Rnordman

I wrote a blog post in September of last year arguing that gross margins and operating margins really matter when valuing companies. I argued that “software companies with software margins” are better businesses than tech companies that are not really software companies but a tech-enabled version of some other business.

But gross margins, in particular, can be tricky to compare. In some cases, a software business is in the middle of the revenue flow, takes the revenue, and then passes on a lot of it, and is left with what looks like a low margin, but is in fact a high margin.

An example of that is the Dutch payment processing company Adyen. Here is a screenshot of a part of Adyen’s income statement from Yahoo Finance:

So Adyen operated in the last twelve months with an 18.7% gross margin. Many would think that was a “very low margin business.” But the truth is Adyen is simply passing through that $2.1bn of revenue to financial institutions in the form of interchange and other fees. They do very little with that money.

Let’s compare that with the big retailer Macy’s. Here is a screenshot of a part of Macy’s income statement from Yahoo Finance:

So Macy’s operated at a 40.1% gross margin over the last twelve months, more than double what Adyen operated at.

That $15bn cost of revenue on Macy’s Income Statement is the cost of purchasing everything you might find in a Macy’s store, the inventory costs associated with that, and the cost and effort of displaying all of that inventory in the stores.

So while it is the case that Macy’s has more than double the gross margin of Adyen, I believe Adyen has a much more attractive business from a margin perspective than Macy’s.

That is because Macy’s expends enormous amounts of working capital and operating expense and effort in its $15bn cost of revenue where Adyen expends very little working capital and operating expense and effort in its $2.1bn cost of revenue.

The trick, I think, is to wrap your head around the cost of revenue or cost of goods sold line item in the income statement and think about what is going on there. If it is very little to no effort, and largely just an accounting entry, then you may have a “low margin business” that is actually a high margin business. On the other hand, if it is a lot of work and capital investment to produce those margins, well then you have what you have and that is often a low margin business.

The world's most successful people are known and celebrated for all different things.

Some are famous for their skills and talents, while others are distinguished by their courage or profound impact on society.

But one thing many of the world's most successful people have in common is their ability to inspire others.

Here are 110 inspirational quotes from highly successful people.

Emmie Martin contributed to an earlier version of this post.

SEE ALSO: 13 inspiring quotes from Abraham Lincoln on liberty, leadership, and character

On life and death

• "The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." —Mark Twain

• "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on." —Robert Frost

• "I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine." —Neil Armstrong 

• "You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough." —Mae West

• "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." —Steve Jobs

• "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." —Mahatma Gandhi

• "If you live long enough, you'll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you'll be a better person." —Bill Clinton

• "Life is short, and it is here to be lived." —Kate Winslet 

• "Don't count the days, make the days count." —Muhammad Ali

• "Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken." —Oscar Wilde

• "Don't let the fear of striking out hold you back." —Babe Ruth

• "It is never too late to be what you might have been." —George Eliot

• "The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes." —Frank Lloyd Wright

• "Every moment is a fresh beginning." —T.S. Eliot

• "The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate." —Oprah Winfrey 

• "When you cease to dream you cease to live." —Malcolm Forbes

• "Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." —George Bernard Shaw

On happiness

• "If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine." —Morris West

• "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened." —Dr. Seuss 

• "If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes." —Andrew Carnegie

• "If you can do what you do best and be happy, you're further along in life than most people." —Leonardo DiCaprio

• "We should remember that just as a positive outlook on life can promote good health, so can everyday acts of kindness." —Hillary Clinton

• "The purpose of our lives is to be happy." —Dalai Lama

• "The most important thing is to enjoy your life — to be happy — it's all that matters." —Audrey Hepburn

• "Happiness can exist only in acceptance." —George Orwell

• "It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about." —Dale Carnegie 

• "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." —Eleanor Roosevelt

• "Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony." —Mahatma Gandhi

On courage, hope, and belief

 

• "Believe you can and you're halfway there." —Theodore Roosevelt

• "We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope." —Martin Luther King, Jr.

• "Don't limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve." —Mary Kay Ash 

• "Courage is grace under pressure." —Ernest Hemingway

• "What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve." —Napoleon Hill

• "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." —Malcolm X

• "It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong." —Abraham Lincoln

• "Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction." —John F. Kennedy

• "If you are going through hell, keep going." —Winston Churchill 

• "Once you choose hope, anything's possible." —Christopher Reeve

• "Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning." —Albert Einstein

• "All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them." —Walt Disney

• "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right." —Henry Ford 

• "It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are." —E.E. Cummings

• "The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don't wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope." —Barack Obama

• "Your voice can change the world." —Barack Obama

• "The more you dream, the farther you get." —Michael Phelps

• "Find out who you are and be that person. That's what your soul was put on this Earth to be. Find that truth, live that truth and everything else will come." —Ellen DeGeneres

• "As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100%." —Arnold Schwarzenegger

On taking risks

• "You must do the things you think you cannot do." —Eleanor Roosevelt

• "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." —Wayne Gretzky

• "Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen." —Michael Jordan 

• "The biggest risk is not taking any risk ... In a world that's changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks." —Mark Zuckerberg

• "The best way of learning about anything is by doing." —Richard Branson

• "If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it." —Elon Musk

• "Be fearless. Have the courage to take risks. Go where there are no guarantees. Get out of your comfort zone even if it means being uncomfortable. The road less traveled is sometimes fraught with barricades, bumps, and uncharted terrain. But it is on that road where your character is truly tested. Have the courage to accept that you're not perfect, nothing is and no one is — and that's OK." —Katie Couric 

• "A dream doesn't become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work." —Colin Powell

• "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference." —Robert Frost (from his poem "The Road Not Taken")

• "If there is no struggle, there is no progress." —Frederick Douglass

• "Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." —Benjamin Franklin

• "Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great." —John D. Rockefeller

• "Do one thing every day that scares you." —Eleanor Roosevelt

• "Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world." —Harriet Tubman

• "But you have to do what you dream of doing even while you're afraid." —Arianna Huffington

• "If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it's within your reach. And it'll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build." —Steve Wozniak

On creativity

• "Creativity is intelligence having fun." — Albert Einstein
• "Creativity takes courage." — Henri Matisse
• "To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it." — Kurt Vonnegut
• "You can't use up creativity. The more you use the more you have." — Maya Angelou
• "The chief enemy of creativity is good sense." — Pablo Picasso

 

 

On attitude and outlook

•  "It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." —J. K Rowling (from "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets") 

• "Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious." —Stephen Hawking

•  "In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you." —Deepak Chopra 

• "As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others." —Bill Gates

• "In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity." —Albert Einstein

• "If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased." —Katharine Hepburn

• "I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward." —Charlotte Bronte

• "Everything you can imagine is real." —Pablo Picasso

• "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched — they must be felt with the heart." —Helen Keller

• "If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon. And if you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve." —Jeff Bezos

• "The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain." —Dolly Parton

• "You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them." —Michael Jordan

• "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." —Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "Keep your face to the sunshine and you can never see the shadow." —Helen Keller

• "Identity is a prison you can never escape, but the way to redeem your past is not to run from it, but to try to understand it, and use it as a foundation to grow." —Jay-Z

• "In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different." —Coco Chanel 

• "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." —Barack Obama  

On success and failure

• "If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward." —Martin Luther King, Jr. 

• "Even if you fall on your face, you're still moving forward." —Victor Kiam 

• "Success isn't about how much money you make. It's about the difference you make in people's lives." —Michelle Obama

• "If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again." —William Edward Hickson

• "There are no mistakes, only opportunities." —Tina Fey (from her book, "Bossypants")

• "It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop." —Confucius

• "The difference between winning and losing is most often not quitting." —Walt Disney

• "Failure is another stepping stone to greatness." —Oprah Winfrey

• "Success is most often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable." —Coco Chanel

• "Don't worry about failure; you only have to be right once." —Drew Houston 

• "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." —Thomas A. Edison

• "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently." —Warren Buffett

• "Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm." —Winston Churchill

• "A champion is afraid of losing. Everyone else is afraid of winning." —Billie Jean King

On relationships

• "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." —Maya Angelou 

• "A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom." —Bob Dylan 

• "We can't help everyone, but everyone can help someone." —Ronald Reagan

• "One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody." —Mother Teresa

• "Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud." —Maya Angelou 

• "If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." —John Quincy Adams

• "You can't please everyone, and you can't make everyone like you." —Katie Couric

• "As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others." —Audrey Hepburn

• "When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace." —Jimi Hendrix

• "Sometimes you can't see yourself clearly until you see yourself through the eyes of others." —Ellen DeGeneres

• "You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty." —Mahatma Gandhi 

And, while wins might be harder to come by during the pandemic, there are plenty of lessons to be learned. Here are a few that relate to business development and your sales team.

The post Five Sales Lessons From The Coronavirus appeared first on Sandler Training.

Here, then, are three tips that can help you become more successful as a sales leader in creating a predictable operational rhythm – a cadence – if you find yourself responsible for the performance of a remote sales team.

The post Three Tips For Setting A Leadership Cadence For The Remote Sales Team appeared first on Sandler Training.

• Venture capital investors say they expect a slowdown in merger and acquisition activity because of the looming coronavirus recession.
•  Potential acquirers may focus on their own survival because they're not sure how long the recession will last. Many could cut costs and scrap their acquisition plans.
• But it's a buyer's market as startup valuations drop, and some cash-rich companies are still shopping around. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Startups are looking for the exit doors in the midst of the Great Lockdown, as the initial public offering market has pretty much closed for technology companies.

However, venture capital investors say startups should brace for a decline in merger and acquisition activity, robbing them of the main alternative to an IPO.

We asked a panel of venture capitalists if they think mergers and acquisitions will be affected by the drastically changing market conditions. Of the 17 people who responded, 11 people said they think activity will slow in the second quarter.

Selling to a competitor, while often painful, affords a startup the funding to keep going, new customers, and an increase in market share — a potential lifeline in an economic crisis. A sale also provides liquidity to investors, which may be why Sequoia's Doug Leone told startup leaders during the dot-com bust to "aggressively examine and pursue M&A opportunities" if cash is running out.

Now, the likelihood of a recession — and the uncertainty around how long it will last — has large potential acquirers cutting costs to ensure their survival. 

Eight investors told Business Insider that merger and acquisition activity will "greatly slow" in the second quarter, and three people said it will "somewhat slow." One person said activity will "stay about the same" in the second quarter as in the first quarter, which saw financial services startup Credit Karma sell to Intuit for $7.1 billion in cash and stock, amidst other big-ticket acquisitions.

Deals are already collapsing

The volley of unknowns has already spurred potential buyers to delay or cancel their plans to snap up other businesses.

Many erstwhile buyers are being forced to focus on the immediate health of their own operations. They may sacrifice some possible growth by scaling back their hiring and acquisition strategies in favor of burning less capital in the near term.

So far this year, Xerox has pulled the plug on its hostile bid to buy larger rival HP, saying that it was no longer sensible to pursue the takeover. A private equity firm is now trying to undo its purchase of Victoria's Secret, after the lingerie brand closed its stores and temporarily laid off most of its retail workers.

SoftBank also rowed backwards on an offer to buy $3 billion worth of WeWork shares earlier this month, though the tech giant justified the move by citing "significant" civil and criminal investigations into WeWork, and not the economic crisis. WeWork's board has sued its lost investor for reneging on the bailout, and the startup's disgraced former chief executive officer, Adam Neumann, also intends to sue the megafund, according to Bloomberg.

The merger and acquisition market could dry up further.

On Thursday, the chairman of the US House antitrust committe proposed a temporary freeze on most merger and acquisition activity until the crisis ends, saying that a "period of rampant consolidation" could wipe out competition from smaller players, as reported by Axios. The proposal would, however, permit deals involving a company that's already bankrupt or on the brink of failure.

The government has never passed such a sweeping moratorium on mergers and acquisitions, and the proposal is "highly unlikely" to have the support of Republicans on the panel, Politico reported.

'It's a buyer's market'

The doomy M&A forecast wasn't shared by everyone on our VC panel.

Five respondents said deal activity will "somewhat increase" in the second quarter, compared to the first quarter. No one thought it would "greatly increase."

Other notable deals in the first quarter include Google's acquisition of data-analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion and Salesforce's $1.33 billion pick-up of cloud-software startup Vlocity. The much younger acquirer Brex also went on a shopping spree, buying three companies at discount prices since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Henrique Dubugras, Brex's 24-year-old cofounder and co-chief executive, told Business Insider in March that his business plans to keep buying startups.

"Because of the markets, there will be opportunities that weren't possible before," Dubugras said. "Valuations are correcting and many startups can't raise [funds] right now, so they find it better to work together on things. We are in a position with a lot of cash and a strong business model, so we are in a position to help a lot of these companies."

The cloud business, in particular, could see an explosion of deal activity, as Business Insider previously reported.

The shelter-in-place orders underline the advantages of running a network on a web-based application that's accessible from anywhere, instead of a private, on-premise data center at company offices. These conditions could lead to a period of consolidation when the three most dominant players — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — as well as other tech giants gunning for a greater piece of the market, could seize opportunities to expand by acquiring smaller players at very low prices.

David Blumberg, a venture capitalist who focuses on startups that sell to other businesses, said one of his portfolio companies recently bought a company without meeting the team in person. The terms of the deal allow the acquirer to pay nothing in the initial sale, while agreeing to give the purchased company all of its earnings on future sales if the business achieves certain financial goals, according to Blumberg.

"It's a buyer's market in that regard," he told Business Insider.

If you're a VC who would like to enroll in the panel, please contact the author of this post.

SEE ALSO: Venture capital investors say deals are in danger of unraveling in the midst of a pandemic. Here's their advice for founders trying to raise funding right now.

Join the conversation about this story »

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Amazon is bringing a year’s worth of free, live and on-demand cooking classes to tens of millions of Amazon Fire TV and Fire tablet owners across the U.S., thanks to an expanded collaboration with Discovery’s Food Network Kitchen. The subscription service launched last fall as a flagship app for Amazon’s Alexa-powered Echo Show, bringing daily live classes, step-by-step cooking videos, on-demand video, home delivery of ingredients, and more to Echo devices owners.

While the Echo Show was the first smart-speaker-with-screen to gain access to Food Network Kitchen, the app is also available across devices, including Amazon’s Fire TV, Fire tablets, as well as iOS and Android phones and tablets.

The subscription offering combines episodes of popular Food Network Shows like “30 Minute Meals,” “Barefoot Contessa,” and “Brunch @ Bobby’s” with both live and on-demand cooking classes from culinary experts and top chefs, including Bobby Flay, Rachael Ray, Giada De Laurentiis, Guy Fieri, Martha Stewart, Alton Brown, Ina Garten, Andrew Zimmern, Ree Drummond, Daniel Boulud, Valerie Bertinelli, Sunny Anderson, Jonathan Waxman, Molly Yeh, Nancy Silverton, JJ Johnson and others.

In total, there are over 2,300 on-demand classes, hundreds of step-by-step videos, Food Network episodes, and over 80,000 recipes included in the subscription.

However, the live content is the service’s most compelling selling point, as it allows customers to cook with favorite chefs and then ask questions during the live Q&A portion of the show — essentially, it’s interactive TV.

Currently, Food Network Kitchen is selling for $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year, according to its website. (It launched with introductory pricing of $47.99 per year and $4 per month).

But starting today, Amazon will make the service available for free by offering Amazon device owners a one-year subscription to Food Network Kitchen.

The companies are hoping to capitalize on consumers’ increased interest in home cooking during quarantine, when restaurants are shut down and even takeout comes with a set of risks. With endless hours stuck at home, more people than ever are turning to cooking and baking to pass the time, then enjoying meals as a family. There’s no better time to reach this audience of home cooks with a service like this, the companies understand. And when the year is up, they believe many customers will continue to pay as they’ve experienced the value first-hand.

“When Food Network Kitchen came to Fire TV and Alexa last year, we saw how much customers love cooking with, and learning from, their favorite chefs,” said Marc Whitten, VP of Amazon Entertainment Devices and Services, in a statement about the subscription offer. “Many of us are spending more time cooking at home during these challenging times and are in need of a little inspiration. That’s why we are excited to offer all of our new and existing Fire TV and Fire Tablet customers a free year of access to Food Network Kitchen,” he added.

To coincide with the free subscription, Amazon and Discovery are also launching a “We Cook Together” initiative on May 2nd and 3rd, which will bring back-to-back live classes for two days straight, allowing Food Network Kitchen consumers to cook in real-time alongside their favorite chefs.

This feature will include 10 new cooking classes from thhe personal kitchens of Valerie Bertinelli, Scott Conant, Bobby Flay, Tyler Florence, Amanda Freitag, Alex Guarnaschelli, Marc Murphy, Michael Symon and Jet Tila

“During this unprecedented time, I know my first instinct as a chef is to turn to my kitchen, to cook something nourishing for those I care most about,” said Bobby Flay, about his participation in the live-streamed event. “Suddenly being faced with the task of cooking for yourself and family, multiple times a day, can be daunting, and we hope the Food Network Kitchen app and our #WeCookTogether weekend of live classes offer the assistance and motivation needed to plate something delicious for your loved ones,” he said.

Details on the offer are here.

• Periods of widespread selling and cash-hoarding shifted the sands of the investing landscape to reveal new opportunities.
• Several of Wall Street's biggest firms are raising billions of dollars to pile into distressed debt, viewing the Federal Reserve's relief measures as a backstop for ailing corporations.
• Significant spending on coronavirus relief measures will drag on global currencies, Bank of America projected, setting gold up to skyrocket through the economic downturn.
• Even bitcoin is breaching key thresholds, and some investors are turning to the volatile asset for the first time "as a hedge against currency wars," Ed Moya, senior market analyst at OANDA, wrote Thursday.
• Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.

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Weeks of indiscriminate selling and rotation to cash has left some corners of the market attractive to major institutions and retail investors alike.

Distressed debt, gold, and even bitcoin are currying new favor as popular sectors grow tepid. Trillions of dollars worth of relief measures from the Federal Reserve and the government have stabilized once-turbulent markets and signaled to buyers they can rely on a policy backstop. Firms tracking investor positioning are trying to get ahead of the curve, advising clients to enter underweight areas before a wave of capital follows.

Uncertainty clouding the US's economic future has spoiled some more traditional investment strategies. The stock market's rebound from late-March lows has slowed its pace, leaving economists forecasting everything from a sharp uptick to a bear-market resurgence. Monday's plunge into negative oil prices pushed the commodity market into uncharted territory and added another phenomenon to an already unprecedented year for the financial sector.

With corporate earnings fueling even more volatility to the virus-slammed landscape, investors are targeting gains elsewhere.

Read more: GOLDMAN SACHS: These are the top 11 companies to watch as we enter the best stock-picking environment in over a decade

Sweet and soured debt

The Fed's policy salvo indirectly gave stocks much-sought-after support following precipitous drops, yet credit markets are where the brunt of the aid will be felt. Distressed debt in the US quadrupled to nearly $1 trillion in less than a week as loan health tanked through March.

The central bank addressed the credit squeeze with an alphabet soup of relief programs aimed at keeping firms afloat through the economic freeze. Where corporations brought fresh supply to the debt market, the Fed's lending facilities are poised to drive outsized demand.

"We say 'distressed' has to trade higher before rally ends," Bank of America analysts led by Michael Hartnett said in a Thursday note, adding clients should "buy what the Fed buys."

The policy backstop hasn't gone unnoticed by Wall Street's biggest offices. Howard Marks' Oaktree Capital plans to raise $15 billion for the biggest ever distressed-debt fund, eyeing risky loans as a golden opportunity. The massive debt piles accumulating around the world stand to drive more defaults than during the 2008 recession, Oaktree said in a presentation seen by Bloomberg.

Read more: The stock market is rebounding without the most important ingredient it needs for long-term gains — and one quant chief warns it's a setup for another crash

Blackstone soon followed suit, with Bloomberg recently reporting the firm is looking to raise $7 billion for its own soured-debt fund. PIMCO is raising a $3 billion fund for a similar strategy. KKR is taking a less conventional path, converting one of its failed funds into a new, $600 million vehicle for buying up corporate loans. All told, billions of investor dollars are following the Fed into distressed debt.

Chase the shiny objects

Gold initially soared as volatility connected to the coronavirus pandemic picked up, but its gains quickly gave way to a mass sprint for cash. With government aid in place and relatively little cash sitting in gold investments, Bank of America said Monday the precious metal is positioned to nearly double to an all-time high by October 2021.

The bank lifted its 18-month price target to $3,000 from $2,000, saying significant easing policies around the world will serve as rocket fuel for the precious metal's value. Such measures place downward pressure on currencies and historically spike interest in gold.

Positioning in "the ultimate store of value" is also "surprisingly weak," leaving plenty of room for investors to get in early, the team led by Michael Hartnett wrote in a note titled "The Fed can't print gold."

Read more: 'I've gone to cash': Mark Cuban outlines his coronavirus investing strategy ahead of another 'leg down' in markets — and says now is the time to buy real estate

The note helped push gold above $1,700 for the first time since 2012 and bringing its year-to-date gains to 14%. As recession relief measures ramp up in the second quarter, the precious metal's streak may even accelerate, Ed Moya, senior market analyst at OANDA, said.

"The stimulus trade is not going away anytime soon and that should mean record highs for gold (in dollar terms) by the summer," Moya wrote in a Thursday note.

Retracing the crypto crash

One play gaining new attention looks to detach from stimulus measures entirely. The recent resurgence in risk appetite is pushing bitcoin to its highest levels since early March, with investors cheering the asset's disconnectedness from the financial sector. The digital currency surged as much as 9% in Thursday trading to break through the key $7,500 threshold, and its value has stayed above the level as of Friday afternoon. 

Read more: Meet the 20-year-old day-trading phenom who's turned $20,000 into more than $1 million. He details his precise strategy — and shares how he made $11,400 in 2 minutes.

Where the stock market closed slightly lower through the week, bitcoin shrugged off the oil market crisis and bleak economic data to notch a 5% gain over the same period. Crypto investors now find themselves at a technical junction. The coin is showing enough momentum to clear the $8,000 mark and break through its recent trading range, Moya said in a note. If enough investors outside the usual group of crypto enthusiasts see promise in the asset, it could emerge as a new favorite for those on the lookout for gains.

"Bitcoin is starting to attract retail interest again. With worldwide stimulus efforts showing no signs of easing, some traders are jumping into cryptos as a hedge against currency wars," he added.

Now read more markets coverage from Markets Insider and Business Insider:

DraftKings soars as much as 18% in trading debut amid sports lockdown and intense market volatility

The Fed will keep interest rates near zero for at least 3 more years, economist survey says

The best small-company stock picker of the past 5 years tells us what he added to his portfolio after the market crashed — and shares his 3 favorite investments for the next decade

Join the conversation about this story »

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What does it take to start or scale a successful, strategic sales enablement program?

In this guide, I’ll cover the four areas of focus that are essential to a program that drives real results:

1. Scope and focus
2. Sales enablement strategy
3. Enablement execution
4. Sales enablement governance

Related: How to Design a High-Performing Sales Enablement Program

1. Scope and focus

When you hear the term “sales enablement,” what comes to mind? I’m guessing training and support for sales teams.

But a successful sales enablement program does more — much more — than training and development.

The focus of sales enablement is to enable sales in whatever way it can. That includes:

• Sales content
• Playbooks
• Best practices
• Training
• Coaching
• Onboarding
• Management of technology
• Measurement

…and more.

The truth is, sales enablement isn’t just a role or department. It’s an activity that everyone in an organization should be participating in. After all, the revenue brought in via sales is what pays their salaries.

The truth is, sales enablement isn’t just a role or department. It’s an activity that everyone in an organization should be participating in.

But someone needs to coordinate that effort.

That’s where sales enablement comes in.

Related: How to Use AI for Sales Coaching

With this in mind, let’s expand our understanding of sales enablement. Not only does it resource and empower sales, it coordinates the efforts of the entire organization to support the sales team. It also creates a culture of learning, where everyone shares their expertise with one another, and in particular, with sales.

What does this look like in practice?

Sales enablement leaders develop sales enablement strategy, optimize its execution, and provide governance. They also lead and coordinate the support of sales, engaging other teams and individuals as needed.

Marketing may participate by creating sales enablement content that can be used to move prospects through the pipeline.

Subject matter experts from all departments can contribute their knowledge to up-level sellers.

The sales team, of course, does their part by committing to apply these efforts in the trenches, win more deals, and drive more revenue.

The point, as Roderick Jefferson says in Sales Enablement 3.0, is people, not the deliverables. “Never forget that we’re in the people business!”

The scope and focus of sales enablement is to empower people. Let’s not forget that as we home in on strategy and execution.

Related: Why Your Sales Meeting Sucks — and How Enablement Can Fix It

2. Sales enablement strategy

The head of a sales enablement program is responsible for developing and writing the sales enablement charter. This document is the business plan for the enablement team, spelling out their goals, deliverables, responsibilities, and the scope of their work.

Your sales enablement charter should includes:

• The business case
• Mission statement
• What success looks like
• Obstacles
• Metrics and key performance indicators
• Implementation plan

As you develop your strategy, here are some things to consider.

1. Start with your business case

The business case is a rough framework that communicates the value of the sales enablement program, why it’s needed, how it will operate, and who will have responsibility for its various functions.

This document is developed first, before the charter is drafted, to ensure the program will align with the company’s key strategic priorities and make the biggest possible impact. Not only does it give you executive air cover, it helps you stay on track, pushing the initiatives your executive team cares about most.

2. Define your mission

Once the brief is approved, you can craft your mission statement. This short statement describes the purpose of the sales enablement function in one or two sentences. It then becomes your north star, keeping you and your team focused on what matters most.

Here are two examples:

To provide the sales organization with the information, content, and tools necessary to streamline sales processes.

To deliver continuous learning and growth to customer-facing teams.

3. Align both up and down

A successful sales enablement program adds value to the business, leadership, and customer-facing reps. To do that, you need to align both up and down — understanding the problems of people at every level and finding ways to help them all reach their goals.

It’s important to understand the challenges or problems that management wants you to solve. But you also need to speak to employees to identify the problems they face.

From those conversations, you can identify the divergence between management and employees, which will help you understand what’s needed and how to set priorities.

4. Identify your subject matter experts

Sales enablement works best when it’s collaborative. In many organizations, Enablement is a small or one-person team. You don’t have the bandwidth to fulfill your mission without help from internal stakeholders and leaders.

For example, Mark Eckstein was once a one-man team supporting 40 on the sales side and 15 in customer success — and every new hire went through 2-week or 1-month training.

There was no way he could run all the sessions himself. So he relied on subject matter experts throughout the organization.

It’s important for sales enablement professionals to network within the organization. Meet with people. Get to know them. Build relationships with people you might need to call on.

Build trust with your experts. They need to understand that you’ll help make them successful. To do that, you need to make small investments. Set the stage for what enablement is, and assure them you won’t create more work for them, that partnering together will actually make their life easier.

5. Decide how you’ll measure success

You need to track two sets of metrics. Programmatic metrics tell you whether you’re hitting your team’s goals. Growth and revenue metrics tell you how well you’re impacting the organization’s goals.

In each set of metrics, you have a lot of options. In a minute, we’ll cover specific metrics that might help you track results. But ultimately, it depends on your program, your organization, and the challenges you’re trying to solve.

3. Sales enablement execution plan

Execution is about fulfilling your charter and achieving the results you’ve promised. It involves:

• Designing training and content
• Testing methods of delivery
• Continually organizing, updating, and optimizing content
• Managing technology and tools
• Coordinating with experts and other teams within the organization
• Getting feedback to understand what’s working and what’s not

You’ll need to set priorities and systematize as much as possible, so you can drive the outcomes you’re looking for even if you have a small team. Here are some tips for running an effective sales enablement program.

1. Make it accessible

Accessibility involves more than the format of your content. Content should be well organized, so it’s easy to find. It needs to be delivered in a way that facilitates learning. And it needs to be easy to consume.

When it comes to sales enablement content, always remember that less is more.

Your reps are busy. They don’t have time to stop everything and consume a 20-minute video. They want snippets of content that answer questions quickly, with no fluff.

Eckstein does that by producing “slices of knowledge”:

I take live calls from all the top salespeople across the organization, each selling to different sales stages. I’ll cut their conversation into snippets. After I’m done, I’ll end up with 400 of these knowledge slices. They’re just two minutes on average.

So I may have, say, 14 examples of different salespeople talking about integrations. Reps can watch how each rep sells across personas, company sizes, sales stages, and how they talk pre-pipeline, during negotiation, and after the close. 

Listening to these snippets one right after another, it’s easy for reps to understand how they might handle a similar situation.

Your training videos should also be short. Think 8-minutes max for each video. Then, to help reps apply what they’ve learned, give them a quick recap and a checklist or cheatsheet.

Make sure you accommodate different learning styles. Whenever possible, you need to provide training in multiple formats: video, text, and tactile.

But you can also accommodate different learning styles within the same program. When you’re making an important point, show it on the screen and repeat it aloud several times. Tell a story to illustrate the point. And if possible, develop an exercise for tactile learners.

If you teach live, consider teaching to small groups of people with the same learning modality — one class for visual learners and another for tactile learners, for example.

2. Create short feedback loops

Not all of your initiatives will work, and there’s no way to know until you test them. Because of that, you need to build short feedback loops into your workflow.

If something isn’t working after the second cohort, update the program or pivot to provide more value and achieve the results you’re looking for.

Related: Agile Approach to Sales Enablement Content

3. Think of yourself as an information broker

Bottom line, sales enablement professionals are information brokers. You need to stay alert to trends, what’s working across the industry, and what’s not. You also need to understand the challenges your team is facing.

Go to all standups and forecast meetings. If you can target where reps are getting frustrated, it’ll be easier to provide workable solutions.

Look for what’s going on outside the sales team as well. Soak up everything going on in the customer success or marketing orgs, for example, so you can see what’s going on before and after the sale.

Here’s a tip for large SE teams: Assign members to different groups in your organization. Then ask them to meet regularly with their assigned group to stay abreast of best practices and trends.

Related: Sales Enablement as Communications Center

4. Knowledge management

Ideally, you want to capture new ideas and lessons learned from the field and other groups, so you can share them across the organization. And at first, it’s relatively easy to organize and tag your content. But as the program scales, content itself can become a problem.

It’s important to find the right technology for hosting content and making it accessible to everyone. As you consider options, don’t just evaluate your current needs. Make sure your technology can scale with your program.

5. Leverage success 

It’s not enough to deliver training. You need to prove that your training and tactics can turn reps into high performers.

When someone implements your training and starts outperforming everyone else, make a point of celebrating their success. The rest of the team will take notice — and you’ll likely get more buy-in to your program.

4. Sales enablement governance

Governance is about measuring and evaluating your program’s assets and outcomes. You need to validate you’re fulfilling your charter and that Sales’ performance is improving. You also need to ensure your content is updated and relevant.

Key governance issues include:

• Updating outdated content
• Demonstrating value
• Tracking results

1. Keep sales enablement content fresh 

As a sales enablement program grows, it becomes more difficult to govern all your links, connections to other data sources, and the content itself. It’s vitally important to set up systems and processes for reviewing and refreshing your content.

If content is moved, you need to make sure links leading to that content are also updated. If content becomes outdated, it needs to be updated — or retired, and all the links pointing to it removed.

2. Demonstrate value

Everything you do needs to fall within the scope of your charter and have a measurable goal. This allows you to track outcomes and show that you’re meeting your organization’s goals.

Through success stories and reporting, you can demonstrate value to the organization, leadership, and reps.

3. Track and measure results

As mentioned above, you need to track two sets of metrics: programmatic metrics that track your program’s success, and growth and revenue metrics that measure your impact on the company’s goals.

Related: Measuring Sales Enablement: The Metrics You Need to Assess Success

Here are the sales enablement metrics that Jefferson recommends.

To measure your program’s success:

• Accreditation and certification scores
• Biannual needs analysis
• Program-based surveys
• Communications deployed
• eLearning statistics
• Percentage of completed enablement requests
• Sales enablement content usage statistics

To measure the impact of your sales enablement program:

• Average deal size
• Collateral use and frequency
• Deal velocity
• New pipeline created
• Number of closed deals
• Quarter over quarter
• Annual quota attainment percentage
• Speed to revenue
• Win and loss rates

Getting a handle on sales enablement

As a sales enablement professional, you’ll put your own spin on the function, creating tactics that drive growth for your organization. But no matter how you approach it, your program will need a strategy, an execution plan, and good governance.

By focusing on these three areas, you’ll be able to continually improve your program and drive real results that make your organization more profitable.

Related: Sales Enablement Platform Buyer’s Guide

The post The 5-Minute Guide to Strategic Sales Enablement appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Impacts of a dysfunctional culture within a contact center

What are your core corporate values, and are they being translated into the organizational culture of your contact center?

Organizational culture refers to a set of shared beliefs, values, and norms within an organization that shape the way its members perceive, interpret, and react to various environmental and relational conditions. In human terms, organizational culture represents a common viewpoint among the members of an organization.

When Good Intentions Go Wrong

Consequences of misaligned, dysfunctional cultures are particularly relevant in the context of contact centers, as culture can often be a source of dysfunction in these contexts. This results, in part, due to the nature of the work. Customer contact roles lend themselves to performance monitoring on a number of easily observed metrics (e.g., average handle time, repeat calls, sales per call, calls transferred, etc.). These metrics can be invaluable in providing insight into the success or failure of work policies and procedures. They can also be indicative of individual employee performance and can be used to set work goals, which can be extremely motivating when they are properly implemented and well aligned with other performance targets and organizational policies.

However, an exclusive focus on call metrics can come at the expense of other important factors. When organizational policies and decisions are driven solely by these numbers, contact center representatives may infer that these are the only important elements of their performance. For example, representatives may be less likely to engage in extra role behaviors (e.g., helping a co-worker, providing non-required support to customers, etc.), which can lead to a negative workplace culture. Further, constant performance monitoring and an exclusive focus on metrics may communicate distrust on the part of the organization, leading to a culture which does not encourage employee empowerment and involvement. The following details some common consequences of a dysfunctional organizational culture in the context of a contact center.

3 Drawbacks of a dysfunctional culture inside a contact center

1) Employee Morale

Dysfunctional organizational cultures can exert a negative impact on employee morale. Research indicates that these types of cultures lead to lower levels of job satisfaction and higher levels of both job strain and stress¹. These factors are particularly important in a contact center environment, as contact centers often require employees to work during unfavorable hours, engage in repetitive tasks, and interact with disgruntled customers, each of which can also contribute to lowered employee morale. A positive organizational culture can help to mitigate these factors, promoting a healthy and satisfied workforce.

2) Employee Withdrawal

Given the strong impact of culture on employee morale, it should come as no surprise that dysfunctional cultures can also result in higher absenteeism and attrition. Research has confirmed the link between culture and withdrawal behaviors². Employees who experience work dissatisfaction, stress, and strain as a result of poor organizational culture are likely to avoid work by calling in sick and eventually resigning. This can result in lost productivity, additional strain on remaining employees, and, as Rob Stilson explained in his blog on achieving retention, lost resources, in the form of training costs.

3) Employee Performance

Organizational cultures can also impact employee performance in a number of ways³. Contact center culture serves to emphasize the important aspects of performance and foster motivation for high performance levels. The following represents a list of some of the contact center performance factors which are negatively impacted by dysfunctional cultures:

• Customer Service – Contact center representatives will be less likely to provide exceptional customer service when the contact center culture either does not promote customer service as a value or has led to lowered morale.
• Compliance – Similar to customer service, organizational culture will provide guidance to contact center representatives on appropriate and inappropriate behaviors. If rule and procedure compliance are not emphasized as organizational values, contact center representatives will be less likely to engage in these behaviors.
• Reputation – The reputation of an organization can also suffer when organizational cultures do not promote employee morale and customer satisfaction. Contact center representatives are in direct contact with customers. They have the ability to appease dissatisfied customers, promote organizational products and services, and maintain customer loyalty through their interactions with those customers. The opposite is also true; when representatives have negative impressions of their organization, those impressions are likely to influence their interactions with customers which can lead to negative customer impressions.

Creating a Positive Organizational Culture

Just as negative or misaligned organizational cultures can produce undesirable results, positive organizational cultures promote effective organizational functioning. Creating a positive culture involves a thoughtful and strategic plan for the communication of organizational values and norms. The following suggestions are designed to get an organization started on the road toward a positive and effective culture:

1) Leadership

Consistent messaging and behaviors from contact center leaders will help to shape and reinforce the culture. Ensuring that leaders understand, accept, and promote organizational values and cultural initiatives will go a long way towards creating an effective culture.

2) Metrics

A careful review of performance metrics and goals should help identify performance areas that are missed by the current performance evaluation system. These areas should be promoted and emphasized to ensure representatives are aware of other factors that also contribute to performance.

3) Rewards

Employees make inferences about organizational values and culture based on the types of behaviors that are rewarded or discouraged. When rewards are linked to positive work behaviors, the culture will set a tone of recognizing and appreciating employee work and accomplishments.

4) Involvement

As Rob indicated in his blog on retention, involvement is a key factor in contact center functioning. When representatives have the opportunity to become involved in the development and modification of work processes and policies, they will feel more committed to the organization and its values.

Because culture provides guidance to organizational members on appropriate perceptions, behaviors, and values, it can dramatically influence organizational effectiveness and employee morale. When organizational culture is not well aligned with strategic goals and employee needs, negative consequences are likely to result.

Resources:

1. Parker, C. P., Boris, B. B., Young, S. A., Huff, J. W., Altmann, R. A., Lacost, H. A., & Robers, J. E. (2003). Relationships between psychological climate perceptions and work outcomes: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 24, 398-416.
2. Sheridan, J. E. (1992). Organizational culture and employee retention. Academy of Management, 35, 1036-1056.
3. Petty, M. M., Beadles, N. A., Lowery, C. M., Chapman, D. F., & Connell, D. W. (1995). Relationship between organizational culture and organizational performance. Psychological Reports, 76, 483-492.

A friend and I were talking about the need to use relationship marketing or, in other words, build a relationship with your website visitors and social media audience. As a business coach, she often has to explain the need for relationship building to her clients. This was her observation:

” What are they doing to cultivate a relationship with website visitors?

It doesn’t make sense to expect that people just hand over their money to hire a service provider. People only buy from those they know, like and trust. So…how do we move a website visitor (a stranger) to the point of sale, and actually buy, becoming a paying client?

It’s imperative to cultivate a relationship. Get their email address, get them on your newsletter list, connect with them on social media, invite them into your community. Virtually take their hand and take a walk in the park with them and get to know them. Only once we’ve gone into their world and found out what they need, can we determine if they’d be a good client and if we can solve their problems. Only then does our marketing efforts become a worthwhile investment.”

~Andrea Hunt Raco, Success and Life Enrichment Coach, Coach for Life

So how do you do this? You are familiar, at least on a basic level, with blogging and social media and how you can use them to market your product or service. The days of high-pressure sales tactics have faded away. Content marketing has taken its place at the front of the class. But is that all there is? Do you stop with churning out quality content? No, we need another level:

You need to actively use Relationship Marketing.

Image Gerd Altman on Pixaby

So what’s the difference between the two? Content marketing is talking with your audience but relationship marketing takes it to a deeper, more meaningful level.

In fact, your success is dependent on the relationships you make with others. You could have a killer blog, high-quality content, and lots of traffic but the rapport you have with your target audience is all about engaging in a conversation with them. People that have chosen you as a source of information should be held in the highest regard. Once they have a great experience with you, they will be more likely to share you with others, bringing more traffic to your site and more potential customers.

How do you build relationships?

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing uses blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, newsletters, whitepapers, SEO, physical products, social media marketing, and other forms of content marketing to attract customers through the different stages of the purchase funnel. You attract people to your product or service based on a common interest or desire to learn more. Concentrate on actively pulling in your community, not passively waiting for them to engage.

It’s is a form of two-way communication. The customer interacts with your business in a dialog. They post on your Facebook wall, join your groups, comment on blogs, or take part in contests. When they participate, they become invested and engaged. People want to be in control of the information they get and this makes them more receptive to your message.

Nurture your relationship with your audience with User Generated Content (UGC).

User-generated content (UGC) is any content—text, videos, images, reviews, etc.—created by people, rather than brands. When your audience creates comments or shares your content, it’s a powerful reference to others.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Ideas to generate UGC:

• Leverage expert bloggers. Ask other, prominent bloggers to write guest blogs for your site.
• Encourage your audience to share a review about your brand across social media.
• Ask for the share occasionally. (Not every post – that looks needy!)
• Get the conversation started. At the end of your blog or social media posts, ask your reader what they think, what their experience is, or if they have any tips to add.
• Run a contest. It can be as simple as ‘tell us what you think of us and share with your friends.’ The top five people with the most shares wins a _________________. (Fill in the blank with a fabulous prize.)
• Share, share, share. The more you give, the more you will receive. If this seems a little backward, you’re wrong. On the internet, it’s all about how much valuable information you can give away. Once people see that you are a reliable source of consistent, knowledgeable content, they will genuinely want to know more and learn more from you. Many “customers for life” are created this way.
• Write FOR your audience. What problems do they have that you can solve? What do they want to hear about? If you keep this in mind each time you will never have a problem reaching those you want to help and in turn, getting them to buy from you over and over again.

Relationship Marketing doesn’t stop with your potential customer.

Share your experience and help others when you can.

Interacting with your colleagues on a regular basis is also a great way to build your business. Mastermind groups and live events let you connect with people who are on the same journey. Valuable business partnerships and joint ventures are created by communicating with those around you. These are people you can count on to share ideas with, create products, and provide bigger and better services that will take your business to the next level.

There is a Facebook group or community for just about any interest. Find a group that your peers would be likely to frequent and start up a conversation. Be sure to read and follow the rules of the group. Many only allow self-promotion on days set aside for it. Actually, get into the discussion, find out what your peers are doing that works and what doesn’t. Share your experience and help others when you can.

Attend live events.

You will meet and learn from some of the experts in your niche when you attend live events and this is also relationship marketing. Some of the most successful businesses owe it all to the JV (joint venture) partnerships created during these events. Meeting new people, hearing about their successes and failures, and establishing relationships are some of the most beneficial things you can do for your self-growth and the growth of your business.

In a sense, our lives and the success we experience depends on the people with whom we know and associate. Building solid relationships with the people you come in to contact with can launch your business to places you never dreamed of. You will also be creating lifelong friendships that will be worth more than any amount of money. The key is to be yourself, and let your unique personality shine through to those you want to reach.

We are dealing with a rapidly changing business environment today. How we live and work is being redefined and refocused. We recently shared ways to help you solidify your target market, change your short term target market focus, and gave you food for thought for future target markets. Still, drastic and rapid change can feel chaotic. This is how we in sales and marketing can stay focused: Be human and helpful in everything you do.

A number of businesses both large and small show how some are coping with change. They are being helpful and human to their past, current and prospective future target markets. These stories are inspiring!

To Stay Relevant in a Changing Business Environment: Be Helpful

We see a human and helpful shift to accommodate prospects and customers today.

There are countless stories of businesses adjusting their priorities to collaborate positively and serve clients in a changing business environment. Following are some real life examples:

• One business provides a financial solution to a niche market. They are adjusting their offering to meet their customers’ sudden product shift to their niche. By adapting, they are still able to serve their customers and bringing on new ones because they continue to solve a critical immediate challenge at this time.
• A contract research organization repositioned in an effort to help in the fight against COVID-19. They have assembled a lab designed to manage clinical trials for coronavirus vaccines.
• A business that produced medicated fabric for clothing has now completely turned their focus to antimicrobial masks.
• A one-person entrepreneur in Western Pennsylvania recently started a sewing business and began making face masks and donating them. Instead of mending a coat, a pair of pants, or a blouse, she chose to fill a different need in a new market.

These companies are adapting their solutions in collaboration with their clients to accommodate their customer’s current conditions. Now they are busy solving their customer’s most critical challenges.

Here is another remarkable story of help, humanity and adjustment in the face of adversity.

I have a dear friend who is a real estate professional. Today she works remotely from her home office where she lives and spends time with her aging mother during the pandemic. Both of them are incredible cooks. So what is she offering? She and her mother are hosting a weekly cooking show online. They provide prospects and customers a little entertainment and a good old-fashioned Italian recipe. Simple!

We are all at home with our families and cooking whether we like it or not. Her prospects and customers are doing the same thing. Not only is she staying engaged with future buyers on real estate topics. She is providing something different, delightful and relevant to those who will one day be her buyers again.

For some businesses, your personal contact with your target markets may be on hold. You have determined your target market will come back, but right now they are not considering nor even thinking about your product or service. You may think you can’t assist right now but can you? What could you do to be human and helpful?

You may find other real and human stories around you to help you to define and serve your target market.

As the COVID-19 virus approached the shores of the United States, some common questions about how our cities will be reshaped emerged. In light of what was happening in the walkable historic urbanism of Italy or the mega-dense Chinese cities, the refrain became, “Shouldn’t we be less dense to be safe?”

This reaction to density is understandable, but (for those readers that know us) our response was, as always, “Where’s the data and how does it compare?” For weeks, we’ve been collectively pummeled with a barrage of nerve-wracking stories as the pandemic crawls its way across the globe.  Though these stories were informative, the data within initially lacked substantive analysis.

It is clear how the virus is spread—through physical contact with those who are infected, from airborne germs, and from infected surfaces. And it is clear that social distancing is one of the best measures for preventing the spread of the coronavirus. But given the evidence, we can’t say for sure yet that density is a main driver, when there are a lot of other factors (like a paucity of testing), and when the virus is spreading in suburban and rural places as well.

In March, the New York Times released a wonderful article comparing the number of coronavirus cases per metropolitan region across small and rural places, as well as the mega centers of New York City and Milan. One takeaway of this chart is that size of population wasn’t an indicator of per capita contamination. For example: Albany, GA and New Orleans, LA had roughly the same amount of cases per thousand even though New Orleans has a much larger population.*

 

 

As informative as this chart is, we found it lacked one bit of information that would help illuminate the question of whether density was a primary driver of spreading the virus. That’s right—we’re talking about land. Below is a table as it was printed in the article, and as we embellished it. Adding the area of each city in square miles, and the people per square mile provides an “apples to apples” comparison of density. A sixth column, cases per 100,000 people per square mile provides a metric to understand infection in the population from a geospatial perspective.

This chart represents a snapshot of data from when the article came out. All of the communities are at different stages of infection, testing, and reporting; so take it for what it’s worth. But the facts of the math do help understand the nature of urban patterns and their relationship to the spread of the virus. Utilizing this model moves us from an emotive to a clear eyed comparison.

 

 

This data suggests that urbanism is not as toxic as commentators anecdotally suggest. What is notable from the data is that New York City and Pittsfield, Massachusetts have the same ratio of COVID-10 cases per 100,000 people/square mile, yet New York City is more than 44 times the density of Pittsfield. Heck, East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania and Albany, Georgia have higher ratios than the Big Apple. That’s the math.

That means that, if you were drop a box around one of these cities, one square mile large, you might still get more cases overall in the dense cities, because there are more people there. But you wouldn’t necessarily get more cases per 100,000 people.

The following charts demonstrate the relationship of the density of the sample of cities, placed against the cases of covid-19/100k population/sq. mi.

 

 

From this measure of the data, it does not appear that density is any more dangerous than other factors. In fact, given some early data it seems that the paucity of testing and lack of consistent measurements are probably bigger factors. Other considerations in monitoring the spread of the virus include population variables such as age (especially since the virus is so much more dangerous to the elderly), income, job type, and unemployment levels.

Ultimately, the value of density may outweigh the virus-induced danger. Cities are bastions of efficiency of infrastructure and capital. People move to New York because economic opportunities are so much better. At $85,000 Gross Domestic Product per capita, New York City is more than double that of Albany, Georgia and East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania , at $39,000 and $38,000 respectively. Services are more readily available in cities, including life-saving medical systems. Simply put, cities (and towns) make us more productive, and perhaps safer, then disaggregated or rural development patterns.

Thankfully, more data analysis is emerging to provide an evidence-based understanding to cut through hysteria and off-base bunkum. As the impacts of this pandemic sink in, hopefully we can leave behind our emotional responses and attune to the power and need for science and evidence in this trying time. After all, there’s a reason why we don’t have doctors letting our blood to relieve our humors, as was the case with pandemics in the past. Data and math matters.

*It should be noted, that this data set needs several caveats. First, it is well known that the U.S.’s slow response to build up its ability to test blows a tremendous hole in any data.  Not all cities on this list are in the same spot with the data, as the testing isn’t consistent across the sample.  New York State is testing at a rate almost 9x that of Georgia: So Albany, Georgia could be a lot worse than we know. Without a consistent standard of practice across states and geographies, the analysis is inherently inconsistent. This becomes murkier across countries because testing is inconsistent across countries. As of the date of the New York Times article, Italy has tested ten times as many people per million as the United States and a third more than China. Without testing, it’s difficult to say that the full level of infection has been captured. Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to understanding a pandemic.

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About the Author

Joseph Minicozzi is the principal of Urban3 and an urban planner imagining new ways to think about and visualize land use, urban design and economics.

Joe founded Urban3 to explain and visualize market dynamics created by tax and land use policies. His award-winning analytic tools have garnered national attention in Planetizen, The Wall Street Journal, Planning, New Urban News, Realtor, Atlantic Cities and the Center for Clean Air Policy's Growing Wealthier report. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Miami and Master of Architecture and Urban Design from Harvard University. In 2017, Joe was recognized as one of the 100 Most Influential Urbanists of all time. He is a founding member of the Asheville Design Center, a nonprofit community design center dedicated to creating livable communities across Western North Carolina.

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It is no secret that Sales Kickoffs (SKOs) are pretty special. It is the reason why year after year, companies continue to invest in these events. Nothing is quite like the spirit and energy of a sales rep with a fresh slate, a new quota to hit, and the motivation to be a top performer for the upcoming year. It’s infectious!

But in an early brainstorming session during the planning of my very first SKO, a teammate posed an interesting question to the group that defined our focus in a different way.

“How do we want the attendees to feel when they leave SKO and are back out in the field?”

SKO’s across different organizations often have different themes, agendas, and goals. However, one thing that almost always rings true is how Enablement wants the attendees leaving event.

So how do you keep these feelings on the forefront of your seller’s brain beyond just the few days following SKO? How do you bring the motivation and excitement to your entire fiscal year? Here are some ways Seismic’s Enablement Team are keeping that SKO energy a part of all of our Enablement services and initiatives and keeping that energy throughout our sales team.

Inspiring Visuals

According to the Social Science Research Network, 65% of people are visual learners. If you really want someone to remember what you said, use a visual. Whether it be an epic picture of a mountain to signify the obstacles your team has overcame this past year or (as our sales leadership is known to use) an iconic photo of Muhammad Ali on an early morning run, these pictures leave us with a certain feeling. By bringing these photos into future sales meetings, QBRs, virtual workshops or emails to the team after a big win, these visuals can help drive that SKO spirit beyond the first quarter.

Homework

Salespeople don’t necessarily love homework. Not a complete shocker there. However, if you want to get people thinking back to the main event, a little post-work or even a mid-year certification never hurt anybody! If a seller begins to expect these post-SKO “to-dos”, you will find them more engaged and dialed in than ever before. You may get some grumbles here and there, but if you make it a regular part of your cadence, you will find that most Sellers want to improve their craft and will leverage the chance to do so.

Revisit Your Theme

Why not make your theme live beyond SKO? A monthly article about the theme and highlight some rock stars on the team, or rebranded monthly sales meetings to reflect that theme, will reinforce the learnings you capitalized on at SKO. Either way – the more you bring the theme into the rest of the year, the more that energy will be brought in as well. These can be subtle or obvious but the more they see it, the more the energy will shine through.

Support from the A-Players

A-Players. Every sales organization has them. They are the sellers who are constantly exceeding quota, scoring big deals, and most likely they have a strong social selling game. These are the people that the new sellers walking in the door want to emulate. Aligning with these sellers will push your methods and ideas through the entire organization. Chances are, they want to better align themselves with you as well. Who doesn’t want to be in the know on Enablement initiatives coming down the pipeline?

Having a group of internal ‘enablement advocates’ has been crucial to our team’s recent success. Seismic Enablement gathers a group of the top sellers and brings them in for quarterly meetings. Not only will this group give it to you straight with feedback directly from the field, they will also be your biggest champions in helping to bring the SKO energy throughout the entire year.

Sales Leadership Buy-in

Last and certainly not least is having executive sponsorship. At the end of the day, Sellers listen most closely to Sales Leadership. Making sure that you align your theme, messaging and imagery with your team is crucial in making it stick and making it last far beyond SKO. There is no greater way to fire up a team then a late Sunday night email from a Sales Leader, motivating and preparing the squad for a brand-new month. And if he or she can incorporate some of the excitement of SKO in that email, even better.

In a world where more and more events are being cancelled and moved to a virtual format, it is important to make your sure you make your Sales Kickoffs as impactful as can be. The only thing better than the feeling a seller has post Sales Kickoff is the feeling an Enablement team will have when they bring that SKO energy far beyond Q1.

I recently got an email from a company that once sold me a pair of jeans. They wanted to talk about COVID-19. I’ve gotten a lot of these emails over the last few weeks, as more and more companies are blasting their contacts, expressing concern, making commitments and vowing that we will get through this together.

I used to run communications teams, so I get it; no one knows what to do these days, and all of us are looking for ways to help. But as comforting as it is to know my insurance company, food delivery service and apparel retailers are looking out for me, I find myself hoping that there’s more to the plan — that they are helping the people who actually need it (not me).

As an investor and advisor to founders, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks as part strategist, part therapist. This crisis is unlike anything that has come before in our lifetimes, but there are things we can learn from other crises and from each other to navigate the uncertainty ahead. This is not a post about layoffs or expense planning, although there are important things to say about both. Instead, this is a collection of ideas that have come out of brainstorming sessions I’ve had with startup founders over the last few weeks focused on how to think about sales and marketing in the time of COVID-19.

No one has a playbook for this. But we can experiment. We can stop a bunch of activity that was normal just weeks ago. We can learn from each other. We can plan for both short-term disruptions and long-term realities. And we can give each other some actionable steps to take at a time when everyone is trying to figure out the best way forward.

To that end, here are a few things I’ve brainstormed with founders, divided into three categories:

1) Things to reconsider or stop doing;

2) Strategies you may want to start using;

3) Places where you can double down.

Vancouver, BC, April 15, 2020--Rocket Builders released its eighteenth (18th) annual "Ready to Rocket" lists. These lists profile British Columbia technology companies that are best positioned to capitalize on the technology sector trends that will lead them to faster growth than their peers. Rocket Builders also released results from its 2019 lists, with strong revenue growth across all sectors.

Last week we held the fourth of our hugely successful Prospecting Sales Bootcamp webinars - with over 1000 registrations to date and amazing feedback on our no BS approach to delivering actionable ideas we're sharing the recording here.

If you have a website for your business, odds are you’d like to get that website ranking better in Google. SEO can seem confusing at first, but it’s easy to follow once you get the hang of how Google’s algorithm works.

Sure, Google’s algorithm does change over time but it’s not hard to keep up with these changes and make adjustments to your site. That said, here are 5 things on your website that could sabotage your Google ranking.

1. Outdated Content

It’s no secret that Google loves fresh content. If you have content on your blog that does well, realize things may change over time. Over time, these become outdated or no longer relevant. Google wants all content to be fresh, current, and helpful to the user.

This means you should focus on updating content each year especially when it comes to your most popular blog posts. Focus on making your content better overall and go more in-depth on certain topics.

2. Overdoing Internal Links

There’s nothing wrong with linking to other content on your website in blog posts. However, you can overdo it and Google doesn’t like this. Try to avoid stuffing a ton of links into one piece of content. This could actually be distracting and overwhelming for the user.

Make sure you’re focusing on linking to content that is relevant and will aid the user reading it. For example, if you’re referencing something that happened in the past and want to link to it, that would make a good internal link.

Another good idea for internal linking would be to share additional information about a topic that you briefly mention in one piece of content.

Personally, I like to add related content links after some of my headings for blog posts to help readers who’d like to learn more about what I just discussed.

3. Additional Advertising

Another thing that can sabotage your Google ranking is having a ton of display ads on your website. This increases your site’s load time and has a direct impact on your website’s SEO. To check your site’s load time, you can go to WebpageTest.org.

Make sure you’re being mindful of the ads you place on your website and make sure they’re not distracting to the user.

4. Automated Pop-ups

Google has been clear that is views some automated pop-ups as intrusive and distracting to the user’s experience. Some businesses like to have pop-up content as it could help better market your email list.

However, you’ll have to choose which one you want more. You can always test having a pop-up on your site and see how well it does. Then test-taking it off and see if your Google ranking improves.

Another option would be to consider including pop-up content when a user is leaving and not right when they arrive on your site.

5. Backlinks to Spammy Sites

Google doesn’t like reciprocal linking. That said, just avoid exchanging links with sites that are not relevant to your niche. Some people are simply looking for backlinks and will even pay a small fee to you for linking to them. This is usually frowned upon by Google and could hurt your SEO later own the line.

Focus on only be linking to pages that make sense. If they’re relevant to your topic and would be helpful to users, then it’s probably not a bad idea.

Summary

As you can see, there are quite a few things you can do to sabotage your Google ranking. Having more success on Google all comes down to providing the best user experience. If you can provide high-quality and helpful content, that’s a good start.

But take it a step further and make sure your site doesn’t contain lots of distractions like tons of ads, pop-ups, or anything else that could deter users.

Improving your site’s SEO can be overwhelming if you try to do everything at once. Take your time and tackle each thing on your list one-by-one. Organic SEO is a long-term game but your efforts today (large or small) will pay off tomorrow.

A group of some of the most noted device engineers on the planet, including several IEEE Fellows and this year’s IEEE Medal of Honor recipient, is proposing a new way of judging the progress of semiconductor technology. Today’s measure, the technology node, began to go off the rails almost two decades ago. Since then, the gap between what a technology node is called and the size of the devices it can make has only grown. After all, there is nothing in a 7-nanometer chip that is actually that small. This mismatch is much more of problem than you might think, argues one of the group, Stanford University professor H.-S. Philip Wong.

 “The broader research community has a feeling that [device] technology is over,” he says. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

But perception has proved pretty important. Nodes acted as markers along the industry roadmap that the chipmakers, their suppliers, their customers, and their future engineers could all aim for. Now the big processor makers have roadmaps that put them at a 1-nanometer node within a decade. (One nanometer is about the width of five atoms of silicon.) And that apparent endpoint is deterring students and new innovators from joining the effort to keep up the advancement of computing, says Wong, who is also vice president of corporate research at TSMC. “We felt that the number of students has dwindled at exactly the time we really need them.”

Node names made sense during the heyday of Moore’s Law, when the industry was basically shrinking the whole transistor at each node. The name actually referred to the most crucial dimension, the length of the transistor’s gate, which controls the flow of current through the device. But around 2000, physics started to get in the way of simply shrinking transistors. Engineers came up with a host of other ways to increase density and performance without necessarily changing the gate length, but the industry kept the convenient shorthand of ever-smaller node numbers. And here we are now with 7-nanometer transistors that have 15-nanometer gate lengths.

Wong and his collaborators decided they needed to come up with something better. “We’re at this juncture where the path to the future doesn’t seem to be very clear. 2D scaling is coming to an end, but we all know that there is a future,” says Wong. “So how do we quantify that?”

Their answer is a set of three numbers, which unlike today’s system, increase as technology progresses rather than decreasing. Taken together, the three metrics describe a technology’s impact on a computing system as a whole.

The first, D_L, represents the density of logic transistors per square millimeter that a technology can produce. Crucially, this captures new 3D techniques in development such as the 3D carbon nanotube chips that Wong helped pioneer, in that it counts all the transistors in a vertical volume.

The second number, D_M, captures the density of memory cells in a computer’s main memory. Right now main memory consists of DRAM, but the metric won’t change if some new type of memory takes over in the future.

The final metric, D_C, might be the biggest departure from the traditional process node measurement. D_C is the density of the interconnects linking the processor to main memory. Overcoming the energy and latency penalty of transferring data between the processor and memory has been a focus of recent research, and increasing the density of interconnects is one way to achieve that.

In a paper introducing the new density metric this week in Proceedings of the IEEE, the group writes that a system using today’s leading-edge technologies for all three metrics would pack 38 million logic transistors/mm², 383 million DRAM cells/mm², and 12 thousand interconnects/mm². (They propose writing that as [38M, 383M, 12K].)

Wong hopes the new metric will give practicing engineers and future engineers “the vision that there is a lot of room for improvement going forward.”

Know your audience and connect the dots for them.

There is a true golden ticket of marketing. With it, you can create effective, targeted communication that helps build lasting relationships with current customers and allows you to reach ideal customers in larger numbers. It can help you pave a path to strategic results. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Every salesperson wants a healthy pipeline, but many don't have a reliable way to take its temperature. Beyond just "healthy" or "dry," what do you need to look at to truly gauge the health of a sales pipeline? These nine important pipeline metrics. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

• In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, business leaders are being forced to manage teams from their homes. 
• Ryan Serhant, creator of The Serhant Team and star of Bravo's "Million Dollar Listing," gave Business Insider four ways he's managing New York City's top real estate team from his home. 
• His leadership strategies include staying connected, leading team meetings, promoting self growth, and encouraging a routine.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Real estate broker Ryan Serhant is the founder of The Serhant Team and the star of  the reality television show "Million Dollar Listing."

According to the team's website, for each of the past five years it has been one of the top five sales teams nationwide in The Wall Street Journal Real Trends report, and it's currently the number one team in New York City.

Including his media company, Serhant Media Group, Serhant oversees more than 60 people. Business Insider caught up with him to find out how he's pivoted his leadership strategies during the coronavirus pandemic while working from home.  

1. He stays connected.

"I touch base with everybody almost every day, whether it's by phone call, by email, or by text message," Serhant said. "I let everybody know that I'm here every day."

Serhant explained it could be as simple as connecting through an Instagram post. He wants his team to know that he is available and not just "home watching Netflix."

Letting your team know you are there for them will go a long way, he added.

2. He recreates the weekly team meeting — on Zoom.

Every Monday at 10 a.m., his team has a meeting via Zoom, mimicking the weekly in-person meetings they had before the pandemic.

During these meetings, they talk about current deals, what's happening in the market, and strategies. 

"But I also make sure to ask them what they did for fun over the weekend and how they're handling quarantine," he said. 

3. He is promoting personal growth, and asking his team to change some of their habits.

Serhant told Business Insider that he's asked everyone on his team to pick one thing that they can pursue during this time that they otherwise wouldn't be able to because of their busy schedules.

He explained that one team member had picked up drawing again and another started working on their first music album. 

"If you look at history, it's pretty amazing to see the things that have come out of really, really scary times," he said.

4. He encourages everyone to stick to a routine.

Sticking to a routine and staying productive is a crucial element to the team's success during this time, Serhant explained. 

"If you're somebody in February that woke up early and went to the gym every day, wake up early and go for a run," he said.

As Serhant explained, getting into "work character" helps to draw a line between your work and home life routine. "If you don't want to wear a full suit, wear the top half of the suit, wear gym shorts on the bottom half, or something like that," he added.

SEE ALSO: 3 tips for landlords with tenants who are struggling to pay rent, from a proptech exec

DON'T MISS: Virtual home tours will become the real estate industry's new norm after the pandemic ends, 2 industry experts predict

Join the conversation about this story »

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• In just one month, Portugal's Tech4Covid19 has grown into a multi-level organization made up of more than 100 startups and over 5,000 volunteers. 
• Portugal has stemmed the rise in COVID-19-related deaths, recording just over 500 fatalities, compared to the tens of thousands in nearby Italy and Spain. 
• One project, "Rooms Against Covid", has so far provided 500 medical professionals with temporary accommodation to help them avoid passing the virus onto their family.
• As the emergency continues, Tech4Covid19 has moved beyond public health initiatives into helping the economy and education. 
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

One month ago, Portugal had not suffered a single death related to coronavirus – but the nation watched in anxiety as the pandemic tore through European neighbors Italy and Spain. 

With an approaching health crisis on its doorstep, Portugal's entrepreneurs moved fast, effectively launching relief effort Tech4Covid19 over a series of WhatsApp messages one Saturday afternoon.  

"We just thought: We have so many talented people at our disposal and resources to spare," said Felipe Avila da Costa, the cofounder and CEO of Infraspeak, a logistics startup whose clients include Siemens and Domino's Pizza, at the time. 

Since then, Portugal has stemmed the rise in COVID-19-related deaths, recording just over 500 fatalities, compared to the tens of thousands in Italy and Spain. 

The effort has been helped in part by Tech4Covid19, which has morphed into a multi-tier organization pooling resources of more than 100 startups, 5,000 volunteers and a portfolio of more than 30 projects designed to counter the disease's impacts on public health, education and the economy. 

One particular project, Rooms Against Covid, has so far provided 500 medical professionals with temporary accommodation to help them avoid passing the virus onto their family – free of charge. 

"It was a lot of pressure bringing that to life," said project manager Mario Mouraz, the cofounder and CEO of Climber, a firm that helps hotels use dynamic pricing to offer the best prices for available rooms.

"I'm aware it wasn't a perfectly formed idea when we launched,  but there were so many doctors in need that we moved as quickly as possible." 

The initial success of the project convinced the Portuguese government to invest €12 million (or $13 million) in subsidizing the accommodation, paying the water and electricity bills. 

While the first weeks were spent finding healthtech solutions to the crisis, Tech4Covid19 has now expanded into edtech and schemes designed to bolster the local economy. 

Under one project, those with spare tablets or laptops can lend them to students without, allowing them to attend online classes. 

In another project, titled "Preserve", residents purchase vouchers tied to local businesses to spend at a later date, when social distancing restrictions have been lifted. 

"It's been a crazy month," Infraspeak's da Costa said. "The speed at which this developed from a few text messages to a movement with thousands of volunteers has been incredible." 

With no clear end in sight, the project's leaders say they hope to be able to pass the tools they have developed over to the state – and concentrate again on keeping their own businesses afloat. 

Startups all around the world have expressed anxiety about the lack of financial protection available, with many banks reluctant to hand out loans to loss-making scale-ups. 

Da Costa hopes the way Portugal's tech startups have stepped up to the plate in this crisis will endear them to officials, highlighting the way the French government set aside an extra €4 billion to bail out its own firms. 

Until then, he and his teammates are focused on scaling up their public health initiatives before handing the reins over to the government. 

"We are moving towards a place where the state can take over," he said. 

"Over the course of the next few months, we want to take the structures we have built and hand them to those in government who have the resources to make them sustainable." 

Join the conversation about this story »

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Every year, businesses consider ways to provide increasing levels of customer service and reduce customer care costs. For many, lowering the turnover rate of agents is a priority.

After all, 93% of customers are likely to buy from companies with superior customer service. Consumers are willing to spend 17% more on companies that provide exceptional customer service.

Companies’ obsession with customer service quality is justified.

To shape up their customer service experience, companies need to examine the customer service trends spawned by buyers’ demand for faster and better assistance, coupled with their growing reliance on smart devices. After this assessment, companies should move to evaluate customer support solutions that can actualize their customer service goals.

Key trends shaping customer service

Omnichannel presence: Consumers spend a lot of their time using multiple channels to research products and engage with sales and customer service representatives. Companies with omni-channel customer engagement strategies are likely to retain, on average, 89% of their customers compared to the 33% customer retention rate for weak omnichannel companies.

Social media engagement: Many companies already take support requests on social media. Statista finds that 47% of U.S. customers have a favorable view of brands that respond to customer service questions on social media. Social customer care is expected to grow in importance; however, businesses must ensure quick and effective responses to increase customer advocacy.

Fewer interactions: Consumers hate repeating themselves during customer service interactions. Agents should be able to view customers’ past service interactions, order history, sales data and other details in one place during a single interaction. This will save customers the effort to repeat themselves, and cut down long resolution times.

Always-on customers: Customers are open to interacting with 24/7 chatbots. Although chatbots aren’t evolved as yet to handle complex customer questions, they can answer basic questions quickly. They can also connect customers to an available live agent, or schedule a meeting with the appropriate point-person on customers’ behalf. As a first point of contact, chatbots go a long way in limiting customer frustration.

Feedback: The average survey response rate is 33%. Pop-up surveys are a popular way to collect customer feedback, providing businesses insights into service quality, agents’ performance and product satisfaction. Other than ratings, many companies also provide a feedback box for customers to add their remarks.

Remote work: Customer service agents can work from the comfort of their home, requiring only a computer to take customers’ audio and video call requests. A flexible work environment is good for retention, engagement (lower absenteeism) and performance. Companies that establish a foundation for remote work are better positioned to minimize operational disturbances stemming from pandemics or civil unrest.

The five best customer support software to take customer experience to the next level

A number of customer support software address customer service trends and consumers’ shift to a mobile-first mentality. The five solutions discussed below expand customer service possibilities, meriting a close look.

ProProfs Help Desk

Cloud-based customer service software ProProfs Help Desk integrates all customer-facing inboxes in one place to ensure that no customer request is missed and responses go out in a timely manner. A single view of customer requests also allows agents to more easily prioritize tickets and create canned responses to boost efficiency.

Customers can choose to access a self-service help center for instant information. Agents have an internal knowledge base to provide quick and effectively responses, resolving issues the first time they occur. The self-service option also reduces the instances of agents having to answer the same question again.

Customers can start a live chat with agents, who have the option to engage from their work desk or via the ProProfs mobile application. Real-time Net Promoter Score customer surveys track agent and group performance, helping companies take informed actionable steps to improve customer service quality.

Intercom

The customer support software is used by over 30,000 companies, including the likes of Sotheby’s, Y Combinator and Shopify.

Like ProProfs, Intercom offers social customer care as well as self-service and chat bots on website, mobile apps and within products, which is helpful for companies looking to integrate chat directly into their applications. The solution enables unified, omni-channel communication, allowing agents to interact with customers seamlessly between email and messenger app.

It is an accepted fact that customer context leads to better service. Agents can see the context for every conversation, including prior interactions and customer behavior data, such as the recent pages that customers have viewed.

By making customers’ most recent activities available on screen, Intercom enables agents to interact more effectively and reduce resolution times. Common customer support questions can also form a part of blog content strategy, addressing topics that matter most to buyers.

Intercom provides performance reports, telling managers what the top-performing messages and bots are, and where new people and conversations come from, creating a feedback loop to drive up the customer service experience.

Buffer

Customers expect speedy responses to their queries to businesses on social media. Popular social media management tool Buffer makes social customer support less challenging for users, supporting their goals of better service quality and more streamlined team workflows.

Users have a collaborative team inbox showing all support requests across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram from one place. Agents can channel conversations to the right team members for effective resolution of customer issues, shorter queues for faster responses, and equitable distribution of work. They have visibility into who else from the team is viewing a conversation, avoiding duplicate responses.

Buffer offers productivity-enhancing features such as saved replies to common questions, tracking conversations with tags and folders, and automating tagging, assigning conversations to team members, and other common tasks.

Whisbi

Whisbi is a conversational marketing platform that primarily works as a sales assistant and accelerator, but also offers a neat ‘broadcast for support’ customer service feature. Conversational marketing is a marketing approach where real-time, one-to-one conversations occur between customers and businesses across multiple channels, including websites, email, mobile, social media and collaboration platforms like Slack.

Whisbi’s conversational sales assistant qualifies web visitors and connects them to human agents, allowing experts to use their time productively for complex, sales-generating conversations. Its support feature focuses on personal interactions at scale via video broadcasts. Customers can watch a live broadcast and ask questions in real-time, which are displayed for the benefit of new arrivals on the website.

Users can set up a live FAQ broadcast within seconds and share the event link with audiences to initiate instant interactions. The ‘broadcast for support’ feature is useful when agents are experiencing large call volumes, and can be leveraged for internal communications, such as delivering keynote presentations from the CEO to all employees.

Quiq Messaging Platform

Sending and receiving text messages is faster than placing a voice call. Messaging has become a mainstay of daily communications, with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger attracting over a billion users each, and Twitter claiming 330 million active daily users. Quiq brings the convenience and swiftness of messaging to customer service and sales engagement.

The Quiq platform allows businesses to integrate a number of messaging tools into their website and applications, including SMS/text messaging, Messenger, Twitter, Kik, Apple Messages, web chat and Google RBM. Users can also integrate messaging into their native mobile applications.

Agents can attend to multiple texts, serving more than one customer at a time, which is not possible for sales and support calls. The advantage of sending images and videos via messaging platforms helps build context quickly, supporting faster resolution times.

Texting with multiple customers or leads can become disorganized and chaotic in the absence of a simple and intelligent interface. Quiq offers a single desktop to manage multiple conversations and cross-channel responses to address repetitive questions effortlessly.

Real-time reports and dashboards provide insights into agent and team performance, along with the capability to export conversation data to third-party BI tools.

Customer service is a powerful differentiator

Exceptional customer support encourages brand loyalty. Customer experience is poised to overtake product and price as a key differentiator. Companies that implement the right customer support software and respond effectively to changing customer behaviors will win the customer experience game.

• It can be challenging to build workplace culture in a virtual environment, but companies that are fully remote see benefits that might not be obvious to others.  
• Carol Cochran, vice president of people and culture at FlexJobs, a job site for remote work, told Business Insider scheduling virtual social breaks can improve insight and problem-solving.
• Cochran advises managers to create "aha moments," or moments that inspire and build camaraderie among remote employees. 
• We've compiled a list of tips for fostering a stronger remote workplace culture in this series, "Office Anywhere."
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

As more teams shift to the new normal of remote work, companies across America are looking for ways to keep colleagues separated by distance feeling like they're part of a bigger "family."

Occasional coffee breaks, happy hours, and even baby showers may seem trivial, but in a virtual environment, these are the traditional gatherings that can help strengthen relationships among remote colleagues.

Employees who telecommute often report feeling isolated from their office coworkers, Business Insider has previously reported. This can lead to a plummet in concentration and a lack of participation in meetings.

Over time, developing a bond with your colleagues can improve workplace engagement. According to a report from Gallup, employees who have a "best friend" at work are more motivated to take actions that positively impact the business.

Carol Cochran is the vice president of people and culture at telecommuting firm FlexJobs, which counts on a majority remote team with offices across the country. Cochran told Business Insider that moving in-person interactions such as coffee breaks to an online platform can make all the difference in strengthening bonds between workers separated by distance. 

"We always start with the question of what would things look like if we were co-located and how can we try to replicate that," Cochran said. "Incidental interactions create these moments of inspiration that we take back to our desk with us."

Here are three ways to make workers feel like they're part of a bigger workplace family to enhance engagement, productivity, and most importantly, camaraderie.

Create virtual "watercooler" moments 

FlexJobs uses a virtual collaboration tool to create online "watercooler" moments where colleagues can casually talk with each other. Using this platform, managers will recognize work anniversaries or simply chat about their families.

According to Cochran, casual social breaks allow colleagues to come up with new ideas. Interactions like these can spur an "aha!" moment that can boost an employee's problem-solving abilities, letting them break down personal work puzzles to find creative solutions for them.

"It doesn't even have to be a formalized brainstorming session," Cochran said. "Just opening your mind up a little bit can let you have a solution or have an idea come to you through this casual encounter."

Remember your colleagues' birthdays 

When you're not working in the office, it's easy to miss your coworker's major life milestones. "Happy birthday" may appear to be a small gesture, but it's reminders like these that can make all the difference in having someone feel included in the workplace.

To celebrate an employee's birthday, managers at FlexJobs will send a gift to their home using a remote employee reward service. Although it's important to have boundaries between your work and home life, Cochran said that the occasional blurring of those lines can help create a more personal connection between workers.

"A part of that is celebrating you as a person, and that starts with the day that you were born," she said. "What better way to honor you as an individual person than to recognize your actual birthday."

Pair them up with a virtual buddy

Teaming up remote workers with a colleague in a "complementary position" can help guide employees through the difficulties of a remote workplace culture. For example, a virtual buddy can provide support for questions that are too awkward to ask direct teammates.

"It's just another person to lean on while they're going through the first 90 days," Cochran said.

In the long run, these casual interactions build trust and strengthen bonds among remote workers. What's more, as employees get a glimpse of the bigger vision of their company, they can get an inside look at how all the pieces fit together.

"It makes you feel more connected to the mission of the company itself because you're more invested in the people," she said. 

SEE ALSO: 20 startups that are hiring remote workers right now

Join the conversation about this story »

• LinkedIn shared exclusively with Business Insider its five most popular skills courses on working from home. 
• Demand for "remote working" courses on LinkedIn have tripled since January, according to the company. 
• Free of charge, LinkedIn members can learn skills including managing a remote workforce and how to use Zoom. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The worldwide coronavirus pandemic has upended the world of work — and almost institutionalized remote working. 

To slow the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, many states have ordered "non-essential workers" to stay at home and the practicing of social distancing. As a result, giant firms like Apple and Microsoft have ordered their thousands of workers to work entirely remotely.

LinkedIn told Business Insider that in the last week of March alone, its members spent a whopping 1.2 million hours watching skills training courses, and many were related to virtual work. And since January, LinkedIn said, searches related to "remote working" courses have tripled.

The company offers thousands of online classes to learn skills related to business analysis, finance, accounting, management, and more. 

To help employees better train for the new remote world of work, LinkedIn gave Business Insider an exclusive list of its five most popular work-from-home skills training courses. These classes are free for LinkedIn members and taught by best-selling authors and renowned productivity consultants.

Here are the five LinkedIn classes guaranteed to make you a remote work expert:

SEE ALSO: I toured the surprisingly bonkers LinkedIn offices in the Empire State Building, which has a 'speakeasy' bar hidden behind a wall of rotary phones. Here's what it was like.

Working Remotely, a LinkedIn course on the basics of remote work, saw a 7,536% increase in viewership in March.

Course details: Coach Mike Gutman from FlexJobs discusses how to use cloud-communication tools to stay connected with your team, build a productive home office, and create meaningful relationships with your remote teammates.

Learning objectives: 

• Describe the ideal home setup for working remotely.
• Summarize the process of onboarding a remote worker.
• Explain the importance of work-life balance and how to maintain it while working remotely.
• Cite the tools remote workers can use to stay connected to the home office.
• Describe how to manage conflict with teammates while working remotely.
• Explain how to build culture in a remote team.

Take LinkedIn's Working Remotely course here.

Time Management: Working from Home, a LinkedIn course on how to stay productive from your house, saw a 5,320% increase in viewership in March.

Course details: Bestselling author and productivity expert Dave Crenshaw explains how to stay productive as a remote employee. He recommends, for example, ways to set up your at-home desk and how to craft your schedule for optimal productivity.

Learning objectives: 

• Create a productive environment by limiting distractions.
• Evaluate and choose the best technology to increase your productivity.
• Differentiate between constant effort and a healthy working rhythm.
• Define expectations around communication while remaining responsive.
• Identify the benefits of relationship building.
• Learn how to manage interruptions and emergencies at home.

Take LinkedIn's Time Management: Working from Home course here.

Leading at a Distance, a LinkedIn course on virtual management, saw a 3,008% increase in viewership in March.

Course details: Leadership consultant Kevin Eikenberry advises managers on how to build interpersonal relationships virtually, including how to coach and build trust with a remote workforce.

Learning objectives: 

• How did we get to remote teams?
• The remote leadership model.
• What success looks like at a distance.
• Providing coaching and feedback.
• How remote politics works.
• Building trust at a distance.
• Communicating effectively.
• Leveraging technology as a remote leader.
• Getting honest feedback.

Take LinkedIn's Leading at a Distance course here.

Learning Zoom, a LinkedIn course on the remote workforce platform Zoom, saw a 2,605% increase in viewership in March.

Course details: This course teaches you how to schedule, moderate, and participate in Zoom meetings. 

Learning objectives: The course doesn't have explicit objectives, but some tips include:

• Set up your Zoom account.
• Adjust audio and video settings. 
• How to join and effectively participate in meetings.
• Sharing your screen.
• Record meetings.

Take LinkedIn's Learning Zoom course here.

 

 

Microsoft Teams Essential Training, a LinkedIn course on the remote workforce platform Microsoft Teams, saw a 376% increase in viewership in March.

Course details: This course gives you an overview of Microsoft Teams, a remote work platform. You'll learn keyboard shortcuts and useful apps that will help streamline work on Teams. 

Learning objectives: 

• Saving time with bots
• Extending the functionality of Teams with apps
• Forwarding emails to Teams
• Modifying your notifications and alerts
• Using Teams as the hub for all of your Office 365 apps
• Hiding channels and teams you don't use
• Helpful keyboard shortcuts

Take LinkedIn's Microsoft Teams Tips and Tricks course here.

Forget Consultative Selling, Value Selling and Sales Process - the things I talk about most often.  The inability to sell that way is nothing - and I mean nothing compared with what I'm going to explain today!

For most salespeople and companies, the last three weeks has been an absolute roller coaster. Most companies expect their sales teams to be not only active, but proactive; to replace face-to-face meetings with virtual meetings; and to continue pipeline building so that there is business to close when we return to work.  But is that what's happening?  In today's article, I'll blend my usual mix of statistics with some personal observation from the clients I have been helping for the past three weeks.  I also included three videos that I extracted from a sales training session earlier this week.  You'll be surprised!

Managing your go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a challenging job in any circumstance, but what happens when life throws you an unexpected curveball like, say, a pandemic and looming recession?

As I write this, everyone I know is struggling to adapt—personally and professionally. We’ve seen an unprecedented level of upheaval across all industries, including the SaaS industry. So, we thought this would be a good time to reach out to Carol Meyers, an inspiring leader with impressive experience adjusting go-to-market strategy on the fly in the midst of very trying times.

A self-proclaimed growth junkie and IPO addict, Carol helped four companies—Shiva, Unica, LogMeIn and Rapid7—go from starting points between zero and $25 million to IPOs and hundreds of millions in revenue.

More to the point, one of her IPOs—for LogMeIn, one of the earliest product led growth companies—happened during the Great Recession.

In my conversation with Carol, she opened up about the lessons she learned from the economic downturn of 2008 and how we can apply them today, and she shared her four-step process for adjusting go-to-market strategy in the face of the current crisis.

Take control by refocusing on profitability

Unsurprisingly, profitability suddenly becomes much more important when things go south. The more dire things get, the more you have to be able to make the numbers work so you can show a clear path to profitability.

In LogMeIn’s case, the biggest challenge for Carol and her team was to figure out how to maintain the incredibly high growth they were experiencing while simultaneously employing razor sharp analysis to make surgical cuts to the marketing budget. At the same time, they were continuing to explore new channels and new ways of reaching people in order to drive growth in new areas.

This two-prong approach—cutting back while trying new strategies—allowed them to reduce their marketing budget by millions of dollars and create inroads with new audiences.

Make the hard cuts

While Carol remembers the LogMeIn team remaining fairly calm, she admits that the cutting back portion of the go-to-market adaptation strategy was definitely a little stressful. This was in great part because LogMeIn was one of the earliest product-led companies, so digital advertising/search—which represented an enormous percentage of the marketing budget—was kind of their lifeblood.

Carol and her team successfully used data and a series of tests to turn off a select set of search campaigns. They identified specific windows of opportunity (e.g., a standard end-of-year slowdown in search traffic), and then analyzed which campaigns weren’t generating enough of the right kinds of users to be truly worth the expense.

While I’m sure it was nerve-wracking, Carol explains that success came down to getting back to basics. “Making those cuts certainly had people very nervous, but it really all came back to understanding the buyer and the market, and having the right metrics in place.”

With those foundational elements in place, Carol and her team were able to monitor everything “pretty maniacally,” and the insights they gained provided excellent focus, alignment, and guidance for the entire process.

The other point Carol made was that you can always adjust your adjustments. “We ultimately decided we had probably cut too much out of digital marketing,” she says. “There were some things in the spend that were creating goodness for us—more web traffic and other things that we couldn’t directly tie to ROI.” So, they added some things back in and found the right balance between budget savings and performance.

Try new things

On the other side of the coin, the LogMeIn marketing team was branching out and exploring new territory. “It might sound a little counterintuitive, but the lesson we learned is that when you’re going through major changes, you should be creating opportunities to try new things,” Carol says.

Basically, since the status quo has already been disrupted—and you know that at least some of the things you’ve been doing all along won’t work anymore—periods of change can be an excellent time to try something different. As Carol put it, “That’s a door opening.”

In LogMeIn’s situation, there were a number of projects on the table that helped the team tap into new channels and test out new tactics.

For example:

• Moving upmarket into enterprise: The team took the opportunity to do more targeted marketing to some of the larger accounts they were hoping to land.
• Overhauling their email marketing: They replaced an in-house tool that wasn’t robust enough to support everything marketing wanted to do with a commercial solution that offered much more sophisticated features.
• Launching an iPhone app: They also did a very successful launch of their first productivity app in what was then a much smaller app market. They used social media by giving influencers and bloggers a sneak preview of the app in exchange for an honest review. At the same time, Carol established relationships with Apple and other key players to help get the word out. The app zoomed to the top of the productivity apps category in the Apple Store, even at the hefty price tag of $29.99. Carol pointed out that the success wasn’t all about the strategy, but also about the product. “With product led growth, you’ve got to have some pretty serious confidence in your product,” she says. “And that worked beautifully for us.”

A critical key to their overall success in trying new things during a recession was making sure all stakeholders were apprised of and in alignment with the various initiatives. When everything is in flux, it’s a good idea to take extra care about maintaining clear and open lines of communication. Nobody likes surprises during the best of times, and even less so in the middle of a crisis.

Think beyond the immediate crisis

“One thing companies might want to do in this current crisis is to consider creating a small task force of creative people who can brainstorm and project ways the world might change,” Carol says. “This isn’t just about your company or your market, but about how the world might change as a whole and how you can bring that back to your business to create new opportunities.”

Optimally, the people on this team would have knowledge across a wide range of topics and areas. They wouldn’t be caught up in the day-to-day stress of what’s going on in your business, so they could instead focus creatively and proactively on the future.

Take these 4 steps to adjust your go-to-market strategy in a crisis

In addition to sharing specific tactics, Carol also gave us a high-level, four-step process for adjusting to a need for major change in your go-to-market strategy. Whether a pandemic, a recession or a new competitor drives this need, the steps are pretty much the same.

Step 1: Check in with your go-to-market team

How is your team responding to the crisis? How are they feeling? What have they already done to adjust?

This is a time for transparent communication. It’s also a time to reassess goals and incentives—not just to get the proverbial ship pointed in the right direction, but also to ensure that the team feels like they can succeed.

It’s important to keep morale up in difficult times. People need positive reinforcement to help them maintain a feeling of hope and enthusiasm. And perhaps most importantly, “they’ve got to feel like they have a great leader guiding them,” explains Carol.

Step 2: Reassess your market and adjust your forecasts

After checking in with your team, you’re ready to build scenarios—best, worst, and most-likely—so you can develop the appropriate metrics and milestones to help you stay on top of the situation and track which scenario you’re trending toward.

Think not only of your big-picture investments, but also about operational things like whether your sales cycle is going to get longer, and—if it does—what does that mean for your customers and for your sales team?

Step 3: Reassess your messaging, targeting and pricing

In a situation such as ours today, this step needs to happen simultaneously while you’re working through the other things. It’s a divide-and-conquer approach where someone with the right sensitivity—who is in touch with the brand and market—starts reviewing all of the content. Ask these questions as you audit your current marketing:

• What does it say about you?
• How does it compare to what your competition is doing?
• Most importantly, is it appropriate for the current environment?

Customer communications are always critical, and in stressful times you have to keep a close eye on what’s going out. In a crisis, what was appropriate to send in an email last week might be completely inappropriate this week.

Carol shared an example. “I signed up for a service that I was curious about. The onboarding email they sent me a few days later suggested that I sign up to travel the world via a volunteering vacation. That is a completely wasted communication, and it also sends the message that the company in question isn’t even thinking about what they’re sending out right now.”

Not a good look.

Step 4: Think about how you can make things easier for people

In a crisis of any kind, people are going to be stressed. To help decrease prospect and customer stress, look for ways to reduce barriers to helpful information, be more transparent in your pricing, and offer access to more support resources.

The idea here is to make it extra easy for people to find and access the information they need. This might mean surfacing certain pieces of content or taking down paywalls, or any number of other tactics. The goal is to avoid adding new stressors and eliminate any existing points of friction.

Push past fear

Carol’s bottom line? Don’t let fear win. “Even if you’re in a business that seems like it will never have a future—if you sell exclusively to restaurants during a pandemic, for example—if you’ve got a really good product, and you can figure out a way to cut back enough and hang on, your day is going to come again.”

She suggests thinking like an earlier-stage startup that’s just taking whatever cash they have and putting it back into making an incredible product. And along with that, shift your focus even more towards existing customers than you normally would so that you retain them. Doing this means you may even be able to upsell them in the future.

It’s all about doing the work now so you’re better positioned to get ahead later. “Maybe the market won’t be as robust as it was before the crisis,” she says. “And there will only be room for a few players, so you’ve got to work to ensure you’re one of those few.”

This is about adopting a forward-thinking mindset that focuses on how you can prepare for when the market does come back. “I think for almost every business, there’s a way to figure out the right go-forward strategy,” Carol says. “It might be painful. But the point is, you don’t have to just hunker down. You can take some time with people who aren’t caught up in the day to day, and think about the future.”

“There are opportunities for people to not just respond to the fear and the stress, but to take it as a chance to learn some new things that they might be able to continue to use in the future,” Carol continues. “The one thing companies should do is be unafraid of looking for those opportunities. That’s what creates excitement within the business and in the hearts and minds of the people who build the business.”

More resources to help you adapt

• Pricing in a Time of Uncertainty
• Founders, Extend Your Cash Runway by Taking These Steps Right Now

The post How to Adjust Your Go-to-Market Strategy in a Crisis, According to Carol Meyers appeared first on OpenView.

The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE.

THE ENGINEER’S PLACE The end came with a whimper. My personal laser printer showed a persistent error message. In the past, closing the cover cleared the message and let me print. Not this time. I surveyed guidance on the Web, even studied the remedies proposed by the printer’s maker. No joy.

After weeks, and then months after opening and closing the cover, and turning the printer off and on, I surrendered. Last week, I unplugged it, removed the ink cartridge (for re-use) and carried the printer to a nearby responsible electronics recycler.

I cringed and wondered. Should I feel shame for contravening the nifty dictum of the self-styled “right to repair” movement, which insists that "instead of throwing things out,” we should “reuse, salvage and rebuild?” 

In the case of my zombie printer, I’m convinced the recycler was the best destination. A near-identical model, brand new, sells on Amazon for $99. The ink cartridge costs a third as much. Even if the printer could be repaired, at what expense in parts and labor?

So I bought a new printer.

When I ponder the wisdom of my decision, I think “Shame on me.” Rather than fight to repair my wounded device, I did what Big Tech and other manufacturers increasingly want owners to do. I threw it away.

Today repair remains an option, one that makers want to monopolize or eliminate. Apple, the world’s most valuable company, is the worst offender, effectively forbidding owners to repair or maintain their smart phones. Not even the battery is replaceable by an owner. Forbidden also are repairs by owners of cracked screens. Such brazen actions void Apple’s warranty.

Many people have a tale of trying to bootleg an iPhone repair. My favorite is when I found a guy on Yelp! who asked me to meet him inside a Starbucks. His nom de repair is ScreenDoc, and he ran our rendezvous like a drug buy. He only entered the shop after I ordered a coffee and sat down. Seated at my table, working with tiny tools, he swapped my broken screen for a new one. I slipped him $90 in cash, and he left.

Sound tawdry? The nationwide campaign, led by Repair.Org, agrees, which is why Repair.Org supports legislation in at least 20 states to promote “your right to repair,” by requiring manufacturers “to share the information necessary for repair.”

Long before the advent of the repair campaign, and a related movement called the Maintainers, there were loud critics of “planned obsolescence.” During Depression-era America, an influential book published 1932 advocated “creative waste”—the idea that throwing things away and buying new things can fuel a strong economy. One advocate, Bernard London, wrote a paper in 1932, “Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence,” in which he called on the federal government to print expiration dates on manufactured goods. “Furniture and clothing and other commodities should have a span of life, just as humans have,” he wrote. “They should be retired, and replaced by fresh merchandise.”

Manufacturers purposely made stuff that broke or wore out, so consumers would have to buy the stuff again. Echoes of this practice persist. In shopping for new tires, for instance, drivers pay more for those “rated” to last longer.

The big threat to devices today isn’t failure, but rather “creative destruction,” or the new advent of new and improved stuff. Who needs to think about repairs when we are dazzled by the latest “upgrade.”

The newest iPhones, for instance, are promoted on the appeal of their improved cameras. The latest Apple watch series boasts new band colors. Such incremental improvements long pre-date Apple’s popularity. One hundred years ago, General Motors decided to release new models, new colors, and faster engines every year. “The changes in the new model should be so novel and attractive as to create demand…and a certain amount of dissatisfaction with past models as compared with the new one,” wrote Alfred Sloan, then automaker’s CEO, in his 1963 autobiography My Years With General Motors.

Some of us never grow disenchanted with certain machines. We love them forever. And we strive to keep them going. Some cherished cars fall into this category, and computers do, too. I’m typing this article on my beloved 2014 Mac Powerbook. My battery is toast, so I can only securely use the laptop while plugged in. And I type on an external keyboard because the original keys are so worn out that a few won’t function at all even though Apple has twice replaced the key caps for me.

I don’t want my PowerBook Pro to die; yet my repair options are ruled by Apple. And a cruel master is she. My best path forward is to ask Apple to replace the keyboard and battery. I dread finding out whether Apple continues to offer this option. Though I feel no shame regarding my utter dependence on Apple for repairs, I do feel outrage and puzzlement. I am aware that the do-it-yourself (DIY) movement that has transformed how we maintain our homes and our bodies, how we eat and drink, work and play.

But DIY maintenance is not for everybody or appropriate for every situation. Nor does it inevitably produce greater “caring.” Results vary. Quality can suffer. While a person’s self-esteem may rise with every home improvement they carry out, the value of their home may decline as a result (because of the quality of the DIY fixes). I favor a simple rule: encourage consumers to repair if they wish but not insist on self-repair under every circumstance, and leave the option that original makers of complex devices will repair them the best (Tesla owners, take heed!)

When self-reliance becomes non-negotiable, the results can be dispiriting. But when the impulse to do things yourself, like brewing your own beer, baking your own bread, raising your own chickens and building your own computers, takes hold, the results can be good for your soul.

In 1974, a repair enthusiast named Robert Pirsig published a book that proved highly influential and sold millions of copies. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance came to define a spiritual and mental outlook by contrasting the approaches of two bike owners. One rides an expensive new bike and relies on professionals to repair. The other rides an older bike that he repairs on his own and, by doing so, hones his problem-solving abilities and, unexpectedly, connects to a deeper wisdom that enhances his sense of dignity and endows his life with greater meaning.

The shift in attitudes a half-century ago was dramatic, reflecting the profound expansion of the human-built world. Once humans sought to “connect” with nature; now they wished to do the same (or more) with their machines. In many ways, the repair movement is a revival of this venerable counter-cultural tradition.

Today’s repair enthusiasts would have us believe that the well-maintained artifact is the new beautiful. But denying consumers the ability to repair their stuff is, to me, chiefly an economic, not a spiritual or aesthetic, issue.

The denial of the repair option is not limited to laptops and smart phones. Automobiles are now essentially computers on wheels. Digital diagnostics make repair no longer the dominion of the clever tinkerer. Specialized software, reading reports from the sensors scattered throughout your car, decides which “modules” to replace. The ease comes at a price. Your dealer now dominates the repair business. Independent car shops often can’t or won’t invest in the car manufacturer’s expensive software. And the hardy souls that once maintained their own vehicles, in their driveway or on the street, are as close to extinction as the white rhino.

The predatory issue is central. The denial of the repair option is often a form of profiteering. The manufacturer earns money from what he or she considers the “after market.” Many makers of popular devices now see repair and maintenance as a kind of annuity, a stream of revenue similar in type to that provided by sales of a printer cartridge or razor blade. For auto dealers, profits from “service” now can exceed profits from sales of new cars. Increasingly products are designed, across many categories, to render impossible, or greatly limit, repair by owner.

I am not sure the practice is wrong, and certainly not wrong in all cases. The profits from repair are often justified by claims of superior service. Brand-name makers, in theory, can control reliability by maintaining their own devices. Reliability easily conflates with “peace of mind,” so that the repair path collides squarely with another basic human urge: convenience.

Not everyone opposes convenience, so the Repair movement might regret choosing to advocate for a “right” to repair rather than an “option.” An option implies protecting a consumer’s choice, not mandating a specific repair scenario. I’m skeptical about applying the language of legal rights to the problem of repair and maintenance; because there are many cases where technology companies especially have the obligation to repair problems, and not foist them onto their customers.

Here’s a live example. Among my chief reasons for my loyalty to the iPhone is that Apple supplies updated software that protects me against viruses and security hacks; Apple even installs this software on my phone sometimes without my conscious assent, or awareness. If I had to assent explicitly to each iPhone software update, I would invariably fail to have the latest protection and then suffer the negative consequences. So I don’t want to be responsible for repairing or maintaining a phone that is inherently collective in nature. I am freer and happier when Apple does it.

I understand that ceding the repair to an impersonal System might seem to libertarians like a road to serfdom. But having the System in charge of repair probably makes sense for essential products and services.

The artifacts in our world are profoundly networked now, and even though some devices look and feel individual to us, they are not. Their discreteness is an illusion. Increasingly no person is a technological island. Our devices are part of systems that depend on collective action and communal support.

Given the deep interconnectedness of our built environment, the distinction between repairing your own devices and letting others do so breaks down; and insisting on maintaining the distinction strikes me as inherently anti-social and destructive to the common good. At the very least the question of who repairs what should be viewed as morally neutral. Our answers should be shaped by economics and practicality, not romantic notions about individual freedom and responsibility.

Because the right-to-repair movement is based on a romantic notion, and pits those who maintain against those who don’t, a backlash against the concept is inevitable. A healthier approach to the genuine challenge of maintaining technological systems, and their dependent devices, would be to also strengthen collective responses and systems of repair and maintenance.

Much is at stake in this argument. Thinking about who is responsible for what aspects of our techno-human condition helps clarify what forms of resistance are possible in a world dominated by Big Tech companies and complex socio-technical systems. Resistance can and should take many forms, but resistance will be far more effective, I submit, if we do not choose repair and maintenance as a proxy for democratic control over innovation.

So I offer different solution. Rather than burden individuals with enhanced rights and duties for repair and maintenance of our devices, let’s demand that makers of digitally-controlled stuff make repairs at fair prices, quickly and reliably. Or maybe we go further and demand that these companies repair and maintain their products at a slight loss, or even a large loss, in order to incentivize them to design and build high-quality stuff in the first place; stuff that requires less maintenance and fewer repairs.

By insuring that repair is fair, reliable and low cost by law and custom, we can achieve the best of both worlds: keep our gadgets running and feel good knowing that the quality of our stuff is not the measure of ourselves.

Iran: Make Love Not War. Mary Jane Walker. 2019 ISBN 978047349160.  A concise and breezy trip through modern Iran.  The author is quite the adventure hound in the nothing ventured , nothing gained style.  She traveled mostly alone and met many helpful Iranians along the way. She has an eye for art and architecture and seems able to talk to pretty well anyone.  Her colour photos are worth the book. After reading this travelogue you will come away with a sense as to what the average Iranian thinks. As well, she finds that the locals are quite unlike and detached from the Muslim leaders, leaders who appear paranoid at being overthrown like they did to the Shah.  Locals are just folks getting by and apart from fearing for their future, you would feel quite at home with them.  This is also a short history lessons on Persia and Persian kings. The descriptions of the cities and architecture is also well done.  Your heart goes out to the mismanagement of water and top level corruption which imposes hardship on the locals.