Sales Forum by Susan Corcoran

What is Inside Sales? — Our Definition of Inside Sales

2012-01-25T06:19:00.002-05:00

The most pragmatic definition of Inside Sales is simple:

Inside Sales is “remote sales,” most lately called “virtual sales,” or professional sales done remotely. Where Outside Sales or traditional Field Sales is done face-to-face.

Taken in this context, the majority of all sales is done remotely, and the numbers are growing. A recent study done by SKKU and MIT, in conjunction with infoUSA, found that over the next three years, Inside Sales is growing at a fifteen times higher rate (7.5% versus .5% annually) over Outside Sales, to the tune of 800,000 new jobs.

More evidence: if you don’t believe it, grab a list of 10 traditional or “Outside Sales” people and call them. 7 out of 10 will be sitting in front of their computer, working in their cubicle, office, or home office—just like the Inside Sales people.

The term “Inside Sales” originally came about in the late 1980s as an attempt to differentiate “Telemarketing” (or “Telesales in the UK) from the more complex, “high-touch,” phone-based business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) selling practices.

Telemarketing is often believed to have begun in the 1950s by DialAmerica Marketing, Inc., reported to be the first company dedicated to telephone sales and services. By the 1970s telemarketing was a common phrase used to describe the process of selling over the telephone. It often included both outbound and inbound, but later became much more synonymous with the types of outbound calling we’re all familiar with—large-scale “blasts” to lists of names to try and drum up quick sales, usually while the family is sitting around the dinner table.

By the late 1990s/early 2000s, Inside Sales was the term used to differentiate the practice from Outside Sales—the traditional face-to-face sales model where salespeople went to the client’s location of business to engage in the sales process.

Companies found the new channel of Inside Sales to be undeniably effective, but often didn’t know what to do to solve the conflict between the younger, disruptive, more technically savvy upstarts who sold over the phone, and their more senior counterparts who wielded incredible political power in their organizations as the entrenched source of revenue for nearly a century.

For years Inside Sales has been relegated to generating leads for the more senior Outside Sales reps or merely closing the smaller accounts. This is now no longer the case. Many companies are already using a hybrid form of Inside Sales, with reps calling from their company’s home office, then traveling occasionally to client locations and merely calling it “sales.”

By Marc Benioff’s own admission in his book “Behind the Cloud, salesforce.com “grew their company for the first five or six years with a telesales or Inside Sales model.” They added Outside Sales or Field Sales to go upmarket when they wanted to sell to Enterprise-class companies, but the company still does a majority of their sales work remotely.

Another way of defining “Inside Sales” is to also state what it is not.

Inside Sales is not Telemarketing.

Let me repeat: Inside Sales is NOT Telemarketing. Telemarketing is a scripted, single-call-close, almost always targeting a small-ticket, business to consumer (B2C) model.

Inside Sales is not scripted. It requires multiple calls or “touches” to create a sales close, involves medium or large ticket goods and services, and targets business-to-business (B2B) or high-end business-to-consumer( B2C) transactions.

Inside Sales is professional sales done remotely. It is not the mindless “phone drone” that calls at dinner time and won’t hang up until you have said “no” seven times.

Inside Sales is also not Customer Service. Though Inside Sales frequently involves an element of inbound call handling like a customer service department, in its pure form it is not customer service.

Some companies erroneously describe their inbound call centers as “inside sales,” but this does not fall within the boundaries of our definition unless the agents’ primary function is selling.

Inside Sales is professional sales done remotely . . . it is remote sales.

Thanks to Ken Krogue for this article!

Team Building in 2012

2012-01-21T13:17:00.000-05:00

It's a new year and for many organizations it's time to shake up your team building exercises. Push people outside of their comfort zone, give them an experience they will talk about for the rest of their lives, challenge them mentally,physically - let them find new boundaries to their resiliency.

Thinking this might be what your team needs? Check out Warrior Dash. MUD. SWEAT. BEER.

Races across the United States, Canada, Ireland, England and Australia.

Watch the video and decide if your team has what it takes to be a warrior.

Top 10 Reasons Employees Get Fired, Among Surveyed Companies 2008 - 2012

2012-01-05T06:48:00.000-05:00

By Patty Inglish, MS

1) Dishonesty, evasion, or lack of integrity on the job.

It is important to be honest, straightforward, and forthcoming on the job with management and coworkers. However, this does not mean that you should blurt out everything you know -- It is important to protect your company's proprietary information, such as copyrighted and trademarked materials, company manuals, program materials, and new projects, services, and inventions in order to prevent corporate espionage and theft. Time sheets and expense reports must be 100% true and accurate, without padding. Projects reports, especially facts and figures must not be faked.

2) Using Employer Equipment for Personal Use.

Employees should not use company materials or equipment for their own personal purposes and this includes telephones, cell phones, copiers, laptops, PDAs, iPODs, and the Internet. However, some employers will make an exception in some cases - for example, printing up few flyers for a charity -- but ask them first in order to preserve ongoing trust. Most employers also permit emergency phone calls from and to family members and allow parents to call to check on their children. Absolutely no employee should use company time, equipment, and materials to operate a personal business on company time, such as an Internet sales page, or a Pampered Chef or Tupperware business, etc.

3) Lying on a resume.

Increasing numbers of employers are checking every single reference a job candidate provides, although EEO regulations make this more difficult to complete since the late 2000s. If there are notations on your resume of more than one business "closed down" or one or more employers having died, or there are untraceable educational certifications, you risk being fired for fraud. Be prepared to show some sort of documentation for those closed down business and schools. Many employers now require that you show them, and provide them a copy of, your High School, Vocational School, and College transcripts and diplomas, as welkl as certifications and licenses.

In many companies, reference checking continues after you are hired. Some employers run regularly occurring credit checks on workers more than once per year. Contracts with firms that do bulk credit and background checks make this cheaper to accomplish.

A local retail conglomerate containing a dozen chains of clothing and accessory outlets also owns a financial services division and a credit and collections division. Through vocational counseling duties, I learned that temporary employees in credit and collections soemtimes underwent no credit checks, while full-time-with-benefits customer service reps were checked at hire and semiannually thereafter.

The two-art employer rationale often reported, albeit perhaps not a valid one for worker credit checks is
To prevent theft and embezzlement, and To prevent a] sloppiness and mishandling of funds/resources, and b] low productivity.

In several workforce articles in the body of literature, evidence emerges that the poor credit check does not usually correlate with the problems supposedly linked with it in the workplace.

During a national recession, the poor credit check result may be even more meaningless and hopefully dropped by some companies. Financial and credit services seem to employee credit checks more often than other employers. As a professional in other industries, I have gathered background checks and these recurring credit checks, and can testify to their time-consuming nature. In my experience, the background check at hire is the more important and should not be eliminated. Credit checks can be eliminated, except perhaps inthe financial industry.

If any one tells you to make up information to make your resume look better, they are either Naïve or ill-informed, or Trying to get you into trouble, because some people make it their hobby to hurt others. It has been advised to me twice (i did not do it) and often to my clients by friends (it did not help).

3) Refusing to follow directions and orders.

This is pretty self explanatory. Your company owns your working time and you must do everything legal that your supervisors and bosses ask you to do. If you have a better idea, you must talk to them and go through proper channels in order to "do it your way." If you are asked to do something illegal, unethical, or what you consider immoral, you need to take a stand on that in a professional manner.

Sometimes, people who cannot follow directions simply need to start their own businesses , and that's perfectly OK. It's a part of the Multiple Intelligences phenomenon and absolutely acceptable. See our Link below for that Hub topic:

Here's a pertinent addition from Hubber, Mr. Ralph Deeds: Inablity or unwillingness to adapt to changes instituted by a new boss, especially in the case of an older long-service employee and a younger new supervisor.

[Note from Patty: I have, indeed, seen this several times in various companies where I have worked.]

4) Talking too much and conducting personal business at work.

Don't be guilty of misusing company resources, including the Internet, office supplies, and especially telephones; too much idle (personal talking) with coworkers. Non-business talking wastes more company dollars than any other activity. It should be saved for lunch and break times. This includes talking on the phone/email with stockbrokers, travel agents, hairdressers, bankers, etc.

In the 1960s and into the early 1970s, many offices and factories did not allow any conversation - employees were to work, not talk. This policy loosened somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s and then as employers discovered how much talking costs them, they began laying off the talkers. HOWEVER, some employers allow a certain amount of this type of activity and it is important to understand YOUR company policies and follow them.

5) Inconsistency - unreliable work and behaviors.

Employees must be stable and consistent in behaviors and productivity in order to benefit the company and produce profits or positive outcomes. While most people have ups and downs, if these interfere with productivity and accuracy in their jobs, they need to contact their Employee Assistance Program or seek professional help. If employee reviews are given regularly, these trends can be caught in time to be guided into something more positive. If you are not receiving employee reviews, ask for one/

6) Inability to get along with other people/reducing group productivity.

Some people have a lower "Social IQ" than others, some are loners, and some are sociopathic or have personality disorders. Unless there is a mental health disorder present (like the sociopathic or personality disorder symptoms) people can learn to be civil and have productive conversations - even those with Aspberger's syndrome and other autism spectrum disorders. Management should notice extreme problems with employee's getting along with others and intervene professionally with a referral to the Employee Assistance Program for consultation and help or the Professional Development Program for training like awareness and communications education.

Without these latter two programs, many more employees would be fired and end up possibly in jail or homeless.

7) Inability to actually do assigned job tasks.

If employees lie convincingly enough during an interview or on a resume, stating that they can do certain tasks, but proving unable to perform these duties on he job, they will likely be fired if they cannot learn to do them very quickly. However, some tasks that require certifications and licenses cannot be quickly learned on the job during the first weeks. These deficits will expose the employee as unable to perform assigned duties and having lied during the application process .

However, occasionally there is a lack of initial orientation and training on the job and the employee needs to ask for help early on. Sometimes, through misunderstanding, an employee will be assigned tasks that are beyond their training or education or in an entirely different field. This is certainly a mis-match. Such an employee needs to speak up right away in a professional manner and ask for help or reassignment. These employees may need to report their circumstances to Human Resources, an Employee Assistance Program, a Union Steward, or their attorney if the situation escalates.

8) Performing tasks slowly, with numerous errors.

Some employees are sloppy and not invested in doing a good job. Unless their attitudes change for more productive beliefs, they will likely be fired.

On the other hand, and unwisely, some employees try to "string out" their work and make it last longer in order to have job security. This is dishonest. A better plan is to finish their tasks at an acceptable rate and ask coworkers if they can help them, and after that, go to the boss and ask for more work. Not only is this honest, but it lets the boss know that you are a good worker and deserving of raises and promotions.

Unfortunately, some companies do not have adequate training and follow-up programs in place, leaving employees to figure out their jobs on their own. In these cases, slow work and high error rate are not actually the workers' fault. Alternatively, some people are simply in the wrong job for them and they need to be placed into jobs in which they can excel. These people need to ask for help from their supervisors and bosses and these management persons need to notice the problem and be prepared to help, either with training and coaching, or a job change.

9) High absenteeism rate.

When you are hired as an employee, your company owns the time that you are at work, except for lunches, breaks, and authorized time off.

It is not a sign of integrity to take every minute of sick time you have, just because you are allotted that amount and are not actually sick. Some employers have solved this problem by lumping vacations, mental health days, sick time, holidays, days for family funerals, and personal days into one category called "Time Off" or similar. You don't have to give any explanation. Longer family-leave and parental leave time usually requires previous authorization though. However, if you need to take sick time for another reason, confide in your bosses and they may make an accommodation for you.

If an employee is having problems with job burnout that often manifests as absences and tardiness or is suffering frequent accidents, drug/alcohol abuse, family difficulties, or other mental health or physical issues, many employers have Employee Assistance Programs to help guide and treat these problems. Employees should take advantage of this help to 1) increase the quality of their own lives and 2) become more consistent and productive workers.

10) Drug and/or alcohol abuse.

his leads to inconsistent work, errors, accidents, poor interpersonal relationships, increased absenteeism, lower morale among coworkers and supervisors, bad publicity for the company, and other negatives. Drug and alcohol problems both are usually only one of a set of serious disorders known as Co-Occurring Disorders, so there is usually much more to the problem than drug use or drinking that got out of hand.

How to maximize your field reps sales potential

2011-12-29T11:25:00.000-05:00

Field Sales is a very different type of selling. It requires a unique type of rep who has no fear and can make a great first impression. Being organized on the road has its own challenges. Here are some of the best practices we have seen for being successful as a road warrior:

1) Marketing Tool Box. To avoid papers sliding all over your car, pick up a portable filing cabinet from staples or an office store and protect your contracts, marketing slicks and paper work from heat, cold, folded corners and being trampled. This will ensure you have all the paper tools you need and will make it obvious when your quantities are low. There is nothing worse than showing up and having to show a brochure with a boot print on it or a contract that looks like it went through a wash cycle.

2) Get a Tablet. Instead of relying on paper or to augment your paper requirements, invest in a tablet. Tablets still have wow factor and you can easily show products, services on a tablet without the pomp and circumstance of booting up a computer. Your prospects will think you are tech savvy, organized and credible. It doesn’t have to be an $800 ipad. An 8g anything will do. I picked up the Blackberry Playbook when it was on sale for $199 for one of my clients reps and it has helped them tremendously – even the simple stuff like email on the road becomes faster.

3) Use a CRM for field Sales. Not all CRM’s are created equally. Many of the CRM’s are great for in office sales or reps that go back to an office in between meetings but choosing the right tool for your road warriors is important. Front Row CRM has some very cool features for field reps. It has a mapping feature that shows you other prospects/leads/customers on a physical map so you can plan your route better. If the reps enter notes as they go, the Manager can see the actual route they took to coach them on better uses of time. It also has a CRM updating feature that can be used via TEXT in the event you don’t have a tablet. This is a stand alone or a bolt on to other CRM systems. CRM that works, is easy to use, simple to populate and actually facilitates sales is key to a field reps success

4) Keeping you office clean. I believe all companies with field reps should pay for an inside and outside car wash once a week. Keeping your car clean forces you to stay organized, helps you feel professional and in the event that a customer sees your car rolling up, it doesn’t look like it’s been off roading.

5) Fuel. Fuel is important. Your body and mind need good fuel to keep you at top performance which can be challenging when you are on the road. Drink lots of water and pack fruit & veg snacks. Apples, grapes, oranges, carrots, celery will all keep for days in a cooler. Don’t over think this. Just grab an apple on the way out or hit a grocery store between meetings. If you feel good, you will sell more.

And to state the obvious - you absolutely need a GPS!

It’s little every day changes that make a long lasting positive impact.

Happy Selling!

Objection Handling

2011-12-21T06:01:00.003-05:00

It’s important that you have solid clarity of all the details in order to be able to truly overcome an objection. There are 5 steps to objection handling:

Acknowledge: Empathise and identify with their concern

Question: As for specifics including Who What Where Why and tell me more

Listen: Be patient and truly understand what the prospect is telling you

Position: Discuss the benefits and connect the dots to their business

(Here is where you could use the Feel, Felt, Found technique)

Check: Has the objection been addressed and ask for further feed back with a question

Here are some common Objections and some questions to ask that will help you uncover the true objection and position yourself to resolve the concern.

Happy with their current provider/service

• Perhaps you could clarify for me – Is it your service or your service provider that are happy with?

• What is it that you like about them

• When was the last time they did an assessment of your requirements or services?

• How do you feel your business would benefit from new technology? Cost Savings? Increased productivity? Efficiencies? Being more Competitive?

• It would be helpful if you could be specific about who your current service provider is and if you have more than one provider for one or more service

• How are you kept up to date on new technology, products and services?

• How proactive is your rep/provider?

• What features do you like about your service?

• Is there a specific feature or product you would like to see from your current service provider?

• Have you ever had an outage? How was that handled? What is your outage process?

Not Competitive

• Could you be more specific? Price? Solution? Product offering?

• Are you speaking with other providers regarding this service?

• I would like to confirm that we are truly comparing apples to apples. Can we move through the solution and truly understand the similarities and differences?

• Some line items may be included in the pricing where as with other suppliers they may be a separate item. Could I help you do a detailed comparison?

• Is there a specific part of the quote/pricing that jumps out at you?

• Was there anything noticeably different in the quotes?

• Do you have a budget?

• Is cost the most important factor in your decision?

• Where do you specifically feel we are not competitive? SLA? Price? Solution?

In a contract

• Is this a verbal contract or a signed contract?

• When was the contract signed? What is the term of the contract?

• If I could show you cost savings, and the numbers make sense, would you consider switching?

• Could I do a cost analysis of savings vs. any penalties?

• Could you share with me some of the main Terms and Conditions of the contract?

• Does it have an auto renew clause? Will your rates increase with the Auto renew?

• Were there any sticking points with the contract?

• What services are specifically contracted?

With the “In a Contract” clause the goal is to set a reminder to follow up 6 months prior to the contact expiry and note it in Goldmine and to offer them other Avega services including Conferencing and Social Media.

Not Interested

• Are you interested in New Technology? Better Service? Saving Money? Being Competitive? Educating yourself on communication trends? Getting a second opinion on solutions?

• What are you not interested in?

• Tell me something about your business that would help me understand what is important to you

• Are phone & internet a service that your business depends on daily to run your company?

• If your business depends on phone and internet, why wouldn’t you be interested?

• How do you communicate with Customers? Vendors? Other employees? What percentage do you use phone to communicate? What percentage do you rely on Internet and email to communicate?

• How critical is phone and/or internet to your business

• If Phone and internet are critical infrastructure, isn’t it worth looking at more closely?

• If I could demonstrate improved productivity and greater efficiencies by having the right solutions, would you agree to look at this service in more detail?

Be that active listener and truly seek to understand the objection. Take your time and be deliberate in your questions and finding the heart of the matter. Happy Selling!

The Trial Close

2011-12-14T09:25:00.007-05:00

The Trial Close Separates The Sales Pros From The Amateurs

By: Nick Moreno

Too many salespeople never ask for an order. Obviously, these salespeople never last very long in sales. Others only ask for the order once they are convinced the prospect is ready to be closed. These salespeople are missing out on a very powerful sales tool, the trial close. It’s a key tool that will increase sales performance. Let’s look at why a trial closes work.

Trial Close And The Sales Process

The trial close is about asking for the order when you assume the prospect is probably not ready to be closed. Let me explain why you would ask for the order when you believe the prospect is not ready to hand you the order. Thinking about a trial close yet?
First of all, your assumptions may not be accurate. Some trial closes actually close the deal. You may have thought the prospect wasn’t ready but in reality the prospect was anxious to do business with you. So, congratulations! Your Trial Close resulted in success.

Trial Close Is A Compass

Most of the time, your assumptions will be correct and the prospect is not ready to be closed. The Trial Close is a great way to uncover why the prospect isn’t ready. The Trial Close is like a compass that allows the salesperson to discover where they are in the Sales Process.

Trial Close And Objections

When your prospect balks at handing you the order, you want to know why. At this point, you will surely get some questions, concerns or objections. Thanks to the Trial Close you now know what’s on your prospect’s mind. Your job is to successfully address all those questions, concerns and objections. Once you do, you absolutely must, once again, ask for the order.

When To Trial Close

The trial close should be used right after you’ve presented your product as the answer to your prospect’s problems, wants or needs. You’ve presented all the benefits your prospect will enjoy by using your product or service. You’ve also cost justified the purchasing decision. The only thing left to do at this point is to trial close. That’s when to implement an effective trial close.

Trial Close With Confidence

Since you may feel your prospect isn’t ready to be closed you may be hesitant about confidently asking for the order and that would be a big mistake. Whenever you ask for an order, you must do it with confidence and that confidence must be evident even during a trial-closing attempt.

As you can see, the Trial Close is a powerful sales tool and you now know when and how to implement it. As a sales strategy, you can’t ignore the usefulness of a solid trial-closing attempt. I hope you’ll use it often and I hope that this advice will have you earning more commissions with your Trial Close.
To your sales success!

Objection Handling using LACE

2011-12-07T07:23:00.000-05:00

Objections happen. If you perform the sales or persuasion process well, you will succeed in seriously reducing the number of objections, but they may still happen.

Objections can be transformed into an opportunity. For example, you can increase understanding of the other person's circumstance and to get closer to them, building a more trusting relationship.

Listen

Before you can act on the objection, it helps a great deal if you can understand properly not only the objection but also the thought and emotion behind it.

Find the objection

First, listen some more. Ask questions that elicit the background and detail of the objection. Listen not only to the objection but to the emotion behind it. Seek to 'read between the lines'.
The objection as stated may well be a cover for the real objection. Probe for more detail. Ask 'what else' and 'how come'.
Find remaining objections

Find out whether there are any other objections. Ask 'Is there anything else'. Tip the bucket. This can cause you more work now and it may seem that it is better to let sleeping dogs lie. But if you do not do so, then when you get towards what you hope is closure, they may easily pop up to frustrate you once again.

Accept

Once you have discovered the objection, the next stage is to acknowledge not only the objection but the person, too.
Accept the person

First and throughout, accept the person. Accept that they have a right to object. Accept that you have not fully understood them.
You do not do this by saying 'I accept you' or anything like this. The simplest way is through your attitude. Objecting can be a scary act, and people can fear your reaction. By not reacting negatively, by accepting the objection, you also accept the person.
By accepting the person, you build both their trust and their sense of identity with you. You also set up a exchange dynamic where they feel a sense of obligation to repay your acceptance.
Accept the objection

Accepting the objection means understanding how it is reasonable, at least from their current viewpoint for them to object to what you may believe is an excellent offer.
It also means accepting the work that addressing the objection will require of you. Objections can be frustrating and if you object to the objection, you will have a mutual stalemate.

Commit

Now it is time to get serious. With the increased understanding and trust, you have an ideal opportunity for a trial close.
Get their commitment

Get a commitment from them such that if you can satisfactorily address their objections, they will agree with you and make the purchase.
This is also a good method of identifying further objections. If they say no, then loop back and elicit these. Eventually, they will run out of objections. If you can address these, it's in the bag.
Make your commitment

This is also the point where you may well be making a commitment to them, to resolve their objections. This may be difficult and cost you in various ways, from calling in favors from other people to putting in additional effort.
The decision you have here, is 'Is it worth it?' Persuasion is often an exchange, and you always at liberty to back out.

Explicit action

Now it is time to address the objections, to take explicit action on the commitments made.
There are two types of objection: real ones and accidental ones. Accidental objections are where the objection is due to a misunderstanding. Misunderstandings are usually easy to address, with an apology and an explanation.
Real objections take work, but if they can be resolved, you've got the sale!
Persuade your way through

Persuading your way through an objection means working to change the way they view the objections. You can wear them down such that they no longer view the objection as being worth pursuing. You can also change the way they view them more positively such that they have an 'aha' experience that leads them to perceive the objection as being no longer important.
Concede your way through

You can also concede your way through, giving in and effectively buying their commitment. If they object to the price, you can always lower it. If they don't want it now, you can come back next week.
Concession can be both a useful approach, especially if you are in a hurry, and a threat. If you give them an inch, then they may want to take a mile. But this is not necessarily so, and a prepared concession strategy can pay dividends.

Thanks to Changing Minds for this objections handling techniques!

What a CEO should do...

2011-12-02T09:15:00.006-05:00

By Mark Davis

I’m a believer that CEOs shouldn’t own workstreams. If they own a customer relationship, marketing plan or product function they won’t be available to invest time in supporting their team. You should be available to help someone on your team when they urgently needs a question answered in order to do their job.

When companies are first started, however, CEOs wear lots of hats and own workstreams that they should divest as the company scales. Owning legal tasks, HR to-do’s, office space procurement, accounting and others are all inevitable, but are roles that CEOs should work to delegate as resources become available.

But what roles should a CEO keep?

Here’s my list of roles that I plan to maintain as Kohort scales:
Strategic Alignment: Ensuring that everyone on my team is working toward the same macro objectives in lockstep, by facilitating communication.

Culture: Setting the culture of the company through office setup, policies and leading by example.

Talent Optimization: Working to maximize the talent of the overall team through hiring decisions and working to ensure each team members maximizes their potential through mentorship and active support.

Fundraising: Raising money to keep the company growing at the appropriate pace.

It’s worth noting that this doesn’t mean that CEOs shouldn’t do sales calls or engage in customer service. They should as long as those activities help their team succeed in their roles. Moreover, a CEO should do any task, no matter how menial, to help their team succeed. Take out the trash, pickup lunch and clean the office - whatever it takes to help your team win.

Also, all of these tasks that the CEO owns are cerebral except for fundraising – that’s the task you never get to fully delegate...

How Today’s Hottest Startups Got Their Names

2011-11-22T06:26:00.001-05:00

By Sarah Kessler

There are no rules to naming a startup. And most entrepreneurs do assume that the name they choose will change before their businesses really start to gain momentum.

Consequently, it doesn’t shock us that some of our favorite startups were sired by picking names out of hats, by throwing out odd proper nouns that might be cheap domain names and by haphazardly removing vowels.

Ever wonder what a “Twitter” is, or who the “Hipmunk” is? We’ve asked nine startups to share the story behind their names.

1. Twitter

The name Twitter was picked out of a hat. A small group of employees from Odeo, the San Francisco podcasting startup where Twitter initially began, had a brainstorming session. They were trying to come up with names that fit with the theme of a mobile phone buzzing an update in your pocket.

After narrowing down the options (which included Jitter and Twitter), they wrote them down, put them in a hat, and let fate decide. Fate decided on Twitter (because clearly asking someone if they saw your latest "jeep" is just weird).

2. Foursquare

Dodgeball, Dennis Crowley’s first attempt at social networking for mobile phones, was acquired by Google in 2005. When Google killed the project, Crowley founded an improved location-based social game he named Foursquare. Does Dennis Crowley have some sort of unresolved childhood issues relating to playground games?

As it turns out, no he doesn’t. “Dennis chose to name both companies after playground games because they were both designed to be fun and playful,” said Foursquare’s PR manager in an email. Apparently, Foursquare was always Crowley’s first choice, but the domain name wasn’t available at the time he founded Dodgeball.

3. Aardvark

Aardvark has been a sleek website where users can type or email their questions, to then be answered by the appropriate people in their own social networks. But co-founder Max Ventilla’s idea began as a chat buddy that could intermediate conversations with people you know online.

There were advantages to having this name at the top of the buddy list, a spot which was occupied on Ventilla’s buddy roster by his friend Aaron. Alphabetically speaking, there aren’t many options that trump Aaron. “Aardvark” is one of the few names that could shoulder him out.

Other factors the name had going for it were its ability to conjugate the invented active verb “vark,” and being an animal that people recognized but typically didn’t have strong associations with.

“We also felt that an animal had the right positioning as helpful but not perfect,” said Ventilla in an email. “If we chose a human or a robot mascot people would spend their time trying to make it look stupid, but they’d cut an animal more slack.”

Google recently announced it would soon shutter Aardvark. Users have until Sept. 30 to retrieve their data.

4. Spotify

Spotify founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon crossed “spot” and “identify” when they named their digital music service.

5. Twilio

“In the early days of the company, the name doesn’t really matter for anything. You always assume you’ll change it later...You should be able to own a word for your company. You should not have any baggage associated with the name.

“What we started doing is saying, we want to invent a word, we know that, so let’s just start making syllables without faces and when we have something that sounds good, check and see if the domain name is available ... We’d just make these weird sounds and then run to the computer and see if it was available. We bought the domain name for $7.”

6. Zynga

Zynga is named after CEO Mark Pincus’s late American Bulldog, Zinga. The name means African warrior princess.

7. Etsy

From a spokesperson:
The origin of the word "Etsy" is shrouded in mystery. Only our founder Rob Kalin knows for sure, and he often throws out red herrings. Some widely-publicized (and certainly fabricated) versions of the story include: a reference to a magic word in a Fellini film, the name of his grandmother's favorite childhood pet, and something about a Unix directory, I think it's "/etc," pronounced “et-C.”

Other fun facts (some of which may actually be factual): Phonetically, Etsy has many homonyms too. It can mean:

"and if" in Latin

"horny" in Japanese

A slur for "loose woman" in Russian-speaking parts of Bay Ridge / Brighton Beach. Oh, and it rhymes with "Betsy."

8. Scribd

Scribd CEO Trip Adler says the company picked Scribd (pronounced "skribbed") beause of its ties to writing and publishing.

More interesting is how the coppany decided on the name of its mobile reader app, Float. “We wanted something to highlight the floating reading experience,” Adler says. “Namely, the idea of reading without boundaries.”

9. Hipmunk

After discarding names like “BouncePounce” (if there were a good travel deal, you’d pounce, right?) and Truvel (travel, but true), Hipmunk co-founder Adam Goldstein was discussing the naming roadblock with his girlfriend.

She suggested they go with a cute animal so that they could have a cool logo. Hipmunk.com was auctioning for about $70 at a time, and so the name -- and admittedly adorable logo -- were born.

The Job Of A CEO At A 200 Person Company

2011-11-16T06:32:00.000-05:00

By Seth Sternberg

The job of CEO at a 200 person company is pretty different from the life I had 6 years ago—just before Meebo launched. It’s a lot less about what I do and a lot more about how I enable others. In today’s world, if you zoom out to a very macro-level view, there are three things I do. 1. Strategy. 2. People. 3. Resource allocation.

Strategy

You always hear that part of a CEO’s job is to come up with the “strategy”. But what does that really mean? In my world it’s listen, synthesize and communicate.

Listening means listening to everyone. Blogs, your employees, the press, other entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, customers and users—anyone who might have an interesting or informative point of view on what your company does. Bandied together, those constituencies form your market.

Synthesizing means taking all those things you’ve been listening to, deciphering signal (10% of it) from noise (90% of it), and adjusting course based on new points of view or new information. It’s rare that you’ll gather the exact strategy you should follow from the signal, but put it together and apply your own secret sauce and you have your winner.

And finally you communicate the newly formed strategy (to the extent you’ve decided to adjust course) to the market – the same people you’ve been listening to. At the end of day, you are your company’s chief sales person. To investors, the press, recruits, customers and users. You need to convince all of these people you’ve been listening to that you heard them, you internalized it all, and you came up with the winning strategy.

Together, I call these three pieces The Strategy Funnel. You listen, you synthesize and communicate and then you start all over again, listening to the feedback after you’ve communicated.

People

So many things are happening on a daily basis that it becomes very hard to stay on top of it all. In fact, you really can’t. Rather, you rely on your team to truly own the pieces of the overall puzzle that they are responsible for. This requires lots of things, top among them is trust.

First, you need to make sure you have the right folks in the right positions. Beyond ensuring that their skills (both hard and soft) are right for the role, you need to make sure that they continue to scale into that role as it inevitably becomes more complex with the growth of the company. Someone who was great at 100 people may hit a wall at 160 people.

Second, you need to make sure that these people are empowered to run their parts of the show. A lot of this empowerment comes through information, which of course needs to be communicated in some way. Counterintuitive as it may seem, ensuring that communication lines are very high bandwidth within the company is one of the top things you can do to empower people. Well…that, and not be a micromanager.

Third, you need to make sure you’ve clearly communicated the mission to your folks. If your leadership team doesn’t understand the mission or strategy, then neither will their respective teams. Watch how quickly progress will grind to a halt without a clearly articulated strategy in place—it won’t be pretty.

Fourth, you are your company’s chief recruiter. If one of our teams needs me to sell a candidate, I’ll get on the phone day or night, weekday or weekend. Heck, I’ve even flown out to see a candidate or two if they’re someone super special. Your company lives or dies by its team, regardless of whether you’re 2 people or 200. Attract the absolute best and brightest to work with your team and you’re already winning.

Resource Allocation

As your company grows and leaders at your company come to run specific functions, each function will vie for the company’s resources to best achieve its goals. Let’s unpack that for a minute. Since you can’t know everything that’s happening within the company, and therefore rely on your leadership team to run their respective functions, how do you make sure everyone’s on the right track? You provide clear goals for them to achieve. You measure these goals through a set of mutually agreed upon metrics that they are working to attain. Often, they will have a bonus tied to the achievement of these goals. So not only is there a sense of professional pride with meeting goals, but a bonus is often on the line too. And since you’re already hiring fantastic people who are intrinsically motivated, these people will work very hard to achieve their own team goals and thusly, the company’s goals.

One of the ways folks work to achieve their goals is to draw resources from the company. Some services are often shared at the corporate level—recruiting, HR, facilities and financial analysis would be an example. Other services are often shared between teams. For example, the ads team is as dependent on our engineering team to provide them with enough engineers to build new ad products as is our consumer products team to build the (very cool) checkins service we’re working on at Meebo. The leaders of these teams, at some level, compete for these shared resources—the more they get—the more likely they are to meet their goals.

You, as the CEO, are the ultimate “disinterested third party” between each of these teams. You, more than anyone, are tasked to make certain that the overall company meets its goals—not just its revenue goals or product goals, but all of them! As such, you make the call on how resources are allocated between competing priorities within the company.

That’s the end of the formal programming. Strategy, People and Resource Allocation are the three things I really spend my time on. But before we part, just one more thing. You are human. You make mistakes. You get stressed. But at all times, be real! Your people and your market want to hear from you—they want to know you and know what you stand for. They can sniff bullshit a mile away. Don’t disengage with reality behind the CEO’s magic curtain—it’s all too easy. Keep it real.

Notes From the MIT Startup Bootcamp 2011

2011-11-11T11:11:00.001-05:00

By Jason Morrison

September 24 2011, I had the pleasure of attending MIT’s 2011 Startup Bootcamp. In its third year, Startup Bootcamp brought an inspiring and thoughful collection of speakers who have had a variety of startup successes.

The event hashtag #sb2011 is a stream of reactions and pull-quotes from the event - mixed here and there with excited anticipation for a dance festival in Goa.

Ten speakers presented a variety of viewpoints, insight, and food for thought.

It was a mixed bag - yes, there was unnecessary focus on vanity metrics and the rah-rah of startup theater. Breathless celebration of hockeysticking uniques and of flying around to court VCs makes for good TechCrunch articles. Like it or not, that’s an inculcated part of startup culture.

But if you get past the Hollywooding and the Silicon Valley adulation, there were gems of solid advice, grounded in experience, on hiring (Paul English of Kayak), data-driven product development (Naveen Selvadurai of foursquare), optimizing your life for personal growth (Drew Houston of Dropbox), identifying underlying social and technological shifts that enable new products (Charlie Cheever of Quora, Patrick Collison of Stripe), negotiation (Alex Polvi of Cloudkick), the importance of on-the-ground and unscalable product development tactics early on (Nathan Blecharczyk of Airbnb), earning and answering to the responsibility of finding your own way in the world (Anthony Volodkin of Hype Machine) and how important it is to empower yourself in perhaps the largest disruptive theme of our time by learning to code (Patrick Collison of Stripe).

Paul English, CTO and co-founder of Kayak.

Recruit a diversity of success.

Paul spoke on three kinds of recruiting: companies recruiting new hires, companies recruiting investors, and job-seekers recruiting companies.

When you’re recruiting, look for success, regardless of the kind. In fact, look for a diversity of success. Paul once hired an olympic rower, and a chess grandmaster, and couldn’t be happier with these decisions. Find people who operate at the top levels of excellence.

Some companies have a “no assholes” rule - at Kayak, they have a policy of “no neutrals”. Like Charlie Cheever, who later discussed the importance of hiring people you have high-bandwidth communication with, Paul encouraged building a team of people who are fully engaged: “intense and in-your-face - in a good way.”

Leah Culver, CEO and co-founder of Convore

Show up, say yes.

Leah told an lighthearted and likeable story of her journey from big state school CS major to Silicon Valley startup founder. Full of serendipity and luck, she shared stories of driving a UHaul from her native Minnesota out to the Bay Area (picked not primarily for its burgeoning tech scene, but for how much better the weather is), getting started with Instructables, and bumping into Pownce co-founders Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka at a party.

Have a good story to tell the press - you don’t have to tell people the ugly, dirty truth.

Another of Leah’s pieces of advice was a common thread through the talks - that of consistent applied effort. “Show up,” she said - in places with a critical mass of startup people, such as Silicon Valley - and “say yes” to opporunities that come your way.

Andrew Sutherland, founder of Quizlet

I didn’t just rush it on my parents that I was leaving MIT. It took two whole weeks.

Andrew shared his story of inspiration for an online learning tool. When he hacked together a prototype to help study for a French III class in high school and subsequently aced the test, he knew he was onto something.

Andrew discouraged market research - “If I had googled for online flash cards, I would have found other sites, that were not as good, and I wouldn’t have made Quizlet. Now, we’re 10x the [volume] of our next competitor.”

This phrasing raised some contention. I would reframe his advice as: focus on your own products rather than on the competition, and don’t be discouraged by incumbent players; rather, recognize them as a validation of the market space, and proceed to out-execute them.

Naveen Selvadurai co-founder of foursquare

At first, go with your hunch. Later, with data.

Naveen worked for Lucent and Sun in college. This was important - it was real-world learning. Seeing engineering culture, doing code reviews, shipping real products. Sun had an open culture of learning where you can dive into other products. “How’d they build Solaris? File systems?” Just sign up for the mailing list.

Naveen shared seven pieces of distilled advice:

Keep good company.

Make something that people want.

Build around an atomic action.

Seek mentors early.

At first, go with your hunch. Later, with data.

Balance unknowns with knowns.

Always be recruiting.

On the last point Naveen shared the four stages of foursquare’s hiring strategy:

Hire friends

Hire friends of friends

Use an external agency (but they didn’t find this valuable)

Hire an internal fulltime recruiter.

It needs to be someone’s job to think about recruiting, seven days a week. Additionally, as a founder, you must always be recruiting.

Charlie Cheever, founder of Quora

Work with people you have really high-bandwidth communication with. Understand how the other person is thinking.

Charlie shared great advice on early-stage tactics. Start with few users (Quora started with fewer than fifty) and a low-cost MVP. Foster the community by hand, be high-touch and, if your business builds on user-generated content, be prepared at the beginning to build a lot of it by yourself. See how the experiment goes, and then take the learning from that experience and apply it to your MVP.

He shared the importance of collecting metrics early on. With Quora, they actually stored the entire webpage for every visit for every customer, so that they could go back later, having identified trends or formulated hypotheses, and see the site as their users saw it.

They noticed a set of high-engagement users, looked at these users’ expereinces, and found that they had all used Facebook connect. Running with this, the team spent time focusing on improving their social experience.

Charlie also left the audience with good food for though:

What wave enables your product? Why is now the right time to build it?

For foursquare, it was GPS-enabled mobile phones. For Quora, it was that “normal” people were comfortable sharing things online, and that the web was turning into a mess; with Google turning up more content farm results, people were moving onto safe harbors of organized information like IMDB and Wikipedia. The timing was right.

Drew Houston, co-founder of Dropbox

Get out of your comfort zone. Learn a little about a lot.

“Everything big starts small” - Drew’s original perception of startups was that of Tolkien’s Mount Doom. His original strategy to build a successful startup was to be overwhelmingly prepared - nab an MIT CS degree, get a few years’ exerpience working for small companies and big companies alike, come back for a PhD, maybe an MBA.

He then related a story from Dropbox’s origins: Drew had just settled into his seat on a Chinatown bus from Boston, in which he could usually get in several hours of undisturbed work. He popped open his laptop, and searched his pockets for his ever-present USB thumb drive. “Shit.” Realization set in just as he visualized, in his mind’s eye, the thumb drive sitting on his desk at home. “Like any good engineer with a problem to solve, I opened my editor.” Drew then wrote the first lines of what would eventually become Dropbox. Today, his company has a multi-billion dollar valuation and “stores more files than Twitter stores tweets.”

Drew exhorted the audience to learn about a broad variety of topics: sales, marketing, finance, accounting, product design, psychology, influence, negotiation, organizational design, management and leadership, business strategy. Buy books (“today we have this amazing thing, Amazon”), dip in, find mentors, and surround yourself with smart people.

Wrapping up, Drew shared his advice for success:

Take on more than you’re “ready for.”

Maximize how much you learn per unit time.

Stack the odds in your favor. Surround yourself with great people; you are the average of your five closest friends.

The fastest way to learn about startups is to join one.

Starting a company is one of the best ways for engingeers to change the world.

Alex Polvi, founder of Cloudkick

No matter what number they offer, pause, count to 10 in your head, and then act as disappointed as possible.

Alex spoke on negotiation, specifically about his experience of his company Cloudkick being acquired by Rackspace.

If a VP of Corp Dev says “strategic” to you, they are talking about acquisition.

Acquisitions are a bit like romantic relationships: you often get the most attention when you’re looking for it the least. Once you are involved with one party, others can sense it. You somehow become more desirable.

Once you have a term sheet from one prospective buyer, you have great leverage. When others call you up, you can very quickly get to hard numbers.

The best negotiation position is one of truth. Build something of value that people want, and your position is irrefutable.

Alex also discussed the importance of taking care of your team, and the people around you. Upon acquisition, he fully accelerated all employees’ options - whether they had been with Cloudkick for four years or four weeks, they were all fully vested and could share in the company’s success. It was important that the acquiring party, Rackspace was on board with this - and they were. Rackspace wanted the new team members to stick around not because they were waiting to vest, but because they wanted to be there.

Anthony Volodkin, founder of Hype Machine

Venture Capital? You do not need anyone’s permission to make stuff.

Anthony shared the perspective that VC or angel investment can be very important, but it’s not for everyone. “I don’t want to shut something off because the math doesn’t work. For people to not remember it. That would make me sad.”

Anthony’s vision was a question: while people with cool friends can get interesting music recommendations from that network, what about people without cool friends? He knew that there was great taste and insight being shared by music bloggers online, and sought to aggregate and distill it. “I didn’t want to miss anything.”

(If music startups are your thing, Anthony couldn’t recommend highly enough Dalton Caldwell’s talk from Startup School 3 on music startups.)

Find your own way.

He started Hype Machine from his dorm room. He didn’t take investor money. This gave Anthony and his team the freedom to run the company as they pleased.

“We wanted to travel,” he said - so they packed their bags and hung out in Berlin for a month. It was cheaper than they would have thought, “about six thousand dollars,” and incredibly fun. But if they’d had VC money? “No way,” Anthony imagined an advisor’s response, “we thought you were, you know, going to be working sixteen hour days. Now you want to go to Berlin and maybe work?”

YCombinator? TechStars? Just fucking make something.

Anthony exhorted: it’s okay to have a different process. Don’t discount investment and the accompanying advisors, but don’t go blindly down that most celebrated path. With a different process, it’s easier to stand out, to be differentiated. You can always get money if you are making something great.

Nathan Blecharczyk of Airbnb

You have to have a vision, you have to be able to execute that vision.

Nathan shared a 2008 pitch deck for Airbnb (then AirBed&Breakfast) - the first time this deck had ever seen the light of day. Tiffany Kosolcharoen posted photos of the slides on her blog.

He highlighted its strengths - it had a problem statement, and had a bottom-up business projection by analogy to CouchSurfing and Craigslist. He was also quick to point out its weaknesses - it involved hand-wavy notions of unlikely major player partnerships, and touted top down projections (“If we can capture 2% of the $1.9B travel booking market… imagine!”) that are quick to raise doubt from savvy adviors or investors.

The company was accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2009 class. YC companies are supposed to be heads-down; but at Paul Graham’s behest, the cofounders zeroed in their market focus to just New York and hopped redeyes back and forth every few weeks. They met with their initial supply-side renteres in bars, and chatted about how things were going. As the team refined the product and identified sticking points, they could be on the ground to help optimize listings. They’d go with people into their homes and take high-quality photos. They found that the initial asking rates were a little too high, so they asked their listers (after a few drinks) to lower their prices. Things clicked, and soon they had handled $250,000 in bookings of which they collected 10%.

Fast-forward to the YC W09 Demo Day, and although at that point Airbnb has already accepted Sequoia investment, they had prepared a Demo Day deck. Gone was the hand-wavy top-down projection and partnership hopefulness, replaced with a quarter million dollars of demonstrable traction, a tight initial market focus, and a tight, clear problem statement.

Like many of the speakers, Nathan stressed the importance of finding quality mentors.

Patrick Collison co-founder of Stripe

It is impossible to motivate great people by something that is merely going to be profitable.

Ptrick’s talk was an excellent finish to the day. He delivered an essay full of engaging stories - I sincerely hope it will be posted online in full.

Patrick’s story was of his trip from hardcore Lisp academic to startup founder. Along the way, he developed one of the first iPhone apps, an offline Wikipedia, before the SDK and App Store, by debugging ARM assmebly. He shared the touching experience of getting emails form users whose lives he had changed; from bringing the world’s knowledge to villages in rural Peru and Ghana to delivering the freedom to browse Wikipedia without overisght to people behind the Great Firewall of China. At nineteen, he co-founded and sold an online action tool, and is currently working on a new payment startup, Stripe.

The anthropological story of the last twenty years is that software is taking over the world. Even if you’re a traveling violinist, you should learn how to program. Do all you can to ensure code is not a foreign language.

Posted by Jason Morrison Sep 25th, 2011

5 ways to keep your rockstar employees happy

2011-11-02T06:53:00.001-04:00

The Googleplex, Google’s corporate headquarters in Mountain View California, is legendary for its perks. Employees have access to unlimited free meals, haircuts, dry cleaning, massages, and even onsite medical care.

Yet earlier this year, when Google interviewed its employees about what they valued most at work, none of these extravagant benefits made the top of the list. Neither did salary. Instead, employees cited access to “even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.”

Tangibles like salary and benefits aren’t enough to guarantee that your best and brightest creatives will remain engaged. Indeed, a recent landmark study by Arnold Worldwide of 3,000 employees and 500 executive leaders across a range of communication and advertising firms found that 30 percent of the advertising workforce say they’ll be gone from their job within 12 months.

Take Jill, an outstanding, experienced copy editor whom Agency X recently recruited at considerable expense from one of its chief rivals. Despite her outward success, she’s unsure how she’s performing, where she stands in the company, and how she fits into the overall goals of the agency. Her pay is great, she loves the Friday office happy hour, but over time, she finds herself feeling demotivated by the lack of communication, and checks out.

The loss of star performers like Jill doesn’t just leave a talent vacuum to fill; it also leaves a gaping hole in the bottom line. Indeed, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal calculated that it typically costs a company about half a position’s annual salary to recruit for that job ¾ and several times that if the position requires rare skills.

So how can your company keep its stars engaged? It comes down to creating a culture of communication — one in which employees know where the organization is headed, how they fit into these plans, and what’s expected of them. Here are a few key strategies your agency can employ to make this happen.

1. Create a culture of education

The average Starbucks barista gets more training in a year than the average employee in a communications company, according to the Arnold Worldwide study.

For employees, the single most important motivational factor was the ability to learn. Yet the study found a huge disconnect when it comes to perceptions about company training. While 90 percent of employees say they learn by figuring things out on their own, only 25 percent of executives think that employees learn independently.

To keep employees motivated, agencies need to build a culture of learning, where employees leave more enriched at the end of each day.

2. Provide regular, consistent feedback

Employee feedback is a critical part of the education process, and shouldn’t just be relegated to the annual review. To be effective, feedback needs to be specific and actionable. But that’s not always how it works.

In a study by Leadership IQ, 53 percent of employees said that when their boss praises excellent performance, the feedback does not provide enough useful information to help them repeat it. And 65 percent responded that when their boss criticizes poor performance, it doesn’t provide enough useful information to help them correct the issue.

Feedback, both positive and constructive, is most effective when given right away. Negative feedback given a month after the fact can lead to a passive-aggressive environment in which an employee feels powerless to act on the advice.

Think of it this way: no one wants to go a full day knowing their price tag was hanging from the back of their shirt, or the remnants of the salad they had for lunch were still stuck in their teeth. If an employee does something well, that activity should be encouraged. And if there’s room for improvement, they should be given the opportunity to learn for their next task.

3. Set time aside for weekly 1:1 meetings

At first, most employees and managers will cringe at the idea of yet another meeting. But instituting weekly 1:1 meetings can be the most important step you take to retaining your top performers.

In its quest to build a better boss, Google discovered that its worst managers weren’t consistent in their 1:1 meetings; some focused on meeting with people who were underperforming, while others met primarily with the top performers.

Consequently, Google implemented the best practice of 1:1 meetings with all team members.

These meetings can cover anything and everything from upcoming projects to the latest client news. With each week, discussions about goals, feedback, and concerns become a lot more natural unlike the awkward, starchy conversations during annual reviews. Over time, it becomes easier for both sides to raise potential problems and deal with them early on, before they fester into something destructive.

4. Manage the grunt work properly

Not every project is going to be awesome. That’s just the way business works. And chances are your employees understand this.

However, managers need to handle such projects responsibly and that means a few things. Boring projects should always be balanced with more stimulating work. Employees should always be told how any grunt works fits into the overall needs of the company (“If we do a good job on x, we’re hoping the client will give us their cool launch next year”). And specific parameters should always be set for the boring stuff ¾ meaning employees should always see light at the end of the tunnel.

5. Publicly acknowledge good work

All too often, managers see motivation in terms of financial compensation, but money is far from the only way to effectively reward talented employees. A 2009 survey by McKinsey Quarterly asked which incentives were the most effective in motivating employees. The top two responses were: “Praise and commendation from immediate manager” (67 percent), and “Attention from leaders” (62 percent).

Praise and commendation go a long way in making employees feel noticed and valued. And the impact of a pat on the back is multiplied when it’s done publicly. Through public commendations, employees not only feel the support and respect of their manager, but the entire organization as well (including top-level executives). Creating a framework for “social recognition” will encourage a culture of appreciation throughout your firm.

Keeping your rockstar employees on board has always been important, and don’t think that economic uncertainty will keep your employees around. Your company has worked hard to recruit some bright people and great talent; make sure an opaque work environment doesn’t drive them into the arms of your competition.

Daniel Debow is co-founder and co-CEO of Rypple, a social performance management platform.

Entrepreneurship is a World of Noes

2011-10-28T20:53:00.000-04:00

Hooman Radfar says entrepreneurs need three things to succeed: persistence, persistence, persistence. “The world of entrepreneurship is a world of no’s. No, I don’t want to invest. No, I don’t want to buy your product. No, you can’t do it,” says the founder of Clearspring. “The most successful entrepreneurs I have met face the word ‘no’ with courage. Instead of stopping, they try to learn from the experience and improve their pitch, product, or – frankly – approach to business.” He says it’s that persistence in the face of adversity, that willingness to continue to stretch and learn, that separates the good from the great.

They say life imitates art – and in Radfar’s case, art imitates entrepreneurship. When Radfar was young he loved to build, draw, write, play music, and any other type of art. He loved to create, and as he got older he transferred that skill and energy into programming applications. Now that he’s an entrepreneur, his childhood hobbies are helping him out in business. “As an entrepreneur you have the ultimate creative task – building something that can, in turn, output new creative works independently of you,” he says. “That has been fascinating.”

It was in 2004 that Radfar realized that the web was shifting from a publishing platform into a platform for services. ”These services would be tied together by a social layer,” Radfar says. “Our vision was to help facilitate that world and we started with the simple premise which lies at the heart of the social web – content sharing.” Along with his co-founder Austin Fath he started Clearspring, a leader in connecting publishers, services and advertisers to audiences on the social web. Radfar says the original idea has changed over the years based on online trends. “The idea and business have evolved as social networking has unlocked the next big wave – big data,” he says. “Using big data, entrepreneurs can now create more intelligent services that are truly personalized to you. It’s a very powerful idea and we are in the first inning.”

When asked about his challenges in the early days of the business, Radfar says ‘everything.’ “We didn’t have enough experience, we didn’t have enough money and we didn’t have enough time. So I guess it all boiled down to having the discipline to focus on something small enough that we could move forward, but was valuable enough to get us a ‘pass’ to the next level.” He says whether it was a prototype to show to investors, or a beta test for customers, being able to identify the most important and hitting it out of the park is consistently one of the greatest challenges for an entrepreneur.

Most startups dream of being acquired, but Radfar instead turned his attention to acquiring sharing platform AddThis. He wanted to create a lighter weight platform that enabled publishers to share anything – widgets, links, etc. – to any site. “We were the leaders in the widget sharing and tracking space in the early days of the social web. We recognized that, for our customers, it wasn’t about the noun – the widget – as much as the verb – sharing,” he says. “AddThis had a great early brand, great lightweight approach, and a great founder in Dom Vonarburg who believed in the future of sharing and social data.” Clearspring acquired AddThis in 2008, and Radfar says it was one of the best decisions the team made, and he’s proud of the team for following through with it.

Radfar is on the board of Pittsburgh startup accelerator AlphaLab, and says he thinks it is absolutely critical for entrepreneurs to reinvest their experience back into early stage companies. He works with a number of young companies as an advisor or investor, including Always Prepped, which provides online math practice. The advice that he gives to early startups is simple. “Surround yourself with the best people possible at every stage. At the earliest stage, that means getting good advisors and co-founders. At the later stages, that means getting the best board, investors and executive team possible,” he says. “People are the beating heart of it all and having the best people on the bus is paramount.”

Clearspring has no shortage of impressive numbers to flaunt – the company has raised $60 million to date from investors including Ted Leonsis and Steve Case, and their AddThis platform is used by nine million sites reaching over one billion unique users monthly. But Radfar says one of his proudest moments was when his brother Cyrus, who was a founding engineer, left the company to start his own company called Kapuno. “The fact that he felt confident and armed enough to build something from scratch because of his experience at Clearspring was really inspiring to me. At the end of the day, it shows that the impact Clearspring is already having echoes far beyond our walls.”

Recently Clearspring hired a new CEO, Ramsey McGrory, who joins from Yahoo! where he led their $1 billion Right Media business. Radfar has taken a new role as Executive Chairman, and in that role he will lead the board and partner with Ramsey to focus on product and marketing. “Clearspring has built an amazing platform and team,” Radfar says. “As our President and COO Gar Richlin says, we need to ‘run through the tape’ and finish the job.”

Steve Jobs and the Seven Rules of Success

2011-10-15T10:58:00.000-04:00

Steve Jobs' impact on your life cannot be underestimated. His innovations have likely touched nearly every aspect -- computers, movies, music and mobile. As a communications coach, I learned from Jobs that a presentation can, indeed, inspire. For entrepreneurs, Jobs' greatest legacy is the set of principles that drove his success.

Over the years, I've become a student of sorts of Jobs' career and life. Here's my take on the rules and values underpinning his success. Any of us can adopt them to unleash our "inner Steve Jobs."

1. Do what you love. Jobs once said, "People with passion can change the world for the better." Asked about the advice he would offer would-be entrepreneurs, he said, "I'd get a job as a busboy or something until I figured out what I was really passionate about." That's how much it meant to him. Passion is everything.

2. Put a dent in the universe. Jobs believed in the power of vision. He once asked then-Pepsi President, John Sculley, "Do you want to spend your life selling sugar water or do you want to change the world?" Don't lose sight of the big vision.

3. Make connections. Jobs once said creativity is connecting things. He meant that people with a broad set of life experiences can often see things that others miss. He took calligraphy classes that didn't have any practical use in his life -- until he built the Macintosh. Jobs traveled to India and Asia. He studied design and hospitality. Don't live in a bubble. Connect ideas from different fields.

4. Say no to 1,000 things. Jobs was as proud of what Apple chose not to do as he was of what Apple did. When he returned in Apple in 1997, he took a company with 350 products and reduced them to 10 products in a two-year period. Why? So he could put the "A-Team" on each product. What are you saying "no" to?

5. Create insanely different experiences. Jobs also sought innovation in the customer-service experience. When he first came up with the concept for the Apple Stores, he said they would be different because instead of just moving boxes, the stores would enrich lives. Everything about the experience you have when you walk into an Apple store is intended to enrich your life and to create an emotional connection between you and the Apple brand. What are you doing to enrich the lives of your customers?

6. Master the message. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can't communicate your ideas, it doesn't matter. Jobs was the world's greatest corporate storyteller. Instead of simply delivering a presentation like most people do, he informed, he educated, he inspired and he entertained, all in one presentation.

7. Sell dreams, not products. Jobs captured our imagination because he really understood his customer. He knew that tablets would not capture our imaginations if they were too complicated. The result? One button on the front of an iPad. It's so simple, a 2-year-old can use it. Your customers don't care about your product. They care about themselves, their hopes, their ambitions. Jobs taught us that if you help your customers reach their dreams, you'll win them over.

There's one story that I think sums up Jobs' career at Apple. An executive who had the job of reinventing the Disney Store once called up Jobs and asked for advice. His counsel? Dream bigger. I think that's the best advice he could leave us with. See genius in your craziness, believe in yourself, believe in your vision, and be constantly prepared to defend those ideas.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/220515

How to Give New Hires a Great Start

2011-09-26T08:01:00.000-04:00

Some small businesses go beyond the standard orientation, raising retention and productivity.

BY Marcus Erb

A number of small businesses focus on providing new hires with only the basic information and skills needed to perform their job. However, going beyond the standard orientation process can enable new hires to become successful in the workplace more quickly, and help ensure that the new partnership will be long and advantageous. The key is offering employees a chance to learn the organization's customs and jargon and connect personally with new colleagues.

A new hire's attitude about your business generally takes shape quickly, and can affect their long-term outlook and commitment to the company. Many employees typically make their decision to stay or quit within their first six months on the job.

So, how can your small business turn employees' first impressions into a lasting and prosperous relationship? Here are examples of how three small businesses are going beyond the basic employee orientation.

1. Connect with them early and personally.

When candidates accept an offer to work at SnagAJob.com, an hourly job site based in Glen Valley, Va., chief executive Shawn Boyer mails them a handwritten congratulatory note and a $100 American Express gift card as a token of thanks to celebrate their new job.

On their first day, new hires are assigned a department "buddy" who gives them a tour of the office, introduces them to their colleagues and serves as a mentor during the first few weeks. New "Snaggers," as employees there are called, also complete an office scavenger hunt and a "Confessions of a New Snagger" questionnaire. This Q&A covers personal trivia about the new hire, such as pets, children, hobbies, and other interests. Once completed, the answers are emailed to all employees and also posted on the company's intranet, along with the employee's photo. Snaggers are then quizzed on the bits of personal information shared in these questionnaires during weekly staff meetings. Correct answers are rewarded with candy.

While fun, these activities make an impression on new hires. "I never felt like the 'new person,'" says one new Snagger. "I didn't have to go out of my way to prove myself to anyone. There was the implicit assumption that since I was hired I must be good enough to handle the job. That level of trust is refreshing and made my transition to SnagAJob.com easier."

2. Make the introduction about more than just the handbook.

Some employee orientations include a strong dose of organizational culture and history, as well as participation from senior leaders. At RadioFlyer, the Chicago-based maker of children's toys, new Flyers join "chief wagon officer" Robert Pasin for breakfast. Pasin shares the history of the company as well as his personal stories of mistakes, successes and lessons learned. He answers questions and covers his expectations for team members to help RadioFlyer continue its success.

New employees also hear more about the company's values over lunch with members of the company's Vision, Mission and Values Committee, Its members are people who have been recognized by peers for living the company values every day.

New Flyers also get a first-hand look at the company's products. New hires complete an audit of customers' retail experiences and assemble RadioFlyer products. These practices help new employees learn about the products as well as their customers. Employees even get to keep a few of the products they assemble.

3. Treat new hires like equals.

At some companies, new employees wait through a probationary period before gaining full benefits and status. Pinnacol Assurance, a Denver-based provider of workers compensation insurance with about 630 employees, treats new hires as equals immediately, speeding their assimilation into the business. For instance, new hires are eligible to begin using their paid days off as early as their first day. Employees get up to 20 days off during their first full year.

A great welcome can make a lasting impact. Efforts to bring new hires into the culture, and not just the job, can reap benefits of shorter learning curves, stronger employee commitment, and reduced turnover. Leaders who take the opportunity to make new hires feel welcome can make a lasting impression that turns into a long-term advantage.

How not to write an email

2011-09-22T06:23:00.000-04:00

I sign up for industry emails and it appears they sell the lists so I get the odd call and or email from sales people. This is an unsolicited email and a prime example of how not to send an email.

I feel for the rep. Likely I wasn't the only potential lead he burned with this poorly cut and paste form letter.

The lesson here? Test your form emails before you send them or set your send receive to delay by a few minutes so you can catch emails before they actually get sent.

I hope this isn't an example of how Sugar CRM works!

The High Cost of Sales Team Turnover

2011-09-17T07:57:00.000-04:00

BY Katherine Graham-Leviss

Even during a time of high unemployment, top salespeople are always in demand, and their skills are easily portable from one sales environment to the next. Losing them to a higher bidder or a more lucrative sales opportunity is too easy to be taken lightly.

The cost of hiring a new employee for any position is significant, whether an employee is fired or laid off or leaves voluntarily. The many formulas that calculate such costs vary widely, but can range upward of 200 percent of an employee's annual salary. That includes not only the obvious tangible costs of severance pay, vacation accrual, and job advertising and recruiting fees, but also indirect costs such as the staff time needed for paperwork, recruiting, resume reviews and interviews, and then new-hire orientation and training. Other hard to quantify costs can include customer dissatisfaction, poor employee morale and loss of revenue during transitions.

Let's assume the average salary in a given company is $50,000 per year. If the cost of turnover is 150 percent of salary, then the cost would be $75,000 per departing employee. For a company of 100 employees with a 10 percent annual rate of turnover, the annual cost of turnover would be an estimated $750,000.

Once you realize what it's costing, in both dollars and people assets, you'll want to seriously consider how to reduce your turnover rate. A first step for reducing turnover is understanding your turnover numbers and issues. Start by answering these four questions.

What is your year-over-year average turnover rate?

Can you tie significant changes in the rate to the workplace's physical environment?

What is your turnover rate compared to your competition?

Are there times during the year when people leave more frequently?

Answering these questions will help you to begin to understand some aspects of turnover within your sales force and you can start to find ways to reduce turnover in your organization.

Another important knowledge-gathering step is to conduct exit interviews and ask why your salespeople leave. While it can be difficult to get candid answers -- employees often realize there's nothing to be gained by saying anything negative -- asking exiting employees to rate factors on a scale of 1 to 5 can point to the problems in a more objective and equally productive manner. You can ask them, for example, to rate the level of sales support, management support, fairness of sales goals and fairness of compensation. Design your questions to determine whether you are creating an environment that salespeople can thrive in.

If you find those leaving feel that sales quotas are unattainable, that they can't live on their compensation between sales, or that they simply think they can make more money someplace else, you'll have a better understanding of what you can do to change the environment.

A great deal of employee turnover can be attributed to mistakes made during the hiring process. The problem lies in the employee selection process. Simply put, when you hire people for the wrong job, they leave.

Tere are hiring practices you can implement that will help reduce your turnover and increase retention of your best people. Here are a few:

Make attracting high-performers part of your ongoing business practices so you are always "hire ready."

Define your hiring criteria, including the job description, so that you hire the right people for the job.

Learn how to screen resumes for top performers.

Give your hiring managers the skills they need to do the job right.

Gather the right kind of data to ensure your candidates have the requisite skills.

Create a consistent and thorough interview and selection process.

Hire salespeople by looking at three areas: experience, technical skills, and communication skills and problem-solving skills.

Too often hiring managers glean valuable insights into employee preferences, strengths and weaknesses during the hiring process and then fail to use the information as a resource to help develop and retain the employee. So rather than focusing exclusively on hiring, you should also begin to think about how to develop sales staff immediately. All that you learn during hiring can be used to continually improve the job-person fit.

Creating a development plan for your salespeople helps show them what they can do to grow and develop, to advance, to become more valued, and to be more satisfied in their work. Development plans also point out what kind of support and assistance they will need to get where they are going faster.

You and your employee will work on the development plan together, but the more involved the employee is in determining the areas to work on, the more committed that individual will be to accomplishing the goals. The objective is to create an environment that encourages continuing feedback from managers, which will help employees advance more quickly, achieve more, avoid unnecessary problems and setbacks -- and stay with your company.

Should You Add a Blog to Your Site?

2011-09-12T07:00:00.002-04:00

By: John Crenshaw

One of the first things small business owners find out about when researching SEO are blogs. One of the most common questions we get is, “should I add a blog to my site?”

Blogs have gained a reputation as having the potential to boost your SEO rankings, but it’s important to understand what a blog does and why it helps, as well as when it wouldn’t help.
What is a blog, exactly?

A blog is nothing more than a collection of articles, generally appearing on a website in reverse chronological order — meaning the newest posts show up first. The key phrase there is “nothing more than a collection of articles.” That’s right, a blog is not some magical thing that will score you all kinds of love from Google; it’s nothing more than a collection of articles.

What that means is, if you really wanted to, you could create your own mock bog just by publishing articles as standard html pages on your website, then publishing another page with links to all those articles. In it’s most basic form, that’s really all a blog is.
So why does everyone say blogging helps SEO?

The simple answer is that SEO is a complicated subject. Because it’s complicated, two things end up happening:
Companies selling SEO services say “Blogs help SEO,” because it’s a thousand times easier than explaining why blogs help SEO, or that some blogging platforms will actually hurt your SEO, or that the same can be accomplished in Dreamweaver or another web publishing platform (albeit not as efficiently). When it comes to selling, keeping it simple helps.

Companies who take the blogging plunge tend to notice their traffic increases. Because SEO is a complicated subject, the easiest explanation is that the blog did it. Then, when you talk to employees in those companies, they tell you how much of an impact blogging made on their business…and the legend grows.

So…Will a Blog Help with SEO or Not?

Yes and no. It’s not the blog itself that will help with SEO. Remember, a blog is nothing more than a collection of articles. What tends to help with SEO are all the secondary things a blog does for you that you might not even be thinking about. A well-designed blog facilitates SEO best practices, by accomplishing the following:
If you have a blog, you should be publishing on it. Anytime you add text-rich pages to your website, you’re giving Google more content to index. More content means your website will show up for more searches. You’re casting a wider net, which tends to catch more prospects.

Most bloggers use WordPress. When setup properly, WordPress does a lot of stuff behind the scenes that is good for SEO. Now, don’t think I’m suggesting WordPress will always help your SEO behind the scenes. WordPress can very easily be setup in such a way that it won’t do you much good at all, and that’s entirely up to the author of your theme…or your designer/developer if you had a WordPress theme custom made.

However, even a perfectly setup WordPress theme won’t do you any good if you don’t follow some SEO best practices. Thankfully, WordPress makes it easier for you to follow these best practices. And we know the easier something is, the more likely we are to do it. Some of the tasks WordPress can simplify are:

Adjusting meta tags (title, description, keywords)

Linking to other pages on your site directly

Linking blog posts together using tags, categories, and archives

Proper formatting (heading tags, bold and italicized text, etc)

SEO-friendly URLs (WordPress calls these “Permalinks”)

In addition to these, WordPress has a huge list of plugins that can add functionality to do just about anything else you could want

What to consider before you add a blog to your site

Now it’s time for a reality check. I’ve shown that just adding a blog to your site is not going to magically get you more business. However, undertaken properly, blogging can significantly enhance your visibility online. In addition to showing up for more searches, enhanced visibility means you’ll be seen more as an authority in your industry and it will help you build your contact network with potential clients, business and advertising partners, and even “old media” contacts like newspaper and television reporters.
I’ve seen blogging do amazing things for small and large companies alike. I’ve also seen a lot of businesses fail to reap any benefits from blogging at all. Here are some important things to consider before you decide to start a blog:
Who will be responsible for getting blog posts published? Someone in your organization has to be committed to keeping the blog updated. This same person doesn’t have to be the one writing the blog posts…you could have anyone handle that, or you could even outsource that entirely. But one person in your organization needs to be responsible for getting posts published on time. That person should have the authority to “motivate” people to get the job done. This will be your blog editor and the responsibility for publishing blog posts rests entirely on his or her shoulders.

When will blog posts be published? You should set a posting schedule of once or twice per week and be consistent about it. The more consistent you are, the better off you’ll be. I’d recommend setting a day and time when posts will be published and not missing those publication deadlines. Treat your blog like a newspaper…no matter what it takes, get something published on time.

Who will train your people? Do yourself a favor and get some basic SEO training for your people. If funds are tight, you could just have the blog editor trained on basic SEO. If you’re able, train your writers too. There are plenty of SEO companies out there that can help you with this, including us. Just a couple hours of training will make a world of difference.

Which blogging platform will you use? I can’t think of any reason to use anything besides WordPress. It’s just so much farther along than any other blogging platform and it’s so widely used that if you need to expand it’s functionality in some way, there’s probably already a plugin out there that will do it for you.

Who will design your blog? When I say “design,” I mean design, develop, program…all of the above. If you decide to use one of the thousands of free WordPress themes, make sure it was created with SEO in mind. If you have a custom theme developed, make sure the developer is familiar with maximizing the SEO benefit of WordPress. Don’t skimp on this…if you can’t afford to pay $1500 or more for a custom WordPress theme, use a free one. You can always have a custom theme designed later, but if you skimp on a cheap custom theme, you’ll be stuck with something that may not help your SEO like it should.

How will you come up with post ideas? Most people find it incredibly challenging to come up with something to write about once or twice a week. If you’re one of those people, I’m here to tell you to stop over thinking it. Your blog posts don’t have to be mind-blowing insights into your industry. Sure, if you can throw in some amazing content occasionally, it’ll help tremendously, but on the whole, remember you’re writing a blog, not a New York Times best seller. It’s far more important that you publish consistently. As you continue to blog, you’ll get better at it, you’ll come up with better post ideas, and you’ll see what your readers like to read about and what they don’t like so much. Still need some help? Here’s a quick and dirty step-by-step:

Publish posts on Mondays and Fridays at 7am.

Write those posts a week in advance and use WordPress’ post scheduling feature to have them automatically published on the right day/time

Schedule a brief Wednesday morning brainstorming session with your blogging crew (30 minutes max.)

Tell everyone to have 3 post ideas ready for the Wed. morning meeting each week

In the meeting, everyone shares their post ideas

Pick the top 2 and assign a writer or outsource it

Publish

Repeat

Conclusion

If you’re reading this post, I assume you’re either considering blogging or are already doing it. Good for you! Just remember, that a little bit of preparation and understanding of the process can go a long way to ensure you reap the maximum benefit. Obviously, blogging isn’t a magical cure-all for your SEO woes, but done properly, blogging can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Now get out there and start writing!

Seven Personality Traits of Top Salespeople

2011-09-06T07:45:00.000-04:00

By: Steve Martin

If you ask an extremely successful salesperson, "What makes you different from the average sales rep?" you will most likely get a less-than-accurate answer, if any answer at all. Frankly, the person may not even know the real answer because most successful salespeople are simply doing what comes naturally.

Over the past decade, I have had the privilege of interviewing thousands of top business-to-business salespeople who sell for some of the world's leading companies. I've also administered personality tests to 1,000 of them. My goal was to measure their five main personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and negative emotionality) to better understand the characteristics that separate them their peers.

The personality tests were given to high technology and business services salespeople as part of sales strategy workshops I was conducting. In addition, tests were administered at Presidents Club meetings (the incentive trip that top salespeople are awarded by their company for their outstanding performance). The responses were then categorized by percentage of annual quota attainment and classified into top performers, average performers, and below average performers categories.

The test results from top performers were then compared against average and below average performers. The findings indicate that key personality traits directly influence top performers' selling style and ultimately their success. Below, you will find the main key personality attributes of top salespeople and the impact of the trait on their selling style.

1. Modesty. Contrary to conventional stereotypes that successful salespeople are pushy and egotistical, 91 percent of top salespeople had medium to high scores of modesty and humility. Furthermore, the results suggest that ostentatious salespeople who are full of bravado alienate far more customers than they win over.

Selling Style Impact: Team Orientation. As opposed to establishing themselves as the focal point of the purchase decision, top salespeople position the team (presales technical engineers, consulting, and management) that will help them win the account as the centerpiece.

2. Conscientiousness. Eighty-five percent of top salespeople had high levels of conscientiousness, whereby they could be described as having a strong sense of duty and being responsible and reliable. These salespeople take their jobs very seriously and feel deeply responsible for the results.

Selling Style Impact: Account Control. The worst position for salespeople to be in is to have relinquished account control and to be operating at the direction of the customer, or worse yet, a competitor. Conversely, top salespeople take command of the sales cycle process in order to control their own destiny.

3. Achievement Orientation. Eighty-four percent of the top performers tested scored very high in achievement orientation. They are fixated on achieving goals and continuously measure their performance in comparison to their goals.

Selling Style Impact: Political Orientation. During sales cycles, top sales, performers seek to understand the politics of customer decision-making. Their goal orientation instinctively drives them to meet with key decision-makers. Therefore, they strategize about the people they are selling to and how the products they're selling fit into the organization instead of focusing on the functionality of the products themselves.

4. Curiosity. Curiosity can be described as a person's hunger for knowledge and information. Eighty-two percent of top salespeople scored extremely high curiosity levels. Top salespeople are naturally more curious than their lesser performing counterparts.

Selling Style Impact: Inquisitiveness. A high level of inquisitiveness correlates to an active presence during sales calls. An active presence drives the salesperson to ask customers difficult and uncomfortable questions in order to close gaps in information. Top salespeople want to know if they can win the business, and they want to know the truth as soon as possible.

5. Lack of Gregariousness. One of the most surprising differences between top salespeople and those ranking in the bottom one-third of performance is their level of gregariousness (preference for being with people and friendliness). Overall, top performers averaged 30 percent lower gregariousness than below average performers.

Selling Style Impact: Dominance. Dominance is the ability to gain the willing obedience of customers such that the salesperson's recommendations and advice are followed. The results indicate that overly friendly salespeople are too close to their customers and have difficulty establishing dominance.

6. Lack of Discouragement. Less than 10 percent of top salespeople were classified as having high levels of discouragement and being frequently overwhelmed with sadness. Conversely, 90 percent were categorized as experiencing infrequent or only occasional sadness.

Selling Style Impact: Competitiveness. In casual surveys I have conducted throughout the years, I have found that a very high percentage of top performers played organized sports in high school. There seems to be a correlation between sports and sales success as top performers are able to handle emotional disappointments, bounce back from losses, and mentally prepare themselves for the next opportunity to compete.

7. Lack of Self-Consciousness. Self-consciousness is the measurement of how easily someone is embarrassed. The byproduct of a high level of self-consciousness is bashfulness and inhibition. Less than five percent of top performers had high levels of self-consciousness.

Selling Style Impact: Aggressiveness. Top salespeople are comfortable fighting for their cause and are not afraid of rankling customers in the process. They are action-oriented and unafraid to call high in their accounts or courageously cold call new prospects.

Not all salespeople are successful. Given the same sales tools, level of education, and propensity to work, why do some salespeople succeed where others fail? Is one better suited to sell the product because of his or her background? Is one more charming or just luckier? The evidence suggests that the personalities of these truly great salespeople play a critical role in determining their success.

There is always a plan "B"

2011-08-29T06:53:00.001-04:00

"Everyone has a plan ’till

they get punched in the mouth."

Mike Tyson

by Steve Blank

One of the key distinctions between an entrepreneur and an operating executive is an entrepreneur’s almost seamless agility in the face of changing circumstances versus an operating executive’s intense execution focus on a plan. World-class entrepreneurs learn how to combine both.

WTF?

Driving home over the mountains from a Coastal Commission hearing, I had time to ponder an email I received from a city official as the road wound through the Redwood trees. The Coastal Commission had found that a zoning change his city requested didn’t conform to the Coastal Act, and we denied it. I felt sorry for him because he had put together a project that depended upon the property owner, developer, unions, hotel operator, local neighbors, city council, weather, wind speed, phase of the moon and astrological sign all aligning just to get the project in front of us. It was like herding cats and pushing water uphill. Reading his email I was sympathetic realizing that if you substituted customers, channel, product development, hiring, board of directors, and fund raising, he was describing a typical day at a startup. I felt real kinship until I got to his last sentence:

“Now we’re screwed because we had no Plan B.”

Say what?

I had to read his email a few times to let this sink in. I kept thinking, “What do you mean there’s no plan B?” When I shared it with the other commissioners who were public officials, all of them could see that there could have been tons of alternate plans to get a project approved, and there were still several options going forward. But the mayor just had been so intently focussed on executing a complex Plan A he never considered that he might need a Plan B.
By the time the mountain road unwound into rolling pastures and then flattened into the farmland just south of Silicon Valley, I realized that this was a real-world example of the difference between an entrepreneur and an operating executive.
There’s Always a Plan B

My formal definition of a startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable and repeatable business model. Yet if you’ve founded a company you know that regardless of any formal definition, startups are inherently pure chaos. As a founder, keeping your company alive requires you to think creatively and independently because more often than not, conditions on the ground will change so rapidly that any original well-thought-out plan quickly becomes irrelevant. (It’s equally true for startups, war, love and life.)

The reality is that to survive requires a mindset which can quickly separate the crucial from the irrelevant, synthesize the output, and use this intelligence to create islands of order in the all-out chaos of a startup.

To do this you are instinctually creating and testing multiple hypotheses which are creating an infinite number of possible future plans. And when the inevitable happens and some or all your assumptions were wrong, you pivot your model into the next plan and continue forward. You do this until you find a scalable and repeatable business model or you die by running out of money.
Great entrepreneurs don’t just have a Plan B, they have Plans B through Z

Lessons Learned
A startup is initially about the search for a repeatable and scalable business model

Most of the time your hypotheses about Plan A, B and C are wrong

Searching requires agility, tenacity, resilience, curiosity, opportunism and pattern recognition

Execution requires a different set of skills. At times it means bringing an operating executive

Operating executives excel at focussed execution

World-class technology CEO’s learned how to combine Searching and Execution (Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Bezos, Page, et al)

5 Impediments to Turnaround and Growth

2011-08-25T11:24:00.001-04:00

Mark Fuast believes that we need to adopt an attitude of “growth regardless of current success.” In the very practical Growth or Bust, he asks, “How much untapped potential lies within your business?”

In his experience as a growth and turnaround consultant, Faust has found that improving sales and profits has little to do with sales training, consulting, or other quick fixes. We already know what to do. “Fostering new growth is more about innovation than marketing angles, sales productivity, or skills; growth is more about a culture of continuous improvement than marketing blitz; growth is more about possibility-thinking than fear-fostering quotas.”

Growth or Bust shows leaders how to create a growth revolution. And it starts at the top. The first person to turnaround is you. “There is no virtue in leadership as important to accelerated growth and turnaround as that of humility.” He lists five impediments to turnaround and growth that any leader should look at:

1. Pride. Unhealthy levels of pride contribute to a leader’s failure to give credit to others, an unwillingness to listen to others, an inability to share emotional ownership of ideas or company success, and prevent a leader from admitting that they may be a contributor to any problem.
2. Abusive Relationships. Inappropriate relationships an abusive behavior intended to demean or control others creates a ripple effect throughout the company.
3. Gossiping. Repeating any report that is not positive about others to those who have no responsibility in the matter is poison. Even when a bad report is 100% factual, it is still gossip.

4. Greed. Unfair pay and entitlement at the top often becomes obvious to the employees and growth is constrained as a result.

5. Any of the Five Dysfunctions in the Principle of Authority:

• Lack of a clear authority structure. Especially in partnerships, when the chain of command is not clearly defined, chaos, dysfunction, and frustration will ultimately ensue.

• Lack of respect for the chain of command. A proper lack of respect for the chain of command creates conflict. At the same time, it shouldn’t inhibit open communication.

• The inability to communicate up the ladder without fear of retribution with legitimate appeals and a clear appeal process. Without it, bitterness and resentment will quickly grow.

• The lack of checks and balances. A titular leader with no checks and balances is bound to get into situations in which the lack thereof will stagnate growth in the team. Being a top leader requires you to constantly check your actions. Even if you feel your integrity is flawless, you’re a=subordinates might think otherwise.

• Megalomania and rebellion. A autonomous leader that is not willing to submit to anyone or anything will eventually endanger the existence of the organization. As a leader, you must show that you are truly willing to submit to some higher authority on at least some issues.

Lucy Kellaway: The seven deadly sins CEOs won't admit

2011-08-23T11:05:00.009-04:00

It's a classic job interview question: "What are your strengths and weaknesses?" At the top of the business world, people seem to have taken to heart the advice to admit no negative traits, just positives in disguise, says Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times.
Every week for the past year and a half, the Financial Times has asked business leaders 20 questions including: "What are your three worst features?"

Executive Sins? They are:

Control freaks

Vain

Ditherers

Bad at listening

Bullies

Afraid of conflict

No good at small talk

By studying the replies, I've amassed a treasure trove of data that overwhelmingly supports a long-held pet theory of mine.

The three worst traits of chief executives are a lack of self-knowledge, a lack of self-knowledge and a quite extraordinary willingness to give themselves the benefit of the doubt.
When it comes to describing their dark sides, 58 out of 60 leaders felt bound by the same rule - any weakness is perfectly admissible, so long as it is really a strength.
They almost all cite impatience, perfectionism and being too demanding - all of which turn out to be things that it's rather good for a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to be.

What is particularly interesting about this mass outpouring of faux weaknesses is that there is no difference between men and women, and no difference between Americans and Europeans. All are as bad as each other.

Psychobabble

Anyone who has ever spent five minutes talking to a CEO can tell you that they have more faults than the next person, because they are extreme versions of humanity.

In the past 15 years of studying them, I've drawn up a list of the seven most common deadly sins.

They are control freaks. They are vain. They are ditherers. They don't listen. They are bullies. They are afraid of conflict. And they can't do small talk.

Given that most of the 60 interview candidates were probably guilty of at least one of the above, why did none of them own up?

The first possibility is that they didn't dare.
But I suspect the real problem is worse: they don't know what their faults are.
A decade of psychobabble, coaching and 360-degree feedback has made no difference.
It has not changed the most basic truth - people never speak truth to power.

Honesty prize

This denial of flaws is a pity. We like people better when they wear their blemishes openly. It makes them seem more human.
There is only one senior leader I know who has no obvious faults at all.

His lack of weaknesses does not make me think him the most brilliant executive I've ever met. Instead it makes me think him flimsy and slightly untrustworthy. I'm sure there is a bad weakness in there somewhere, and it troubles me that I haven't yet found it.

Of the 60 leaders, only two admitted to big faults.
Marcus Wareing owned up to one of the most common yet unmentionable sins - he doesn't listen.
But then he's a chef, and chefs aren't meant to be listening. They are meant to be making sure the iles flottantes are taken to table six - now!

My prize for honesty goes to Jon Moulton, the private equity tycoon, who has made enough money to be able to say what he likes.

His declared weakness is absolutely taboo, yet goes with the territory. Indeed, it is a weakness the other 59 leaders demonstrated through the self-serving answers they gave.

His stated fault - "excess of ego".

Ten things top entrepreneurs do differently

2011-08-18T10:45:00.002-04:00

Often, entrepreneurs are characterized as the “rock stars” of the business world. This romantic vision is appealing but, like most stereotypes, a far cry from reality. So, what makes a good entrepreneur great? There’s no entrepreneurship gene. But a new Ernst & Young survey shows leading entrepreneurs do share common traits, beliefs and approaches that empower them to drive innovation – and economies – around the world.

1. They’re made, not born

Fifty-eight per cent of entrepreneurs we surveyed have “transitioned” to entrepreneurship, and one-third say their experience as an employee enabled them to build a successful enterprise of their own. You may not be an entrepreneur yet – but you could be one soon. And everything you’re learning now will help along the way.

2. They believe knowledge should be shared

More than three-quarters of Canadian respondents are mentoring other entrepreneurs in some form. They value the lessons learned from these relationships, and they pass that knowledge on. Collaborating like this benefits the teacher, and the student.

3. They know keeping an eye on the cash prize pays off

Accessing funding is the top challenge facing entrepreneurs today, and a real stumbling block to startup success. Those who succeed do so by building strong relationships and thinking outside the financing box, looking for alternatives and opportunities long after the first “no.”

4. The best realize there’s no I in team

Good entrepreneurs surround themselves with good people – who have the technical and business skills to take the company forward, but also share the leader’s values. Survey respondents say finding people who share their vision is challenging but critically important.

5. Success can mean choosing between being rich and being king

All founders of growing companies face a central decision: do they desire wealth or hands-on involvement? The ability to make big picture decisions like these makes or breaks entrepreneurs. Successful entrepreneurs navigate this carefully and move according to their ultimate goal.

6. Some see opportunity where others see disruption

Success lies in the way entrepreneurs view the world. Even disruptions like the financial crisis generated opportunities for entrepreneurial leaders willing to take them. Our survey reveals entrepreneurs have at their core a unique way of viewing the world around them and acting on that view.

7. Failure is best worn as a badge of honour

The extent to which a culture celebrates or stigmatizes failure can make a difference in how entrepreneurial leaders see risk. Early business failures should be seen as providing vital experience for future successes.

8. True entrepreneurs are architects of their own vision

Seventy-six per cent of those surveyed peg vision as the top quality of successful entrepreneurs. Those who succeed have helped people come together around a common purpose to achieve a goal. This comes from a vision owned not only by the people in the business, but also by investors, customers, suppliers and all those the organization touches. The entrepreneurial leader must be the architect of that vision to succeed.

9. Entrepreneurs succeed by seeking to be better

Although innovation is important, filling niches and market gaps does not need to involve radical new solutions. Often, an entrepreneurial business can simply fit a better business model or a more effective way of delivering a product or service. Pushing products, services and people to be better is at the core of the entrepreneur’s being.

10. They balance blue skies with the bottom line

To be an entrepreneur, you must not only be an opportunist, but also be an optimist. The world’s best entrepreneurs see opportunities and truly believe they can create ways to profit from them. Maintaining a deep-rooted sense of optimism doesn’t mean you are unrealistic. But it does allow entrepreneurs to push their ideas harder, sometimes giving them a competitive edge.

Ernst & Young’s report, Nature or nurture? Decoding the entrepreneur, is based on a survey of 685 entrepreneurs and in-depth interviews with winners of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® Award around the world.

Thanks to the Globe & Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/exit/the-top-tens/ten-things-top-entrepreneurs-do-differently/article2044356/

Start Up Sales Strategy

2011-08-15T06:29:00.000-04:00

Nat Turner writes about creating a selling strategy for start ups with his experience with Invite Media which he sold to Google in 2005. Enjoy!

If you’re starting a company, you’re going to have to sell your product/service to potential customers (at least if you plan on making any money). This especially applies to enterprise software companies or B2B companies in general, as you’re selling to someone who’s job may ultimately be on the line for the “who we’re going with” decision (related post: The IBM effect). Your company’s strategy and style of how you sell your product is extremely important, and like many other things in your startup’s life cycle, is critical to be aware of and get right. It’s the first impression you make on customers, may be the deciding factor on if you get the business, and depending on the company may end up being a major part of your culture.

First, I’m going to assume you’re building a product to the best of your ability and have built an effective product management process. This post is squarely about how you put that product in customer’s faces and win deals. At Invite Media, the company I co-founded, the core concepts of sales strategy became drilled in our head as we faced the market and encountered competitors. We learned we needed to be conscious of how we sold our product and the first interactions customers had with our company, very specifically, and needed to develop a sales strategy that we could teach others as we scaled the organization. In other words, it wasn’t enough to build the greatest platform we could. We by no means perfected it and more sales-focused organizations probably can do this stuff in their sleep over time, but we definitely came to appreciate it’s importance. Over time, as our sales strategy evolved, it ultimately influenced many other functions at our company, such as how we recruited people and raised money. Overall, the day we figured out how to put ourselves in our customer’s shoes was the day we learned how to effectively sell.

My first piece of advice on sales strategy at startups is to not oversell your product. Aggressive sales tactics piss people off, and set a bad first impression. There’s nothing worse than a salesperson who doesn’t take no for an answer and talks out of his ass about the product and promises the moon, and worse is selling a shitty product to begin with. If your product sucks, fix your product. In other words, fix the root cause, don’t rely on sales to win deals. Companies who rely on aggressive sales tactics in order to win business in general are probably compensating for a weak product, at least in my experience (or are knowingly selling a scam). Even more disappointing is when a company has a great product but uses aggressive sales tactics and steps on their own toes with customers, as that’s something that was entirely avoidable. This unfortunately isn’t uncommon in startups, as many founders decide they can’t or shouldn’t sell and “check the box” by hiring a sales person, which can be extremely hit or miss and hard to do without prior experience (a topic for another day).

The reason this is important is that in ad technology (and in most spaces probably), we learned that the best platform/technology doesn’t necessarily win every deal. Like in sports, that’s why they play the games (i.e., don’t declare a winner based on who has the best team at the start of the season). In startups, sales strategy is an important part of the game. You obviously have to have a great product to ultimately be successful, but you also have to be smart about how you sell it. In other words, the winner of a deal will have a combination of both a great product and a great sales strategy, and rarely does one win being extremely heavy on one side. As an investor or acquirer, if you did have a company on one end of the spectrum and thus wasn’t properly balanced, you’d obviously love to see a company on the “great product, horrible sales strategy” side, as fixing sales strategy is way easier than fixing a shitty product. This even applies to companies with no actual sales people and a purely self-service system, whereby the sales strategy ends up becoming your accessible messaging, how you offer the product online, etc…

At Invite, our sales strategy was very simply “educate the potential customer on the Invite platform, answer any and all questions, and be confident that we have the best platform and that they’ll ultimately chose us.” As a side note, that doesn’t mean we took the initial meeting and then just sat around and hoped they emailed us back; we did our fair share of following up on next steps and checking in if we had mutual expectations to move the process along, but we made sure to never cross the line of being aggressive. Ultimately, if the customer picked someone else because the platform was lacking in an area they required, either we needed to decide to fix that in our product or decide that client wasn’t a fit for us because what they were asked for wasn’t going to be in our roadmap (and both happened a lot). That’s why things like the product feedback cycle (i.e., reducing the number of “layers” between a client’s product feedback and your engineering team) are important, which I’ll mention again later in this post. These are the kind of questions you’ll need to go through, and it took us while to get there (and still wasn’t perfect).

My second piece of advice is think extremely hard about the incentives you give your sales team. The world is run on incentives. You as a startup founder are incentivized

If you do hire sales people, hire sales people who can discern what clients are asking for in your product and can effectively work with your product and engineering teams to improve the product based on that feedback. That doesn’t mean hire a sales person who can code, as that’s a rare thing, but hire a sales person who is comfortable with technology if you’re a technology company, is smart enough to dig into basic tech details, and is a willing and capable listener but also communicator (what good is listening if you do a crappy job of explaining what you heard to the person who needs to build it?). It’s always a scary thing when you see a young company with a product that’s still evolving put a junior or incapable sales person in front of their early clients, and the customer provides all sorts of valuable product feedback that you know won’t ultimately get back to the engineering team in a meaningful way (or worse yet, doesn’t get the feedback in the first place because he didn’t know what questions to ask or didn’t given the customer a chance to speak). Customers really appreciate sales people who understand their needs, understand the product, take the time to listen, and can trust that what they’re telling them is actually being taken back to the engineering team properly. This will build confidence in your product and team that the customer can rely on. It all starts with that initial sales strategy. That’s another reason why it’s great to see founders do a lot of the initial sales, as the product feedback is never more important than then and the founder(s) should know their product better than anyone else at the company.

Another important step is to as the founder, lead and help craft a definition of and a list of characteristics of who your ideal customers are. This is especially important in B2B companies, as every company is different and can be highly complex. If your industry is small enough, this may be an actual list of potential customer names. Making mistakes here are hard to fix if you bring on a customer that isn’t a fit (for both sides). It’s kind of like a golf swing and alignment. You could have the greatest swing in the world, but if you aim at the wrong target and still make the perfect swing (or perfect sales strategy), you’ll still miss. Do you work with agencies or advertisers, or both? Each has it’s own implications for sales strategy and ultimately servicing if you win the deal. Do you only want to work with customers who have a certain number of employees? Or who are or aren’t using a particular piece of software or have previous experience with it? You can always update this definition and/or hit list, and should. The more effort you put into defining who is your ideal customer upfront, the better focused your sales team will be and the less time you’ll waste of your potential customers. Why meet with a company/prospect and confuse them and/or sell them on something you have no intention of delivering or isn’t a fit if you could have known that upfront?

My last piece of advice is to track as much as you can, as you can’t improve something you don’t measure. Figure out close rates on deals for starters. If you have multiple sales people, track performance and patterns across people. Use systems like Salesforce to organize and track stuff like this. If you have a really low deal close rate, you could either have a shitty product, a shitty sales strategy (and/or people), or you could also even be pitching the wrong clients (or all of the above). Figure out what it is. Use data to help you figure out how to adapt and evolve your sales strategy. In this process you may learn that your market is too small, or that you’re building the wrong thing, or that your definition of who an ideal customer is was too broad or too narrow, or that your sales people aren’t effectively able to sell your product. Always be learning.

As a final note, this isn’t re-inventing the wheel and hardly scratches the surface on the topic of sales strategy. There are plenty of better articles on the basics of things like aggressiveness and the concept of sales strategy as a whole that are extremely helpful and way more in-depth than this post. I highly suggest doing your research on the topic of sales strategy as much as anything else.

Why You Should Eliminate Titles at Start-ups

2011-08-11T07:59:00.000-04:00

This is an interesting article by Jeff Bussgang on how titles hamper start up growth. On the flip side, I have seen startups hand out big titles, sometimes in excange foe lesser pay, which also hamper growth. enjoy!

There has been a recent dialog around a theme I'll call "hacking the corporation" - creating novel approaches to building young companies, particularly when they are in their formative start-up stage and pre-product market fit. One of them, reinventing board meetings (or, "Why Board Meetings Suck"), has gotten some attention from leading thinkers like Steve Blank and Brad Feld.

I'd like to submit another item to add to the "hacking the corporation" punchlist: elimnating titles.
At business school, I learned all about titles and hierarchies and the importance of organizational structure. When I joined my first start-up after graduation, e-commerce leader Open Market, I found the operating philosophy of the founder jarring - he declared no one would have titles in the first few years. If you needed a title for external reasons, our founder told us, we should feel free to make one up. But we would avoid using labels internally. In other words, there would be no "vice president" or "director" or other such hierarchical denominations.

Why? Because a start-up is so fluid, roles changes, responsibilities evolve, and reporting structures move around fluidly. Titles represent friction, pure and simple, and the one thing you want to reduce in a start-up is friction. By avoiding titles, you avoid early employees getting fixated on their role, who they report to, and what their scope of responsibility is - all things that rapidly change in a company's first year or two.

For example, one of my first bosses in the company later became a peer, and then later still reported to me. Our headcount went from 0 to 200 in two years. Our revenue grew from 0 to $60m in 3 years. We went public only two years after the company was founded. We were moving way too fast to get slowed down by titles and rigid hierarchies. Over the course of my five year tenure, I ran a range of departments - product management, marketing, business development, professional services - all amidst a very fluid environment. Around the time that we went public, we matured in such a way that we began to settle into a more stable organizational structure and, yes, had formal titles. But during those formative first few years, avoiding titles provided a more nimble organization.

So when I co-founded Upromise, I instituted a similar policy: no titles. We had an open office structure and functional teams, but a fluid organizational environment and rapid growth. One of our young team members changed jobs four times in her first year. Only after the first year, as we settled into a more stable organizational structure and I recruited senior executives who were more obviously going to serve as my direct reports on the executive team did I begin to give out titles (CTO, CMO, CFO, etc.). With the title policy, there was some early tension and discomfort (one young MBA kept referring to himself as a VP externally, although he was clearly playing an individual contributor role and was soon layered). Often, when you are running your start-up experiments, you are not even sure of the right profile for employees or organization structure for optimal execution. But you can establish role and process clarity without having to depend on titles.

I haven't been able to institute this systematically in our portfolio, but whenever young start-ups are formed, it's one of the first things I counsel the founder. Don't let your founding team and early hires get too attached to titles and hieararchy. In fact, in that formative first year, see if you can avoid them altogether.

The dreaded "Just checking in"

2011-08-08T06:55:00.001-04:00

Craig Rosenberg insights on the flailing attempts of sales people to move the cycle forward is worth the read. Don't be that guy! That "guy" who is just "checking in".

Tell your sales people they are forbidden to do a "check in" with their prospects or clients. e.g. "HI ___; just "checking in". Honestly, it has zero value to the buyer and is frankly, embarrassing. People rarely "check in" in their personal life unless someone is sick. The sales person is implying they have nothing to offer or they think they have the right to start the conversation off with this so the buyer can update him/her. No thanks.

Want to know why you aren't getting a response or moving a deal along? "Checking in" is one reason.

Here are ways to avoid the "check in":

1. Sales Intelligence -- there is a lot of information about your clients. Doing 5 minutes of research will provide clues into what your approach should be. The sales reps who emailed to congratulate me when they read I won an award -- memorable.

2. Sales Intelligence Part II: Trigger Events -- this is Tibor Shanto and Craig Elias rallying cry and it makes sense. There are events that happen in a decision maker's business life that are reasons to not just "check in" but go sell. Here is an example: decision maker just announced that they need to double revenue this year.

3. Content -- there is an un-named sales person who "checks in" with me by sending me relevant content offerings. By the way, she sends blog posts from people unrelated to her company! She is trying to check in by offering me something that makes a difference in my life. She is creating a trusting, memorable relationship with me. Oh and by the way, I will sometimes write back (unlike the "check in" emails I receive).

Now, some may say "But there is a reason to 'check in' during the sales cycle". Typically, the sales person who "checks in" has lost control of a deal. They don't know what is going on and need to find out more.

1. Always mutually agree on a next step or deliverable -- if you leave a call without some type of agreement, you will be FORCED to "check in". I have heard stories in the old days of enterprise sales reps bringing calendars into sales meetings to create a time line with the prospect. I like that, you know have something the prospect has agreed to allow you to ask for. If you "check in", I don't have to get back to you. If I owe you something, then I owe you a response.

2. Don't be such a wimp -- this is a business relationship, don't use the "check-in" as a way to be passive-aggressive. Ask for what you want. If someone is supposed to send you their requirements, ask for that.

Lead Nurturing and Mature Lead Management

2011-08-03T06:47:00.000-04:00

If the three most important words in real estate are location, location, and location, then the three most important words in Lead Generation are quality, quality, and quality. When it comes to generating leads, think of quality as the “X” factor.

The other critical factor in lead generation is timing. Sales needs a steady supply of high-quality leads in order to meet their sales goals. But what are the necessary ingredients you need to turn this sales-and-marketing dream into a workable reality?

In the 1970s, Paul Masson ran a very successful advertising campaign with Orson Welles as their spokesman. Their tag line, “We will sell no wine before its time,” can be applied to marketers who don’t want to turn their leads over to sales too early. Not wanting to waste sales’ time is a worthy goal. However, when sales is clamoring for more leads, so they can make their quota, marketing will likely give in and pass on leads prematurely.

How then can smart marketers make that sure their leads are mature enough to be given to sales? Is there a system that can be put in place that can determine when leads are ready to buy?

The old theory that leads should be pushed through a pipeline won’t work in today’s sophisticated and complicated markets. The strategic marketing process has changed dramatically from just a few years ago when the sales rep was seen as an adviser who guided the prospect through the decision-making process. Today’s prospect has a wealth of information at his fingertips, and it’s easy to do research, access reviews from peers, and make an informed decision without ever talking to a salesperson.

Today, buyers don’t want to talk to sales reps until they’re ready to buy. In fact, a recent Forrester Research report stated “Mature lead management processes pay off in better sales follow-up rates and higher close-rate percentages for marketing-generated leads.”

But how do you know when your leads are mature? What’s the best metric to use?

The answer is that leads need to go through a thorough process that’s been developed by bringing together the entire sales-and-marketing organization. Definitions of lead quality must be established and agreed upon by all constituents. And protocols for lead scoring, classification, routing, and nurturing all must be established.

Each of these components will have thresholds and parameters that streamline, automate, maximize, and optimize the lead process. Once it’s honed to perfection, the result is quality leads, better-quality leads, and top-quality leads.

Companies who partner with a direct marketing agency to create, automate, manage, and facilitate their entire lead generation process will end up far ahead of their competitors.

Thanks to the The Kern Organization. for this article

10 Ideas For Those Critical Early Startup Sales

2011-07-28T08:07:00.000-04:00

This post initially appeared on Dharmesh Shah’s excellent blog, OnStartups.

Closing your initial sales at a startup is one of the most challenging parts of building a company. Many startups die before they ever close a deal.
Unless you’re entering a well established market there will be uncertainty with your product, approach, and timing until you have enough customers to prove that you have a good business model.

When Brendan and I started Wistia, we had questions about how the sales process should work, what kinds of documents we needed in place, how long things should take, and where we should look for potential customers. Through sheer will, conviction, and lots of failure, we found our way to where we are today. Here are the 10 principles we learned along the way.

1. Don’t wait to sell

You should start selling as early as you possibly can. Do not wait until your product is polished and launched. We changed direction and started heading towards Wistia about a year into startup life. How’d we know to head towards Wistia? Because we had a real potential customer that was interested when we had NO PRODUCT. We talked to them about what we thought Wistia could be. They liked the concept and we built the first version of Wistia in two weeks. A month later and we had our first customer.
We had just spent seven months building a portfolio website and four months trying to get people on board while our bank accounts shrank and our time to live decreased. In the course of a month we sold our first customer, decreased our burn, and realized that selling early was possible.

2. Do things that don’t scale

We learned an enormous amount from our first customer. That first sale gave us a benchmark for what people were willing to pay, how long it would take to close a deal, and how easy it was to use the product.

We made a point of going to our first customer’s office every couple of weeks to talk about the challenges that they were seeing and how we could make the product better suited to their needs. We could never spend as much time with every customer as we spent working with customer numero uno but we magnified all the extra learning upfront across the customer base.

Trying things that seem like they can’t scale is not just okay, it’s imperative as long as you are actively learning from every interaction.

3. Get inside your customer’s head

What books and magazines would your customers read? What conferences would they go to? What search terms would they use? Who would they follow on twitter? Once you have an idea of where your customers hang out, you need to go there. The more time you spend where your customers are, the more you’ll learn about how they think and whether or not you’re focused on the right group.

We thought some of our early customers would want to use Wistia for training, so we went to learning conferences. When that didn’t work we focused on talking to people from big companies that went to tech events. As we got better at figuring out where our customers could be we had more opportunities to learn from the right audience.

4. Focus on the buyer

Sometimes, especially with enterprise sales, the buyer of your product will be different from the user. That’s why it’s critical that you focus on the buyer.

CRMs are an excellent example of this phenomenon: a product is sold to the VP of Sales that will be used by the sales team. If you focus only on making an amazing experience for the sales team while ignoring the high level dashboards of how the sales team is doing, the VP of Sales will have trouble buying.

Look at Salesforce.com; their application can be an ardous one to setup. In fact, there are companies like OpFocus, whose main business is working with companies to optimize the Salesforce.com system already purchased. But Salesforce.com does have a great set of dashboards for the executives. The buyer, the VP of Sales, is happy and Salesforce is a $18B company with a product that has a terrible UI. All because they focus on the buyer.

5. Don’t price against cost

Cost matters when markets are mature and products are well defined. All that matters to customers is value. Should we charge our customers based on how many servers they’re using or how much video bandwidth they’re pushing because those are our costs? No.

Our customers don’t care how much we’re paying Slicehost or any of our other providers. They want to know if their videos are effective, they want to close more deals, and they want to provide a better experience for their customers. These needs could not be more divorced from our costs.

6. Position against complementary products

For some reason, competitive startups tend to think that they need to position themselves against each other. But as my good friend David Cancel likes to say:
I believe a startup only has one real competitor, indifference

People not caring enough about your product is your true competition, not some other startup.

When you’re thinking about how to position yourself, look at the complementary products, not the competitive ones. Ask yourself two questions: How much value can I create for my customer? And how much value are they getting from the other products they use?
Say your customers are spending $50 a month on Mailchimp, and they get an email platform they use every week that allows them to design, manage, and market to 5,000 recipients. Don’t try to sell them a video hosting solution for $1,000 a month that they’re going to use once a quarter to train 200 people. We made this mistake, and it’s an important one to learn from. Be honest about how much value you create and how much value your customers are getting from other products.

7. It’s only the beginning

When you first start selling a new product every new customer feels hugely important, and they are. It becomes easy to put a crippling amount of pressure on yourself to close deals and get people interested. While this can be a good motivator, it can also cause you to make mistakes.

When we were first getting going sometimes we’d say things like “Maybe we should wait a bit until feature XYZ is launched. Then they won’t be able to say no.” or “If we can just get company ABC to sign up, then it’ll be way easier to get that other guy too.” Here’s the problem with this: unless you’re dealing with a market in which there are less than 100 customers, the customers you’re trying to sign up should only be floating on the surface of your pool of potential customers.

You should not be afraid of scaring people away with a high price, the wrong messaging, or an initial email that’s too short. You need to try all of these things and more to figure out what’s going to work for your sales process. You need to be able to take risks and push forward quickly. This can be impossible if you structure your plans around closing each and every individual potential customer.

8. Focus on every customer

Even though no one customer should define your business model, you should leave yourself the flexibility to cater to each individual customers in specific ways. The most likely way to get customers to close is to spend a little time on each individual target. You need to personalize the correspondence as much as possible. This is true if you’re sending an email or if you’re meeting with someone in person. Figure out why they’re successful, what their hobbies are, and what conferences they like going to. The more you can understand them the more likely you are to speak in their language.

It takes time to prepare and learn about every target. But as you get more customers you’ll quickly learn what similarities and differences your customers have. It becomes easier to figure out where to focus and how to craft your message.

9. Act your size

When you’re first getting started it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to act bigger than you are. Common pitfalls include trying to demand exorbitantly high prices, positioning to have more customers than you have, and promising more than your product can deliver. Yes, I’ve made all these mistakes.

When you’re trying to act big, it often highlights just how small you are. Pretend like you have more customers than you do and when someone asks you who your customers are you’ll be left speechless. Position your price too highly like your more entrenched comparables and people will stop responding to you.

The secret is: the right customers will gladly pay startups for services. They’ll think they can get a deal because they’re early to the party, which is likely true. They’ll be excited about using cutting edge technology to get a leg up — again true. And if they pick right and your product rocks they get to tell the world that they were first — how can this benefit even be measured!

10. Just keep going

The hardest part of bootstrapping your sales is sticking with the process. It can take a very long time to get your first deal. But each deal comes faster with practice and more information
Your initial hit rate will probably be terrible. If it isn’t, you’re doing something right. I have some friends who run a company called Usable Health that just closed their second deal in a complex and emerging space: kiosk-style self checkout at mid-sized restaurant franchises. They’ve been selling for one and a half years and pivoted three times in the process. Now they have a pattern, happy customers, a model that looks like it could scale, and real tangible revenue.

Not giving up is the most important part. Give yourself time to build your business model. Once you’ve done that, you’re golden.

What Motivates An Entrepreneur?

2011-07-25T07:50:00.001-04:00

Motivation has been a popular topic at My City Lives HQ lately. We’re obviously keen to identify ways to motivate activity on our platform and having recently doubled the size of our team, the motivation discussions have grown to asking how organizations motivate and catalyze the talented people they work with. Even at our home at The Center for Social Innovation – a startup incubator and a startup itself – we find ourselves in an environment rich with dialog and perspectives on motivation.

In his TED talk, “The Surprising Science of Motivation“, Dan Pink makes a case for businesses to consider what science has established for years: money only works as a contingent motivator (i.e. if you do this, you get that) in which there are a clear set of rules and one solution. But when a task requires creativity and problem solving, a contingent motivator is a negative force because it focuses the mind when it needs to be open. The human psychology, more importantly, just doesn’t seem to get motivated by a bigger carrot as much as it is by three simple to understand factors: Autonomy (having choice and freedom), Mastery (getting good at something valuable) and Purpose.

Why do we do what we do?

Pink’s 3 pillars completed a process inspired by author Simon Sinek last year, when he challenged me to consider why I do what I do. Sinek is a “why” advocate – he believes that if we start by understanding our why, we’re more likely to do things that we want to do which correlates strongly to our happiness and not surprisingly, our ability to excel.

Until I was able to connect Sinek’s case with Pink’s, my response to the question “why I decided to start a company” was that it made me happy. Now, I understand that happiness is the outcome but not the why. Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose are my whys and by understanding that, I’m more aware than ever of my motivation for being an entrepreneur and thus, given Sinek’s case, in a better position to succeed.
So what motivates an entrepreneur?

Autonomy and the Entrepreneur

I really don’t believe that the prolonged motivation of an entrepreneur is being “their own boss”. The allure of being your own boss is short lived because the reality is that being your own boss is arguably one of the most difficult things to do. Self accountability is the antithesis to a walk in the park.
It’s not that I begrudge “being my own boss” – it does have its perks after all – but I just never really think about it nor find myself passionate about it. I am passionate, however, about the possibilities that autonomy provides me. Entrepreneurs are dreamers at their core. Every product or service was at the some point some person’s “crazy idea”, which they turned to reality only because the systems or status quo didn’t allow for it. The autonomy factor for entrepreneurs relates to a deep need to actualize their dreams.

Mastery and the Entrepreneur

No one starts as the best but what distinguishes successful entrepreneurs is a never ending quest to get better. I’ve often understood Mastery through the lens of competition. You don’t have to be a sore loser to agree that losing sucks. As an entrepreneur, you’re going to “lose” many times but I’ve noticed the critical difference with those who are successful is that they take personal accountability for not being the best. By doing so, they fuel their inner passion to get there. Simply put, entrepreneurs are motivated by an inner desire to be the best at what they do, period.

Purpose and the Entrepreneur

I’m a purpose junkie. I’m constantly fascinated not only by my own purpose but what other people identify as theirs. Part of the reason for this is that you’ll never find identical answers and you can learn a lot about a person and yourself if you understand the purpose that drives them be it personal, social, a trigger event or even another person.

Startup romance dictates that if you build it then they will come. Startup reality, however, is that building it is just one part of the puzzle. The reality is that starting a company is a constant fight against competitors, against naysayers, against barriers and even against yourself (I’ve seen a lot of friends self select themselves out of being an entrepreneur and have nearly done it to myself). If you don’t have a reason to fight when the going gets inevitably tough, you’ll likely find yourself on the wrong end of the startup failure rate.

Why is understanding what motivates you important?

Given the high failure rates in entrepreneurship, you’re going to have to bring everything to the table and to do that consistently is challenging especially if you don’t know why you’re doing it in the first place.

Adil Dhalla is the Chief Dish Washer at My City Lives. He can be reached on Twitter (@mycitylives) or via email (adil@mycitylives.com).

The Most Underrated Quality of a CEO

2011-07-12T07:43:00.000-04:00

You usually hear a lot about the early days of being a founder CEO, but I'm going to try to write more about the days of being a founding CEO as a company grows. The articles will probably be shorter and more frequent. Earlier today, someone asked me on Formspring what the most under-rated quality of a CEO is and I responded very simply with this: The Ability To Let Go. Late last week, I was lucky enough to get advice from a very successful CEO that told me: only focus on tasks that you yourself can specifically do. If it's something someone else can do and it constantly eats into your time, then you should find someone to fill that role if you have the resources. It resonated with me heavily as I find Onswipe growing faster than ever before and thinking about what tasks I should be taking on every day.

You Can't Do It All Yourself

As a growing company, there is absolutely zero chance that you can do it all yourself. Even if you had 24 hours in a day, there's no way to do it all. Eventually deals will start to take time, hiring will take numerous interviews, product will be in different divisions, and more. You need to realize this and find someone who can start taking over the burdens. As entrepreneurial CEOs, it's in our DNA to feel like we can do everything. The great CEOs realize they actually can't do everything all by themselves.

Find People Smarter Than Yourself

The best way to do this is to find people that are way smarter than you in the area of expertise. A CEO has to do a great job at setting the vision for the organization and orchestrating it. When your company starts expanding, you need to find people that are just way better at the specific task than yourself. It might be cutting deals with partners in BD or finding top notch engineers. You have to find those that are smarter than you.

Make Sure You Set The Vision

Make sure you set the vision as CEO before bringing people on board. Everyone needs to have cult like zeal in the mission and exact vision of what you're building. If they are not on the same page, it will ultimately destroy your belief that they carry it out when you defer your trust to them. Take the time to make sure everyone is on the same page with the entity that is your startup.

Trust and Defer

The phrase I use internally a lot is "Trust and Defer". I trust certain people with making decisions on certain areas of the company and defer to them for domain expertise. I do my job well by setting the overall course and vision for the company, so the decisions within their domain expertise fit within those confines. You have to trust the people that join your company with your life because that's literally what your product is.

It Will Hurt

There's no way around this. It's going to be a weird feeling if you're used to bootstrapping and running a company with 1-2 cofounders. When you're all of a sudden 10+ people working across the globe, it hits you in the face. It's okay, this is normal. If you've found people you trust and are smarter than yourself, it will work out better than you ever expected.
We're growing faster than I ever thought. A few weeks ago we got to the point where there are teams handling BD and teams that are handling Engineering. I've learned to make sure that the vision is set and make sure that I'm focusing my time solely on the things that solely I can do.

Why Everyone Should Work in Sales — at Least for a While

2011-07-05T07:34:00.001-04:00

By Jeff Haden

Everyone should work in sales at some point in their career — the earlier the better.

My first post-college job was with a Fortune 500 company. In terms of workload, we only experienced two conditions: Busy and busier. So I never thought about the task of drumming up sales. Why would I? Work magically appeared.

Many people, especially those who work for large companies, are not exposed to the difficulties and challenges faced by sales teams. But we all should be. Why?
Sales skills are incredibly useful — in every field.

To many people the word “selling” implies manipulating, pressuring, cajoling… all the used car salesman stereotypes. If you think of selling as explaining the logic and benefits of a decision, then every job requires sales skills: Convincing coworkers your idea makes sense, showing your boss how a project will pay off, helping employees understand the benefits of a new process, etc. Communication is critical in any career; you’ll learn more about communication by working in sales than you will almost anywhere else.

Here are more reasons everyone should work in sales, at least for a period of time:

You’ll learn to negotiate. Every job involves negotiating: With peers, with other departments, even with your boss. Salespeople learn to listen, evaluate variables, identify key drivers, overcome objections, and find ways to reach agreement — without burning bridges.

You’ll learn to close. Asking for what you want is difficult for a lot of people. Closing a sale is part art, part science. Getting others to agree with you, and follow your direction, is also part art and part science. If you aspire to a leadership position, you must be able to close. Great salespeople know how to close. Great supervisors and managers do too.

You’ll learn persistence. Salespeople hear the word “no” all the time. Over time you’ll start to see “no” as a challenge, not rejection.

You’ll learn self discipline. If you work for a big company, sometimes you can sleepwalk your way through a day and still get paid. When you work on commission, “If it is to be, it’s up to me,” is your credo. Sales is a great way to permanently connect the mental dots between performance and reward.

You’ll learn to work well with a wide range of people at all levels. Plus, working in sales is the perfect cure for shyness. Learn to step forward with confidence, especially under duress or in a crisis, and you can take on any role in an organization.

If you want to own a business, you’ll always be in sales. Every business is an extension of its owner. Even if they have a sales team, a business owner is always involved in sales. (In many companies the owner still handles the major sales personally — or at the very least is brought into the process to help close the deal.) An entrepreneur who can’t sell faces a major challenge. Gaining sales skills will help you win financing, bring in investors, line up distribution deals, land customers — in the early stages of starting a company, everything involves sales.

Understanding the sales process and how to build customer relationships is incredibly important, regardless of the industry or career you choose. Spending one or two years in a sales role is an investment that will pay dividends forever.

Think of it this way: The more intimidating or scary a position in sales sounds, the more you need to take one. You’ll gain confidence and self-assurance, and the skills you gain will serve you well for the rest of your business — and personal — life.

Seven marketing mistakes most startups make

2011-06-27T07:18:00.003-04:00

by Matt Heinz

Marketing for a startup is different than anything you may have done before. It’s different from the big-company and/or traditional marketing many executives may be used to, and a whole new challenge for entrepreneurs who don’t have a background in marketing to begin with.

The way startups need to market themselves is as unique as their product, service, market and target customer. But there are several mistakes many new startups consistently make.
Whether you’re managing a startup, managing marketing for a startup, or even consulting for a startup, here are seven common mistakes to avoid.

1. Hiring a PR firm too early

PR is sexy. It’s exciting to see your name in print, to have others talking about you, to have articles framed on the wall and shared with investors. And PR can be an important component of early marketing strategy for some startups. But hiring a full PR firm might not be the right answer, at least not yet.

Your initial PR efforts should be organic. They should stem from self-published channels and social networks, spread via employees, investors and customers directly. Executing on this opportunity requires a smart strategy and well-understood messages & objectives, and may very well require some outside help to coordinate. But early-stage startups can typically achieve these objectives and save money in the process by working with an independent socially-adept PR consultant who can help coordinate the internal and organic efforts that will drive early PR momentum.

2. Overthinking brand

I’ve seen countless startups obsess about their brand at the expense of the business. They build thick brand guidelines before they even have something to monetize or sell, and fuss over the logo instead of empowering the sales team.

Early startup marketing strategies need be executed with a bias for action, sales and revenue. If the color palette is slightly different for the email campaign vs. the trade show banner, nobody except a handful of insiders and others with too much time on their hands are going to notice and care.

Brand is important, brand consistency is important. But shipping, testing, moving fast and driving customer behavior and monetization is more important. If you can’t drive revenue and grow the business, that brand binder isn’t going to mean a thing.

3. Starting with a marketing budget

Startups should have to earn their marketing budget. They should operate with the assumption that there’s no money for marketing, and instead focus initially on the scrappy, organically-generated ways to drive customer awareness, demand and closed business.

We live in a world where our customers can be a powerful marketing channel, where countless free tools exist for us to be effective publishers with good content, where a good product and great value can create inbound demand that supersedes the need to pay the expensive, traditional marketing “tax”.

You may eventually start spending money to accelerate your opportunity. But if you start by spending money, there’s little incentive or motivation to first figure out what can drive the same performance and results with far less investment.

4. Taking strategy or tactical cues from competitors

If you’re doing it right, you’re obsessed with your competitors. You’re watching everything they do – from product updates to Web site changes to what their low-level employees are tweeting. And when you get a link from an investor to something that a competitor did that you’re not doing, your first reaction may be to scramble to catch up.

Resist that temptation. Use your competitors as a source of ideas, but filter them through your own objectives, priorities and needs. What’s good for your competitor may not work for your business. And what competitors are doing, launching or trying today may fantastically fail. If you’re doing it just because they did it, you’re distracted from the work that will more directly drive your unique business forward.

5. Letting interns driv\e the social media plan

Would you let a college student run your customer service department? Would you put them on a panel at an important customer event? Would you trust them to serve as the voice of your business directly to current customers, prospects, future investors and more?

Interns may be more socially-savvy than you, they may have more time to execute, they may have great ideas. But they by definition aren’t going to be around for long, they aren’t as invested in the business as you are, and anything they start that you can’t sustain when they leave is wasted work, or worse. Countless blogs, Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages sit dormant since the intern left, making the company look like it stopped doing business. Don’t be that company.

6. Allowing adversarial relationships with sales and biz dev

It’s ridiculous that businesses big and small allow an adversarial relationship between marketing and sales to persist. It’s more ridiculous for marketers in today’s environment to fail to hold themselves accountable for measurable performance and revenue traction.

Sales and biz dev may close the deal, but marketing can set the table. Marketing can have a direct impact on driving larger sales pipelines, more business development opportunities, and faster revenue ramp. If sales, marketing and business development have the same goals, and are measured based on their individual and collective performance against measurable revenue-based outputs, it’s far more likely that they’ll work together.

There’s no reason that marketing can’t drive this process. And if you run the business, put common metrics & expectations in place and expect this level of collaboration to take place.

7. Impressing board members & investors instead of customers

Your board and investors are important constituents, no question. They’ll have lots of opinions and ideas. But it’s your job to filter those ideas through the eyes of your customer and your target market. Not every idea is going to work, not every idea is even worth testing.

And if you explain your rationale back to the originator with a thoughtful, customer-driven response, I guarantee your board and investors will greatly appreciate that you didn’t waste your time (and their money) on something that was less likely to work.

10 pitfalls of rookie management teams

2011-06-23T06:54:00.000-04:00

This is an interesting article that has some merits. Where mistakes happen to every manager new or old dogs, the ability to learn, adapt and keep energy levels high are important factors. I hope you enjoy this article from Steve Tobak

Inexperienced execs may make mistakes — but the smart ones will learn from those mistakes and pick up sound strategies from seasoned leaders. Here’s some advice to get you on the right track.

I’ve worked with and consulted for hundreds of startups, entrepreneurs, and relatively inexperienced management teams. I also was an inexperienced executive myself, once upon a time. Lots of water under the bridge, I can tell you that.

Now, I wouldn’t begrudge anyone the unique growth experience of learning from his own mistakes, especially the wisdom and humility that only failure can impart on the executive ego.

That said, savvy managers listen to the voice of experience. They may choose to ignore the advice, but they still listen. Information is power, forewarned is forearmed, and all that.

When asked in a CNBC interview what keeps her up at night, Christine Day, CEO of fast-growing, high-flying athletic apparel maker Lululemon Athletica, said, “Scaling the growth. Our growth has been phenomenal, and that puts a lot of pressure on a young management team.”

Day, who spent 20 years at Starbucks, most recently as president of the Asia Pacific Group, knows her stuff. Scaling the business is on my list of novice management pitfalls, along with nine other rookie mistakes.

1: Thinking you’ve got it all figured out

Or thinking that the answers are self-contained within your four walls. One of the biggest differences between mature execs and novices is the understanding that the management team and the board do not have all the answers. Source far and wide, debate, then make decisions.

2: Failing to say no to opportunities

One of the biggest pitfalls is taking on too much, starting too many projects, spreading resources too thin, and failing to focus on what’s most important: execution and growing the core business.

3: Staying the course too long

Entrepreneurs often stay the course when there are clear signs that they’re pointed in the wrong direction — for instance, customers want B instead of A, customer traction isn’t happening as planned, or the market isn’t materializing.

4: Hiring other inexperienced executives

If you’re scratching your head and wondering how dumb is that?, you’re not alone. I can never figure out why entrepreneurs do this, but they do, and their boards, VCs and all, let them. It happens all the time. The result: the blind leading the blind.

5: Hiring executives just for their experience

All too often, entrepreneurs know they need to complement their relative inexperience with executives who’ve been around, so they hire people with big corporate backgrounds and overlook key qualities, like how well they’ll do in a fast-paced, collaborative, entrepreneurial environment.

6: Underscoping the challenges of scaling the business

This is huge for high-growth companies where it’s critical to scale the operation — human capital, IT infrastructure, processes, facilities, equipment — in sync with growing demand. It’s a real tightrope to simultaneously maintain growth, quality, and profits.

7: Failing to moderate risk-taking

In an effort to maintain the entrepreneurial spirit that got them where they are, inexperienced executives will oftentimes shy away from organizational processes and systems that are needed to facilitate growth. That often results in a shoot from the hip mentality or, even worse, a constantly shifting strategy du jour.

8: Suddenly becoming overly risk averse

Clamping down on calculated risk-taking based on sound risk-reward analysis is just as bad an idea as playing it fast and loose. In today’s highly competitive global market, playing it safe won’t help you maintain market share. Quite the opposite is true.

9: Lacking marketing competence

All too often, especially in the technology industry, marketing competence is an afterthought. Executing on the product or service and customer traction are the keys for startup success, no doubt, but marketing intelligence will improve the odds. Finding competent marketers seems to be the rub.

10: Going public too soon

There are benefits to an IPO — primarily as a source of capital and currency for acquisitions. But the downside — SEC and public scrutiny, Sarbanes Oxley, and most important, management team distraction — can negatively affect a company’s ability to execute when it needs to be firing on all cylinders.

The flip side

In light of all that, you’d almost be tempted to avoid inexperienced entrepreneurs and executives. But that, my friend, would be a mistake. Anecdotally speaking, those with experience don’t necessarily do any better than their novice counterparts. I guess experience has its own pitfalls. Hmm … sounds like a subject for another blog post.

Neil Patel’s Guide To Closing BIG Deals

2011-06-20T07:40:00.002-04:00

When it comes to selling, I am terrible at it. If you told me to convince you to buy a red plastic cup, I wouldn’t be able to. But if you told me to sell Walmart a million of these red plastic cups, it’s very likely I would be able to.

Over the years I learned that although I suck at selling products to individuals, I am great at closing big deals with businesses. As an entrepreneur I have closed deals ranging from $240,000 a year to even $1,200,000.

Aside from knowing what you are going to sell, here are the 5 tactics you must use if you want to close big deals.

Step #1: Create a Bond

People like doing business with those they can relate to. If you are going to spend money, why not spend it on people you like, right?
The best way to get people to relate to you, and your product, is to create a bond. You can do this by telling stories, or just “shooting the shit”.

One thing I like doing is to talk about my past experiences. I tend to talk about my childhood or teenage years. Once I do this the other person usually feels comfortable enough to talk about their life experiences.

The whole purpose of doing this is to get to know the other person on an intimate level. At the same time, they’ll quickly feel like they’ve known you for years, when in fact… you’ve just met.

Step #2: Be Logical

The tactic I use most often when trying to close a big deal is logic. If a company is spending $100,000 with someone else and you can do the same thing for $50,000 while still maintaining a healthy profit margin, why not talk about how you can save them $50,000 every year?

In addition to saving others money, I always try to talk about how my services and products create better results than the competition. Through the use of case studies and testimonials, you can easily achieve this.

Another tactic you can utilize is to break down how much additional revenue you can provide a company. A logical tool I have found useful is called, “effectuation.” For example, I once did a pitch to Blue Nile and broke down how I can drive much more traffic to their website, what percentage of those visitors would convert into customers, and the average revenue/profit per new customer. This helps increase their growth rate and would potential cause their stock price to go up.

Step #3: Change Their Mood Not Their Mind

Although logic is great, not everyone bases their decisions on logic. Many people are motivated by emotional triggers. Instead of trying to change a person’s mind, start trying to change their mood.

Lets say I am offering companies a tool that helps them increase their revenue through conversion optimization. Through logic, if I am not able to convince you to use my tool, I’d figure out a way to change your mood. Changing sentiment can be as game changing as using cause/effect analysis.

Utilizing step 1, if I learned you love Madonna, I would try to find a Madonna concert I can get you tickets to. Or I would buy an autographed Madonna album on eBay and mail it to you.

It’s true that money can’t buy everything. Sometimes understanding the sentimental value of things, particularly the value individuals place on certain items, allows you to get a better understanding of how to change moods positively. Typically what people are missing isn’t work related, so you’ll have to think outside the box.

Step #4: Create a Sense of Urgency

Now that you have the other party interested in your product or service, you need them to move fast. The best way to do this is to create a sense or urgency. Playing on the idea of supply and demand can have great results. Terms like: limited supplies, limited time only, and while quantities last put pressure for you to move quick.

The pitch I usually make is that we only have one opening to take on a new enterprise customer and that it will be filled within the next 30 days.

When creating a sense of urgency make sure you aren’t lying, because it can backfire. When I tell companies that I only have one opening, I mean it! Yes, I can take on more customers in the future, but that involves scaling my company… which takes time.

Step #5: Turn the Tables

Although this is the last step, in many ways it is the most important step. Not only will it determine the size of the deal, but it also determines if you will be able to close the deal.

With most business deals you’re the one pitching, which naturally gives the other party the upper hand. And when they have the upper hand they won’t just make you earn the deal, but they’ll squeeze you on the price. This will make the deal less lucrative for you.

Leveraging step 4, by creating a sense of urgency, is the best way to turn the tables. Here is what I typically say to turn the tables:

As you already know, I only have an opening for one client. I only want to work with companies who are doing fun, exciting, and revolutionary things. Why should I choose to work with you?

Believe it or not you’ll get a response, and it’s typically one that defends how great their company is. In essence they are now pitching you on why you have to work with them. Now when you send them a proposal they’ll be more likely to sign a deal.

Conclusion

Following these steps won’t help you sell that single red cup, but it can help you close big deals. At first you may struggle at closing big deals, but with some practice you’ll get good at it.

If I was able to close 6 figure deals while I was in high school, there is no reason why you can’t do it as well. Try it out and let me know what you think.

Why sales should stop "checking in" and five tips to avoid it

2011-06-13T06:52:00.000-04:00

Let's work backwards from this: Tell your sales people they are forbidden to do a "check in" with their prospects or clients. e.g. "HI ___; just "checking in". Honestly, it has zero value to the buyer and is frankly, embarassing. People rarely "check in" in their personal life unless someone is sick. The sales person is implying they have nothing to offer or they think they have the right to start the conversation off with this so the buyer can update him/her. No thanks.

Want to know why you aren't getting a response or moving a deal along? " Checking in" is one reason.

Here are ways to avoid the "check in":

1. Sales Intelligence -- there is a lot of information about your clients. Doing 5 minutes of research will provide clues into what your approach should be. The sales reps who emailed to congratulate me when they read I won an award -- memorable.

2. Sales Intelligence Part II: Trigger Events -- this is Tibor Shanto and Craig Elias rallying cry and it makes sense. There are events that happen in a decision maker's business life that are reasons to not just "check in" but go sell. Here is an example: decision maker just announced that they need to double revenue this year.

3. Content -- there is an un-named sales person who "checks in" with me by sending me relevant content offerings. By the way, she sends blog posts from people unrelated to her company! She is trying to check in by offering me something that makes a difference in my life. She is creating a trusting, memorable relationship with me. Oh and by the way, I will sometimes write back (unlike the "check in" emails I receive).

Now, some may say "But there is a reason to 'check in' during the sales cycle". Typically, the sales person who "checks in" has lost control of a deal. They don't know what is going on and need to find out more.

1. Always mutually agree on a next step or deliverable -- if you leave a call without some type of agreement, you will be FORCED to "check in". I have heard stories in the old days of enterprise sales reps bringing calendars into sales meetings to create a time line with the prospect. I like that, you know have something the prospect has agreed to allow you to ask for. If you "check in", I don't have to get back to you. If I owe you something, then I owe you a response.

2. Don't be such a wimp -- this is a business relationship, don't use the "check-in" as a way to be passive-aggressive. Ask for what you want. If someone is supposed to send you their requirements, ask for that.

Thanks to Craig Rosenberg for this article!

Everyone sucks at interviewing. Everyone.

2011-06-09T07:52:00.002-04:00

Just. Don't. Interview.

Jason Freedman's lessons learned...and relearned.

Interviewing is broken. Has been for years. This rigid commitment everyone seems to have to the standard resume/cover letter/interview system of hiring is just plain insane.

I've been fascinated by hiring processes for years. Hiring great talent is such a massively tough challenge, and I see so few companies that do it well. Even the best companies hide a deep dark secret: their hiring processes don't predict success accurately. It's long been whispered that Google's sophisticated HR scoring system has little correlation with an employee's success at the company. One management consultant for a top firm told me recently that, despite incredible efforts to improve hiring analytics, the best predictor of success for junior employees was still just their SAT scores.

Paul English, one of the absolute best said this about his style of hiring at Kayak:

"At times, I've fired maybe one out of every three people I've hired. That might make people think I'm bad at hiring, but I think I'm quite good at hiring."

So, Paul English, one of the most respected out there, gets 1 out of 3 wrong? Shit. This stuff is hard. But Kayak is at a stage of development where the organization can sustain the disruption of people leaving. Most startups I know have such difficulty firing because everything is already so unstable. Can't fire during a product launch. Can't fire during a funding round. Let's give him 3 more months and see if things improve...

I don't claim to be good at hiring, but I do have a particular style that I learned from some advisors.

I never actually interview people. Ever.

I think of hiring as mutual courting. The only way to court in a work setting is to spend time working together. Whenever I'm thinking of hiring someone, whether entry-level or senior, we do a project together. I pay them a reasonable contractor fee for the work, and I make sure it's the type of work that's easily definable, has clear deliverables, and lasts a few weeks.

Sometimes we do this process and the project goes outstandingly well, and we make a full-time offer. Our ability at this point to define a job description and compensation package is remarkably easy. We know what we're getting. The employee is also motivated at this point because we've all proven ourselves to each other. He's learned the real strengths and weaknesses of the business and of working with the team. A decision to accept a full-time offer at this point is a well-informed one.

Sometimes, the project turns out only so-so, at which point we wish the very best to the applicant and do whatever we can to help him find a role that is perfectly suited for him. There's no termination paperwork, no 6 months of trying to make it work, no awkward conversations about his progress behind closed doors.

Sometimes, a talented person can't, for whatever reason, commit to a 3 week project. But maybe there's a smaller project he can do over nights and weekends. Maybe there's an open source project of mutual interest. Maybe he can take 3 days off his oyher job and work half a week and a weekend with us. If it's a student, maybe he can join us for part of spring break. And if none of that works, then well, we can't hire him. And we wish him well and do our best to refer him to a company that will work.

But what we don't ever do is engage in some interview/code puzzle/awkward question process that has nothing to do with what it's really like to work with us.

Courting great people, working together temporarily as contractors, and then only engaging in full employment when everything proves out as hoped--that's the way to go. This method is spreading throughout the startup world, and I think it's good for everyone involved. Most of the BigCo business world doesn't work this way. Most larger companies have HR departments that hire through a more formal process. I would guess that BigCo Inc. could actually be far more flexible than it currently is, but that's out of my scope of expertise. I know for certain that startups can be more creative (and less insane) in their hiring practices...and they should.

Consumers today more likely to be influenced by Twitter, Blogs

2011-06-06T07:35:00.002-04:00

By Gillian Shaw, Vancouver Sun

VANCOUVER - Nobodies are the new somebodies.

They have become the key influencers and companies must remember that when they are trying to win people over to their ideas, products and services.

That’s the advice from Guy Kawasaki, managing director of Garage Technology Ventures who, as one of the employees behind Apple’s marketing of the Macintosh, pioneered evangelism back in 1984, turning consumers into avid advocates for the brand.

Kawasaki, who was in Vancouver last week for the Internet Marketing conference, shared his formula for “changing hearts, minds and actions.”

It all boils down to one word: “enchantment.”

“If you can change people’s hearts, minds and actions, you can change the world,” said Kawasaki, a venture capitalist, a columnist with Entrepreneur Magazine and author of nine books on marketing and entrepreneurship.

While old-school marketing saw companies seeking to enchant those they figured had the power to influence, social media has made that practice obsolete. “I think marketing is completely reversed,” Kawasaki said.

It used to be that companies sought favourable reviews from influential publications like Fortune and The Wall Street Journal, but today’s consumers are more likely to be influenced by blogs or by the Twitter users they follow.

“The new way is that nobodies are the new somebodies,” said Kawasaki.

Instead of top-down delivery, marketing happens from the bottom up, he said. “Someone you’ve never heard of embraces your product, they love the product and they spread the word. You never know which mommy blogger is going to make your product successful.”

Enchantment is more than a smile and scintillating conversation. Here are some more of Kawasaki’s tips on becoming enchanting:

1. Always default to a yes attitude. Kawasaki attributes this bit of advice to Vancouver’s Darcy Rezac, author of Work the Pond! Use the Power of Positive Networking.

2. You can’t enchant people if you’re not trustworthy. And if you want people to trust you, you have to trust them. Companies like Zappos, with its paid shipping return policy, are examples of how it can pay off to trust customers. Be a mensch, someone who can be trusted, who is honourable and has a world perspective. Think Nelson Mandela if you’re looking for an example.

3. Deliver a product or service that meets the enchantment test: Is it DICEE? Deep, intelligent, complete, empowering and elegant.

“It is easy to enchant people with something that is great; it’s hard to enchant people with something that is crap,” said Kawasaki, who points to Google as one company that meets that DICEE test.

4. Conduct a pre-mortem before you launch. Gather your team together and say, ‘Let’s assume our product failed and come up with the reasons why it failed.’ When you’re creating something, it’s very difficult to poke holes in it; this exercise is aimed at identifying the shortcomings without having the team at odds with one another.

5. Sell your dream. The iPhone is really $188 worth of parts and AT&T (at least in the U.S.) but Apple sells the dream, the smart phone that changes your life.

6. Follow the 10-20-30 formula in presentations. That’s 10 slides, 20 minutes talking and a 30-point font.

7. Rules of e-mail: Have a great subject line and a message that is no longer than five sentences and includes what you want, what your cause is, who you are, why the recipient should help you and what the next step is.

8. Use Twitter, the greatest marketing tool ever created, according to Kawasaki. Have a good avatar, no red eyes or out-of-focus photos; remember your profile is in a sense your resume, so make it good and when you tweet, provide interesting links.

Top 18 tips (yes 18) on how to get and stay productive

2011-05-31T06:50:00.000-04:00

Do you ever find that your day runs away from you? Here are some tips on getting and staying productive.

1. Start your day with at least 30 minutes of exercise.

2. Turn off all technology for 60 minutes a day and focus on doing your most important work.

3. Turn your Blackberry/Smartphone to silence. It steals your focus and creates unecessary interuptions.

4. Don't check your email first thing in the morning.

5. Turn all your electronic notifications off.

6. Take one day a week as a complete recovery day, to refuel and regenerate (that means no email, no phone calls and zero work). You need full recovery one day a week otherwise you'll start depleting your capabilities.

7. The data says workers are interrupted every 11 minutes. Distractions destroy productivity. Learn to protect your time and say no to interruptions.

8. Schedule every day of your week even Sunday morning. A plan relieves you of the torment of choice (said novelist Saul Bellow). It restores focus and provides energy. Organization is the key to productivity.

9. Work in blocks of time. Creative geniuses all had 2 things in common: when they worked they were fully engaged and when they worked, they worked with this deep concentration for long periods of time. Rare in this world of entrepreneurs who can't sit still.

10. Drink a liter of water early every morning. We wake up dehydrated. The most precious asset of an entrepreneur isn't time - it's energy. Water restores it.

11. Don't answer your phone every time it rings.

12. Invest in your professional development so you bring more value to the hours you work. Keep it fresh.

13. Avoid gossip and time thieves.

15. Keep a "Stop Doing List".

16. Get up early. 5 am....6 am... be productive before most people are out of bed.

17. Have in office days and out of office days. The inertia of the road is good but if you do it everyday it interrupts your opportunity to focus on in office activities.

18. Do the things you hate to do first thing in the morning. Just get them done and over with. Then they won't cloud your subconscious all day

It's challenging to be 100% productive every day but just like other commitments in life, you take your best run at it!

How not to use Twitter for Business

2011-05-16T06:04:00.002-04:00

It is important to learn how to use Twitter to promote your business without annoying your followers with bad twitter etiquette.

Here are some of easiest ways to annoy your followers:

1. Post Spammy Tweets.
If you don’t know what spamming on Twitter is and don’t know a single spammer, then you are probably one of them. If you are, it is important that you change the way that you tweet. Do not post something that claims to be about a popular topic just to send them somewhere else. People will feel tricked and be annoyed at you.
Post relevant and helpful information that keeps followers coming back for more. Make your followers really want to read your next tweet.

2. Follow Anyone and Everyone
You should only be following those whose thoughts and tweets actually interest you, post good information and/or are relevant to your brand.
Do not use auto-follow programs. They are not considered ethical since you are really only using them to increase your number of followers. Take the time to look through those who follow you and those tweeting about topics in your niche to determine whether someone is worthy of your follow.

3. Post Tweets Which Have No Relevance to Those who Follow You
If you have a shoe company and generally post about the shoe business, brands and new products...don’t tweet about things like cookie recipes or Justin Bieber (unless, of course, he is actually wearing the shoes!)
If you represent an online business about safely products, don’t promote web hosting.

It is simply not relevant and annoys your followers! Keep every post relevant to the people who follow you. Learn how to use Twitter to pass along information that is important to them and they will pass it on to others.

4. Post Automated Tweets That Are Out of Date.
Do not post about summer sales in the fall. Do not talk about Christmas gift ideas in March. While there is a place for automatic posting, make sure each and every tweet is relevant and valuable to anyone who might read it. Otherwise, this is just another form of spamming.

5. Discuss What You Are Doing Every Minute.
Tweet 1: I just got out of my bed.

Tweet 2: Have to go brush my teeth.

Tweet 3: Need to take a shower.

Tweet 4: Out of the shower now. Time for breakfast.

Tweet 5: Cereal or bagel?

Tweet 6: Cream cheese or butter?

Tweet 7: Better hurry…still need to get dressed
Trust us...they Don’t Care! Don’t bore followers with your details!

6. Ignore Everyone Who Reaches Out to You.
If you’re not going to be social with anyone else on Twitter, then you might as well not use it at all. The whole point of social media is to be social!
It does not take that much time each day to check mentions that you have had (like @BizSocialNet in their tweet), retweets and direct messages from others. Thank people for mentions and retweets.
If someone tweets you in their #FollowFriday (or #FF) list, thank them for that too. You may want to even return the favor on the next Friday!

7. Sell, sell, sell.
If all your tweets lead to a sales pitch, people will get sick of them really fast. People want information...not a constant sales pitch.
Make almost all of your tweets helpful and informative without a hard-sell agenda. Then if you do happen to tweet a sale or offer once in a while...the followers will welcome the information instead of running the other way.

8. Rarely Tweet.
If you only update your profile and tweet once every six months, people will probably unfollow you. If you are not tweeting regularly, what’s the point?

Not sure if you are using twitter to it's full advantage? Best to read up and harness the power of Twitter before it causes harm to your brand.

10 pitfalls of rookie management teams

2011-05-11T10:55:00.000-04:00

The flip side

The 100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur

2011-05-09T06:36:00.000-04:00

I was introduced to James Altuchers blog through Sprouter. Some super valuable tips and reminders about what is important. (oh, and to follow him on Twitter) Enjoy!

If you Google “entrepreneur” you get a lot of mindless clichés like “Think Big!” For me, being an “entrepreneur” doesn’t mean starting the next “Facebook”. Or even starting any business at all. It means finding the challenges you have in your life, and determining creative ways to overcome those challenges. However, in this post I focus mostly on the issues that come up when you first start your company. These rules also apply if you are taking an entrepreneurial stance within a much larger company (which all employees should do).

(this is BS)

For me, I’ve started several businesses. As I’ve described in the rest of this blog, some have succeeded, many have failed. I’m invested in about 13 private companies. I’ve advised probably another 50 private companies. Along the way I’ve compiled a list of rules that have helped me deal with every aspect of being an entrepreneur in business and some in life.

[Btw, Claudia thinks I shouldn’t put this post up. This is going to be a chapter in a book I am self-publishing in a week or so: “How to be the Luckiest Man Alive”. But I’m trying to price the book for free on Kindle so why not? Plus, once I write something, I can’t help myself. I have to put it up.]

Here’s the real rules:

A) It’s not fun. I’m not going to explain why it’s not fun. These are rules. Not theories. I don’t need to prove them. But there’s a strong chance you can hate yourself throughout the process of being an entrepreneur. Keep sharp objects and pills away during your worst moments. And you will have them. If you are an entrepreneur and agree with me, please note this in the comments below.

B) Try not to hire people. You’ll have to hire people to expand your business. But it’s a good discipline to really question if you need each and every hire.

C) Get a customer. This seems obvious. But it’s not. Get a customer before you start your business, if you can. (see, “the Easiest Way to Succeed as an Entrepreneur”)

CA) Follow me on Twitter.

D) If you are offering a service, call it a product. Oracle did it. They claimed they had a database. But if you “bought” their database they would send in a team of consultants to help you “install” the database to fit your needs. In other words, for the first several years of their existence, they claimed to have a product but they really were a consulting company. Don’t forget this story. Products are valued higher than services.

E) It’s OK to fail. Start over. Hopefully before you run out of money. Hopefully before you take in investor money. Or, don’t worry about it. Come up with new ideas. Start over.

F) Be profitable. Try to be profitable immediately. This seems obvious but it isn’t. Try not to raise money. That money is expensive.

G) When raising money: if it’s not easy then your idea is probably incapable of raising money. If it’s easy, then take as much as possible. If it’s TOO easy, then sell your company (unless you are Twitter, etc).

(if it’s too easy, sell your company)

H) The same goes for selling your company. If it’s not easy, then you need to build more. Then sell. To sell your company, start getting in front of your acquirers a year in advance. Send them monthly updates describing your progress. Then, when they need a company like yours, your company is the first one that comes to mind.

I) Competition is good. It turns you into a killer. It helps you judge progress. It shows that other people value the space you are in. Your competitors are also your potential acquirers.

J) Don’t use a PR firm. Except maybe as a secretary. You are the PR for your company. You are your company’s brand. You personally.

K) Communicate with everyone. Employees. Customers. Investors. All the time. Every day.

L) Do everything for your customers. This is very important. Get them girlfriends or boyfriends. Speak at their charities. Visit their parents for Thanksgiving. Help them find other firms to meet their needs. Even introduce them to your competitors if you think a competitor can help them or if you think you are about to be fired. Always think first, “What’s going to make my customer happy?”

M) Your customer is not a company. There’s a human there. What will make my human customer happy? Make him laugh. You want your customer to be happy.

N) Show up. Go to breakfast/lunch/dinner with customers. Treat.

O) History. Know the history of your customers in every way. Company history, personal history, marketing history, investing history, etc.

P) Micro-manage software development. Nobody knows your product better than you do. If you aren’t a technical person, learn how to be very specific in your product specification so that your programmers can’t say: “well you didn’t say that!”

Q) Hire local. You need to be able to see and talk to your programmers. Don’t outsource to India. I love India. But I won’t hire programmers from there while I’m living in the US.

R) Sleep. Don’t buy into the 20 hours a day entrepreneur myth. You need to sleep 8 hours a day to have a focused mind.

S) Exercise. Same as above. If you are unhealthy, your product will be unhealthy.

T) Emotionally Fit. DON’T have dating problems and software development problems at the same time. VCs will smell this all over you.

U) Pray. You need to. Be grateful where you are. And pray for success. You deserve it. Pray for the success of your customers. Heck, pray for the success of your competitors. The better they do, it means the market is getting bigger. And if one of them breaks out, they can buy you.

V) Buy your employees gifts. Massages. Tickets. Whatever. I always imagined that at the end of each day my young, lesbian employees (for some reason, most employees at my first company were lesbian) would be calling their parents and their mom and dad would ask them: “Hi honey! How was your day today?” And I wanted them to be able to say: “It was the best!” Invite customers to masseuse day.

W) Treat your employees like they are your children. They need boundaries. They need to be told “no!” sometimes. And sometimes you need to hit them in the face (ha ha, just kidding). But within boundaries, let them play.

X) Don’t be greedy pricing your product. If your product is good and you price it cheap, people will buy. Then you can price upgrades, future products, and future services more expensive. Which goes along with the next rule.

Y) Distribution is everything. Branding is everything. Get your name out there, whatever it takes. The best distribution is of course word of mouth, which is why your initial pricing doesn’t matter.

YA) Follow me on Twitter.

Z) Don’t kill yourself. It’s not worth it. Your employees need you. Your children or future children need you. It seems odd to include this in a post about entrepreneurship but we’re also taking about keeping it real. Most books or “rules” for entrepreneurs talk about things like “think big”, “go after your dreams”. But often dreams turn into nightmares. I’ll repeat it again. Don’t kill yourself. Call me if things get too stressful. Or more importantly, make sure you take proper medication

AA) Give employees’ structure. Let each employee know how his or her path to success can be achieved. All of them will either leave you or replace you eventually. That’s OK. Give them the guidelines how that might happen. Tell them how they can get rich by working for you.

BB) Fire employees immediately. If an employee gets “the disease” he needs to be fired. If they ask for more money all the time. If they bad mouth you to other employees. If you even think they are talking behind your back, fire them. The disease has no cure. And it’s very contagious. Show no mercy. Show the employee the door. There are no second chances because the disease is incurable.

CC) Make friends with your landlord. If you ever have to sell your company, believe it or not, you are going to need his signature (because there’s going to be a new lease owner)

DD) Only move offices if you are so packed in that employees are sharing desks and there’s no room for people to walk.

EE) Have killer parties. But use your personal money. Not company money. Invite employees, customers, and investors. It’s not the worst thing in the world to also invite off duty prostitutes or models.

FF) If an employee comes to you crying, close the door or take him or her out of the building. Sit with him until it stops. Listen to what he has to say. If someone is crying then there’s been a major communication breakdown somewhere in the company. Listen to what it is and fix it. Don’t get angry at the culprit’s. Just fix the problem.

(you don't want your employees to be sad.)

GG) At Christmas, donate money to every customer’s favorite charity. But not for investors or employees.

HH) Have lunch with your competitors. Listen and try not to talk. One competitor (Bill Markel from Interactive once told me a story about how the CEO of Toys R Us returned his call. He was telling me this because I never returned Bill’s calls. Ok, Bill, lesson noted.

II) Ask advice a lot. Ask your customers advice on how you can be introduced into other parts of their company. Then they will help you. Because of the next rule…

JJ) Hire your customers. Or not. But always leave open the possibility. Let it always dangle in the air between you and them. They can get rich with you. Maybe. Possibly. If they play along. So play.

KK) On any demo or delivery, do one extra surprise thing that was not expected. Always add bells and whistles that the customer didn’t pay for.

LL) Understand the demographic changes that are changing the world. Where are marketing dollars flowing and can you be in the middle. What services do aging baby boomers need? Is the world running out of clean water? Are newspapers going to survive? Etc. Etc. Read every day to understand what is going on.

LLa) Don’t go to a lot of parties or “meetups” with other entrepreneurs. Work instead while they are partying.

MM) But, going along with the above rule, don’t listen to the doom and gloomers that are hogging the TV screen trying to tell you the world is over. They just want you to be scared so they can scoop up all the money.

NN) You have no more free time. In your free time you are thinking of new ideas for customers, new ideas for services to offer, new products.

OO) You have no more free time, part 2. In your free time, think of ideas for potential customers. Then send them emails: “I have 10 ideas for you. Would really like to show them to you. I think you will be blown away. Here’s five of them right now.”

OOa) Depressions, recessions, don’t matter. There’s $15 trillion in the economy. You’re allowed a piece of it:

PP) Talk. Tell everyone you ever knew what your company does. Your friends will help you find clients.

QQ) Always take someone with you to a meeting. You’re bad at following up. Because you have no free time. So, if you have another employee. Let them follow up. Plus, they will like to spend time with the boss. You’re going to be a mentor.

RR) If you are consumer focused: your advertisers are your customers. But always be thinking of new services for your consumers. Each new service has to make their life better. People’s lives are better if: they become healthier, richer, or have more sex. “Health” can be broadly defined.

SS) If your customers are advertisers: find sponsorship opportunities for them that drive customers straight into their arms. These are the most lucrative ad deals (see rule above). Ad inventory is a horrible business model. Sponsorships are better. Then you are talking to your customer.

TT) No friction. The harder it is for a consumer to sign up, the less consumers you will have. No confirmation emails, sign up forms, etc. The easier the better.

TTA) No fiction, part 2. If you are making a website, have as much content as you can on the front page. You don’t want people to have to click to a second or third page if you can avoid it. Stuff that first page with content. You aren’t Google. (And, 10 Unusual Things You Didn’t Know About Google)

UU) No friction, part 3. Say “yes” to any opportunity that gets you in a room with a big decision maker. Doesn’t matter if it costs you money.

VV) Sell your company two years before you sell it. Get in the offices of the potential buyers of your company and start updating them on your progress every month. Ask their advice on a regular basis in the guise of just an “industry catch-up”

WW) If you sell your company for stock, sell the stock as soon as you can. If you are selling your company for stock it means:

• a. The market is such that lots of companies are being sold for stock.

• b. AND, companies are using stock to buy other companies because they value their stock less than they value cash.

• c. WHICH MEANS, that when everyone’s lockup period ends, EVERYONE will be selling stock across the country. So sell yours first.

XX) Ideas are worthless. If you have an idea worth pursuing, then just make it. You can build any website for cheap. Hire a programmer and make a demo. Get at least one person to sign up and use your service. If you want to make Facebook pages for plumbers, find one plumber who will give you $10 to make his Facebook page. Just do it.

YY) Don’t use a PR firm, part II. Set up a blog. Tell your personal stories (see “33 tips to being a better writer” ). Let the customer know you are human, approachable, and have a real vision as to why they need to use you. Become the voice for your industry, the advocate for your products. If you make skin care products, tell your customers every day how they can be even more beautiful than they currently are and have more sex than they are currently getting. Blog your way to PR success. Be honest and bloody.

ZZ) Don’t save the world. If your product sounds too good to be true, then you are a liar.

ZZa) Your company is always for sale.

AAA) Frame the first check. I’m staring at mine right now.

BBB) No free time, part 3. Pick a random customer. Find five ideas for them that have nothing to do with your business. Call them and say, “I’ve been thinking about you. Have you tried this?”

CCC) No resale deals. Nobody cares about reselling your service. Those are always bad deals.

DDD) Your lawyer or accountant is not going to introduce you to any of their other clients. Those meetings are always a waste of time.

EEE) Celebrate every success. Your employees need it. They need a massage also. Get a professional masseuse in every Friday afternoon. Nobody leaves a job where there is a masseuse.

FFF) Sell your first company. Don’t take any chances. You don’t need to be Mark Zuckerberg. Sell your first company as quick as you can. You now have money in the bank and a notch on your belt. Make a billion on your next company.

GGG) Pay your employees before you pay yourself.

HHH) Give equity to get the first customer. If you have no product yet and no money, then give equity to a good partner in exchange for them being a paying customer. Note: don’t blindly give equity. If you develop a product that someone asked for, don’t give them equity. Sell it to them. But if you want to get a big distribution partner whose funds can keep you going forever, then give equity to nail the deal.

III) Don’t worry about anyone stealing your ideas. Ideas are worthless anyway. It’s OK to steal something that’s worthless.

IIIA) Follow me on twitter.

Questions from Readers

Question: You say no free time but you also say keep emotionally fit, physically fit, etc. How do I do this if I’m constantly thinking of ideas for old and potential customers?

Answer: It’s not easy or everyone would be rich.

Question: if I get really stressed about clients paying, how do I get sleep at night?

Answer: medication

Question: how do I cold-call clients?

Answer: email them. Email 40 of them. It’s OK if only 1 answers. Email 40 a day but make sure you have something of value to offer.

Question: how can I find cheap programmers or designers?

Answer: if you don’t know any and you want to be cheap: use scriptlance.com, elance.com, or craigslist. But don’t hire them if they are from another country. You need to communicate with them even if it costs more money.

Question: should I hire programmers?

Answer: first…freelance. Then hire.

Question: what if I build my product but I’m not getting customers?

Answer: develop a service loosely based on your product and offer that to customers. But I hope you didn’t make a product without talking to customers to begin with?

Question: I have the best idea in the world, but for it to work it requires a lot of people to already be using it. Like Twitter.

Answer: if you’re not baked into the Silicon Valley ecosystem, then find distribution and offer equity if you have to. Zuckerberg had Harvard. MySpace had the fans of all the local bands they set up with MySpace pages. I (in my own small way) had Thestreet.com when I set up Stockpickr.com. I also had 10 paying clients when I did my first successful business fulltime.

Question: I just lost my biggest customer and now I have to fire people. I’ve never done this before. How do I do it?

Answer: one on meetings. Be Kind. State the facts. Say you have to let people go and that everyone is hurting but you want to keep in touch because they are a great employee. It was an honor to work with them and when business comes back you hope you can convince them come back. Then ask them if they have any questions. Your reputation and the reputation of your company are on the line here. You want to be a good guy. But you want them out of your office within 15 minutes. It’s a termination, not a negotiation. This is one reason why it’s good to start with freelancers.

Question: I have a great idea. How do I attract VCs?

Answer: build the product. Get a customer. Get money from customer. Get more customers. Build more services in the product. Get VC. Chances are by this point, the VCs are calling you.

Question: I want to build a business day trading.

Answer: bad idea

Question: I want to start a business but don’t know what my passion is:

Answer: skip to the post: “How to be the luckiest person alive”. Do the Daily Practice. Within six months your life will be completely different.

Question: I want to leave my job but I’m scared.

Answer: same as above question. The Daily Practice turns you into a healthy Idea Machine. Plus luck will flow in from every direction.

Final rule: Things change. Every day. The title of this post, for instance, says “100 Rules”. But I gave about 70 rules (including the Q&A). Things change midway through. Be ready for it every day. In fact, every day figure out what you can change just slightly to shake things up and improve your product and company.

Throughout the rest of this blog I have examples, ideas, rules, etc. In fact, it adds up to a lot more than 100 rules. Many of the rules above are repeated in other posts ahead but use this post as a cheat sheet. If you can think of more rules for me, add them to the comments. I’ll try and put them in the upcoming book.

Cool ideas for your Face Book Page

2011-05-06T07:00:00.000-04:00

Now how ingenious is this! Great ideas for spicing up your Face Book page...

Top 10 myths about job interviews

2011-05-05T07:35:00.000-04:00

Here is Ask Annies list of the top 10 job interview myths, and how to deal with them:

Myth #10: The interviewer is prepared.

"The person you're meeting with is probably overworked and stressed about having to hire someone," Couper says. "So make it easy for him or her. Answer that catchall request, 'Tell me about yourself", by talking about why you're a great fit for this job. If it's obvious they haven't read your resume, recap it briefly, and then tie it to the job you want." Tell them what they really need to know, so they don't have to come up with more questions.

Myth #9: Most interviewers have been trained to conduct thorough job interviews.

While human resources professionals do get extensive training in job interviewing techniques, the average line manager is winging it. "To make up for vague questions, be specific even if they don't ask," Couper suggests. "Be ready with two or three examples of particular skills and experiences that highlight why they should hire you."

Myth #8: It's only polite to accept an interviewer's offer of refreshment.

"They usually try to be courteous and offer you a drink, but they don't really want to bother with it," says Couper. "Unless the beverage in question is right there and won't take more than a second to get, just say, no, thank you."

Couper once interviewed a job candidate who said she would love a cup of tea, which, he recalls, "meant I spent half the allotted interview time looking for a tea bag, heating water, and so on. It was irritating."
Another good reason, Couper says, to decline caffeine is that "if the interview is a lengthy one, you don't want to need a restroom halfway through the conversation."

Myth #7: Interviewers expect you to hand over references' contact information right away.

Hold off until you're specifically asked, Couper advises, and even then, you can delay a bit by offering to send the information in an email in a day or two. There are at least two good reasons for not rushing it, Couper says. First, "you sometimes don't know until the end of the interview who would be the best references for this particular job," he notes. "If you get a sense that the interviewer cares most about, for instance, teamwork, you want to choose someone who can attest to your skills in that area. A reference who can only talk about some other aspect of your work is not going to help."

Second, and no less important, "you want a little time to prep your references, by gently coaching them on what you'd like them to say, before the employer calls them."

Myth #6: There's a right answer to every question an interviewer asks

"Sometimes how you approach your answer is far more important than the answer itself," Couper says. If you're presented with a hypothetical problem and asked how you would resolve it, try to think of a comparable situation from the past and tell what you did about it.

Myth #5: You should always keep your answers short.

Here's where doing lots of research before an interview really pays off. "The more you've learned about the company and the job beforehand, the better able you are to tell why you are the right hire," Couper says.

Don't be afraid to talk at length about it, partly because it will spare the interviewer having to come up with another question for you (see Myth #1 above) and partly because "in a good interview, you should be talking about two-thirds of the time."

Myth #4: If you've got great qualifications, your appearance doesn't matter.

Reams of research on this topic have proven that physical attractiveness plays a big part in hiring decisions. "Anyone who says otherwise is lying," Couper says. "People care about your looks, so make the absolute most of what you've got." Even if you're not drop-dead gorgeous, it's impossible to overestimate the importance of looking "healthy, energetic, and confident."

Myth #3: When asked where you see yourself in five years, you should show tremendous ambition.

The five-year question is a common one, and it's uncommonly tricky. "Interviewers want you to be a go-getter, but they also worry that you'll get restless if you don't move up fast enough. So you want to say something that covers all bases, like, 'I'd be happy to stay in this job as long as I'm still learning things and making a valuable contribution,'" says Couper.
You might also consider turning the question around and asking, "Where do you see me in five years?" Says Couper, "Sometimes the answer to that -- like, 'Well, we'd expect you to keep doing the same thing we hired you to do' -- is a good way to spot a dead-end job."

Myth #2: If the company invites you to an interview, that means the job is still open.

Alas, no. In fact, the job may never have existed in the first place: "Some companies use 'interviews' to do market research on the cheap. They ask you about your current or recent duties, your pay scale, and so on, to get information for comparison purposes." Another possibility, Couper says, is that "they may already have a strong internal candidate in mind for the job but just want to see if they come across someone better."

If you get an interview through a networking contact, he adds, "an employer may interview you simply as a courtesy to the person who referred you, if that is someone they don't want to disappoint."
Even if the job opening is phony, it's still worth going, he says: "Sometimes they discover you're a good fit for a different opening that really does exist. You never know where an interview might lead."

And the #1 myth about job interviewing: The most qualified person gets the job.

In at least one crucial respect, a job interview is like a date: Chemistry counts

"A candidate who is less qualified, but has the right personality for the organization and hits it off with the interviewer, will almost always get hired over a candidate who merely looks good on paper," Couper says.
What can you do if you suspect you're not knocking an interviewer's socks off?

"At the end of the discussion, you'll probably be asked if you have any questions," Couper says. "If you sense the person has reservations about your style, ask what the ideal candidate for this job would be like."

Then think fast. Can you talk a bit about how you fit that profile? "Addressing any concerns the interviewer might have, beyond your formal qualifications, is your chance to seal the deal," Couper says.

Top 10 over used business speak of 2010

2011-04-13T14:16:00.000-04:00

If you're like most business people, you've probably read your fair share of jargon-filled emails this year. Bursting with sentences that sound like Dilbert comics, these messages do almost everything but get to the point. As the year winds to a close, time has come to recall some of the more popular and most obnoxious such phrases of 2010.

Boil The Ocean

Definition: To try to "boil the ocean" is to take on a task that is so difficult, or requires so many company resources, that it would be just about as easy to boil the Atlantic Ocean. Often however, this phrase is used by an office drone who wants to make his meager responsibilities seem like herculean efforts.

"I want to make sure this deal goes through, but we don't want to have to boil the ocean here. Let's come up with a game plan we can all play ball with."

Disambiguate

Definition: An unnecessarily pompous word used in place of "to clarify." Generally, this term is uttered by a clueless manager who can't understand exactly what is being discussed, but doesn't want to reveal himself as an imbecile. Rather than admitting to be lost in the conversation, he might dress it up a bit and throw this gem out there to ask for clarification.

"Your last email looks pretty good, Mark, however I'm going to need you to disambiguate the part about our quarter 4 figures so that I can rally the troops back at base camp and break it down for them."

Game-Changer

Definition: A game-changer is any new product or strategic decision that brings about colossal profits and monumental success. Ever since this phrase was spoken by rapper P-Diddy in the 2010 comedy "Get Him To The Greek," few executives have been able to stifle the urge to utter the phrase to their subordinates.

"Johnson, your proposed deal was on the right track, yet ultimately underwhelming. What we need here is a real game-changer!"

Moving Forward

Definition: Moving forward is a business speak for "from now on," and is usually used in a disciplinary statement. Some executives want to feel like every decision they make is in some way instrumental to the direction of the entire organization. Using this phrase in place of such common expressions as "in the future," and "starting now," lends itself to the fantasy that new office policies will make them business literature legends.

"I didn't always mind the way your department represented our brand in the past, but moving forward we're going to have to ask you to follow protocol to the T."

Net-Net

Definition: A shorter and more urgent way of saying "get to the point." This phrase is often used when you want to appear as if your time is very important and you aren't sure if simply asking for the bottom line will convey this strongly enough.

"I see a lot of fluff and necessary chatter in your email here, can you just give me the net-net on the situation?"

Socialize Internally

Definition: The hip new way to say "talk to my coworkers." From social networking to social media, movies about Facebook to popular new social phone applications, 2010 has been the year of "social" everything. It was only a matter of time before the business pop culture adopted the craze and applied it to areas where it doesn't belong.

"Thanks for your speedy reply on this proposal! Things look good at a glance, so I'm going to socialize internally over here and get back to you by the end of the business day."

Value Add

Definition: Simply put - any completed work that improved a product or service. Around bonus season, it sounds more powerful to reaffirm that you are "adding value" to the company, rather than simply "doing your job."

"While the rest of the team circles back to discuss the accuracy of the flowcharts, I'll be working on several value adds for the current project."

Low Hanging Fruit

Definition: A tasty phrase used to describe a deal that is easy to obtain. If you ran a used car lot, for example, the male teenage driver with an eye on your red muscle car is low hanging fruit, because it won't take much more than a conversation about girls and speed to put the keys in his hands and a loan on his credit.

"Moving forward, we need to remember that this business is all a numbers game and go after the low hanging fruit as often as we do the big accounts."

Screw The Pooch

Definition: A polite way of saying "you are not really working and your may want to reconsider your work ethic." It's bad etiquette to utter profanity in the board room, so while you may have several choice words for the guy who dropped the ball on the big account and cost you your holiday bonus, it's best to use this phrase in place of the expletives.

"I know we're all excited about the new direction this project is headed, so as long as none of you screw the pooch on your deadlines, we should be able to get the deliverables in front of some eyeballs by this time next week."

Action Items

Definition: A very puffed-up and consequential nickname for "tasks." Of course, no one ever feels as cool John Rambo slashing through the jungle and knocking down enemy camps with nothing more than a cross bow and combat knife when they call their work "a bunch of tasks." To avoid this belittling feeling, some business folks have begun referring to the things they need to do as "action items." When has organizing the mail room sounded more exciting?

"I'd love to put in some face time and go over the contract ASAP, but I'll be working on several action items today and won't have free time until tomorrow."

Thanks to Focus.com for the content, gently tweaked by me

How to Get Involved Without Micromanaging People

2011-03-30T07:07:00.000-04:00

One of the more vexing problems most managers face every day is how to get involved in the work of their people without doing the work themselves or micromanaging those doing it.

You can resolve this challenge with the same approach that we described in our previous blog — the technique we call Prep-Do-Review. In this simple but often forgotten action model, you think of every activity not as one step — doing — but three distinct steps: prepare to act, act, and then reflect on the outcome and what can be learned from it.

Last time, we focused on how you can convert everyday activities into tools for making managerial progress — moving toward goals, developing people, building a team, creating and sustaining a network, and all the other things managers are supposed to do but never seem to have the time to do.

Here we focus on using Prep-Do-Review with your people. Start by expecting your people to use Prep-Do-Review themselves in their work. Not only will it make them more effective, but it will provide a way for you to become involved in their work as appropriate for the person and the situation.

This is the way it works:

Prep: Start by previewing people's plans with them and suggesting changes, if necessary. You do this by asking crucial questions. What are you going to do? Why — for what purpose? How will you do it? How can you use this to make progress on our goals and plans? Who should be involved or kept informed? How can this be used to help you learn and get better? What if your assumptions are wrong or the unexpected happens? This is how you move your group's purpose, plans, and work forward, how you coach and develop others, how you delegate more confidently, how you assure yourself that someone is well prepared and ready to act on her own.

Do: Based on what you learned in the Prep stage, you can decide whether and how to be involved in the doing of the activity. Working with a novice, you may want to perform the activity yourself while the person observes. Next, you may want to monitor periodically as the person does the activity and then give them feedback afterward. Thereafter, you probably don't need to be present at all — the Prep and Review stages are where you'll be involved.

Review: Great managers make post-action review a regular practice for themselves and their people. You can make it the focus of a one-on-one after an activity has been completed. Or it can be part of periodic meetings with each of your people or a standard procedure you go through in the updates your people provide at staff meetings. Be sure to model what you expect when you describe something you did — Here's what we learned. Next time we'll do it this way.

Remember to do a review regardless of the outcome of an action — failure or success. We are much more likely to reflect on our failures. Too often, we don't take time to learn from our accomplishments and never really understand the keys to our success and what lessons we can take forward.

Most of your managerial interactions with people will occur in the Prep and Review stages. Only with someone inexperienced or in situations of high stakes and high risk will you, or should you, be involved in the actual performance of a task.

Used this way consistently and consciously, Prep-Do-Review becomes a powerful management tool that will improve how you manage your people. By giving you ways to be involved without directly intruding as your people do their work, it will make your interactions with them richer, improve outcomes, help people learn, and make you a better delegator.

If you operate this way as a boss consistently, you'll find certain core management tasks become easier and more systematic. It will let you delegate more intelligently, based on both a person's skill and experience level and on the situation. It will help you coach people more effectively; indeed, it will help you turn many tasks into learning experiences. And it will let you use your time more effectively by helping you determine when you do and don't need to be involved.

With very experienced people, and especially with routine tasks, you needn't be involved in either Prep or Do, but as a boss you never completely let go of the Review stage. You may not review outcomes after every task, but ongoing performance review is something you'll never give up entirely.

If you think about it, Prep-Do-Review is the fundamental cycle of activities by which effective bosses manage — through a perpetual loop of prep-do-review-prep-do-review. By using it to become more mindful and deliberate in all you do, it will help you convert mundane workaday activities into management activities. It will help you make progress through the daily work. And it's the way you guide your people, produce results, and help them learn without inserting yourself unnecessarily into what they do. It's not the solution to every management challenge, but it's a powerful approach and the closest thing to a management secret that we know.

Leadership Diagnostic: Are You Having Maximum Impact?

2011-03-26T16:04:00.000-04:00

For most of us, the high-impact leader lurking inside comes out only on our best days. If you find yourself in this category—if you’re not getting the leadership traction you want—ask yourself these questions. If most of your answers are “no,” you may be getting in your own way.

1. Overemphasizing Personal Goals

Do I spend most of my time as a manager thinking about what other people in the organization need to succeed?

Does the “best version” of my employees show up in my presence?

Does their best version endure in my absence?

2. Protecting Your Public Image

Do I ever stop monitoring myself and simply do my job?

Have I been willing to “look bad” in the service of my team or organization?

Do I explicitly model the attitudes and behaviors I want others in my organization to adopt?

3. Turning Competitors into Enemies

Is it rare for me to feel defensive, insecure, or judgmental?

Is it rare for people to feel defensive, insecure, or judgmental around me?

Is my environment generally free of people I can’t stand to be around?

4. Going It Alone

Do I have a core group of people who help me make important decisions?

Do I have people around me who can handle both my audacity and my insecurities?

Do the most important people in my life participate in my leadership dreams?

5. Waiting for Permission

Is it possible to make a difference from my current position?

Do I have control over when I’ll be able to have a meaningful impact?

Could I become a leader before other people see me as one?

Sales Teams: Forum on analyzing performance based on stats

2011-03-21T08:05:00.000-04:00

This company has 11 reps (a – k on the graph) and like every sales team, there is a wide variety of skills, effort and personalities. So here are the questions:

Who would you consider the top rep
Who is the worst rep
Who would you cut and why?
What individual training would you suggest
What group training would you suggest
Any comments on lead to closing ratios
Which rep should be the bench mark for success based on their activity.

These reports were pulled from Front Row Solutions CRM and are based on a 12 month window. The assumption is that all the reps have been employed continuously the past 12 months.

I look forward to your insights!

What not to do when interviewing for a sales role

2011-03-18T07:44:00.001-04:00

I have been recruiting for one of my clients recently and I have to tell you, it still get surprised the odd time by unprofessional responses.

It's important to understand that the person interviewing you is trying to predict future behavior. If you can't comply to requests from the interviewer (within reason) you have to understand that they may be making observations on your ability to work as a team, follow leadership, your writing ability and your responsiveness to potential customers.

This is a real email I received and an example of how not to respond:

Hello Susan,

Sorry but my copier is not working at all at this time. So I will not be able to get you a copy of my resume. But I can confirm that I can make our appointment for Tuesday am. Could you confirm that you got this email and our meeting is confirmed.

If a candidate can not be resourceful enough to find a printer, how hard will he try with a customer?

The use of highlighting and capital letters is perceived as email yelling or making the statement loud. This is not a tone you want to take with a potential employer.

The grammar and writing style uses the same word twice in a sentence and no one should start a sentence with "But".

Responding to a recruiter should not be taken lightly. How you interact now will influence if you are moved forward in the process.

Thanks,

Susan

Sales Best Practices: Where Will You Find the Time?

2011-03-17T07:47:00.001-04:00

I wanted to preface this blog article as I would not want the power of the message lost. I used to work for a great sales manager, Dave Brown. He was tough and fair. He taught me discipline and persistence but more importantly he taught me how to work smart and hard.

Back in the late 90's, I made a base of $36k and on target was $70k. Dave would not let us do anything but be on the phone from 9 to 5. No emails (not there were many), no correspondence, no expense forms - nothing but selling. My first year I made $125k.

What Dave taught me was that the extra time pays dividends.

Enjoy

_____________________________________________________________________________

By: Anthony Iannarino

Time is a deep fundamental. You have to use it well—very well—to produce the best results possible. Much of what you need to do to produce sales results isn’t urgent. More still, much of what needs done doesn’t show up on the reports that your sales manager requires.

Prospecting and nurturing are two vital activities salespeople fail to spend time on. To produce better results, you have to find the time to religiously focus on these tasks and activities. Here is where you’ll find the time.
Arrive Earlier, Stay Later

Your company may require you to work from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. That may be what they require, but it may not have anything at all to do with what succeeding wildly requires of you.
Getting to work even a half hour earlier to respond to emails, to do your follow up work, or to update your sales force automation means that you gain a half hour later in the day. If you stay an extra half hour to prepare your call lists for the next day, you will have gained a full hour.
That extra hour on an 8-hour day is 11% increase in the time you work. By shifting the time you do administrative tasks, you will find an additional hour to invest in productive prospecting or nurturing activities.
You may have to wake up an hour earlier.
Skip Lunch, Or Make It Meaningful

The most effective people I know do one of three things at lunchtime; they skip lunch, they eat at their desk, or they have lunch with a client, prospect, or someone in their network.
Skipping lunch (or working through your lunch) will buy you another hour of productivity. Skipping lunch or eating at your desk is good for two days each week.
Then, schedule a client lunch and invest your time in those relationships, schedule a dream client for lunch and nurture that relationship, and schedule someone in your network for a working lunch.
What if you don’t have anyone to take on one of those days? Then schedule someone from another department within your own company and nurture the internal relationships and grease the skids to make sure that you deliver for your dream clients and clients.
Doing both of the above will find you a net 22% increase in your productive work time. But there is still more.
Avoiding the Weapons of Mass Distraction

This one only gives you back the time you normally waste. This means eliminating much of time you spend with the weapons of mass distraction, the Internet, most emails, more than half your phone calls, and much of time you spend at the water cooler.
If you are completely and totally honest with yourself, there is almost always an hour to be found in time wasted on distractions and novelties. You have to firewall your time from distractions, and you have to plan your day so that you do what is necessary and not urgent.
By doing so, you can easily find another full hour to spend prospecting, nurturing your dream clients, or taking care of your existing clients. This is without suggesting that you do what the most successful salespeople do, which is to do a couple hours of work from home (especially all their administrative tasks and duties).
Protect your time. Invest it wisely in opening and nurturing the relationships that you need to gain and win opportunities.
What could an extra hour each day invested in real sales activities do for your results? (That’s 260 hours over the course of the year, or an extra 6.5 weeks)

The Six Real Reasons Why VPs of Sales are Fired

2011-03-15T07:30:00.005-04:00

From the Heavy Hitter Wisdom

It can be well-argued that the vice president of sales is the most important position within a company since their words and actions impact the organization’s most critical issue—generating revenue. However, the average job tenures of vice presidents of sales is now at an all time low of eighteen months to twenty-four months.

Obviously, one of the main reasons VPs of sales are fired is because they miss the revenue target. However, with the economy in the tank this traditional measuring stick doesn’t tell the entire story. In fact, many VP of sales are “let go” at the wrong time and for all the wrong reasons today. Quite often the CEO mistakenly believes the grass will instantly become greener with the addition of a new sales leader. Unfortunately, this tumultuous changing of the executive guard can do far more harm than good in both the short and long term. With this in mind, here are the six real reasons why a vice president of sales should be fired.

Inability to Recruit “A” level Talent. Outside of revenue generation, the most important task for every vice president of sales is to attract, hire, and retain top-level talent. In other words, the VP of sales must present the compelling closing arguments to “A” quality salespeople as to why they should join the company. More importantly, the VP of sales should be able to recruit high quality “A” level managers. Because, “A” level managers hire “A” level salespeople and “B” level managers hire “B” and “C” level salespeople. The cascading effect of diminishing talent kills the competitiveness of the sales organization. This is particularly true for smaller companies that must compete against a gorilla (Oracle, IBM, Cisco, etc.) in their industry.

Wrong Sales Culture. The sales organization’s culture dramatically impacts the ability to achieve revenue. Three of the worst sales cultures are based upon secrecy, dominance, or submission. A secretive sales culture is one where there is a conscious effort to withhold information from the rest of the company. As a result, there is a black hole of customer information and engineering and marketing are always guessing about what they should do next. A dominant sales culture takes bullying to the extreme. They condescendingly steam roll the other departments of the company to get what they want and cut corners wherever possible. At the other end of the spectrum is a culture based upon submission and inferiority. Think about it for a moment, if the sales organization doesn’t have enough backbone to fight internal battles inside their own company how can they be expected to vanquish the competition in the field?

Inaccurate Forecasting. Does the VP of sales have the pulse of the sales organization? Does he look through rose colored glasses over-optimistically at the forecast or with so much pessimism that it is impossible to decipher what business is real? Is he well-versed on the major deals and close enough to the salespeople to discern unachievable pipe dreams from real pipeline? Are there continual surprises and is bad news continually delivered at the last possible moment? Remember what Machiavelli said, bad news should be given all at once and as soon as possible.

Executive Team Combativeness. Since the sales function relies so heavily on the other departments (engineering, marketing, customer support, etc.) to achieve success, it is completely natural that friction develops between members of the executive team. And, the VP of sales who tenaciously fights for his department’s causes should be respected. However, a change is warranted when this turns into a personal vendetta against other executive team members.

Is the VP of Sales a Strategist? Can he or she create a competitive sales strategy based upon marketplace realities (and implement a process to execute it)? Does he aggregate meaningful product feedback and articulately represent the customer’s experience? Does he help advise marketing as to which programs to pursue and how best to spend their precious dollars? Most of all, can he dovetail his sales philosophy to the company’s ever-changing strategic direction?

Does He Add Value in C-Level Executive Customer Meetings? One of the most critical and often overlooked aspects of the VP of Sales job is the ability to participate in C-Level customer meetings and convince company leaders to buy. Does your VP of sales sit in the safe confines of the ivory tower at headquarters or is he able to make a direct impact on the most important deals in the field?

I remember hearing a vice president of sales publicly pronounce that all his problems would be solved if only he could, “Make the monkeys climb higher in the trees.” His tongue-in-cheek criticism was the topic of conversation within his sales force for months. To his salespeople, it was just another example of a management style that they found to be repugnant. Anyone who creates an environment like that should be fired.

Conversely, I have the pleasure to work with many very talented sales VP’s. They are great recruiters, masterful forecasters, and serve as mentors to sales managers and salespeople alike. They are charismatic leaders who measure their success using three criteria; meeting revenue goals, creating an environment where the entire team can succeed, and helping the entire company realize its potential. While they are not perfect, they are well-liked and a unifying force for the entire organization.

As a side note, one thing that can really hurt a VP is fishing off the company Pier. With power can come attention and adoration. I have seen a few VP's in my time fall due to inter office romance.

Twitter for Business: 2011 Directory of Techies to follow on Twitter

2011-03-11T07:57:00.003-05:00

By Jason Hiner
If you’re interested in technology and you want to know who to follow on Twitter, here is a directory of leading tech journalists, commentators, and personalities, divided by categories and specialties.

As I’ve been saying for years, Twitter can be an extremely valuable tool for techies — if you know who to use it. The most important factor in making Twitter useful is knowing who to follow. To help people interested in technology, I published a list of 100 techies on Twitter in 2009 and then updated the list to 140 techies in 2010.

It’s time to update the list again, since lots of new tech commentators and personalities have joined Twitter during the past year and I’ve discovered some new names worth following. My list is up to 180. However, instead of simply adding to the numbers, I’ve decided to break the list into categories to make it easier navigate. In each category I’ve listed the people alphabetically.

For updates on the latest tech news you can find me on Twitter at @jasonhiner

If you’re new to Twitter, I’d recommend reading my article on the four stages of a typical Twitter user and my quick Twitter guide and glossary for business users. Also, if you’re new to Twitter and you’re clicking through the names listed below, there’s an important thing to note. You should ignore all of the posts that begin with an @username. Those are individual replies. You will not see those in your Twitter stream (unless you follow the user being mentioned, which will be rare). Focus on the posts that simply begin with text in order to get an idea of the kinds of things that the person posts on Twitter. That’s the stuff that will show up in your Twitter stream if you follow them.

Learn More » The people I’ve listed here are technology executives, journalists, pundits, and analysts who not only have a Twitter account, but also post actively about the tech industry. If there are people you’d recommend added to the list, post a note in the discussion at the bottom of the article.

I wish there was a way to simply let you follow everyone on this list with a single click. There was a utility called TweepML that used to let you create one-click lists, but it is currently down for maintenance. Once TweepML is available again, I will create a version of this list with that tool.
However, I have created this as an official Twitter list called Hiner Tech Directory so that you can also follow the list that way. In fact, if you have a desktop client like TweetDeck or HootSuite or Seesmic, you can simply add the Hiner Tech Directory list in its own column and view it as a feed separate from your main Twitter feed.

General technology

•Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) Editor in Chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail

•Michael Arrington (@arrington) Founder of TechCrunch

•Patrick Beja (@notpatrick) French podcaster and tech commentator

•Bianca Bosker (@bbosker) Technology Editor for The Huffington Post

•Henry Blodget (@hblodget) Controversial Wall Street journalist who covers tech sector

•Rick Broida (@cheapskateblog) CNET blogger scours the Web looking for the best deals in tech

•Brian Cooley (@briancooley) CNET car-tech editor

•Charles Cooper (@coopeydoop) Veteran tech reporter for cbsnews.com

•Dan Costa (@dancosta) Executive editor at PC Magazine

•Robert Cringley (@cringely) Long-time technology writer and pundit

•Chris Dawson (@mrdatahs) ZDNet blogger on technology in education

•Michael Dell (@michaeldell) CEO of Dell

•Sam Diaz (@sammyd) ZDNet news hound on the Between the Lines blog

•Larry Dignan (@ldignan) ZDNet Editor in Chief; prolific tech news blogger

•Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) Co-editor of Boing Boing; digital rights activist

•Jack Dorsey (@jack) CEO of Square; creator and co-founder of Twitter

•John C. Dvorak (@therealdvorak) Famously cranky tech pundit

•Esther Dyson (@edyson) Veteran technology pundit

•Mike Elgan (@mikeelgan) Widely-published freelance tech writer

•Rob Enderle (@enderle) Long-time analyst of the PC industry

•Michael Gartenberg (@gartenberg) Gartner analyst on consumer technology

•Denise Howell (@dhowell) Lawyer; commentator on technology and law

•Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) Canadian tech writer for GigaOm

•Shibani Joshi (@shibanijoshi) Fox Business Network reporter on tech and the NASDAQ

•Mitch Kapor (@mkapor) Lotus, Mozilla pioneer; angel investor

•Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla) One of the tech world’s most influential venture capitalists

•Adrian Kingsley-Hughes (@the_pc_doc) Technology hardware commentator at ZDNet

•Martin Lamonica (@mlamonica) CNET writer on green technology

•Leo Laporte (@leolaporte) Host of TWiT network and former TechTV host

•Cali Lewis (@calilewis) Host of GeekBrief.TV

•Katie Linendall (@katielinendoll) On-air geek tipster for CNN, CBS, and others

•Jim Louderback (@jlouderb) CEO of Revision3; former editor of PC Magazine

•Om Malik (@om) Founder of GigaOm

•John Markoff (@markoff) Science writer for The New York Times

•Harry McCracken (@harrymccracken) Founder of Technologizer and former editor of PC World

•Declan McCullagh (@declanm) CBS News correspondent on US tech policy

•Tom Merritt (@acedtect) Host of Tech News Today on the TWiT network

•Clayton Morris (@claytonmorris) Fox TV personality covering geek topics and social media

•Natali Morris (@natalimorris) CNET TV host of Loaded and tech correspondent for CBS News

•Walt Mossberg (@waltmossberg) Tech columnist for The Wall Street Journal

•Patrick Norton (@patricknorton) Tekzilla host and former TechTV personality

•Andrew Nusca (@editorialiste) ZDNet news writer; SmartPlanet.com editor

•John Paczkowski (@johnpaczkowski) Tech news hound for All Things Digital

•Jason Perlow (@jperlow) ZDNet technology columnist

•Chris Pirillo (@chrispirillo) Tech geek turned Internet personality

•David Pogue (@pogue) Tech columnist for New York Times and CNBC

•Jason Pontin (@jason_pontin) Editor in Chief of MIT Technology Review

•Seth Porges (@sethporges) Tech editor at Popular Mechanics magazine

•JR Rafael (@jr_raphael) Tech news writer for PC World

•Gabe Rivera (@gaberivera) Founder of Techmeme

•Jack Schofield (@jackschofield) Computer editor at The Guardian

•MG Siegler (@parislemon) TechCrunch news writer

•Dwight Silverman (@dsilverman) Technology editor for the Houston Chronicle

•Brad Stone (@bradstone) Technology reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek

•Robert Strohmeyer (@rstrohmeyer) Freelance tech columnist

•Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) Silicon Valley blogger for AllThingsD.com

•Baratunde Thurston (@baratunde) Editor, writer, and comedian; one of the funniest techies on Twitter

•Dan Tynan (@tynan_on_tech) Tech humor columnist and veteran tech writer

•Lance Ulanoff (@lanceulanoff) Editor in Chief of PC Magazine

•Padmasree Warrior (@padmasree) CTO of Cisco Systems

•Molly Wood (@mollywood) CNET TV host and writer; creator of the famed “Molly rant”

•Becky Worley (@bworley) ABC technology reporter, TWiT network host

Mobile computing

•Bonnie Cha (@bonniecnet) CNET mobile tech editor

•Jessica Dolcourt (@jdolcourt) CNET mobile tech reporter

•Bob Egan (@bobegan) Analyst on mobile tech; Wi-Fi pioneer

•Ina Fried (@inafried) AllThingsD.com mobile reporter

•Jonathan Geller (@boygenius) Founder and Editor in Chief of Boy Genius Report

•Kent German (@kentgerman) CNET mobile tech editor

•Nicole Lee (@nicole) CNET mobile tech reporter

•Stuart Miles (@stuartmiles) Founder of Pocket-lint.com

•Matthew Miller (@palmsolo) ZDNet blogger on mobile computing

•Maggie Reardon (@maggie_reardon) CNET reporter on mobile and wireless technology

•Sascha Seagan (@saschasegan) Mobile writer for PC Magazine

•Mark Spoonauer (@mspoonauer) Editor in Chief of Laptop Magazine

•Kevin Tofel (@kevinctofel) Mobile site editor for GigaOm

•Tony Vincent (@tonyvincent) Writer on mobile tech and IT in education

Enterprise

•Marc Benioff (@benioff) CEO of Salesforce.com

•David Berlind (@dberlind) TechWeb Editor-in-Chief

•Toni Bowers (@tbowers928) TechRepublic IT career columnist

•Tony Bradley (@tonys3kur3) Freelance tech writer specializing in security

•David Davis (@davidmdavis) Author, blogger, expert on Cisco and virtualization technologies

•Bill Detwiler (@billdetwiler) TechRepublic’s Head Technology Editor

•Erik Eckel (@erikeckel) IT consultant and TechRepublic writer

•Scot Finnie (@scotfinnie) Editor in Chief of Computerworld

•Steve Gillmor (@stevegillmor) Veteran tech journalist

•Bob Gourley (@bobgourley) CTOvision.com blogger; government IT expert

•Dion Hinchcliffe (@dhinchcliffe) Blogger and consultant on Web 2.0 for business

•Chuck Hollis (@chuckhollis) EMC CTO and blogger

•Alex Howard (@digiphile) Government 2.0 Correspondent for  O’Reilly Media

•Doug Kaye (@dougkaye) Founder of IT Conversations

•Michael Krigsman (@mkrigsman) Watchdog of IT project failures

•Scott Lowe (@otherscottlowe) CIO, author, and TechRepublic columnist

•Abbie Lundberg (@abbielundberg) Former editor in chief of CIO Magazine

•Steve Ranger (@steveranger) Editor of UK IT site Silicon.com

•Don Tennant (@dontennant) Former editor in chief of Computerworld

•Rick Vanover (@rickvanover) Senior IT professional and TechRepublic blogger

•Werner Vogels (@werner) Amazon.com CTO

•Alex Wolfe (@awolfe58) Editor in Chief of InformationWeek

Microsoft

•Todd Bishop (@toddbishop) Seattle-based Microsoft reporter

•Ed Bott (@edbott) Microsoft Windows expert, blogger, book author

•Mary Jo Foley (@maryjofoley) Notable source on all things on Microsoft

•Bill Gates (@billgates) Microsoft co-founder and former CEO

•Mark Kaelin (@markwkaelin) TechRepublic editor covering Windows and PCs

•Frank X. Shaw (@fxshaw) PR chief at Microsoft

•Deb Shinder (@debshinder) Popular tech tip writer for TechRepublic and other publications

•Paul Thurrott (@thurrott) Microsoft Windows columnist, editor, and podcaster

•Stefan Weitz (@stefanweitz) Search chief at Microsoft

Apple

•Jacqui Cheng (@eJacqui) Apple editor for Ars Technica

•Jim Dalrymple (@jdalrymple) Editor of The Loop, veteran Apple columnist

•Philip Elmer-DeWitt (@philiped) Apple reporter for Fortune Magazine

•John Gruber (@gruber) Author of Daring Fireball

•Andy Ihnatko (@ihnatko) Apple pundit

•Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) Venture capitalist, former Apple employee, former Mac columnist

•Steven Levy (@stevenjayl) Author and columnist on Apple topics

•Tim Robertson (@mymac) Podcaster; founder of MyMac.com

•John Siracusa (@siracusa) Apple writer for Ars Technica

•Jason Snell (@jsnell) Editorial Director of Macworld

•Brian Tong (@brian_tong) CNET TV host of AppleByte and Prizefight

•Seth Weintraub (@llsethj) Columnist covering Google and Apple

Google

•John Battelle (@johnbattelle) Author and pundit on Google and Internet search

•Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) Google engineer, blogger

•Chris DiBona (@cdibona) Open source spokesman at Google

•Vic Gundotra (@vicgundotra) Google VP of engineering for mobile apps

•Marissa Mayer (@marissamayer) Google product development executive

•Andy Rubin (@arubin) Head of Android development at Google

•Eric Schmidt (@ericschmidt) Chairman of Google

•Gina Trapani (@ginatrapani) Host of This Week in Google podcast

Open source

•Matt Asay (@mjasay) COO of Ubuntu and open source columnist

•John “Mad Dog” Hall (@maddoghall) Free software advocate

•Doc Searls (@dsearls) Tech journalist, author, open source advocate

•Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (@sjvn) Long-time Linux and open source columnist

•Jack Wallen (@jlwallen) Linux enthusiast, columnist, and tip writer

Web and social media

•Randall Bennett (@randallb) Founder of TechVi, Web video specialist

•Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) Inventor of the World Wide Web

•Paul Boutin (@paulboutin) Reporter for VentureBeat, The New York Times, and Wired

•Danah Boyd (@zephoria) Academic/researcher in new media

•Jason Calacanis (@jason) CEO of Mahalo, founder of Weblogs Inc.

•Pete Cashmore (@mashable) CEO of Mashable

•Mrinal Desai (@mrinaldesai) Tech startup founder; tech news junkie

•Caterina Fake (@caterina) Co-founder of Flickr

•John Furrier (@furrier) Silicon Valley entrepreneur

•Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) Professor and author who covers tech and new media

•Sarah Lacy (@sarahcuda) Freelance author covering Silicon Valley

•Shira Lazar (@shiralazar) Web video journalist covering the intersection of tech, culture, and new media

•Jennifer Leggio (@mediaphyter) ZDNet blogger on social media for business

•Charlene Li (@charleneli) Author and social media thought leader

•Amber MacArther (@ambermac) Tech journalist and broadcaster

•Richard MacManus (@rww) Editor and founder of ReadWriteWeb

•Andrew Mager (@mager) Web developer and ZDNet blogger on Web 2.0

•Caroline McCarthy (@caro) CNET writer covering Web 2.0

•Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) Founder of WordPress

•Rafe Needleman (@rafe) Editor of CNET’s Webware

•Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media

•Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) Forrester analyst on new media technologies

•Aza Razkin (@azaaza) Former creative lead for Firefox

•Kevin Rose (@kevinrose) Founder of Digg.com, host of Diggnation

•Joshua Schachter (@joshu) Creator of Delicious, a.k.a. del.icio.us

•Erick Schonfeld (@erickschonfeld) TechCrunch co-editor

•Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) Tech writer and social media flag-bearer

•Stephen Shankland (@stshank) CNET News reporter, covering the Web

•Joel Spolsky (@spolsky) Co-founder of Stack Overflow

•Owen Thomas (@owenthomas) Writer at VentureBeat

•Alexia Tsotsis (@alexia) TechCrunch reporter

•Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) Tech venture capitalist in New York

•Dave Winer (@davewiner) “The father of blogging and RSS” (BBC)

•Jonathan Zittrain (@zittrain) Author and Harvard professor covering the Internet

Consumer electronics

•Donald Bell (@donald) Gadget reporter for CNET

•Veronica Belmont (@veronica) Host of Tekzilla and Qore, and former CNET TV host

•Ryan Block (@ryan) Former Engadget editor and co-founder of GDGT

•David Carnoy (@davidcarnoy) CNET editor of mobile gadgets

•Jason Chen (@diskopo) Gizmodo editor

•Brian Lam (@blam) Editorial Director of Gizmodo

•Erica Ogg (@ericainsf) Gadget reporter for CNET

•Nilay Patel (@reckless) Managing Editor of Engadget

•Don Reisinger (@donreisinger) Gadget columnist for CNET

•Peter Rojas (@peterrojas) Founding editor of both Gizmodo and Engadget

•Ross Rubin (@rossrubin) NPD head analyst on consumer technology

•Joanna Stern (@joannastern) Engadget reporter

•Jeremy Toeman (@jtoeman) Consumer electronics startup advisor

•Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) Editor in Chief of Engadget

•Dave Zatz (@davezatz) Gadget and digital lifestyle blogger

Dealing with Specific Types of Difficult People

2011-03-09T07:28:00.009-05:00

Tim McClintock, PMP, Global Knowledge Instructor

Introduction
About 10% of the typical workforce falls into the “Difficult People” category. Some people are "surprised it's so little!" Sometimes it feels like they are everywhere! What is a difficult person? Perhaps the better question is: what is a difficult person for you? Perhaps it's someone who is disruptive. Or . . . it might be someone who is too quiet and hard to draw out; not a good listener and always interrupts; someone who bullies and is very abrupt.

The effects they have on the organization vary greatly, but usually involve the following: Low moral, increased conflict, group attitude goes as their attitude goes, intimidation, insults, team demoralization, decreased productivity, rising costs, increasing project risks, need for additional resources, etc.

What happens to you when you deal with a Difficult Person? Everyone has a slightly different reaction, but some common reactions include a rise in blood pressure, racing heart, lump in the throat, "fight, flight, or freeze" syndrome,” or getting red-in-the-face.

One thing you can be sure of: If you don't do something about the "thing" that someone is doing that makes them difficult for you, you'll continue to get more of it.

What Are the Different Types of Difficult People?

There are many types of difficult people. In general, they can be rolled into these main groups:

The Steamroller

This is the bully of the group - always interrupting, insulting, and yelling.We all know those types.

The Sniper

These are the folks who hide in the back of room, always sniping - taking shots at everyone, constantly nitpicking back at you, sending out comments, etc. They always want to do this from "under cover." If you call them on it they say, "Oh, I'm just kidding," or, "Can't ya take a joke?" or, "I didn't say anything!" They always have a comment.

The "Can't Say No" Person.

Will not say no to work. The problem is they won't say no, they won't say no, they won't say no . . . and then they finally just collapse!

The Know-It-All

Do I have to say anything else? Need I say more? They know it all!

The Complainer

Chronic complainers! Chronic whiners! To them, life is one big complaint!

The Staller

The Indecisive Staller. This is the person who just will not make a decision. They will not commit to anything; they are always stalling.

Time To Take Action!

No matter which one of these personality types is the difficult person for you, you must learn to effectively deal with them.

Dealing with Specific Types of Difficult People

So that leads to the question: How do you deal with these difficult types of people?

Dealing with the Steamroller

When dealing with a steamroller, also known as the verbal "big bully," stay calm. Typically, they are trying to "rile you up," wanting you to elevate your emotions to their level. Don't let them do it. Keep eye contact with them. Remain assertive. Let them go on and on, let them unwind. Then when they spool down a bit, interrupt them!

When you interrupt them, you will have the chance you need to become assertive. That's when you pick up the ball. One effective approach is close to Muhammad Ali's Rope-A-Dope! Muhammad Ali was known to have the ability take a great many punches to his mid-section. He would lean against the ropes, and let his opponent "box himself out"/get tired. He would wait for his opportunity, and then, BAM! He would knock them out. In a similar fashion, you should do the same thing verbally when dealing with the steamroller. Allow them to verbally wear themselves out, and then, when you see your opportunity, BAM! You take your turn.

Call them by name, and then say, "OK, now wait a minute, I have something to say. I've been listening to you, now you listen to me." You will start, and what will happen? They will interrupt! What should you do? Be assertive! Say, "Hey, I said wait a minute. I listened to you, now it's my turn." Don't back down! That's what they expect! Also remember to keep eye contact. Just don't back down. You may not "win" the argument or
discussion, but once you stand up to them, they typically will become your best buddy. It only takes one time!

They may still bully other people on your team, but they won't bully you any longer. By going "toe to toe" with them, you may have just earned their respect.

Dealing with the Sniper

Again, these are the folks who hide in the back of room, sending out comments, always sniping, taking shots at everyone, constantly nit-picking back at you. Think back to your high school classroom days. What would your teacher do with these guys? Most of the time, the teacher would call them out. For example, the teacher may say something like, "Excuse me, did you have something to say? Something to share with the entire class?" Of course they would rarely, if ever, stand up and say anything; they would always back down and say something like, "Oh, no, I was just kidding," or, "No, I don't have anything to share."
This approach works most of the time. Call them out; don't let them get away with it. Clarify: "Excuse me, but I thought I heard something in that comment. Do you have something to share with everyone in the meeting?"

One word of caution: be careful. Most of the time they will stop their sniping behavior, but occasionally they will shift gears and become the bully - the "Steamroller." But now you know what to do with a bully.

Simply switch tactics, do your own version of the "rope-a-dope," wait for your opportunity, and then when it's time, seize the moment.

Dealing with the "Can't Say No" Person

This is the person who has a hard time saying no, especially as it relates to work assignments. They will attempt to undertake any assignment, even those given to them by people other than their own boss.

Why would they do this? Some people really are afraid to say no. They are afraid to be seen as incompetent or unable to carry enough of the load. Some people simply do not know their limits, or worse, they ignore them.

In other situations, it is because the employee is a rookie on the team and doesn't want to let the others down; for others it is a personality issue, or even the result of the culture in which they were raised. In some cultures, saying no is highly discouraged. As a result, people raised in this environment have a hard time when it comes to balancing the work-load effectively.

In dealing with the "Can't Say No" person, the first thing you want to do is to build a relationship with them.You need to earn their trust and get them to be comfortable with you. Then, let them know what you are concerned about.

Once you have built a good level of trust, you can begin by asking questions that are designed to help them understand that they are out of balance. Be careful, though, as they will often be very sensitive. In their mind, they are doing a really good thing. From their point of view, if they were not doing the work, it really would not get accomplished. Quite often though, even if they do manage to complete all of the work that they have taken on, the quality of that work will suffer.

Occasionally you will find the "Can't Say No" person who is able to accomplish all the work with an acceptable, and even excellent, quality level. The problem here is that rarely will they be able to maintain that momentum, and they will eventually burn out. At that point, they will be of no use to the team, but more importantly, they will have done harm to themselves. Recovery from a true burnout stage is more than difficult.

Our goal is to prevent the "Can't Say No" person from ever reaching anything close to that stage. There are several things that you, as the boss, can do that will be helpful.

You can make suggestions for alternatives; there may be many people who can do the work that they have taken on, but they will not see that. You can point out the obvious, but quite often you will need to become their work filter. You will tell them that they are only allowed to take on work assignments that are passed through you. No one is allowed to give them an assignment that does not come by your desk first. They will resist this, because they will feel it to be an embarrassment. They will try to stall you and put you off. Just be firm, and reassure them that things will be fine, but they must continue to trust you.

You will need to keep on top of them, continually getting agreement that this is the best approach. You need to be their sanity checker. You can do a workload histogram to show them exactly how much work they have been doing. This will show them exactly how much they have been out of balance. It's almost like a 12-step program. They need to learn in baby steps that it's okay to say no, at times, and the world really will continue.
The work really will get done.

Dealing with the Know-It-All

In dealing with the Know-It-All, here are some bottom-line items to be aware of.

Typically, they have been around a long time, and they do know a lot. So, make sure you know your stuff, because if you don't, they will point it out very quickly. Recognize it, and respect it, but show them that maybe their ideas aren't always the right answer or the right way.

The typical Know-It-All tends to be a bit of a bully as well. They have their idea, and they just won't let it go. You can try saying things like, "That's a really good point, but have you thought of this? What if this or that happens?" Basically, you need help them see the alternatives. Will they ever admit they are wrong? Typically, not. It's like trying to catch a greased pig. Most of the time, it's not going to happen.

If you find yourself dealing with a Know-It-All in a meeting, ignore the temptation to make them look bad. Do not alienate them. Throw an idea out there, and let it sit for a minute. Sometimes they may actually come around to it, but quite often, they will want to spin it so that it will seem as if it were their idea. And you know what? That is okay sometimes. Occasionally, selling an idea someone else wants to take credit for, once in a while, is okay. Your job is done, and the elimination of conflict will be better in the long run.

Dealing with the Complainer

Understand that to them, life is one big complaint. Complainers typically come in one of two delicious flavors.

The first type of Complainer really doesn't care about solutions; they just want someone to listen to them. They will come into your office in the morning, and they will talk, and talk, and talk, until you finally chase them out! Here's what you can do. Listen for a while, and then move them to a problem-solving alliance.

Acknowledge their feelings, deal with the emotions if necessary, but try to push them toward finding a problem-solving solution. You can say something like this, "Okay, I hear your dilemma. Let's see if we can solve it."

The secret is when you move into problem-solving, they will typically leave. Very quickly. They really don't want to solve anything. They just want to complain!

With the second type of complainer, it's a little bit different. These are the folks who complain because they are paralyzed - they really don't know what to do. When you move to problem-solving, you really will help them. One thing to be careful of though: don't facilitate their dependence on you, otherwise they will come back again and again for the very same issue or problem. As the saying goes, you can feed someone, or you can teach them to fish for themselves. If you fail to do that, it is now you who has an additional problem, one of time management. Learn to be upfront. Say, "Okay, I will show you this one time. Here's a pen and a sheet of paper; I'm going to talk, and you will take notes. I will show you this one time. I will stay here all day if necessary, but when we leave, I expect that you will really have 'gotten it'. I expect that you will be able to do this for yourself after this conversation, so make sure to pay attention and ask as many questions as you need to understand."

Use a tone that is gentle, yet firm at the same time. By having this conversation, you will actually have helped two people, you and them.

Dealing with the Staller

Ah, the Indecisive Staller. They don't want to upset anyone, which really means that they want to please everyone.

In their mind, the way to accomplish this is never to make a decision that ends up upsetting everyone!

They don't want to take a stand. Instead, they take the attitude that if they just leave the issue alone, it will go away. Yes, quite often it will go away, but only because someone else will have done the work, and now they're mad too!

One way of helping them is to discuss the benefits of deciding. Talk about all the good that comes through getting off the fence and making a decision: work actually is accomplished, people are happy, morale will go up, projects will be able to move forward, and they get to continue drawing a paycheck! Another thing you can do is discuss a few options with them. This is basically the old salesman’s trick. Instead of saying, "Would you like to buy the vacuum cleaner today?" you say, "Which of the vacuum cleaners will you be buying today, the red one or the blue one?" What you are doing is narrowing down their options, and forcing them to make a decision.

Summary

From our short analysis of difficult people, one definite conclusion can be drawn. If you don't do something about the difficult people in your life, you will simply continue to get more of their problematic behavior.

Whether it is the Steamroller, the Sniper, the Can't Say No person, the Know-It-All, the Complainer, or the Staller, you must take action. Be gentle, but be firm, and remember they are human, just like you are. But, after all, it's a place of business, and work needs to be accomplished. And in the accomplishment of that work, sometimes the more difficult conversations need to take place.

Twitter for Business: A quick Twitter guide and glossary for business users

2011-03-07T11:47:00.001-05:00

By Jason Hiner

For a service that is remarkably simple, Twitter is often difficult for new users to understand and to quickly turn into something useful. In fact, the simplicity of Twitter can actually be a barrier in the beginning, because there’s not much to help a new user get started.

So in order to assist business users and IT professionals in getting up to speed on Twitter, I’ve put together this quick collection of 10 core Twitter concepts that you need to understand in order to turn Twitter into a powerful 140-character communications tool.

Who to follow

The first thing you need to figure out is who to follow. This, more than anything else, will determine how useful Twitter becomes for you. For business users, I’d recommend following many of the colleagues you work with on a regular basis. While some of them may post useless ramblings, you’re also likely to pick up project updates, inside perspectives, and subtle red flags that you would not have seen otherwise.

Of course, what makes Twitter most powerful for business users is following experts and thought leaders in your field and industry. For tech workers, I’ve put together a directory of techies who are active on Twitter. I’d also recommend finding thought leaders in your specific industry. Directories like Twellow can help. But the best method is to find a few industry experts, then look at their profile pages to see who they follow. You’re very likely to find other industry experts.
Learn More » Never be afraid to follow new people. Give them a try. However, if they post useless stuff, simply unfollow them. You should regularly unfollow people who simply don’t provide much value. This is part of the regular rhythm of Twitter because Twitter makes it very easy to follow and unfollow new people. In fact, after a couple years on Twitter, I’ve now got a few people whom I’ve followed and unfollowed several times.

What’s a tweet?

The word “tweet” is a Twitter term used as both a noun and a verb. As a verb, it used to talk about a user posting something on Twitter. For example, “She tweeted that she was flying to a business meeting in Seattle with Microsoft.” When used as a noun, it refers to an individual Twitter post. For example, “He posted a tweet last week that included a link to screenshots of Mac OS X Snow Leopard.”

What’s a retweet (RT)?

The “retweet” (often shortened to “RT”) is something that was not originally designed by the Twitter team, but Twitter users invented in order to re-post something really interesting from another Twitter user. For example, if another tech journalist (e.g. Harry McCracken) posted breaking tech news on Twitter, I might quickly take Harry’s post and re-post it like this: “RT @harrymccracken Google announces it is launching its own private space program.”

The reason I would post something like this is because not all of the people who follow me follow Harry, and I find it important and interesting enough to share with as many people as possible. It’s the social networking version of word-of-mouth.

By the way, Twitter recently announced that it is officially adopting retweeting, with plans to streamline the process for users, integrate retweeting into Twitter.com, and build the new retweeting functionality into its API.

Replies and mentions

A “reply” on Twitter is when you directly respond to a post from another user. For example, Sascha Seagan (a PC Magazine editor) recently tweeted, “I’m back from vacation. What I learned: Yes, AT&T coverage is much better outside NYC.” I replied, “@saschasegan In Midwest, AT&T network is infinitely better than NY or SF, but still not as reliable or widespread as Verizon.”

As you can see, you start a reply with the @ symbol and then add the person’s Twitter username. The Twitter.com home page makes it easy to reply to a tweet by simply mousing over it and then clicking the reply arrow. It automatically populates @username in the posting field and then you fill in the rest. Twitter client software (see below) also makes it easy to reply to a tweet.

Similar to a reply is a “mention.” This is where you mention a person’s name and since that person is on Twitter, you identify the person by using the their @username. For example, I might tweet something like, “While I was in New York today I had lunch with @ldignan to discuss our coverage plans for Windows 7 on ZDNet and TechRepublic.”

Also notice that every instance of an @username is turned into a clickable link that will take you to that user’s Twitter profile, where you can then choose to start following the person. Plus, on the Twitter home page you’ll see your @username on the right column of the screen. When you click this, you’ll see all of the replies to your tweets and mentions of your username. This is useful because there may be times when people you don’t follow mention or reply to you and this allows you to catch it.

Direct messages

There may also be times when you want to reply to someone one on Twitter, but you don’t want everyone else to see the message or you just don’t think it would be useful for everyone else to see. In that case, you can send a “direct message.”

To do this from Twitter.com, go to the person’s Twitter profile page and then go to the right column under Actions and the click the “message” link. However, keep in mind that you can only send direct messages to people who follow you. This prevents the direct message feature from being used by spammers.

I’ve also found that the direct message feature can work almost like an instant message to get someone’s attention, if the person is a regular Twitter user. It can often be a quicker way to message someone than e-mail, but less intrusive than a text message or instant message.

#Hashtags

Another Twitter convention that users developed without the input of the Twitter staff is hashtags. Hashtags are essentially keywords. For example, #techrepublic is a hashtag. When people post links to TechRepublic articles, they often identify them by adding the #techrepublic hashtag at the end of the tweet. Other popular tech hashtags include #windows7 and #iphone, for example.

Doing a Twitter search on a hashtag allows you to see all of the Twitter conservations that are happening around a specific topic. It can also be a good way to find people who regularly talk about a specific topic and then follow them.

One thing to remember about hashtags is that they are not case sensitive. So, #techrepublic is the same as #TechRepublic or #TECHREPUBLIC.

Posting links

Some of the most popular things to post on Twitter are links to articles, blog posts, video clips, etc. Some of the most valuable people to follow are the ones who post the best links, and that means not just the big stories that everyone is tweeting but also the really good stories that are under the radar.

The problem is that Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters and most article URLs are 50 characters or more. That doesn’t leave much space to post the title of the article or any brief thoughts about it. As a result, most people use URL shorteners such as TinyURL when posting links on Twitter. My favorite URL shortener is Bit.ly, because it allows you to shorten URLs to about 20 characters and it gives you some basic analytics on all of your Twitter links.

Desktop clients

Most habitual Twitter users don’t spend much time on Twitter.com. Instead, they migrate most of their Twitter use to desktop clients while they are working from their desk and smartphone clients when they’re on the go.
The most widely used desktop Twitter client is Tweetdeck, although Seismic and Twirl are also popular. Tweetdeck is an Adobe Air application that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It provides a columnized view of Twitter with columns for your main feed, your mentions, your direct messages, any #hashtag searches, and more.

One of the best parts of Tweetdeck is its ability to create groups. For example, I have groups for “Tech Journalists” and “CBS Interactive” (my work colleagues) so that I can view them in separate columns. Another nice feature of Tweetdeck is that it automatically refreshes, so you can just leave it open and let it do its thing in real-time.

For those who prefer to stick with Twitter in the Web browser, Twitter.com is still not your only means of accessing the service. Tweetvisor is a powerful browser-based Twitter client that puts a lot more Twitter functionality at your fingertips than the standard Twitter homepage. There are also a variety of Firefox plugins that can ramp up the experience of Twitter in the browser, including PowerTwitter, TwitterFox, and TwitBin.

Mobile clients

You know you’re getting addicted to Twitter when you start looking into how to use it from your smartphone. I know plenty of techies who use their smartphone as their primary method of accessing Twitter and the desktop is really secondary.

While you can use Twitter via SMS, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have an unlimited SMS plan. Plus, the Twitter mobile apps typically provide a much better experience by making it easier to reply, retweet, send a direct message, etc. Here’s a breakdown of some of the top Twitter clients on each of the big smartphone platforms:
•iPhone: Tweetie, Twitterific, Birdfeed, Tweetdeck, Twitterfon

•BlackBerry: UberTwitter, Twibble, TwitterBerry, TinyTwitter

•Windows Mobile: Twikini, PockeTwit, TinyTwitter, Twobile

•Palm Pre: Tweed, Spaz,

•Android: Twidroid, Twit2Go, CuTewit, TwitterRide

•Nokia Symbian: Gravity, Twittix,

Posting photos

Another interesting (and occasionally even useful) thing to post on Twitter are photos taken from your smartphone. This can be especially useful when you’re at trade conferences and industry events and you want to report on items of interest.

The most popular tool for posting photos on Twitter is Twitpic because you can use it from any cellphone with a camera. You simply take the photo with your phone and then email it to your customized Twitpic email address and you type your Twitter message in the subject line of the email. The challenge with this is that there’s no character count in the subject line of an email so you have to be careful to not make your message too long. If it’s over 140 characters it will simply get truncated.

Flickr has also come up a service that is virtually identical to Twitpic called Flickr2Twitter. So if you already have an active Flickr account, it makes sense to use Flickr rather than Twitpic because then all of your mobile photos get added to your album, rather than creating a separate album on Twitpic.

Sales Forum by Susan Corcoran

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Team Building in 2012

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How to maximize your field reps sales potential

Objection Handling

The Trial Close

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What a CEO should do...

How Today’s Hottest Startups Got Their Names

The Job Of A CEO At A 200 Person Company

Notes From the MIT Startup Bootcamp 2011

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Entrepreneurship is a World of Noes

Steve Jobs and the Seven Rules of Success

How to Give New Hires a Great Start

How not to write an email

The High Cost of Sales Team Turnover

Should You Add a Blog to Your Site?

Seven Personality Traits of Top Salespeople

There is always a plan "B"

5 Impediments to Turnaround and Growth

Lucy Kellaway: The seven deadly sins CEOs won't admit

Ten things top entrepreneurs do differently

Start Up Sales Strategy

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The dreaded "Just checking in"

Lead Nurturing and Mature Lead Management

10 Ideas For Those Critical Early Startup Sales

What Motivates An Entrepreneur?

The Most Underrated Quality of a CEO

Why Everyone Should Work in Sales — at Least for a While

Seven marketing mistakes most startups make

10 pitfalls of rookie management teams

Neil Patel’s Guide To Closing BIG Deals

Why sales should stop "checking in" and five tips to avoid it

Everyone sucks at interviewing. Everyone.

Consumers today more likely to be influenced by Twitter, Blogs

Top 18 tips (yes 18) on how to get and stay productive

How not to use Twitter for Business

10 pitfalls of rookie management teams

The 100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur

Cool ideas for your Face Book Page

Top 10 myths about job interviews

Top 10 questions to ask employees in a performance review at a small company

Top 10 over used business speak of 2010

How to Get Involved Without Micromanaging People

Leadership Diagnostic: Are You Having Maximum Impact?

Sales Teams: Forum on analyzing performance based on stats

What not to do when interviewing for a sales role

Sales Best Practices: Where Will You Find the Time?

The Six Real Reasons Why VPs of Sales are Fired

Twitter for Business: 2011 Directory of Techies to follow on Twitter

Dealing with Specific Types of Difficult People

Twitter for Business: A quick Twitter guide and glossary for business users