I am staying with some friends near Boston, MA (on my way to the Business of Community Networking conference where I'll be speaking on Wednesday and Thursday).
And the network is REALLY, REALLY fast here.
Wow.
Meetup: Rethinking Learning in Berkeley (Tuesday)
There is a great event happening tomorrow evening (this Tuesday) in Berkeley; a session with the Learning Irregulars on the future of learning in organizations. Discussion will revolve around the marvels that networks have wrought and how organizations can improve the way they approach learning.
More details here.
Please note! This is an event that is open to everyone, even if you are not a learning professional. Diverse viewpoints are the source of innovation. Invite your neighbor who's a labor leader, CFO, anthropologist, psychologist, professor, historian, executive, butcher, baker, or candlestick maker, so long as he or she is out to make the world a better place. Major innovations result from mashing up concepts from diverse silos, and accelerating innovation is the goal.
People make a meeting like this work.
Learning Irregulars!
Berkeley 7-10 pm
Tuesday, March 24th.
Please RSVP
FREE
What’s In The New iPhone OS 3.0?
Registration Open for “Sales 2.0” Webcast (March 31, 2009)
Click here for registration info
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.
More on the SXSW iPhone Web App and Widget
A nice writeup here by the folks over at Mobile Marketer regarding our latest Ventana. Thanks, y'all!
Fair Rent
"Brands exist in OUR BRAINS. We should charge a fair rent." – Ed Schipul
SXSW iPhone Web App and Widget
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!
Visualizing Sales 2.0
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
Curves
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.
The Social Media Buyer’s Guide
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/
Also check out the blog post: http://www.socialmediaclub.
Seeya there!