There was a point in grad school when my marbles were starting to get a little loose. One could argue that would be when I decided to apply, but still, I at least approached the task as if I were sane. That is of course unlike the time that I decided I would submit my thesis in crayon. My dear wife (then fiance) helped me through this period in her own quirky way by giving me a box of 96 crayons (complete with crayon sharpener). I started doing TCP state machine diagrams in various colors and hung them up around my workspace at home. It took a good week or two before the phase ended, but it was arguably the most fun I had working on my thesis.

When I started working in the Real World™ as a software engineer, I viewed marketing as a bunch of yahoos that wasted their day using crayons to make pretty data sheets. I mean, come on now, how long can it really take to do a one page data sheet for a product that already exists?! The engineers told you what it does, what else is there? My first foray into marketing was doing technical marketing. While I took the job seriously, I still didn't take myself all that seriously and that was represented by my favorite box of crayons sitting on my desk.

Obviously I stopped worrying and learned to love marketing. I learned the answer to how long does it take to do a data sheet? and was of course a bit stunned. (If you don't want it to stink, the answer is "weeks on the low end".) Working with the sales teams made the final connection of why all the material needed to be necessary.

And this is the part that trips up a lot of startups, especially ones founded by engineers: Sales tools, those silly things that marketing keeps dreaming up to "waste" their time with, have a dollar value. If you're doing it right, the return on investment can be extraordinary.

Take a simple example: the compression test page.

The resident geek in me is still a bit amazed that there are people that don't use compression for their web sites. It's available on every web server out there, is all standards driven so the end user has to do nothing, completely automated so the site developer just needs to flip a switch, and results in impressive bandwidth savings. Who wouldn't do this?

Well, apparently a good number of people. You would be stunned by the number of people that just haven't thought to do it, didn't think it was worth it, or didn't even know it could be done.

So a handy sales tool is a little web site that lets you plug in a URL and get a compression ratio for a few URLs. This means the sales person can walk into a first call with a custom report in his hand showing the benefits for the specific customer instead off of some generic spec sheet. It's a powerful tool and one that prospects respond to much better than Yet Another Glossy.

But when it comes to funding an effort like this, many startup scoff at the idea. "It's obvious," is a common cry from an engineer. "It's incomplete," is another citing that a tool like this won't catch the whole site accurately. My favorite is "we can already do that, just plug the widget in, configure it this way, and then run the command to show aggregate statistics."

Buzz.

No, it's not obvious. If it were obvious, you would have a hard time justifying a company making a product that does this. No, it's not complete, but that's okay. Prospects typically just need a sample to get a sense of what it can do. If anything, they would not take well to a sales representative poking at their infrastructure to put together a sales pitch. The last of the ideas just doesn't work -- the point of a sales tool is to have something that you can show or give that doesn't require installation of the product. This is a quick way to show value without spending a lot of time on it.

A well built / well-written sales tool is powerful and the investment has measurable value. A product without a good set of sales tools is a product that is going to struggle with seeing the light of day.

I still keep the crayons that my wife gave me on my desk. It's a nice set and they remind me of her. I've just learned to value the products of marketing enough to not write them in crayon. Well, not anymore. :-)