CEO about blockchain, explaining to him the advantages of decentralization, freedom from intermediaries and creating trust where needed. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to find any good use case (for the moment) for our Television, mainly because our public has confidence in us, there is no trust problem to solve.
The way money flows in and out the company is quite transparent also, there is no trust problem here either.
So I’m doing blockchain project consulting (for an supply chain project) and teaching (at the university) outside my job at RTS, and I loooove doing that 
I’m really passionate by the blockchain projects, since 2017.
Have you ever heard about good blockchain use cases for a State Television ?
With warmest regards from Switzerland, Chantal
Wow! That’s amazing, I’m so happy to hear your story
Funny story, me and Ivan actually worked on an IT project for our state television company a few years back. But it wasn’t a blockchain project and unfortunately I don’t have any use cases in mind. It’s not a fit for every company out there.
Hello Filip, I think you doing god in sales. Sales is exactly like the blockchain. It’s about trust, decendralisation, security (relayability), transparance and tracability. I think you stand up and reflect these things.
I’m 52, live in Swede and I am ceo in a small company and our business is software for Technical Analys of stocks. Thank you // Jim
Hi, That was some nice words.
If you use @filip. He will see your post in his notifications.
Ivo
Hi! As I am doing this course with my ideas 1.5 years later, it would be extremely interesting to know how is your business going? How much did it move forward since this comment?
hey @filip
I have to say I am a little bit disappointed from this chapter. It’s far too superficial. What I was interested about: How do you calculate your earning? What can you charge (you can give a range what could be fair/good) for doing the things (education, research etc. ). I also want to have examples what did you build in the past with your blockchain consultancy (PoC). I cannot think of anything you have done. What was an MVP you developed? Are you the programmer for everything? Who builds the product? Maybe you can give answer here. I can understand if you cannot tell everything in detail because of reasons for secrecy. I would be very happy if you can explain and tell something more what are you exactly doing and what can you charge for it. Thank you!
Can someone explain or give me an example how SME can integrate blockhain in their business? I have the feeling that only big corporations are able or have the possibility to integrate a blockchain solution because for SME it seems to elaborate, expensive and not feasible. Would be nice if someone can give me an example or examples how SME can integrated blockchains in their businesses.
I just looked at your website (blockchain consulting). There is the project Bru. What exactly is decentralized? What was your job and what did you implemented? I think on your reference side (projects) you should add what you have done (not in details but in general). If I click on learn more I am visiting the Bru website. I did not understand what you have done there. It is good for your reputation.
Hi @KryptoDr,
I’m sorry to hear that you were disappointed in the lecture. We are looking to update the business course in the near future.
I’ll try to answer your questions the best I can here.
Earnings for a consultancy company is quite simple, it’s mostly salary costs and how much you can arbitrage on salaries vs the consultants price. When you’re running a smaller consultancy company, this is quite easy. You have a few gigs and out of those gigs you need to pay yourself and hopefully add to your retained earnings for a rainy day.
When talking about how much you can charge it gets more difficult, because it depends on so many things, who you are, what type of project, where you are located and where your customers are located. I think I said this before that we charge roughly €250 when we do programming projects. Education and speaking gigs are a lot of the time fixed price and depends a lot on the circumstances. Ivan is obviously quite expensive to get as a speaker. I’ve done a few speaking gigs myself ranging from free gigs where I want the exposure and more potential clients, to a few thousand €.
Most of the stuff we built are not public or famous projects. The most public project we did was Resistance, where we held an tech advisory role. But we decided to leave that project before it launched because of reasons I can’t get into. We’ve done a lot of programming work building smart contracts, dapps and coins over the years that never really reached the mainstream.
I can share one MVP that we built. It was a smart contract + dapp solution for dairy tracking. Simple smart contract with info about dairy production and a very simple MVP interface on the front end.
Me and Ivan have programmed a lot of the stuff in the past. We did hire some freelancers here and there for different smaller projects, but we were in no way a big consultancy company. We were a small but well recognized company.
It seems to me like it would be harder to find a use case in general for SMEs, it’s definitely more difficult. It’s easier once we start talking about multinational companies, payment providers, banks and so on.
BRU is a multinational textile company, and they were looking into using blockchain and cryptocurrency in their global supply chain. We educated their team and did research for a potential solution. I don’t think anything was built in the end, but I don’t know if they took it on themselves. But I was not personally on the BRU project myself.
I hope that helps you!
Hey @filip,
thank you very much for the clarification. With these information I think a little bit different now from you and your company with Ivan. Maybe you should add in the next business course in the introduction a video about you and Ivan where you are explaining what you have built already and what are you actually doing in your company (I thought Ivan would not do any coding for your company anymore, because of his scarce time). Regarding SME: a use case in general is really difficult. I had the hope that you or someone else heard about a blockchain use case for SME.
Have a nice weekend and again, thank for your time and answer.
Thank you Filip. What I like of the Academy approach is that is complete. We can find also not strictly technical themes but also a huge quantity of also-linked subjects that really sorrounds the knowlegde and put it in a right environment, like a beautiful house sorrounded by a beautiful garden.
Dear Filip and community,
Happy to have an area where I can actually add value, as I’ve been learning much more than contributing in this academy. But as someone with an MBA and managing resources in the International community, I can offer some advice in this. This is more a change management area than a sales area when it is internal, and as such I recommend following Kotter’s model summarized below:
Establishing a Sense of Urgency or need for the change (even without the emergency through industry analysis, showing where the world is heading, some added value and use cases.)
Creating a Guiding Coalition (like minded individuals in a company with certain authority. Here you might also need to talk to resistors and try to get them on your side)
Developing a Vision & Strategy
Communicating the Change Vision (here you start communicating as you said in the video and inspiring with a clear vision of where we are going with this through the support of your group)
Empowering Broad-Based Action (Give the tools needed to the people to be part of the change)
Generating Short-Term Wins (PoC, pilot projects…)
Consolidating Gains & Producing More Change
Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture (rewarding change and making it part of the culture).
Hope this helps,
I am more on the entrepreneur side of the fence but i think the concepts and strategies are pretty much the same. In the case of working for an organisation you would have an upper hand as you could sift out current problems or maybe experiencing current issues yourself directly and so would be a lot more streamlined in terms of knowledge to build a POC solution. Also as apposed to knocking on doors i’m sure it would be easier to have a conversation with the managers and decisions makers not to mention the I.T department. I was a short while ago working for a company where SAP software system was the primary use of database and functions for the business. lo behold i think Vechain are integrating supply chain features into it so i think for anyone working for an organisation, now is the time to put into motion the measures and conversations to really see if blockchain could be a productive and efficient fit for a blockchain solution.
Good discussion here and good to read others perspectives to learn more. Seems like big companies are implementing blockchain solution as they have the resources to make it happen. I’m in the entertainment business and hopefully I can interest some influencer in my organisation some day about this matter. Looks like VeChain BC is moving forward.
Go for it my man. Very most Good Luck to you