Difficult week at work
May 1st, 2006 by Yue
It has been a difficult week at work.
My official job is business development for China, but working at a startup, I often get involved with pleny of non-sales issues. This week I pitched in on a whole bunch of things. I provided advice to customers about what RFID tags to use, what antenna to use, how to integrate our modules into their readers, helped out on regional certification, etc.
My technical background helps a great deal on these questions. I’ve also spent my first six months learning our products as well as I can. I’m probably the only salesperson who has actually setup a full system in my office, read through the user manual, the reference guide and even our tag/reader protocol. I’m now at the point where I can handle some support calls from our customers (which I have to do sometimes if the customer only speaks Chinese).
This week was a tough week though. One of my customers has a problem that requires the product team to step in. But doing that will delay the schedule of our next generation product. These sorts of situations are quite tough, but fairly typical of startups where resources are stretched to the limit.
