There’s no denying that in sales, talent is a key differentiator.  The same goes for pro athletes.  The majority of your “A” players are talented.  They hold themselves accountable and have the competencies required for success.  However, even the most talented will fail if they're put in the wrong environment.  Even the best NFL quarterbacks.  Today’s post is about how Sales Ops can create conditions that enable success.

How well have you created conditions for sales success?  Find out by downloading the Sales Performance Conditions Scorecard here.

Ultimately, sales success is about making the number.  Many variables influence making your revenue goals.  Overall strategy, go-to-market model and product suite are essential.  So too are having the right talent, structure and head count.

However, without setting up the right performance conditions, revenue goals won’t be met.  Specific performance conditions include:

• Sales Process: This is your playbook.  Is it aligned with the buyer, adopted in the field and reinforced by your “coaches”?
• Territories: The field of play.  Are territories designed to maximize growth balanced with efficiency?  Are you holding back performance based on territory design and assignment?
• Compensation: Akin to a pro athlete’s salary.  Is it competitive and geared to keep your very best?  Is it synced with your strategy and driving desired behavior?
• Quotas: Your most important player statistic.  Are your quotas attainable and reflective of current performance and market potential?

I’ll illustrate the importance of these conditions using a sports analogy with the NFL.

Aaron Rodgers is a quarterback with the Green Bay Packers.  He’s considered by many to be one of the best NFL quarterbacks playing today.   The Packers are also one of the greatest NFL franchises ever.  With the right game plan, coaches, supporting team, trainers and equipment he’ll remain elite.

Huddle Around A Sales Process

What if Rodgers’ receivers and running backs all decide not to follow a scripted play?  That’s like having sales reps create their own sales process.  Without a huddle and playbook, you get no predictable activity, cadence or alignment.  Without a sales process, some of your “A’s” may improvise.  However, to raise performance broadly, you need an adopted and repeatable process.

Give Your “A” Players the Best “Field”

Great quarterbacks use the entire football field.  However, their real “patch” – where they maneuver the most - is the backfield.  How would Rodgers perform if his “patch” was much worse than competing quarterbacks?  If his backfield was filled with gopher holes and boulders, he would fail.  Give your very best reps the very worst sales territories and suffer the consequences.

Design territories that are efficient and take untapped opportunity into account.  To do this right you have to conduct account segmentation.  Update the analysis annually and make adjustments.  Assign the highest potential territories to your best reps.  They will thank you for it and perform.

Competitive Compensation Aligned to Strategy

Rodgers’ current total pay will average about $19 million per year.  Among the highest paid QB’s in the NFL.  Consider if Green Bay had a pay policy that capped him at $5 million.  Still a good chunk of change but he would opt out.  He would get paid more by the competition. 

If your compensation plans aren’t in line with your competition, you lose talent.  Don’t kid yourself – great sales people are like “free agents”.  They expect to get paid what they’re worth.  Benchmark the market regularly to see if you’re competitive.  Reward strong performance.

Incentive pay is a lever that must align with strategy.  Suppose Rodgers was paid an incentive every time he threw an interception.  Crazy, right?  Well, no different than paying incentives misaligned with your core strategy.   Pay sales well for results that reinforce the strategy of the company.  Align the two or you won’t get the desired behavior.

Realistic Quota Setting

Here’s one last parallel to consider regarding quota setting.  Assume Rodgers was told to double his pass completions this year to make his incentive.  In addition, if Green Bay traded all their best receivers, would Rodgers make his “quota”?  It would be totally unrealistic to expect him to double his performance.  Quotas must be attainable.  To set them appropriately requires looking at past performance and opportunity potential.

Setting the right performance conditions for your team is complex.  It requires your foresight, analysis and execution.  You need support from executive management.  It demands a team approach.  It’s much more than just making analogies to NFL football.  How well have you created the best conditions for sales success?  Use our Sales Performance Conditions Scorecard to begin your evaluation.

It’s not too early to start now in preparation for 2014.  You could wait but you run the risk of losing your “A” players.  You’ll miss the number.  Success begins with setting the right performance conditions.  Move the ball downfield.

Author: Patrick Seidell

Follow @pseidell

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This week, brands everywhere started to switch things up. New features, new monetization models, and even new data cropped up everywhere ... and you've got to make sense of all of these new shiny objects in case they could be a great opportunity in your marketing. To help make sense of the ever-changing world of inbound marketing, we compiled the top stories of the week with some quick takeaways for you. So you can, you know, spend your time kicking butt at your job instead of searching for news stories. Enjoy!

Google+ Update Makes It Easier to See What Your Friends Like, From Mashable

Last Tuesday, Google+ made it easier for your content to spread on the social network. Now, Google+ users can see posts that people in their circles have +1'd as well as their own successful posts all in their main stream. That being said, only your public posts will have the potential for an expanded reach -- anything you post on Google+ that is for your circles only or is private will not be promoted.

Marketers, let's get pumped! With this new feature, you'll have more opportunities to extend your content's reach. Of course, you'll still need to create top-notch content for this feature to kick in in the first place ... but still, this new feature is something to get excited about. Read more about this update on Mashable.

How Millennials Shop Online, From eMarketer

If one of your buyer personas is a millennial, you're in luck this week. eMarketer released some interesting data on how millennials shop online, detailing things like how much time they spend shopping online and what types of products they prefer to purchase online versus in-store. Whether you're an ecommerce shop or a brick-and-mortar business, these trends are definitely something to be aware of. Learn more about millennial shopping habits over at eMarketer. 

Instagram Enables Photo and Video Embedding to Spread Its Content Across the Web, From The Verge

The lack of embedding feature for Instagram posts has been a big pain point for a while. If you ever wanted to use your Instagram photos and videos elsewhere, you had to have some hacking knowledge. Lucky for us, Instagram just released a feature that allows all public photos and videos to be easily embeddable. (If you want a step-by-step guide to embedding Instagram photos and videos, check out our blog post).

This is fabulous news for us marketers who itch to include visual content in our marketing ... but may not have the best design skills. It's easy to take a picture or video on Instagram, and to include it on your blog or website you just have to copy and paste a snippet of HTML code. The new embed feature can also give our Instagram content a potentially wider reach through you and your fans' networks. Learn more about this new feature on The Verge.

A Practical Guide to Building a Killer Content Strategy, a Free Ebook From HubSpot

Struggling to get started with creating your own content? It can feel daunting, especially when you have a zillion other marketing activities on your plate. If you aren't sure where to start, check out our latest ebook, "A Practical Guide to Building a Killer Content Strategy." You'll get a ton of tips and tactics to take away so you'll be cranking out quality content in no time! Download the free ebook here. 

Publishers Try a Different Kind of Pay Wall, Unlocked by Watching Web Video, From Ad Age

Media outlets are still trying to find their secret monetization sauce. Though native advertising and the comeback of paywalls have been all the rage lately, some publishers are trying out video ads instead. Most people are used to seeing ads before YouTube videos, so this could be a potentially profitable source of income for publications. That being said, videos should be kept short, as data shows that only 12% of America will watch a video ad for 30 seconds.

For marketers, this could be a new advertising opportunity or even a trend to keep an eye on if you plan on pitching participating publications. While there isn't enough data yet to determine whether this is a solid form of revenue, it's an interesting bit for us as savvy inbound marketers to watch out for. Learn more about this new type of paywall at Ad Age.

Pinterest Now Has 70 Million Users and Is Steadily Gaining Momentum Outside the U.S., From The Next Web

Yes, we all know that Pinterest is a top social network, but did you know that it's increasingly attracting an international audience? According to data by Semiocast, 45% of new Pinterest users that registered in June 2013 were from outside the U.S. While U.S. users are still far more active on the platform, international folks could start becoming a larger and larger chunk of active users as more people register.

For those of us who are marketing to international audiences who haven't jumped on Pinterest yet, it may be time to take another look at the social network to see if it works for your organization. If you need help getting started, take a look at our guide for using Pinterest for business. Learn more about this data over at The Next Web.

What other stories did you hear about this week?

Image credit: .faramarz

With the panoply of modern software products, devices, and technologies driving more of today’s sales process, sales teams can enjoy better support, more functionality, and a more organized workplace. However, in some of the most well-connected firms with the best digital arsenals, issues sometimes come up around exactly how the people in the driver’s seat use the available technology. In sales, as in other parts of the business world, professionals sometimes find themselves overwhelmed and confused by excessive choices or by the complexity of IT systems.

Modern Journalism: An Analogy

To illustrate how these kinds of problems arise, it’s possible to make a good analogy to the world of journalism. For example, sales teams pondering their roles in their high-tech offices could take note of veteran broadcaster Tom Brokaw’s recent appearance on The Daily Show on June 20. In a critique of today’s news industry, Brokaw detailed his sense that all of the new abilities and tools presented to today’s journalists have in some ways led to results that are messy, that lack a cohesive narrative or focus. Brokaw points to situations where new technology simply allows broadcasts to veer off into a tangent or to become consumed with peripheral details, or to put the cart before the horse and report on non-stories, filling the news hole with empty data.

Falling Behind Sales Technology

The same kind of principle could hold true in the sales world. When thinking about all of the great new tools at their disposal, including customer relationship management, customer experience software, remote work tools, and all kinds of other digital technologies, does your sales team feel confident and empowered or burdened by a big technology learning curve? Do individuals work together to use these tools to create good narratives for customers, or is each person acting in their own digital trajectory, with random IMs, tweets, Facebook posts, or other outreach?

Just like in the example above, where modern journalists suffer from too much choice, brand new technologies can sometimes fall flat in the world of sales and commerce. Simply put, today’s cutting edge sales tools don’t offer their own easy manuals for use. They require a blend of human creativity and resourcefulness to really drive better business processes and bigger sales numbers. Like the ancient horse cart, these technologies need to be “driven” by individuals with knowledge and focus.

Taking Control of Technology

In order for a sales team to get control of their digital resources, it’s often possible to “reverse engineer” the situation, in order to change IT setups to make existing technologies serve human goals. This can require some brainstorming about what’s most important to a business. Sales leaders and others can sit down and hash out the details like:

• What are the core messages that need to be brought to customers?
• What are some different categories of customers that can require different approaches?
• How can each person use these technologies day-to-day in a coordinated way?
• How can digital oversight systems maintain a consistent process?

Sales pros can get more handy tips from articles like this resource from Technology Insider, or from in-depth items like this one from the American Marketing Association where experts look at actual uses of sales technologies, and how they can be improved. At the same time, it’s also possible to get a better idea of where to go with new tech tools from something as simple as a morning role call meeting. When sales pros get together and bounce ideas off of each other, some clear and actionable strategies can develop naturally. Sometimes, all it takes is a little articulation of what some intuitively know and can teach others. Or, by putting their heads together, sales leaders can come up with some simple ground rules that will help drive a consistent process with a CRM module, a new smartphone app, or a new content system for customer education. New technology doesn’t have to be frightening; with the right training and the right support, it can be something that makes normal sales staffers into superheroes with much more powerful sales strategies and a better vision of how to advance into future markets.

A few years back I took a course on strategic planning for small business. When the floor opened for questions many revolved around building teams. What kind of skills should you look for when building a team, is experience more important than education, are soft skills more important than hard skills, at what point of the project should you bring on a new team member … that type of question.

But the topic I found the most interesting was around how to build a good team. The discussion spiraled on subjects we had previously discussed. Finally in exasperation, one attendee said, “Yes, I understand all that, but how do you build a good team?”

The lecturer paused, looked straight at him and answered, “Build a good team”.

It seemed a simplistic joke but as he went on to explain, it had a great deal of merit. It means that in order to have a successful team you must build a good team.

Still too simplistic?
Below is the discussion that followed on how to build a good team.
Wicked Way #1: Know your goals and your objectives

Number one, number one, number one. Always know your goals and objectives. Keep these clear in your mind. Write them on a piece of paper and stick them to your wall in a prominent place. If it’s a project deadline, if it’s gross sales, if it’s a percentage of growth, write it down. Paper remembers, people forget.

Wicked Way #2: Define roles and set expectations

Define the roles that you need in order to meet your goals and objectives. Fill these roles with people who can meet them. When you are interviewing to fill the roles, make it clear what your goals and objectives are and set expectations.

The person you interview may have the best qualifications and a great attitude but if they don’t know what you want and they don’t know whether they can do what you want, you are relying on a wish and a promise, neither one is a position for success.

Wicked Way #3: Provide feedback

Once you have a team, continue to set expectations. Provide feedback. Let the person know what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong.

Always ask yourself and the team, will this activity help move us towards our goals and objectives? If it doesn’t, stop immediately.

Find out what will work. Then move on. And when the work your team member is helping to meet your goals and objectives, acknowledge and reward.

THAT’S IT

There you have it. Simple. Easy peasy.

How to build a good team….build a good team.

The following is the third of five blog posts adapted from a speech by Cameron Uganec, HootSuite’s Director of Marketing, given at the Marketo’s 2013 Summit Conference in San Francisco. The first post, “Why Storytelling?”, can be found here. The second post, “Back to the Future”, can be found here. The session, entitled “Social Media + Storytelling = Awesomesauce” can be watched in full here.

In the previous posts, I explored how social media and storytelling can be used by marketers to engage with an audience and build relationships. It turns out that there is another benefit to following a brand storytelling approach; it can increase the shareability of your content. In fact the potential to build relationships coupled with the “viral effect” is what makes storytelling and social media powerful tools for marketers.

My team creates a lot of content. Our content marketing takes many forms: Tweets, Facebook posts, contributed articles, infographics, videos, blog posts etc. In order to unlock the potential value of the ‘earned media’ component of social media we endeavour to make every piece of content shareable. So it’s important that we understand why people share content.

Why People Share

The NYTimes Insights Group published a study that looked at the key factors that influence people to share content. Unsurprisingly, they discovered that sharing is all about relationships. They outlined these key motivations for people to share:

• To bring valuable and entertaining content to others.

• To define ourselves to others.

• To grow and nourish relationships.

• To get the word out about causes and brands I care about.

When you are creating content it’s important to be mindful of what the motivation of your audience is. When planning each piece of content our team answers these questions:

• How does this add value for our audience?

• How will this help or entertain them?

• Why will they share it?

Psychology of Sharing

Some of the other reasons people share are at a deeper psychological level. The journal Psychological Science published a study about the psychology of sharing in 2011. The research uncovered that evoking certain emotions can help increase the chance of a message being shared. Here’s a quote:

“The sharing of stories or information may be driven in part by arousal. When people are physiologically aroused, whether due to emotional stimuli or otherwise, the autonomic nervous is activated, which then boosts social transmission.”

In another study researchers went further and looked at what types of emotions evoked by content sparked sharing. The top ones were: awe, amusing, moving, illuminating, inspiring, shocking, cute, sex, fear, anger, and controversial.

Emotive Content Gets Shared

Positive Negative Amusing Shocking Inspiring Fearful Cute Anger Illuminating Controversial

Of course, storytelling is an effective way to convey this emotive content. You don’t need to be constrained by the 140 characters of a Tweet. Often social is the channel we use to point to longer form content. Other times, a story in this context could be a photo embedded in a post or a short Vine or Instagram video.

When you look at the types of emotions listed above, you will notice there are two sides of the spectrum: positive and negative messages. They both work at getting your content shared. As marketers, it’s up to us about which side we want to propagate. One side leads to being an empowering brand, and the other leads to brands that tell stories about the inadequacy of their customers. If you want to create a long-standing powerful brand you should be telling a positive story. Focus on stories that place your customer in the role of the hero.

So what does this all mean? It means there is a science to creating shareable content. It’s not an exact science, but by following specific guidelines and playing into the needs, wants and psychology of your audience, you can drastically increase your chances of getting your content shared. Here is what to keep in mind:

6 Tips to Creating Content That Gets Shared

1. Appeal to your audience’s key motivation – to connect with each other (it’s not just with your brand).

2. Tell a story.

3. Trust is the cost of entry for getting share, ensure you have established credibility.

4. Keep the message simple.

5. Appeal to positive emotions like inspiration, illumination or amusement.

6. Embed a sense of urgency.

If you don’t have time or patience to do any of the above you can always use Buyral.

In part 4 of this series, we will explore the growth of visual storytelling and the emergence of social video.

As we previously reported, Oracle's salesforce has been in the midst of big changes, not all of them good.

Over about the past two years, since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, many experienced sales folks have left, multiple sources have told us, and Oracle has been hiring like mad to replace them and grow its salesforce, too.

We just talked with Jill Rowley, a salesperson who has bucked the trend and joined the Oracle salesforce.

Rowley landed at Oracle as part of its $871 million acquisition of Eloqua. But, she says, it took a lot of wooing for Oracle to get her to stay. She had spent a decade at Eloqua becoming such a one-woman force that people called her "Jilloqua," she told us. "I gave the company my everything. I was the Eloqueen, I dressed in red. My two daughters were not allowed to wear purple because purple was the color of the enemy," she laughs referring to the corporate colors of Eloqua's chief competitor, Marketo.

The day that Oracle announced it was acquiring Eloqua was an "FML" moment, she told us. (Her words, look it up). Oracle's $871 million purchase of Eloqua in December was a gauntlet thrown to her old employer and top customer Salesforce.com.  Eloqua and Salesforce.com were close partners, and this gave Oracle an in to convince Salesforce.com's customers to ditch it and try Oracle's cloud instead.

"I was like no way are we getting acquired by Oracle. It was a nightmare. At 5:30 a.m., my phone rang (with news of the acquisition). My first text was at 5:40 a.m. to my No. 1 client, Salesforce.com. It said 'I'm sorry.' I knew the acquisition threw [Salesforce] for a loop."

Rowley is known in the Valley for a sales style she calls "social selling" which uses social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to work with prospects and customers.  That's because most business-to-business IT purchasing decisions start on the Internet. IT professionals also lean heavily on social networks to research tech products and to work with vendors. Rowley learned how to meet the customers where they were hanging out.

Before Eloqua, she had worked for Marc Benioff, and after the acquisition was announced she was invited to go back to Salesforce.com.

"I'm a Salesforce.com girl. Benioff has had a profound impact on my career. He and I IM on Facebook. How could I go work for the enemy?" she thought at the time.

She also had a job offer from SAP, with Co-CEO Bill McDermott calling her personally, she told us.

But then Mark Hurd came up with an idea she couldn't refuse. Because Oracle was dealing with a large influx of new salespeople, he wanted to develop a company-wide training program for them, she said. He appointed Nina Purvis Kunz as vice president of a new Oracle Sales Academy.

Kunz convinced Rowley to join her and build a sales school based on Rowley's social selling techniques. It would be a cut in pay — Rowley who was pulling in $500,000 a year as a top salesperson at Eloqua — but she was so excited by the prospect of teaching others about social selling that she took bait.

Her first task is to educate the 440 college grads Oracle just hired to sell its cloud. 

This week, they completed Week 1 of an immersive, 10-week training program. They live on campus and learn everything from business fundamentals to advanced sales techniques.

After that, they'll be handed a bonus for graduating, and a quota, and be sent off into the world to find new cloud customers. They'll officially be part of Oracle's direct sales team, she said.

This is different from how Oracle used to treated entry-level salespeople. College grads worked on lead generation and handed off leads to more experienced salespeople to close deals, JMP Securities analyst Pat Walravens previously told Business Insider.

It's a big experiment that is being watched at the highest levels. Larry Ellison approved the curriculum himself, she says and Mark Hurd has been preaching social selling to the salesforce in his all-hands meeting, Rowley says.

"I heard all the horror stories of Oracle. I had people telling me, 'I can't believe you are going to join Oracle.' And three months and 12 days into it [they] are still saying 'are you crazy?,'" she told us. 

But she is obviously happy right now. "We are transforming the company and I can't believe it's happening. It's my dream job. I pinch myself every day."

Join the conversation about this story »

Shira Ovide / Wall Street Journal:
Building a Better Dell: More R&D, Less PCs  —  Silver Lake is betting it and company founder can restore the computing icon to its former luster.  —  Private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners may soon be wagering $1.4 billion on a bet that many analysts think is sheer folly: To restore computing icon Dell Inc. to its former luster.

For small-business owners and bootstrapping startup founders, it's tough to completely retreat from work. If you’re an entrepreneur, you may feel there’s too much on your plate, no one to take over, and that any downtime will lead to lost business. It's not easy to decide when to take a vacation.

However, even a tiny vacation is critical, both for your personal health and sanity, as well as for your business. Studies show that as leisure time decreases, we experience more negative emotions, more stress, more health problems and lower life satisfaction. Even if you love what you do, you can’t live on work alone. Taking time off is essential to recharging your batteries and avoiding entrepreneurial burnout Read more...

More about Startups, Features, Business, Entrepreneurs, and Contributor

Once upon a time, there might have been a valid argument that Apple had no hope for a bright future. But considering all the fanboys who own more Mac products than they can count on one hand, we'll just make the assumption that Apple is in the clear (for now)

In this comic, Krishna Sadasivam of PC Weenies makes it clear that Apple has no reason to worry

Comic illustration by Krishna Sadasivam, PC Weenies. Published with permission; all rights reserved. Read more...

More about Comic, Comics, Iphone, Apple, and Humor

If you're planning to check out Pacific Rim, the summer blockbuster featuring giant robots fighting other-dimensional monsters, you might want to know that not all the robotic inventions you see in that movie are science fiction.

Sure, humans may be a long way from building gigantic mechs like the Jaegers in Pacific Rim, which are piloted by two people linked telepathically. But inventors are creating astonishing devices that can aid humans by supplementing our own bodies or help us in our work.

YouTube put together some videos to honor our real-life robotic helpers. Check out the gallery above and be amazed at how far we've come. Read more...

More about Robots, Robotics, Tech, Dev Design, and Gadgets

Google’s Eric Schmidt says that the entertainment industry should focus on taking content pirates to court, rather than just trying to get Google (and other search engines) to remove pirate sites from search results. His comments, reported by Variety, came yesterday during an impromptu chat...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Dr. Amar Bose, an acoustics pioneer and founder of the Bose Corporation, has died, according to MIT, where he was once a member of the faculty. He was 83 years old. He is survived by his son, Vanu Bose.

According to a MIT release, he joined the university in 1956 and started a research program in physical acoustics and psychoacoustics. He later won many patents in acoustics and other technologies.

He started Bose Corporation in 1964. In 2011, he gave a majority of his stock in Bose Corporation to MIT. The company is privately held and according to a statement from company’s president Bob Marseca, it will remain privately owned.

At one time, the company was well known for its home audio systems, but lately Bose’s work has become an integral part of our digital lives. Bose makes noise-canceling headphones and smartphone related accessories. It is also a big player in portable digital audio market.

Bose was born and raised in Philadelphia. He was born on on Nov. 2, 1929. His father was an Indian freedom fighter who emigrated to the United States, and his mother was American. At age 13, he started to repair radio sets for pocket money and later to help his family. Bose, spent his entire life on researching and furthering the field of acoustics. According to the New York Times, in an interview with the Popular Science magazine he said:

“I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by M.B.A.’s. But I never went into business to make money. I went into business so that I could do interesting things that hadn’t been done before.”

Dr. Amar G. Bose – Last lecture of Fall ’96 Acoustics Course

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Retail’s reinvention: technology’s impact on today’s supply chain
• The Internet of Things: What It Is, Why It Matters
• The Xbox One’s role in the TV ecosystem

Here is a short list of stories that I read and enjoyed. They made me smile and made me angry. And more importantly, they made me think. Hope you like this selection.

• Think you know Shinola? Think again. This is a new watch brand backed by the guy who created Fossil watches. Anne VanderMey reports on the brand for Fortune magazine.
• The apps that get featured on the iOS App Store. Dave Addey digs in and finds some great trends. Helpful if you are in the app business or are curious about how Apple’s feature process really works (or not).
• What I expect from a feed reader. Justin Blanton makes some great points that made me rethink my own expectations.
• Shooting the messengers. The risky business of being a war reporter.
• The Expendables: How the temps who power corporate giants are getting crushed. Yup, this is the kind of stuff people don’t like to talk about. It is a problem that is not going to go away anytime soon unless we have folks in Washington, D.C. who actually have compassion and empathy for citizens instead of viewing them as voting blocs and part of a data matrix.
• The endless summer of Bob Uecker. I can’t believed I am reading Sports Illustrated again. It must be baseball season.
• The call of Battle: Matt Cook, a soldier, writes a great first-person piece for one of the best magazines in business, Texas Monthly.

Every currency created since the advent of money 2,700 years ago has fit nicely into one of two classifications: Either it was a representative money system, deriving its worth from a link to some physical store of value like gold, silver or gemstones; or it was fiat, deriving its value from the fact that a government or central authority guaranteed it.

Bitcoin, the world’s most successful digital currency, defies this time-tested classification system: It is neither fiat nor representative. It is not fiat, because its supply is actually finite and, more importantly, it lacks any central backing authority. (Click here for a good primer on the tech behind Bitcoin). Nor is it representative, because it is not linked to anything physical. Thus the internet has (once again) spawned a phenomenon that is inexplicable via conventional economic frameworks.

As economists study the attributes of digital money, they are discovering that Bitcoin is, in many ways, a better currency: unlike paper money, it is unforgeable; unlike gold, its supply is perfectly verifiable. It is immune to the inflation that plagues all fiat currencies: governments cannot simply print Bitcoins to pay off their debts. It is perfectly secure: all transactions are monitored collectively by the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin payments can be made at any time, to anyone, with as little as zero fees and no dependence on financial intermediaries. Bitcoin transaction histories are distributed and decentralized, making the system robust and resilient. And Bitcoin minimizes the amount of personal information that users have to disclose when transacting.

For all of these traits, Bitcoin has potent disruptive potential to the world banking system, and thus the governments that are supported by it. Which is precisely why it is doomed.

Anonymity threatens control

Though novel today, the anonymity of transactions that Bitcoin provides is actually a very old trait of money, one that most currencies actually enjoyed for most of their history. If fact, it was only recently eradicated by virtue of the digital nature of modern banking, combined with legislative initiatives in the United States (and other countries).

Governments today enjoy unprecedented power of monetary observation, which they argue has resulted in a “safer” world with less money laundering, greater impediments to criminal activity, and reduced tax evasion. Industrialized nations are just beginning to maximize the benefits of this newfound transparency and so understandably have no interest in reverting to a more opaque banking system.

Monetary control is power

But beyond monitoring money flow, there is an even more fundamental reason why substantial Bitcoin success is undesirable for governments. For any government, ceding control of money supply is tantamount to an abdication; without control of money there is no control at all. For this reason, as Bitcoin continues to gain users, government indifference must gradually give way to bemusement and ultimately resistance.

However, well before governments attempt to curtail Bitcoin, there is another antagonist that might take action more rapidly: the financial services industry. Banks and their kin make tens of billions of dollars every year from providing the very basic task service of moving money from one place to another. And as a nearly foolproof revenue stream – zero risk, almost zero cost, and billions of dollars in profits – it’s also a pillar of their business model. In fact, banking as we know it today would have a far diminished role, if any, in a Bitcoin-denominated economy. Hence, you will see little support for digital money from any bank.

Thus, if Bitcoin can continue to gain in popularity, its users can look forward to an eventual confrontation with two extremely powerful antagonists. Unfortunately for Bitcoin, both parties, governments especially, can follow a simple strategy to ensure Bitcoin, or any other aspirational digital currency, never gains widespread use.

Governments hold nuclear option

The strategy, by the way, is not prohibition. A legislative attempt to curtail Bitcoin would be hampered by political agendas, court challenges, enforcement costs and, perhaps most importantly, the complications national boundaries create. Indeed, lawmaking is utterly clumsy compared to the much cleaner, cheaper and perfectly effective solution called “currency intervention.”

All major economic powers are experienced in the techniques of manipulating the value of monies whose price they care about. To affect a currency, one need simply to buy or sell enough of it that marginal supply or demand is affected. Price change then follows naturally. (For example, China and Japan have done this in the recent past to weaken the buying power of Renmimbi and Yen respectively, to reduce the cost of their exports in Western markets.)

Interventions are usually meant to do one of two things: change the value of a currency or moderate the volatility of a currency. But currency intervention can just as easily be used to increase the volatility of a currency. And, in the case of Bitcoin, it would be utterly simple to do because the total value of all Bitcoins, currently about $1 billion, is so minuscule compared to the buying power of any industrialized country.

This would remain the case if Bitcoin’s market cap increased 100-fold or even 1000-fold. The algorithm is simple: gradually purchase large sums of Bitcoins, a  hundred million dollars worth given the current market cap would be plenty. Then flash sell them to flood the market and drive the price down. Rinse, repeat.

A currency that quintuples in a month, and then loses two-thirds of its value in the following week, is not a currency that inspires confidence in users. And while features like security, verifiability, untamperablity and decentralization are attractive, they are all secondary to the main factor that controls adoption of any currency: stability of purchasing power.

Thus Bitcoin’s Achilles heel is its susceptibility to manipulation by the very people who need Bitcoin to fail. It seems not just possible, but likely, that the potential victims of Bitcoin would exploit this vulnerability if they needed to. And, ironically, they would be able to do this totally anonymously. It is this vulnerability that the Winklevosses and others who are “going long” Bitcoin should probably take a good look at sooner rather than later.

Tammer Kamel is founder and CEO of Quandl, a searchable database of numerical data, including a collection of Bitcoin statistics. Follow him on Twitter @TEKamel.

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After today, there are 13 business days in the month of July. For some of you this is fine because you are on track with your sales goals. Others will have a lump in your throat, or just a queasiness because you need to find ways to close business soon. Before 13 business days pass. Am I right?

Here are some ideas to help you. As with all advice, some will work in your particular situation and some won’t – so pick and choose what might work.

I wrote this post because I had several conversations with sales reps who are all stuck and need to move forward. It doesn’t mean that they just need to close deals, because some don’t have enough deals ready.

The biggest issue for the folks I talked with today was attitude. You have got to KNOW you will bring more business to closure in the next 13 days.

Ways to Bring Business to Closure: 

• Go through your deals - if you are newer this is a simple quick task. If you are very new you may have no deals. No matter where you are, determine what you have to work with. It’s like figuring out your personal assets. If you don’t have many, it is a quick activity. For those of you veterans, dig around and see what might be able to be revived. One of my clients did this and they ended up closing business once thought to be impossible to close
  
• Get away from your office - not just physically but mentally. Decide to not think about this until Sunday evening, when you can put more creative thought into it. I once closed one of my biggest deals ever this way – by getting so far away from a work mindset then coming back refreshed. Can you do that?
• Put a creative “SWAT” team together - for bigger or at least for important deals for your company, sometimes bringing a few of you together to talk through the deal will help unlock creative strategies not thought of yet. Use people from different parts of the company – over lunch or breakfast with a whiteboard. Write down every crazy idea to help you find new ways to work with a prospective customer.
• Find a new way to collaborate with your buyer - selling now is all about collaborating and creating a win/win. Could you be so focused on your company that you are not thinking about theirs? How can you refocus and find points of commonality?
• Lighten up - Stress brings your energy and your whole body down. Work through it, like a professional athlete. They don’t give up after losing a game. They get up and get ready for the next challenge. So must you.

Is there a creative way to unlock a stuck deal?

Are there buyers who were not ready but may be ready now and you have not followed up with them?

What can you do to move forward?

Post your thoughts – it helps others.

Lori Richardson is recognized as one of the “Top 25 Sales Influencers for 2013″ and one of “20 Women to Watch in Sales Lead Management for 2013″. Lori speaks, writes, trains, and consults with inside and outbound sellers in technology and services companies. Subscribe to the award-winning blog and the “Sales Ideas In A Minute” newsletter for sales strategies, tactics, and tips in selling. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.

The post Close Your Deals In 13 Days appeared first on Score More Sales.

The Only Two Business Strategies is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

There are really only two business strategies: caring and not caring.

No Caring

The “no caring” business strategy makes everything transactional. This strategy is built on the idea of driving down costs as much as possible and charging the lowest possible price. Eventually everything must be sacrificed on the altar of lowest price. Every transaction, every interaction, needs to be done at a lower and lower cost. Even the customer experience must be sacrificed, because an excellent customer experience increases costs. And if you can’t–or won’t–capture a higher price, then you can’t allow your costs to increase.

When you hear people complain that no one does good work anymore, that customer service is dead, or that no one really cares, they’re really making an observation about a lot of companies choice of business strategy. But when you demand cheaper and cheaper, you demand a “no caring” strategy.

Many companies have unwittingly made this choice by selling price. But by driving towards lowest price, you are driving towards transactional. Transactional is “no caring.”

Caring

The caring business strategy is completely different. This strategy is built on the idea of delighting customers and building lasting relationships. It is built on trust. Customers that choose the “caring” strategy are accountable for the promise of delivering something that is worth paying more to obtain. Caring is what delivers that promise.

It’s “caring” in manufacturing in design. It’s “caring” in user experience. It’s “caring” in customer experience. It’s “caring” in execution. And it’s “caring” in results.

The “caring” strategy is anything but the lowest-price strategy. Caring takes resources, including time and money. It requires that you hire people that care, and that you build a culture that supports–and insists on–caring. Nothing you do can be transactional. Value must be created and captured to deliver “caring.”

When you hear people rave about an experience, a product, a service, or a sales organization, what they are raving about is “caring.”

The middle between these two poles is purgatory. You are either driving towards “caring” or you are going to be driven to “no caring.”

Questions

What is your choice of strategy?

Are you driving towards lower transaction costs and lower prices?

Are you capturing the value you need to deliver real “caring?”

How easy is it to tell which choice a sales organization has made?

I love reading on my Kindle, but the screen is just too small and blurry to be useful for PDF files. While it's lacking in customizability, PDF4Kindle solves this problem pretty well by converting PDF files into Amazon's native .mobi format, all while being completely web-based.

Everyone's go-to ebook converting pocket knife, Calibre, can perform the same conversion (and a lot of others) just as well, but if you're on a computer that doesn't have it installed, or just don't want to wade through a ton of menus, PDF4Kindle is a fine alternative. You just upload a PDF file through the site, and download a .mobi a few moments later. I tested it out with a few PDF files, and while it has the normal formatting weirdness you'd expect from an ebook, all the content was there, complete with images and resizable text.

The app isn't magic, so it's not going to turn scanned pages into native text via OCR (try Papercrop to help reformat those files), but for any PDF with selectable text, it should do just fine.

PDF4Kindle (Free) via AddictiveTips

If there's anyone in the modern workplace more annoying than an obnoxious self-promoter, it's surely the self-promoter who's apologetic about it: "I don't usually send emails like this, but…" Beyond the workplace, there's a third, even more annoying type: the celebrated novelist who retweets praise from readers. (Sure, Midnight's Children won the Booker, but look: some random bloke you've never heard of liked it, too!) Yet these people deserve sympathy. The question of how to blow your own trumpet is a distinctively contemporary one; the rules are still evolving. We're told we need to do more of it, now that more of us are working freelance, and more applicants are chasing fewer jobs. Women, especially, need to get over their aversion to bragging, Sheryl Sandberg argues in her much-discussed book Lean In. But for anyone with a smidgen of self-awareness, it's a minefield. Can you really (to quote one book on the topic) sell yourself without selling your soul?

Numerous self-styled experts – themselves pretty good at self-promotion – purport to have the answer. But much of their advice involves learning to care less about coming across as obnoxious, which feels like winning the battle while losing the war: wanting to be non-obnoxious is a good thing! You could likewise "solve" your marriage problems, I suppose, by becoming the kind of person who doesn't give a monkey's what your spouse feels or does, but I think we'd all agree you'd be missing the point.

More useful is the shift in perspective hinted at in Peggy Klaus's thoughtful 2003 book Brag! The Art Of Tooting Your Own Horn Without Blowing It. The trick is to see your self-promotional efforts from the vantage point of others. Ironically, there's actually something self-centered about being highly allergic to self-promotion, as if the world might end if you put a foot wrong. Step out of self-absorption, and it becomes easier to see that some forms of self-promotion aren't only forgivable, but actively welcome. In a job interview, when you detail your accomplishments, you're providing much-needed information. As the writer Clay Shirky notes on his blog, this rule can be generalized: the people dispensing opportunities want to make sure they're going to the right recipients, so when you tell them why that should be you – using facts, not bluster – you're helping them out. Indeed, Shirky adds, the willingness to do so is helpful information in itself: "Raising your hand is… a high-cost signal that you are willing to risk public failure in order to try something."

This perspective-shift also ensures you'll pick the right audience for any given bit of horn-tooting. Your friends probably don't mind being kept abreast of your activities; what they mind is mass emails phrased in such a way that they don't feel acknowledged as friends. Similarly, the praise-retweeting novelist has misjudged his audience: since they follow him, they probably already like him, so he looks desperate. (A better way to self-promote on Twitter is to link to actual stuff: articles, interviews, etc.) And if you still can't stomach bragging, try this entry-level idea, adapted from Klaus: keep a list of your accomplishments for yourself. That way, they'll stay near the front of your mind, and next time you're in the lift with the chief executive, a few may unobtrusively leak out. No obnoxiousness required.

oliver.burkeman@guardian.co.uk

Follow Oliver on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

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Employers and hiring managers often label workers over 50 as bored, lethargic and unengaged. I resent and disagree with that description.

But according to a new Gallup report, The 2013 State of the American Workplace, there may (unfortunately) be more than a kernel of truth to the stereotype.

The Most Actively Disengaged

The study found that boomers (now ages 49 to 67) are the least engaged generation of today’s workforce and — it gets worse — the most “actively disengaged.”

Gallup’s report indicates that only 26 percent of boomers are engaged at work, meaning they “work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company,” and nearly 1 in 4 boomers (23 percent) are actively disengaged. Employees who are actively disengaged, Gallup says, are not merely unhappy at work, they’re “busy acting out their unhappiness.”

That’s troubling, and not just from a career standpoint. An earlier study by the Sloan Center on Aging and Work at Boston College found that staying engaged in your 50s and 60s is directly linked to overall well being. As Boston College researcher Christina Matz-Costa wrote on Next Avenue, people who reported being highly engaged in work, volunteering, caregiving or educational activities had significantly higher scores for life satisfaction and mental health than those who were relatively unengaged.

Why Boomers Are Unengaged on the Job

As I read through the new Gallup workplace report, I wondered, What gives? Why are so many boomers feeling so disconnected from their jobs at the point in their careers when they should be on a roll?

To find out, I turned to Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist for workplace management and well-being. He told me that boomers are less confident about their future role in their organizations than other generations. “But they are also less likely than younger generations to say they want to look for a new job,” Harter added. “My interpretation is that they have very busy lives, are invested in their current jobs and have less choice for mobility to other workplaces.”   

The Vicious Cycle of Work Disengagement

As a career coach, I’ve found that many people in their 50s and 60s are squeezed to the max at work (as are lots of other workers). But for a variety of reasons, including concerns about age discrimination and the tough economy, they’re finding it more difficult than their younger colleagues to make a job change. Yet when they stay where they are, they frequently feel overworked and undervalued.

Unfortunately this dynamic creates a vicious cycle: When you’re unhappy at work, you tend to disengage. High levels of disengagement lead to sub-par performance. Poor performance leads to a tenuous job situation. And a tenuous job situation can result in being fired.

The Problem Costs Firms Over $450 Billion

So where does that leave you if you’re not “feeling it” at your job but would prefer not to quit?

Well, if you’re lucky, your management might get wind of the Gallup report and decide it's time to make a change in the way your company treats its older employees. Harter told me that workers’ lives (and their organizations’ performance) greatly improve with a strong manager who “engages them in their future while taking into consideration their busy lives.”

Smart companies are taking notice because engagement directly impacts their bottom line: Gallup estimates that active disengagement costs U.S. businesses $450 billion to $550 billion a year.  

3 Keys to Becoming More Engaged at Work

But don't wait for management to come around. There are three steps you should consider to proactively improve your morale and your performance. They might save your job and make you more enthusiastic about going to work each morning.

1. Discover and leverage your strengths. The Gallup report makes it exceedingly clear that the happiest employees are those who are able to maximize their strong points.

“When employees know and use their strengths, they are more engaged, have higher performance and are less likely to leave their company,” the study said.

According to Gallup, people who take this approach every day are six times more likely to be engaged on the job than those who don’t.

Getting in touch with your strengths and exploiting them shouldn’t be hard, but it never ceases to amaze me how often I meet with people over 50 who can’t quite figure out what their natural skills and talents are. They have little difficulty sharing what they don’t do well, but when I ask them about their strengths, they freeze or pooh-pooh them.

I recently worked with a client who displayed a wonderful ability to get her teenagers to open up about their personal problems. When I pointed this out to her, she rolled her eyes. “Oh please, Nancy — it’s no big deal,” she said.

I’m happy to tell you that this client has since decided to explore ways to leverage her talent. She's now pursuing a master’s degree in social work, with plans to counsel teenagers who have eating disorders.

In a Next Avenue blog post about the third chapter of a career, OgilvyOne chairman and chief executive Brian Fetherstonhaugh offered this advice: “Think of your eBay factor. Say to yourself: ‘If at age 60, I was put up for auction on eBay, who would bid for me?’ If neither a paying organization nor a not-for-profit would, go do something about it to make yourself more valuable.”

Even if you’re not in a position to go back to school or switch jobs, it pays to maximize your particular gifts and talents.

Once you really appreciate the full range of what you do best, begin trying to shift your duties and put your talents to use. Take on new responsibilities that leverage your strengths and let your boss know about your accomplishments. This could help you become a star on the job.

Two helpful tools to assess your strengths are the book Strengths Finder 2.0 and VIA (Values in Action) Classification of Strengths, a free online survey you can take at the website Viastrengths.org.

2. Find a boss who really cares about you. I know, I know. If it were only that easy!

I recognize that most people can’t just magically switch bosses. But if you have the opportunity to take on a new assignment with a different and particularly caring manager, grab it.

Working for supportive managers matters to all age groups, but according to the Gallup report, “more so than other generations, baby boomers respond to managers who make an extra effort to show that they care.”

If you’re stuck working for a difficult boss, you can still ask other colleagues to mentor you and toprovide ongoing support.

3. Look for ways to engage your strengths and talents outside of work. Gallup’s studies show that
 the more hours each day you use your strengths to do what you do best — not just when you’re at work — the better you’ll feel. And the better you feel, the likelier you’ll become more engaged at your job.

So whether you’re, say, a skilled painter, a talented chef or a master carpenter (even if you don’t make a dime from these talents), it’s important to incorporate that strength into your life on a more regular basis.

Try spending more time on a fulfilling hobby or engage in a meaningful volunteer assignment that lets you do what you’re great at. Those extra hours of engagement outside the office will fortify and restore you — even during the most difficult days on the job.

Who knows? Maybe if more of us boomers start doing these things, the next Gallup workplace engagement survey will reveal very different results.

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What makes an entrepreneur successful?

Some people believe it's the ability to innovate. However, many startups are refinements of existing business models or improvements on how everyday products and services are delivered.  Being innovative helps, but it's not the deciding factor.

How about access to capital? It's admittedly difficult to start a business if you don't have the money to get it started.  Even so, there are plenty of successful startups that survived on the thinnest of shoestrings for their first few years.

Management skill? Give me a break. Entrepreneurs are famously short-tempered and few have the patience to coach employees.  If they wanted to play politics, after all, they would be working in a big company, not starting something new.

There is one thing and one thing alone that every great entrepreneur absolutely must possess: courage.

And courage is very rare in our world.  Numerous surveys of the population at large have shown that, above everything else, most people value security.

Most people will tolerate just about anything--a bad marriage, an intrusive government, a horrible boss, a job that they hate--if only that thing can make them feel more secure.

It's sad, really.

But entrepreneurs aren't like that.

It takes courage to forego the predictability of a corporate job.

It takes courage to sacrifice your nest egg to your startup.

It takes courage to take the risk of failure.

It takes courage to make your dreams into reality.

And it takes courage--lots of it--to hand over the reins when your startup grows beyond your ability to manage it.

That's why entrepreneurs are--rightly--the true heroes of our modern world.

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You meet new people all the time. At work, at your kid’s school, at Starbucks while waiting for your morning latte… and maybe it’s someone you’ve seen before, but once you’ve had a conversation you’ll always look at that person differently. Why? Because you’ve chatted, looked them in the eyes, traded pleasantries. It doesn’t take much for you to form an impression.

As a matter of fact, you probably have a better sense of how to market to someone you’ve actually met than anyone who’s name and email address happens to be in your database. Now imagine if you could meet with everyone in that database. Well, clearly that’s not possible unless it has less than 100 people in it, and even then, that’s a lot of morning lattes!

The good news is there’s another way.

Why not leverage social media to gain insights into what your target buyer is talking about, what content they’re sharing, and who most influences them? It’s not the same as connecting one on one, instead it’s more akin to walking through a party listening to conversations and seeing whom different folks gravitate to. But what a great way to get a sense of who to approach and how to engage them, right?

Tap into social media insights about your target audience

To get started, you first need to do these three things:

1. Build social channels filled with prospects and customers.  My experience is that most B2B marketers aren’t focused enough on building high quality social channels. If you’re one of them, then repeat after me: “It’s about quality NOT quantity”. Given that, how do your social channels stack up? Look through your followers and fans and see how many you (or your sales team) would be excited to talk to. Yes, you have a lot of work to do.
2. Find your target audience on social media.  Don’t think your prospects are using social media? You’re wrong. They’re on LinkedIn, they read industry blogs, and they ask questions on Twitter. So find out where they’re participating and be there too. Start with LinkedIn. Join groups that your best customers and top prospects are already participating in. Next look at industry publications and see who’s commenting on blog posts and following these publications on Twitter. You get the idea!
3. Start listening to social conversations.  Now track what your customers and prospects are talking about on social media. Each day list the relevant discussions happening in the LinkedIn groups you care about. Note which industry blog posts seem to generate the most comments and what those comments are about. See what sources and topics your “quality followers” are tweeting. Over time (and it won’t take long) social insights will begin to emerge…

Lots of ways to put social media insights to work

Armed with these social insights, you can begin to incorporate them into your marketing efforts.

Here are five different ways to consider:

• Inform buyer personas.  You’ve found out where your target buyers are active on social media, shouldn’t that information be part of your buyer personas? Absolutely. How about the topics you see them sharing or questions they’re asking? Yes, again. And which publications, brands, and people they read, share, and mention? Ditto.
• Identify key influencers to engage.  Not sure who else to have as a guest speaker for your next webinar or user conference? Take a look at who in your industry has the strongest influence with your target audience. Hint: they have lots of followers, retweets, and mentions. Start engaging these key influencers before you need to ask for their help.
• Get content marketing ideas.  So what are your prospects talking about on social media? What questions are they asking? Which posts are getting shared the most? All helpful information if you’re trying to figure out the topic of your next blog post, white paper, or webinar. And knowing which keywords they’re using will help with title creation, too!
• Find out where to promote your brand.  Which online publications are doing the best job generating content that your target audience actively shares, likes, mentions, and comments on? Chances are this is where you want to consider paid advertising, public relations outreach, and submitting “by-line” articles.
• Competitive insights. Don’t forget your buyers are also following, sharing, and engaging with your competitors. Plus your competitors are participating on LinkedIn, tweeting out their latest white papers, and building their own social channels. Why not get insights into what they’re up to?

Now it’s your turn. Are you using social media insights to inform your marketing efforts?

If so, how? If not… well, why not?

Want to see great examples of social insights? Check out our latest report: Marketing Executives on Twitter

Sales Training Article: Ten Things Learned at Work

By Geoffrey James, INC - Sales Source

These ten simple truths about life and business were extracted from years of working with people and ideas.

The other day my eight year old son asked me: "What did you learn at work today?" He was, of course, mimicking my daily question about what he learned at school. Even so, his question got me thinking: "What HAVE I learned at work?" Not just today, but every day.

So I sat back and thought about it for a while and I came up with this list, which encapsulates the most valuable things I've learned over the years working with everybody from programmers to salespeople to top executives:

1. You can do anything, but you can't do everything.

Life has an infinite number of possibilities and your ability to achieve success is limited only by your imagination. However, there are always trade-offs and sometimes moving in one direction prevents you from moving in another.

2. You can't argue somebody out of a belief.

Most people think their beliefs result from objective fact. Actually, people organize and interpret facts according to their beliefs. Therefore, the more facts that you marshal for your argument, the less the other person is likely to change beliefs.

3. Pressure creates resistance.

The natural human reaction to being pushed is to push back. This is why the "hard sell" doesn't work today and, indeed, has never worked. It's also why heavy-handed management techniques always fail.

4. All you can change are your thoughts and actions.

Most of the misery and disappointment in life and in business emerges from the fruitless quest to 1) make other people change and 2) change the course of outside events. All you truly control is how you think, what you say, and what you do.

5. You never know what other people are thinking.

Everyone in the world has three faces. The first they present to the world at large, the second they share with their friends and family, and the third they keep completely to themselves.

6. You live up (or down) to your expectations.

I once met a guy who was dead broke, on drugs, overweight, often drunk and who had drifted in and out of jail and bad relationships. On his right shoulder was a tattoo he'd gotten when he was 16. It read "Born Loser."

7. The "good old days" weren't all that good.

Many people wish they'd been born in a simpler time, like the 1950s, the Victorian period, or the middle ages. What utter foolishness! By any reasonable measure, we live in the best, the healthiest, and the happiest time in all history.

8. Great product ideas are a dime a dozen.

There are millions of great ideas floating around that, if implemented, could make somebody millions of dollars. But it's never the ideas that matter. It's the ability to implement one idea and make it something real.

9. Nobody has a monopoly on truth.

Politicians, priests, prophets, and pundits all claim that they (and they alone) know the truth. While they may be sincere, they are human beings and therefore their "truth" is a product of a fallible human mind, and therefore incomplete.

10. All you need is love.

The Beatles may have been seriously pot-addled in the 1960s, but they definitely got this one right. When it comes down to it, it's your ability to feel and express love that will bring you both the greatest happiness and success.

---

Need some help with your sales performance? Take a look at the sales training workshops available to you and improve sales performance.

Read more sales training articles from CustomerCentric Selling® - The Sales Training Company.

Did you know that 72% of B2C marketers have acquired a customer through Facebook? Or that B2B marketers have found LinkedIn 277% more effective than Facebook or Twitter for acquiring new customers? In this infographic we’ll show you how marketers are using social media to acquire new customers and how you can to!

For tenured B2B Chief Sales Officers, the world of sales – as they know it – is undergoing its most dramatic disruption in the last 50 years. What worked before no longer works now. Sales organizations are under constant assault by both internal forces and buyers. The demands and expectations of buyers and internal leaders rising each quarter.

As I have written about for marketing, B2B sales now find themselves in the throes of a buyer revolution. The traditional sales processes of the last two decades have been upended and overthrown by newly empowered buyers. The use of conventional sales processes, methods, and strategies are no longer effective.

One approach always counted on when sales faces challenges is to approach it with more vigor. Calling for more sales training, more product training, more motivation, more processes, more methodology, more productivity, and more management oversight. While the approach of vigor has been one to count on in the past, I do not think it will cut it to survive the buyer revolution at hand.

Rethinking Is In Order

Sales leaders today need to begin taking a few steps back from the vigor approach and begin to rethink sales in light of the buyer revolution. Radical and disruptive changes in market and buying behavior dynamics calls for rethinking of strategies, tactics, and the often forgotten but important key – organization. The sales organization of tomorrow will need to operate and adapt differently than the sales organizations of yesterday. Embracing evolving changes in buying behavior, both at the organizational and the buyer level. Leading their enterprises in understanding the buyers of today’s digital age.

Taking Bold Steps

The rethinking and reinventing of B2B sales calls for CSO’s to take bold steps. I recommend Chief Sales Officers consider these important steps:

Step 1: Gather and Lead with Buyer Insight

One of the best selling business books recently has been The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. Dixon and Adamson are colleagues at the Corporate Executive Board. I like the premise of the book, which is about the use of insights to enable customer conversations. The authors claim the big revelation is B2B sales professionals need to “approach customers with unique insights about how they can save or make money.” In the new reality of today, I believe the book oversells a bit concepts which have been around for a while – but – it is still a pertinent message.

I believe the main benefit of the book is the raising of consciousness about insights and conversations. B2B Chief Sales Officers must do two important approaches in this step:

One, invest in buyer insight research. An ongoing gathering from an expert source, which informs you not only about sales strategies, but lays the foundation of critical insights you need to work from to enable customer conversations.

Two, turn your sales force into insight pros, which lead with insights. Earning an elevated level of collaboration involvement from companies and buyers. This is much more than just approaching with insights on how to save or make more money. Which unfortunately have only amounted to cliche’ two-liner sound bites in the past. Leading with insights means strong business acumen backed by knowledgeable training on how to analyze, develop, and lead with insights.

Step 2: Map the B2B Critical Path to Purchase: Know Your Entry Point

We have heard much about the buyer’s journey and buying processes during the past two years. B2B sales leaders must move beyond this and know how to identify their critical buying path to purchase. This is an in-depth understanding versus just knowing stages of a buyer’s journey. Here is why it is important for B2B sales: it helps to identify the exact entry point for sales.

During the past year, the figures of 50% to 70% has been touted by various reports regarding how much of the buying process is completed before the first sales contact is made. Be careful about taking these figures too literally or too gospel-like. Every industry and segment operates differently. It can be 10% or it can 70%. While it is important to acknowledge the shift in buying behaviors towards online due diligence, you must know what it is exactly for your segments.

A case in point, for one organization I conducted buyer persona and insight research for, potential buyers in a mid-market segment made their first sales contact as part of their second step of evaluation. About 15%-20% into the buying process. Had this organization taken a 50% number as gospel, they would wind-up missing opportunities!

Step 3: Empower Sales with Company Personas and Buyer Personas

Today’s buyers and organizations are changing. Along with their own changes, they are resetting their expectations on interacting with suppliers, collaborators, and partners. To succeed at leading with insights and an elevated level of collaboration, sales professionals today need ongoing company and buyer insights at their fingertips. Insights, which help them, grasp how organizations and buyers are changing.

In some cases, best-in-class organizations I have worked with have developed both Company Personas and Buyer Personas. Personas are about modeling behaviors – specifically buying behaviors for our purposes. A Company Persona™ looks at more than the Ideal Company Profile approach. An Ideal Company Persona™ goes beyond frimographics to model organizational behaviors. Company Personas examines processes, procurement, structure, systems, talent, ecosystems, and effectiveness. Companies and buyers expect sales professional to not only understand how to bring value but how to make an impact on improving organizational effectiveness.

Buyer personas give sales professionals the insight they need to know who to interact with inside companies and how to help buyer accomplish their specific goals. In complex company environments, the use of an Ideal Buyer Persona™ can help in anticipating buying situations, processes, and which buying teams are most likely to be formed.

Step 4: Match Sales Representative to Ideal Companies and Ideal Buyers

For most B2B organizations, the hiring criteria for sales professionals have been unchanged for years. The focus has been on matching to sales related abilities and methods. B2B sales leaders have to rethink the approach of territory filling to matching business acumen and capability to the ideal company and the ideal buyers. With expectations now high stakes, this is a crucial new development. I advocate B2B companies now develop a Sales Persona™ (or Ideal Sales Persona™) for specific buying situations, companies, and buyers. Modeling the archetype of the ideal sales representative best matching companies and buyers.

Taking this step completes a new important perspective – a triangular relationship of what “Ideal” now means for sales organizations.

Step 5: Transition from Sales Training to Buyer Insight and Conversation Training

Year after year, sales professionals are subjected to sales methodology training. Just as well, heeding to marketing’s demands to pour product training onto their sales force. It is a cycle, which has continued unabated for a very long time. A bold move by B2B sales leaders is to put an end to this cycle as it exists today. What is sorely needed is researched-based buyer insight training. Specifically focused on two areas:

One, is improving sales professional competency in buyer insight and predictability. Having good intuition, insight, and foresight to know what companies and buyers are facing and how to bring both insight and foresight to a buying situation.

Two, is improving the buyer interaction and conversational abilities of sales professionals today. Interacting with buyers today is conversations and exploration as opposed to old methods of leading questions.

The Ultimate Goal

One of the key success ingredients for sales in the future will be buyer predictability. The ability to have and provide buyer foresight is the ultimate goal to be pursued. The sales organization is the front line to buyers and customers. By necessity, they need to be the eyes, ears, and voice leading their organization on buyer predictabiity. These five steps will help you build and lead an organization designed to anticipate and predict how best to help buyers achieve their goals. And, do more than just bring insight to buyers. Bring powerful foresight, which impacts their own way of operating their business.

(If you are a leader in Sales, I welcome further conversations to help explore these five steps. I am very interested in getting your thoughts and perspectives. Please share widely – your peers and colleagues are trying to survive the buyer revolution.)

Is content marketing – the marketing methodology that entails disseminating free special reports, white papers, e-books, blog posts, and other useful content to potential customers – overrated? Sales expert Robert Minskoff seems to think so. “Go ahead and blog, tweet, and post,” says Minskoff. “But be very aware that there is still a large segment [...]

Google Glass, the search giant’s foray into wearable augmented reality technology, has generated considerable interest within and beyond the tech community, and generally positive press. The glasses-like device essentially overlays a close-to-the-eye computer display over whatever is in the wearer’s field of vision, and provides smartphone-like features through Bluetooth voice commands.

But while it’s an intriguing technology with some fascinating potential applications, Google Glass is likely to, if perhaps not quite fail, then succeed only as a niche product—not like the broad consumer applications Google loves (search, AdWords, Android, YouTube, etc.).

The reasons aren’t as simple as some have suggested. Consumer embrace will not likely be limited by price, since like any other new technology, the cost should decline steeply over time. Nor will the product fail because most people think they look better without glasses.

First, anyone who’s not self-conscious about having a Bluetooth headset protruding from their ear is unlikely to be concerned with how they look wearing Google Glass. Second, the appearance issue is easily fixable: make Google Glass look like aviator shades. Suddenly the wearer looks like a Tom Cruise character instead of just a rich dweeb.

No, Google Glass will fail—or succeed only in limited, niche applications—because both valid concerns and not-entirely-unreasonable-Google-paranoia will cause the product to be banned in many of the locations where it isn’t already impractical.

So, is Google Glass half-full…

First, among the applications where Glass may find a home:

Tourism and travel: imagine being able to walk the streets of an unfamiliar city and get instant information about your location, transit options, nearby restaurants and attractions, the architect who designed the building you are looking at…pretty much anything. For walking tours, you could download an app that would automatically display supplemental information to what the tour guide is saying based on where your gaze lands.

Gaming: get off your couch! Google Glass creates some amazing opportunities for game players. No longer limited to their flat-screen TVs or the imaginations of the game creators, gamers will be able to shoot zombies, Nazis, and aliens popping out from behind the couch, the car, the backyard fence—any object in any place where such behavior is allowed and doesn’t look too strange.

Medicine: Google Glass offers a wealth of opportunities in this area, from assisting with diagnosis to keeping vital signs within view during surgery. Harvard’s John Nosta recently wrote an outstanding article for Forbes about how Google Glass is changing medical education.

Field work: this technology can be used to provide critical supplemental information to professionals across a wide range of “in the field” professions, from land surveying to civil engineering to underground inspections to on-site equipment repair—pretty much any application where visual information is needed, instantly, outside the office or home environment.

Exercise: though the current version would be close to worthless here, a more comfortable, rugged, and considerably lower-priced versions would be ideal for runners, cyclists and others who want to track heart rate, miles traveled, calories burned, and other fitness activity tracker metrics.

…or half empty?

The above applications and others offer promising niche market opportunities for Google Glass. But unfortunately for the goal of making this a widely adopted, mass market technology, there are many more places where the technology is likely to be banned outright. Among them:

Any secure area: these are not limited to nuclear facilities and government laboratories, where most of us don’t spend much time anyway. The sign above was actually posted in a small factory / retail outlet that makes and sells bulk foodservice items like baked beans, chili, and au gratin potatoes. The owners ban Google Glass because they don’t want anyone stealing their recipes or techniques.

Google Glass may be banned anywhere the collection and recording of too much visual information could present a business or security risk…even, potentially, airports.

Meetings: it’s highly likely that Google Glass will be banned at business events and meetings. Meeting organizers are already frustrated by the electronic distractions offered to attendees via their smartphones (checking emails, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram…). Google Glass takes the potential for distraction to an entirely new, and one would suspect generally unwelcome, level.

Driving: cell phones are a dangerous distraction, even in hands-free mode. Google Glass would make that problem far worse by creating visual as well as audible distraction. Look for the wearing of Google Glass while driving to be banned by legislatures across the globe. Unless, perhaps, one is wearing Google Glass while riding in a driverless Google Car.

Retail stores: showrooming is already a serious problem for brick-and-mortar retailers, costing an estimated $217 billion in lost sales annually. Though the practice isn’t difficult, it does currently require some degree of work by consumers; Google Glass would alleviate even that modicum of effort. It could also be used by competitors to see, in real time, a retailer’s pricing, selection and display for any and every item in the store. It would be surprising if retailers don’t start banning Google Glass in their shops.

Public performances: cameras and video recorders are already barred in most theaters, concert venues, arenas and stadiums. Banning Google Glass would be a logical extension of those bans. With file sharing having sucked so much income out of the recording industry, musical artists now rely on concert revenue more than ever before. The NFL famously prohibits even “accounts of the game” without consent; what team is going to allow 60,000 real-time recording devices in the stands?

Courtrooms: as with theaters and arenas, cameras are recording devices are already banned. It’s virtually inconceivable an exception would be made for Google Glass.

In short, Google Glass represents a fascinating technology, but one with ultimately limited usefulness. Niche applications may be enough for Google, but given the company’s history, once the limitations of the market become clear, it wouldn’t be shocking to see Glass go the way of Google Reader, Knol, Buzz, Picnik, Jaiku, and other products in the Google graveyard.

What do you think?

Twitter’s popularity has exploded over the past five years, with the social media network now estimated at around 250 million active users with about 500 million tweets posted each day.

With social media usage at an all-time high, more and more travel companies are tapping into the networks to build loyalty and increase their customer base.

United Airlines and JetBlue Airways, for example, have offered flight deals via their Twitter accounts. In early June 2013, JetBlue tweeted a promotion for $59 one-way fares via its @JetBlueCheeps Twitter account, which has more than 360,000 followers. United introduced its Twitter deals, known as “twares”, in 2009.

Using social media in this way gives companies a cost-effective method of driving sales. No longer is an expensive radio spot or television ad needed – a simple tweet can engage consumers on platforms they control and prefer.

Acknowledging Customer Complaints

More consumers are venting their frustrations on Twitter, which presents challenges and opportunities for companies in the arena of customer relations. While negative comments can travel like wildfire on social media, so too, can positive reviews. Accordingly, companies that resolve customer complaints in a matter of hours – or even minutes – instead of days, weeks or months are likely to boost their reputation.

Twitter should be viewed as much more than just a broadcast channel. It’s an invaluable listening tool for companies to monitor online conversations about their brand, their competitors and the travel industry as a whole.

Send Update Tweets

Of course, in order to earn glowing reviews, companies must ensure their customers have the best experience possible.

For travel companies, that involves updating customers via Twitter and other social networks. Instead of passengers having to constantly check on their flight’s status, for example, airlines can tweet about schedule delays, weather alerts and traffic backups.

Similarly, hotels and rental car companies can effectively stay in touch with their customers on Twitter, ensuring that the travel experience remains as smooth as possible.

Get Personal

One of the most important pieces of the customer loyalty puzzle is adding personal touches to business interactions. This can be achieved by creating thoughtful campaigns that focus on unique selling propositions: who is your target market and how can you make their experience better? For travel suppliers, this could be as simple as catering to travellers with pets or children.

If used correctly, social media networks such as Twitter can be a powerful tool in helping travel companies to build their customer base and, more importantly, foster loyalty.

Recently, LinkedIn announced the upcoming launch of curated channels and influencer blogs within their application about specific topics. In fact, over the past few years Linkedin has steadily increased their focus on content curation, and more broadly on content. This is one of the first, in what I anticipate to be many big moves towards more content curation marketing models for organizations. You’ve seen the headlines, Content is King and Content Marketing is now Mainstream. I decided to dive into LinkedIn’s decision to shift and really dissect how they did it and why they did it, ultimately providing you with insight on how this change could benefit your organization’s marketing strategy.

An Overview of LinkedIn’s Content Moves

I have put together an infographic (located at the end of this post) that summarizes some of LinkedIn’s major moves with regards to content. Here’s a quick rundown:

March 2011: LinkedIn Launches “LinkedIn Today”

In March of 2011 (and even today), very little content was created and hosted on LinkedIn. To get users to turn to LinkedIn as a source of content, they relied on curation so they did not have to build a large publishing team. Linkedin made their foray into content with the launch of LinkedIn Today.

While LinkedIn does not host a lot of content, a lot of content passes through their network in the form of links shared in status updates. LinkedIn employed social curation by mining these links and publishing a curated section of their site with the most popular articles for each user’s specific industry. If you’re on LinkedIn, you likely are receiving this already.

March 2012: SlideShare Acquisition

A year later, LinkedIn made their first major content-related acquisition by adding the “YouTube for Slideshows” — SlideShare to their portfolio for $87 million. The SlideShare acquisition made sense for LinkedIn for two main reasons:

1. Overnight LinkedIn acquired millions of pieces of content to inject into their ecosystem.

2. While videos and picture content is attractive for Facebook users, and music is attractive for MySpace users, presentations are attractive for LinkedIn’s professional audience.

October 2012: Influencers and Blogging

Six months later, LinkedIn quietly rolled out the ability for a set of 150, hand selected influencers to create content on their site. These influencers have really been the cream of the crop from respected individuals in the business world such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson. For the first time, users could create content directly within and hosted by LinkedIn. LinkedIn plans to aggressively expand this ecosystem as reported in a recent New York Times article.

April 2013: Pulse Acquired

Right around the time of Yahoo’s acquisition of news summarization app, Summly, and Google’s news aggregation app, Wavii, LinkedIn announced their acquisition of news sharing application, Pulse, for $90 million. Though LinkedIn has not fully incorporated the application within the LinkedIn experience, we should expect them to use this to enhance their content presence on mobile and tablet devices.

Why is LinkedIn so interested in Content?

So why is LinkedIn doing all this? Why are they investing hundreds of millions of dollars in freely available content that’s not directly monetizable?

It’s because LinkedIn fundamentally lacks user engagement. In a recent talk by Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, he described the four gears that drive any online consumer company: acquisition, engagement, monetization, and activation.

• Acquisition is the ability to acquire new users. LinkedIn excels at this and has one of the largest social networks online.

• Monetization is the ability to extract revenue as a result of that user base. Whereas Facebook has issues with this, LinkedIn does not; with Premium subscriptions, recruiter tools, and sales tools.

• Activation is the ability to get your user based to proactively recruit other users to fuel monetization and acquisition. LinkedIn users have been very active in growing their own networks and as a result the network overall.

• Engagement is the ability to keep the user base involved and active on your properties post acquisition. This is where LinkedIn has been lacking.

Think about it. What do you usually do on Linkedin? If you’re like me, then you go to the site to: (1) check out and search for profiles, (2) reply to messages and invitation requests, and (3) occasionally interact in groups. Compare that to Facebook, where users can spend hours on end. In fact, the average American spend 59x more time on Facebook than on LinkedIn.

Lessons Learned

There are a few immediate lessons from LinkedIn’s strategy that can be employed by marketers:

• Use Content for Engagement. Similar to how LinkedIn is employing content to increase engagement, you can do the same to increase prospect engagement with your brand. By creating engaging and relevant content, you can drive your customer acquisition, activation, and monetization.

• Use Curation to Bootstrap. LinkedIn’s first step into content was not to build an editorial team or to try to become a media company. Instead, they curated third party content to start. While LinkedIn used social curation by harvesting content shared by millions of users, you can get started with curation without such a user base by curating content as an authoritative topic expert.

For more resources on how to get started with content marketing and content curation, you may be interested in our award winning eBook 5 Simple Steps to Becoming a Content Curation Rockstar. Or if you’re already familiar with content curation and want some further inspiration beyond LinkedIn, check out the 2013 Content Curation Look Book featuring real-world brand examples of curation. Lasty, if you’re on LinkedIn and you’re looking to connect with other content curators, join the Content Curators group.

There's a big controversy at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, the business school regularly ranked as the best place to get an international business education. The struggling school, which had a $4 million deficit in fiscal 2013, has agreed to a partnership deal with a for-profit education provider called Laureate Education Inc.

Many alums are enraged. At least two board members have resigned in protest. They believe the link up with for-profit Laureate will tarnish the school's brand. But some of them should be paying a little more attention to how much some of the school's faculty are making.

The highest paid professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management makes more than the dean of the Harvard Business School. Or his boss. Or, for that matter, President Obama.

Yet, he is little known outside his Glendale, Arizona-based school, not widely quoted in the media, nor broadly recognized as an expert in his field. He doesn’t even make the list of the top 50 business thinkers in the world.

Still, global strategy professor Kannan Ramaswarmy (photo above) was paid total compensation, with benefits, of $700,096 in fiscal 2011, according to government records filed by Thunderbird. That’s more than the $662,054 in total compensation made by Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria or then-Thunderbird President Angel Cabrera who pulled down $584,749 in 2011. And it’s more than the estimated $550,000 in pay, benefits and perks that President Obama makes.

How in the world can a struggling school which has been in decline for many years afford to pay Ramaswamy so much? For one thing, he teaches in several of the school’s executive education programs which are among its more lucrative ventures. For another, he has tenure and the school can’t cross him off its employment roster even if it wanted.

Yet, he’s hardly alone in getting big pay at Thunderbird. In fact, the highest paid ten professors alone in fiscal 2011 were paid some $4.3 million, more than the $4 million deficit reported by the school, red ink that forced it into a highly controversial partnership with for-profit educational provider Laureate Education. Not surprisingly, perhaps, all of the most highly paid profs are men.

Andrew Inkpen, another global strategy professor, was paid $565,457 with benefits in the same year. Graham Rankine, an associate professor of accounting, was paid $492,908. The compensation for three other faculty members—Robert Hisrich, a professor of global entrepreneurship; William Youngdahl, associate professor of operations management, and Mansour Javidan, dean of research—all easily topped $400,000 a year.

Among the other top ten most highly compensated faculty at the school are John Mathis, a professor of global finance, who made $302,191; David Bowen, a human resources professor, who made $307,582; Dale Davison, a professor of accounting, who pulled down $261,789, and Humberto Valencia, a professor of global marketing, who made $260,109.

For just about all of these professors, of course, this is only the compensation paid to them by Thunderbird. Many faculty members also have lucrative consulting contracts with clients that can equal or vastly exceed their income from the school.

Nice work if you can get it.

Join the conversation about this story »

Are “Challenging” and “Insight” synonymous? I had been mixing them together, but more recently have been thinking they may be but don’t have to be. Or actually, I’ve been thinking, “Does the Challenger sales person have to be the provider/teacher of the insights, or is she the orchestrator and manager of the process?”

So much of the discussion around Challenger has been on providing Insight and the Teaching Pitch. Sales organizations have been investing a lot in preparing sales people to go out and challenge, providing pitches and decks the sales person uses to “teach the customer.”

But now we see wounded challengers limping back into the office, tails between their legs. The problem is, the customer started challenging the sales person, asking questions, drilling down, trying to learn more. And to many sales people are unable to respond. They may not have the depth of experience, the “scars,” or even the business understanding to respond, engaging the customer in ever deeper conversations about their businesses. It seems to be, successfully delivering and defending Insight requires scars.

With very complex problems and solutions, we’ve long known it’s impossible for the sales person to have the depth of knowledge necessary to respond to all the customers’ questions. We’ve known we have to provide specialists, pre-sales support, technical support, and other resources to help the sales person respond to the customer in helping solve their problems. In very complex sales, the sales person becomes more of a resource manager, conductor and director. They get the right people involved, the manage the entire process and keep it moving forward–both on the customer side and with their own teams.

So as we implement Challenger, why should we think it should be any different. Why do we assume the sales person is the person that provides the Insight? Couldn’t the Challenger sales person be the orchestrator of the process?

There are many interesting characteristics of Challengers, they understand the customer’s business, they get the customer to think differently about their business, they take control of the sale, and many more.

But it’s naive to think the Challenger sales person has to do it all themselves (God forbid we see the rise of the 2013 version of the Lone Wolf). I’m not certain Matt Dixon or Brent Adamson would claim to have represented Challenger sales people to be the only teachers of the customer.

Additionally, I would tend to guess, that great Challenger sales people are probably very effective in leveraging resources within their own organizations.

Perhaps we are doing the wrong thing in equipping the sales person to actually to the Teaching Pitch. We can’t expect the sales person to go 10 levels deep into semiconductor fabrication technologies, but supported by engineers, physicists, meteorologists, and others, they can deliver help customers rethink the semiconductor fabrication process, improving yields. Likewise, we can’t expect a sales person to challenge Boeing to rethink their airplane design and manufacturing process, but accompanied by experienced airplane designers, we can.

Perhaps one of the greatest capabilities of Challengers, but seems not to be discussed much, is “they take control of the sale.” This means they provide leadership to the customer and their own teams in moving the buying process forward. The best semiconductor physicists in the world can’t do this. Nor can the best airplane designers.

So while deep Insight, getting customer to think about their businesses differently, challenging them to see new possibilities is critical to creating value for the customer, the sales person doesn’t have to be the person doing this, they just have to be the people to make it happen.

Providing Insights to our customers is a critical part of creating value f(it always has been). It’ is a core part of Challenger (as it is with other sales approaches). We need to structure our organizations, providing the right resources to support sales in delivering these Insights. Where sales has the capability, depth of experience, and understanding to do this, that’s great–but where they can’t be expected to do so (or we can’t find enough “airplane designers” who can sell), then we have to provide the resource to support them, leveraging them to help teach the customers.

We (and possibly the CEB) need to rethink the Challenger Implementation. Some time ago, I wrote Sending Your People Out Naked, The Problem With Challenger Selling. I suggested Challenger is an overall organizational strategy, not a sales strategy. Maybe we need to rethink the “Insight” piece. Sales people may not be the most appropriate people for delivering the Insight, but they are accountable for making sure those conversations are being held with the customer. They are accountable for getting the right resources in front of the right people at the right time, stimulating the right conversations.

From an organizational point of view, whether it’s Challenger or any other model, we need to constantly rethink the way we deploy resources to maximize our ability to connect with the customer, so that as organizations we are constantly providing Insight, perhaps through the sales person, perhaps at the direction of the sales person, perhaps in what we stand for and how we present ourselves in the markets. We need to think of delivering these insights in the most impactful, effective, and efficient way possible, and get off the idea that it has to be the sales person that is the deliverer of Insight.

There hasn’t been a lot of discussion about what the Challenger sales person does once she gets the customer hot and lathered to change. There certainly needs to be more discussion about this, but it is clear, Challengers take control of the sale, they provide leadership to the customer through their buying process. Do they do everything, no, they orchestrate the right resources to help move the buying/selling process effectively. Those resources may be from their company, they may be the customer resources.

Isn’t this what professional B2B selling is really about? Whether you call them Challengers, Solutions Sales People, Customer Focused Sales People, or any other label. The top performers always take control of the sale.