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MIT Sloan Sales Lecture
Revenue GrowthI have been invited to speak as a guest lecturer at the MIT Sloan Sales Club on February 23 and when considering the right focus for the session, an important sales transformation issue came top of mind.
Call it sales 2.0 perhaps, but the real transformation has come from the intense competitive challenge and the need for a differentiated relationship process.
Today’s sales teams clearly can no longer work through the phone book or the local business journal lists to find the target buyer. Today, sales managers must put together a far more integrated demand generation program and team up with marketing to make it happen.
In the session, I will explore the new dynamics of sales in today’s digital context. I will explore selling from the lens of the sales manager who must now orchestrate an integrated sales engine from demand generation and lead nurture to sales excellence and account management. In today’s environment, a fully aligned sales and marketing capability and integrated multi-touch campaigns are critical and sales must embrace new technology, content marketing and persuasive communications to meet targets.
Your Blog: Quality over Quantity
Content Marketing, Revenue Growth, Social MediaIn the age of information overload, the quality of your blog content matters more than ever. While there’s a temptation to flood the internet with frequent blog posts, focusing on creating high-quality, valuable content can have a more significant impact on your audience and your business goals.
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2011 Top Ten List for Revenue Growth
Revenue Growth, Revenue MarketingWe had fun this year with our holiday greeting and we offered a top 10 list of resolutions. Why not share it with the blog reading audience.
We hope you can be:
Some might say- “OK, but I already have these items on my wish list… how do I get them all done?” To that I would ask whether they have a plan in place.
If you can’t answer these, it is worth a little time to get organized – it will save you in the long run. Most every client we work with is on a continuous path to maturity around each of these areas and the bar keeps moving. Just when you think you have your content marketing plan in place with relevant articles and blog posts, you realize digital video is more important to reach audience and communicate message.
Why You Should (re)Tweet
Revenue Growth, Social MediaSuccessful tweeting is about focus. Numerous companies small and large have shown that diligently writing a few tweets with content their customers want to read can greatly increase connection that a person has to the company. Even more common are twitter feeds that are rarely read and pretty much irrelevant. The difference is focus. Treating a feed like it is business will go unnoticed. Treating a feed like a friendly conversation will get noticed. Think of it as telling a friend “I liked this article and you probably will to.”
By doing something as simple as tweeting news articles or retweeting other’s valuable tweets that your firm’s clients want to read makes your twitter feed worth reading. The simple truth is that most people don’t want to spend their time finding news that directly pertains to them in the vastness of digital information.
The number of news outlets has risen exponentially in the past decade. Just as books became significantly cheaper and more available after the Gutenberg press, the internet has again dropped the cost of publishing to a new level. One of the numerous side effects is that the amount being published has risen and, because content is king, newspapers have been publishing more because their main reason for not publishing has all but disappeared: Cost.
The cost of publishing, as Clay Shirky has told us, was the main deterrent for publishing articles that consumers wouldn’t read. Publishing too many unread articles would lead to decreases in readership then subscriptions and eventually profits. The cost lowering effect of internet media has removed that physical barrier on printed page real estate. It is this cost reduction that has lead to a decrease in the inherent filtering that newspapers perform and hence an increase in total articles published. This has lead to the popular notion of “Information Overload.”
This impression isn’t exactly accurate because since shortly after the Gutenberg press was invented there were more books than a human could physically read in a lifetime. The difference between printed and e-newspapers eras is a question of filtering. Trusted newspapers became trusted because filtered for to find the best of “all the news that’s fit to print” and printed quality, vetted news that their readership wanted to read. By becoming the filter for your audience you become the source. Using the retweet function can increase your Social Capitol because you are the filter. As any retailer will tell you, being the source is good for business.
Retweet – and be the filter – so that you are the source.
Key Topics from the HBS Discussion on Digital Business
Revenue Growth, Revenue MarketingWe had a packed room at Harvard Business School on November 17 to discuss experiences in developing digital businesses.
Mike Roberts, a James M. Collins Senior Lecturer and Executive Director at the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship put the speaker team together and it included some highly experienced HBS students, recent students and entrepreneurs sharing their experiences in building digital businesses. The team included Maxwell Wessel, Brent Grinna and Lincoln Edwards. Our moderator, Christopher Michel both facilitated the session and delivered a lot of value as an accomplished entrepreneur. Brent is an MBA ’10 grad who is incubating his start-up, Evertrue at a Venrock-backed company in Boston called Where. Maxwell and Lincoln also represented some fresh and real experiences launching digital applications. I was put forward by our client colleagues at Bain Capital Ventures and MITX. My role was to bring a perspective as both a service provider to the industry and as an entrepreneur building digital businesses.
Most of the 100+ attendees were midstream with plans to launch digital businesses. There were Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship scholars and others, and they surfaced a range of issues. Christopher Michel, the facilitator was back from a month in Tibet but was able to jump right in and drive the conversation. The challenge was to share some perspectives on how to go about a web development project, how to engage effectively technology team and how and whether to outsource to an offshore provider. Qestions included:
Some headline conclusions were:
How and whether to outsource technical development?
The outsourcing model makes a great deal of sense for elements if not all of the development process. It is particularly strong for low cost prototyping efforts at the early stages of concept development. A critical success factor will be having a technical member of the core team to help oversee the outsourced team. Some of the considerations we discussed were location – whether offshore in India, Eastern Europe, Asia or South America makes sense and how language, time zones impact these choices. There are also highly varied levels of offshore resources ranging from one or two people in India to global sourcing firms. The choice of who to select should consider the technical complexity and technology frameworks used, the ability to work in a highly effective communication process. Keep in mind as well the location and documentation of the code base to ensure sustainability if things go wrong with the relationship. Using milestone payments for documented code releases can be an effective model. Most of the digital applications in this discussion were based on a custom build approach – for companies looking to outsource web development for standards based platforms like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, the options are many and the risks more manageable.
How does an HBS entrepreneur engage the right technical leaders in partnership to launch a digital business?
The days of heading down to Kendall Square and lining up a development team from MIT are perhaps gone. In fact, it may be the reverse. The MIT Technologist heading to Harvard Square to line up a business team for his/her digital venture. But the real truth is that a digital business cannot be successful – in my opinion – without a highly trusted core team member that is also a technologist. The role is critical to ensure an effective development process and effectively translate a business vision into a solution. This is particularly true if the team uses an offshore provider to build out the system.
What are some of the better offshore partners?
Many were brought up in the discussion, and there are many firms that specialize in different segments of the outsourced environments. The checklist should include competencies around the current technology platforms needed in the development, the approach to project management, the ability to communicate in English in a trusted way. Above all, the provider needs to be a trusted partner and you can’t rely solely on the ratings in the freelancer systems as these organizations change. Make sure you discus options and get personal referrals where possible and use win-win contract structures. What is the CMM level of the firm? Will the team be dedicated? How do you communicate, Skype? Are all the skills considered – user experience and branding? Functional design? Technical implementation? Testing? By developing a personal relationship with the provider team and meeting face-to-face, you can build long term trusted relationship and realize strong returns on investment.
What are other considerations in building a digital business?
A few other considerations were brought up. Technology is only a small part of the business model. How will the team operationalize the business? How is the the governance structure set up? How is equity and compensation structured? When executing a project, what is the right development model? Iterative? Waterfall? How do you ensure confidentiality? How will the application be supported over the longer term? What are program, regulatory, operational and sourcing risks and how should they be managed?
Final Remarks
Debi Kleiman who recently took over leadership of MITX from Kiki Mills offered a strong closing argument about the benefits of membership and the supporting focus of the MITX organization as a resource for students and others pursuing a digital business.
Wikipedia – Getting to Yes!
Revenue Growth, Social MediaWikipedia is amazing: a plethora of information at your finger tips. Let’s face it, my kids will probably think an encyclopedia is a large coaster by the time they are in middle school. A client had asked us to submit their business to Wikipedia. I knew this would be a challenge as most businesses on Wikipedia are the large corporations like Coca Cola, GE, Ford, etc, you get the idea. Wikipedia is a lot like Facebook, getting a straightforward answer on how to do something is difficult. Essentially, you search Wikipedia to find out how to use Wikipedia and then click though from one link to another until you have found the answer.
Submitting this was tricky, it had to sound authentic and like an encyclopedia entry, straightforward, and unbiased. They had their PR company write up the entry, I figured out the convoluted coding system and we submitted it for approval by users. It was declined again and again for a total of three times. What makes this entry complicated is that it is technically a business, but more than anything it is a location. Not like Starbucks on 3rd Ave, but an entire community. So how does one make an entry similar to this one and have it approved?