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December 6th by Sam in Image

“Sales orgs have adoption apathy.”

The Sales 2.0 Conference theme “Strategies in a Social and Mobile World” translated to: “Oh god, what is all this?”

As optimistic as the title of last week’s Sales 2.0 conference in Santa Monica was, the content was clear: WTF?? As conference moderator, Gerhard Gschwandter said, “Sales organizations have adoption apathy.” That’s another way of saying, when Sales organizations look at all this social media stuff, they just see gobbledegook and move on.

Jim Keenan pointed out, “For some reason, sales as an functional group are slow to adopt social media.” I’m not sure I’d only point at Sales as the organization that’s slow, I think that except for Marketing, many departments glance at all this Social stuff and then it’s back to their regularly scheduled jobs cuz there’s work to do. Company’s front lines haven’t adopted because there’s not a clear application that has to do with driving Sales. Even the conference organizers, recap the event with “holy crap, our folks are buried with challenges.”

Selling innovation starts with you, right?

The breakout sessions were focused on how to use Linkedin, or how to “live in van down by the Social River” and use a pile of different consumer tools to machine gun the social web to catch a fish. I heard lots of buzz words. There was “social business” and “social capital” and every once in a blue moon “sCRM.” VPs begged to arm their Reps with something that would make them bulletproof. There were arguments about how much of this was art vs science. One guy raised his hand and said, “I’m walking away with the need to get my Sales team blogging.” Really?

Where are the new ideas?

You’d think that since it’s an amazing, new world out there filled with tons of new ways to connect, discover and propose solutions that there would be all sorts of innovation. Imagine how much could be custom-made for the most critical part of the enterprise: Sales. But outside of web meeting software, Salesforce’s data.com, Hoovers, and Jive no one else was there. Instead, it seemed the only thing a Rep could do was was to rifle off a few connections on Linkedin or maybe answer a tweet. Then it was back to their record management system ball and chain.

How upside down is all this? Sales should have the BEST stuff– something completely different and made for them–not this confusing consumer muck.

 

 

November 24th by Sam in Uncategorized

Early Crushpath teaser site results

Two days ago our beta request site went live

Late Friday afternoon we soft-launched our teaser website and have been blown away by the interest we’ve seen so far. The teaser site was put together in just six days (from zero to live) to have a placeholder while in stealth mode. I’m proud of the passion and experience the team brought to deliver such quality in so litte time. It’s still very early but we thought we’d share some quick stats and lessons learned so far.

Early results

We’re super happy with the results so far. The big surprise is having more than 10% conversion from visitor to sign up, given the fact people had extra obstacles (we ask for Linkedin authorization). Also, folks have spent an average of about 2 minutes per visit, so they’re spending time with the story.

 

 

Productivity tools we used:

The teaser site started while we were literally around the world from each other (I was in Bali for my wedding). Being 15 hours and +1 day away from each other made for around-the-clock work. Not surprisingly, we used these same tools even when we ended up in the same office.

Skitch

We’re fans (and friends) with the guys at Skitch, which is the ultimate visual grok machine– a super rapid way to asynchronously collaborate on the stuff on your screen. Just snap a pic of a part of your screen or drag a url into the app, annotate on top of it, and click “share.” Skitch then gives you a url you can share with anyone who can see just what you mean in seconds. Here’s a pic of one day of my Skitch history.

Evernote

I had never used folders or even shared folders before in Evernote. My personal Evernote is just one massive dump of inspiration or forget-me-nots, so this was the first time I had used Evernote collaboratively. We had a number of shared folders set up to grab inspiration, work on the script, and pull a-lot of our formative assets.

Dropbox

File sharing and iteration really hit hard the last 3 days (out of 6) as the web assets were getting assembled and needed to be in one place. As we gave feedback or changes to Jason (our designer), he’d simply replace the file in Dropbox so we always had the most up-to-date stuff.  Matt & team then used a script to automatically pull the latest and publish to the sandbox environment. From new graphic update to sandbox typically took < 1 minute.  This allowed us to review and approve new updates, within the live site structure, instantaneously.

Github

Matt & team had over 230 commits to GitHub over the 6 days it took to build the teaser site and integrate with our back-end engine over REST.  Being this agile and leveraging a slew of new technologies required constant code review, merges, and sandbox pushes.  As we aggressively hire engineers (ping Matt if you got what it takes), we will continue to leverage GitHub’s distributed collaborative infrastructure to organize, store, share, and iterate on our fast evolving code base.

Inspiration

We wanted a way to tell the story of two ways to land business, so we imagined two different downtowns: Goosechase (the old way) and New Business City (the new way). Jason’s original visual inspiration for the city came from Grand Theft Auto for iPad (I attached his first screenshot). He then found some awesome scrolling interaction sites like Ben the Bodyguard, We Bleed Design, and  Bullet PR.

Vehicle-wise, we looked through Google at a number of cool steampunk-styled contraptions. Originally we were going to use more of a parade float for the “new business” side vehicle. For the final design, Jason fused a float with an iPhone.

Other sites with cool interaction design that inspired us:

 

 

Lessons

As soon as we went live, a number of people reached out to help make our beta site better. One of them was our friend, Justin Kistner (who’s way smarter than we are when it comes to social media marketing).

He recommended a number of things:

- If we added the ability to comment on the FB like button we’ll get full posts with a picture and text (and folks see these posts more than others)

- We hadn’t thought through how to track twitter referrals from folks clicking links via the Twitter client.

- If we use campaign IDs on links from the Like button, our integration with LinkedIn could separate out how much traffic came from those sites because of links published from people seeing posts from those buttons vs. organic visits from those sites from people sharing without using our share buttons.

 

Reporting from here

We’ve made most of the recommended changes and will continue to respond to advice and ideas from those who want to help. You can bet that we’ll be sharing more official results once we’re further along. Thanks a ton to everyone for your feedback and support.

 

July 18th by Sam in Industry Productivity

Crushpath: Partially out in the open.

Today we peeked from stealth

After a long stretch of personal radio silence, I’m proud to share a little bit about Crushpath and open our private beta registration. Since we’re still in stealth, we won’t go into our solution, explain exactly what Crushpath does or share all the internal happening at the company. I can share that we were co-founded by our CTO, Matt Wilkinson, ex-VP of Product Development at Socialcast (recently acquired by VMware) and our Executive Chairman, Dave Hersh (ex CEO of Jive Software). I look forward to going into full detail with the rest of our team later this  year.

Beta registration open

If you’re interested in being a part of our private beta program just sign up on the bottom of the teaser site. We are prioritizing beta access to the excited elite who help us get the most folks to sign up, so the best way to get a spot is to spread the word.

It’s time to change B2B Sales for good

Sales software has made selling harder. Don’t believe me? Follow a B2B Sales Rep, Entrepreneur, Biz Dev person…anyone working their tail off to get deals done…and see how neglected and under-serviced they really are, at least from a “help me do my job better” product perspective.

Or don’t follow them– that’s what all the systems do. They track their every move, force tons of data entry, and have them backtrack to report what’s happened in the past.  It’s a micro-managed reality that sucks the life out of the people who fight to keep us all fed. Solutions are made for revenue trackers, not revenue generators. And what about folks who handle deals but aren’t Sales people? CRMs aren’t made for them.

Revenue Generators have been using systems that have been around 15 years or longer–that’s when eBay got started and Prince Charles and Princess Diana got divorced (no connection).

Buying has changed. Selling has changed. Now is the time to change Sales for good.

Soon Enterprise Software gets personal…

July 15th by Sam in Industry Productivity

Social Business isn’t going anywhere. (What’s it for?)

Technology is about expansion. And when new technology is introduced, it doesn’t go away. It stays. Some tech is meaningful for huge amounts of people. Some for just a few. All new technology finds it’s way along that spectrum.

It’s pretty easy to spot tech that will be widespread vs specialized. A hammer is immediately big. A Doctor’s hammer, immediately small. Both are really valuable.

Unless you’ve lived it, it’s hard for most people to imagine just how desperate Enterprises are for something that saves them from cliche. It’s universally shitty being employee number 46,193. You quickly don’t care and you certainly don’t think you can change anything any more than you believe you can fix the government. It’s a globally understood, generalized pain that’s the very engine that drives Dilbert, The Office, and countless satire everywhere. The truth is, worker bees, managers and execs are bored reaching for the same tools the last 15 years. They’re sick of waking up and going into a real-world scenario filled with TPS Reports and the guy with the red Swingline stapler. They’re sick of being productivity integrators in the same way that as consumers we were sick of being system integrators during the reign of PC Economics. It’s not too funny when 80% of your day is spent in the Dilbert pool.

Given the enormity of this problem, enterprises are subconsciously kicking and screaming for the next big thing that gives some relief from all this and comes closer to making their work-life contemporary, as powerful and as fluid as the high-velocity consumer web they love at home. Do I think Social Business Software will flush Dilbert out of business? No way. Do I think it’s the next big thing Businesses will have on their desks everyday? Absolutely.  Unlike consumer tech that iterates so unbelievably quickly that it doesn’t even have a chance to Cross the Chasm wave, Enterprise tech won’t skip generations (from blogging to microblogging) because Social Business Software is a big enough macro-category that solves a big enough pain that it can host all sorts of innovation that lives within it.

To say that Enterprises won’t embrace this change, is ridiculously short-sighted. To say Enterprises will change as fast (or the way we want them to) is insanely selfish. A lot of pivoting and stalling occurs along the road to discovering how to chiropractically align people and product. But once that vibration is achieved everything seems like a foregone conclusion. Do you need CRM? It’s “duh” now, and was “maybe” ten years ago.

For some of you, this future feels like it will never come. If that’s you, look at how the world has responded to Apple, Wikipedia, and Google the last 10 years. Do you really think we’re talking about a long time? The toothpaste is out of the tube.

“What’s it for?” The Social Business Sinkhole says it’s Pivot Time.

The bigger question at the heart of all this is: What’s Social Business Software for? The industry has been aptly struggling to clearly answer this for years now. When early majority businesses outside of Silicon Valley look at this space, they see a lot of stuff that screams “don’t buy” because none of it clearly fits into their world and/or urgently solves the big problems that matter. And don’t forget, they’re still trying to learn the basics while a ton of us are already burnt out on the same old stories. We make it  hard on ourselves.

The longer it takes for us to communicate “what it’s for,” the longer it will take for Social Business to be on everyone’s desk. The longer we don’t match the pragmatism of the workplace– from what and how we sell, to the way customers want to buy, to the way they want to try it– the longer it will take for the required herds to form that pull the rest of the market forward. And, most importantly, this is a category that REQUIRES enterprises to understand and embrace an extremely significant change in their behavior (“so, how I DO Social Business?).”

We’re are deep in the sinkhole and it’s time to re-aim our efforts from geeks to golfers.  It’s pivot time. Time to climb the ladder: From targets, to messaging, to offerings, to pricing now is the time to re-focus, simplify and solve, solve, solve. There’s a big smelly delta between the sinkhole and a big, voracious market of customers. And there’s not much time.

Off the bat, here are some things that need to change:

I am out of the country for Enterprise 2.0 this year but I hope that this is the year that the industry pivots and quickly gets a playbook in place to go from geeks to golfers.

June 13th by Sam in Productivity

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