X-Message-Number: 28586
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 10:55:55 -0700
From: Regina Pancake <>
Subject: cryonics Re: Sales Rep

Hi Jonathan,

I was reading your post. Its a good suggestion.
Inevitably Alcor will have to get one. Or two, or three.
Currently, in my opinion, not such a good idea at the moment.
Why? You ask?
*1. Because the infrastructure isn't ready for it yet. *
Alcor Central is getting better daily, but they are probably a good year 
away from
locking down a scalable corporate system internally. Scalable is the 
real operative word here.
Like Tanya said, at the conference, and I paraphrase, that if a rat was 
revived out of a frozen state tomorrow,
and we were swamped with new sign ups, we would be overwhelmed.
I agree with that. Its like water is good. But you can drown in it. Or 
you can drink it in, in an orderly fashion, one gulp at a time.
Alcor's processing is maturing.
Not that a sales rep would necessarily get sign ups right and left, 
right off the bat. But that brings me to the second point.

*2. The cost of a sales rep can not be supported yet.*
A decent sales rep worth their salt is not cheap. And the cheap ones you 
don't want.
They need to tool up the computers better and get up on an enterprise 
software first.

*3. Over selling the product. *
Alcor and all of the cryonics organizations suffer a perceived predatory 
approach to the weak minded and the old.
And in business, perception IS reality. (if you want me to elaborate on 
that, I will. Just ask.)
I run into this a good deal of the time. I've had long discussions 
regarding this topic. If we push this or aggressively market cryonics 
before
we have more science on our side, we run the risk of drawing the fear 
and anger of vast populations of organized groups that would stomp on 
our necks.

Most all of this can be solved. And is in process.
But we are not there yet. No jumping the gun.
What I do think we can do in the mean time regarding a sales rep is 
start the short list of who we'd want and the vetting process now.

This is my first posting to Cryonet. I'd love it if I could get some 
feed back on this and if anybody would point out any previous posting 
that might have covered this topic in the past.

Thanks for your time,

Regina Pancake
Alcor Member A-1351

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