50 Most Important And Influential People In The Tech Business

According to, soon to be no-more, Business 2.0 magazine, the following people are the 50 most important, most influential in the tech sector of business:

50. Jay Adelson - CEO of Digg.
49. Jason Calacanis - Jason was the founder of Weblogs, Inc, which was sold to AOL in 2005. His latest internet venture is Mahalo. "Mahalo" means "thank-you" in Hawaiian.
48. Gina Bianchini - Gina is the CEO of Ning, a website that allows people to create their own social networks, like the Brooklyn Art Project, for example.
47. Ed Iacobucci & Vern Raburn - Co-founders of Citrix Systems and, soon-to-be, DayJet air taxi.
46. Paul Graham - Founder of Y-Combinator, a new seed fund that takes a hands-on approach to nurturing startups.
45. You - Almost as cheesey as Time's person of the year.
44. Evan Williams - Founder of Twitter, and the man responsible for "daily tweets."
43. Elon Musk - Currently involved with 3 ventures: Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and Solar City.
42. Doug Melton - Co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.
41. Tim O'Reilly - CEO of O'Reilly Media and the person who coined the term "Web 2.0."
40. Sam Zell - Print media mogul and not afraid of picking fights with powerhouse Google.
39. John Edmond - Co-founder of Cree, an LED lightbulb manufacturer
38. Arianna Huffington - Political blogger Ariana's wildly popular Huffington Post is one of the most visited blogs on the internet.
37. Fake Steve Jobs - The real Dan Lyons is AKA Fake Steve Jobs.
36. Kevin Walsh - Walsh's Renewable Energy division at GE Energy Financial Services plans to spend $4 billion on renewable energy investments trough to 2010.
35. Howard Draft - CEO of DraftFCB, a big-time marketing agency.
34. Mark Zuckerberg - The face of The Facebook. Mark started "The Facebook," which is now just Facebook without the "the."
33. Richard Branson - Virgin.
32. Indra Nooyl - CEO of Pepsi. Coca-Cola is better!
31. Mukesh And Anil Ambani - Billionaire brothers from India.
30. Charles Phillips - President of Oracle.
29. Nicholas Negroponte - Chairman of non-profit One Laptop Per Child.
28. Reed Hundt - Vice Chairman of Frontline Wireless.
27. Janus Frils & Niklas Zennstrom - Co-founders of Joost and Skype.
26. Tom Cogan - Chief Project Engineer at Boeing.
25. Philip Rosedale - Founder of Linden Labs which created a Second Life for people with no first life.
24. Tony Fadell - Senior VP at Apple
23. Min Kao - CEO of Garmin, a manufacturer of GPS devices
22. Michael Arrington - Getting TechCrunched can do wonders for an internet startup.
21. Randall Stephenson - CEO of AT&T.
20. Shigeru Miyamoto - Senior Managing Director at Nintendo.
19. Martin Eberhard - CEO of Tesla Motors
18. Agile Software Development - Not really a "person."
17. Robin Li - Cofounder of Baidu, China's biggest search engine.
16. Barry Diller - CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp, which owns Ask.com.
15. Bruce Chizen - CEO of Adobe.
14. Mark Hurd - CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
13. Jimmy Wales - Founder of Wikipedia. Check out what Michael Scott has to say about Wikipedia in the video below:



12. Jeff Bezos - CEO of Amazon.com
11. Brian McAndrews - CEO of aQuantive.
10. Katsuaki Watanabe - President of Toyota.
9. John Chambers - CEO of Cisco Systems.
8. Arnold Scharzenegger - Governor of California, AKA The Governator
7. Susan Decker - VP of Yahoo!.
6. Rupert Murdoch - CEO of Newscorp, which owns MySpace.
5. Paul Jacobs - CEO of Qualcomm.
4. Michael Moritz - Managing Director at Sequoia Capital.
3. Private Equity - Also not a real person.
2. Steve Jobs - The REAL Steve Jobs
1. Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin - Google is taking over the world!

Useless Techniques For Handling Sales Objections - Reframing

My favorite useless technique for handling sales objections is reframing. I really can't believe that so many sales trainers still push this one. Reframing is putting a different spin on a sales objection to frame a negative viewpoint into a positive viewpoint. Sounds like a good strategy but, when put in use, it's really a technique that aims to manipulate a customer.

Take this example: A customer is buying a car. The price is still too high. Customer asks salesperson to cut $1000 off of the price. If he could do that, then there would be a deal. Using the objection reframing technique, the car salesperson would say something like, "If I understand you correctly, you're saying that you'd buy this car if the price is just $1000 less? If you drive this car for 3 years, that's 1095 days. That's 91 cents a day, less than the price of a coffee. So, you're saying that if you just pass on buying one cup of coffee a day, you'd buy this car, right?" Notice how the salesperson says "you're saying." Ya, he reframes the question to make it sound like the customer came up with the idea. Don't assume customers are that stupid.

To use this technique is to assume that all customers can be manipulated. I think everybody understands that if they cut out on one coffee a day they'd save a lot of money in the long run. This is the case whether they purchase the car or not. The car has nothing to do with it. The customer wants the best price either way. People can also save money by cutting out the purchase of other trivial things... newspapers, candy, snacks, magazines, games, entertainment... They don't care to hear a salesperson tell them this. Heck, why not ask the customer to change their whole lifestyle so that they could afford to buy whatever you're selling? Manipulation is old-school sales. It may have worked in the 80's. It doesn't work as well any more.