Year: 2009

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Our friends over at The Customer Collective have invited Mark Woolen from Oracle and Anneke Seley from Phone Works as well as myself to share some thoughts (and perhaps spar a little) on the topic of "How do you take the proven fundamentals of good selling and apply
them to social networking? What Web 2.0 tools should you as a sales
professional be utilizing to find new prospects and keep the customers
you have loyal?"

I'll be the guy taking the customer's perspective.  :-)  Here are the bios:

Mark Woollen, with more than 20 years of sales, marketing and
development experience, is responsible for driving market requirements
and business strategy for Oracle CRM applications. He will share the
changes Web 2.0 and social media are bringing to enterprise software
and what that means for sales.

Christopher Carfi is co-founder of Cerado, Inc. and author of The
Social Customer Manifesto weblog. Chris is a recognized expert in
applying emerging social technologies such as blogs, wikis, and
podcasts to create strong customer communities and strengthen
relationships between vendors and their customers.

Anneke Seley has spent over 25 years creating high-performance, high
profit sales models for companies such as Microsoft, NetApp,
Interwoven, and Hyperion. Now with her new book "Sales 2.0: Improve
Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology", she
is pioneering next-generation Web 2.0 sales practices.

Should be good fun.  Seeya there.

Click here to register.

A nice writeup here by the folks over at Mobile Marketer regarding our latest Ventana.  Thanks, y'all!

"Brands exist in OUR BRAINS. We should charge a fair rent." – Ed Schipul

Related Links:

SXSW iPhone Web App
SXSW Mobile Web App
SXSW Widget

Due to popular demand, we've updated and completely revamped the Unofficial SXSW Mobile Pocket Guide that we built with Cerado Ventana.  What's the same:

• Still looks great on the iPhone and other mobile devices
• Still works great as a widget you can drop on your blog or even your start page (iGoogle, NetVibes, etc.)

What's new this year:

• Listings of panels
• Listings of parties
• Pulls in Twitter buzz
• And (very cool), you can add parties or events to the guide yourself!

 

If you're going to, or simply want to follow the buzz at, SXSW09, check it out!

At the Sales 2.0 conference today, and just had the opportunity to see a strong presentation from Jeanne Glass from Fair Isaac, explaining how the Fair Isaac organization is managing their internal sales process.

Ok, the coolest thing — XPLANE developed the process map for Fair Isaac to help them visualize, understand and communicate their sales process.

(A larger version of this image is available on Flickr.)

Love it, and this is perfect segue from the VizThink conversations of last week.  Visualization matters, even in "hard core" business areas like sales.

For Fair Isaac, Jeanne noted three key factors for their individuals who are interacting with prospective customers.

• Know their methodology
• Know their customers
• Know their solutions

Fair Isaac seems to have a very strong measurement and benchmarking component to their sales process; they look at how they are doing on particular dimensions (e.g. "Our executive leadership is actively engaged in our sales process"), and compare themselves to both the industry average as well as the "world class benchmark" on those dimensions.

Most importantly, Fair Isaac encourages their team to use these resources in conjunction with their prospects and customers!  For example, their team wants to have a high degree of transparency.  How to do this?  Fair Isaac shares their process with the customer, even down to sharing the plan that Fair Isaac has for a particular opportunity directly with the customer herself.  Right on.

Scoring is a key part of the process, which enables decision making based on facts, not emotions.

Results at Fair Isaac from following this process:

• Improved close rates
• Common language
• Teamwork and planning
• Metric based decision-making

I have no CLUE how he does it, but Chuck made Highway 280 look sexy.  (Chuck, it's tons and tons of poured concrete.  How the hell did you do that?)

Amazing.  More of his stuff here, of course.

On
Wednesday, March 4 (today!), I will be participating in the Social Media Buyers
Guide podcast on how to evaluate and get started with social media for your brand, organization or event. Other panelists and
I will give our top three pieces of advice for organizations and
individuals responsible for buying social media solutions and the top
three questions we recommend asking any social media vendor or
solutions provider.

This is a LIVE show (so, it'll sorta be like Cirque du Soleil, but without the acrobats and stuff) and will also be an open conversation where callers (that's you) share their own insights into integrating social media products and
services. You can listen in on the web at 10:00 AM (PST) at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Social-Media-Club/2009/03/04/Social-Media-Buyers-Guide-Insights-from-Organizational-Buyers, and participate live (seriously!) by dialing in at (347) 308-8038 between 10:00am and 10:45am PST.

Also check out the blog post: http://www.socialmediaclub.org/2009/02/26/buyer-be-heard-social-media-buyers-guide-on-blog-talk-radio-march-4-2009/ for more info.

Seeya there!

I'd read a bunch of the reports on Flight 1549.  I'd also heard the tower communications audio.  But those very left-brain analyses of the incident really didn't pull it together for me.  Now check out this video reconstruction that overlays the tower audio with a visual reconstruction. 

Ok.  Now I get it.

 

I really am not a big fan of the "fill out this form and then we'll let you see this next page" types of hurdles that a lot of websites put up, with dozens of mandatory fields to fill out.  So, I try to meet them half way by filling in things like "please don't call" for name, phone #, etc.  Don't want them to waste their time reaching out to me when it's not a worthwhile investment of their resources.

Of course, the reason that organizations choose to require all that information is so that they can try to roboticize as much of the "relationship" process as possible, which is a fool's errand.  Relationships can't be automated.

That said, many continue to try.  Hence the email I just received that addressed me as Mr. Please-Don't-Call.  That cracked me up.

Related:  The $300mil Web Form

As of 10pm PST Sunday, the folks over at Skittles have launched a very interesting experiment (I HAVE to imagine it's an experiment) in giving over nearly their entire web presence to a collection of social media websites.  Here's what we're seeing right now:

1)  The home page itself is solely a tracking of the trending buzz around the search term "skittles" on Twitter.  The small overlay navigation pane is the only Skittles-branded bit; everything else is Twitter.  Not surprisingly, some of the search results are not necessarily family-friendly.

2)  Clicking on the "friends" link in the navigation pops to the Skittles Facebook page

 

3)  Clicking on Media|Photos brings up the Skittles Flickr Page

4)  Clicking on Media|Videos brings up the Skittles YouTube Page

What this means:  This is a very interesting hybrid approach from Skittles with respect to engaging with their customers.  Some of the links (e.g. photos, videos, friends) still afford the expected level of "corporate control" over what is seen and viewed, as those links are going out to accounts that are managed by the Skittles brand.  However (and this is a big however), the connections out to the Twitter page — and the decision to make that the landing page for the initial customer experience — is a decision that is much more Wild West.  There's no telling what's going to show up on that home page.

In a perhaps counter-intuitive position, I think that giving over the entire homepage to the Twitter search for the brand has the possibility of actually decreasing customer engagement.  Why?  With the lack of any sort of way to address the signal/noise ratio on that page, actual customers who are looking for actual information about actual Skittles products are likely to be turned off (or at least frustrated) by the need to dig through pages of spam to find the relevant bits of information they were looking for.  That said, I think linking to the Twitter page is great and, once it's no longer the focus of the site, the lure of putting up novelty or spam items will wear off.

With a few tweaks (for example, not making the landing page the Twitter search results, but instead perhaps a slightly more predictable set of information), I think this is an approach we may see more of in the future.