The power of Social Media

I’ve been a close follower of Dave Stein’s blog for a while now. In fact, one of his posts mentioned Avitage and Private Sales Coach and because of this, we’re in deep negotiations with Jim Burns to bring his products into the APAC market.

If you want to understand the power of Social Media then have a look at this post from Dave’s blog. Whilst its disappointing that these thought leaders are being ripped off and are having to invest so much time chasing this – losing productive time, it’s a very powerful example of how Social Media works. If you follow the links and have a look at how this has developed, you’ll realise that many many people are affected .

Dave also makes a really good suggestion about Google Alerts. We have on average around 13 alerts going at any one time. We follow companies we’re interested in, technologies we believe in or promote, along with our partners and competitors. Like Dave, we strongly recommend you use this free service from Google.

Another tool you should be using is the Google Toolbar. When installed, it allows you to select any text on a web page, right-click and either drop this text straight into Google Notepad or send directly to Gmail. I use the send to email option as it includes the URL you were on at the time. So basically I can collect snippets of data including the URL and store this in a Gmail account for future reference.

Livescribe Smartpen – The inevitable price rise

With the recent decline of the Australian dollar, we’ve received news from our partners at BigAnt that a price rise is imminent and most likely to come into effect from 1 November.

As you’re all no doubt aware, the Australian dollar has been in decline since around April of this year. The following graph gives a good indication of this:

This graph shows the decline of the AUD over the past 90 days - Thanks Uncle Sam

The cost of importing the Livescribe product range has subsequently increased quite dramatically. We’ve worked really hard with BigAnt to get as much stock into the country as possible. However, from 1 November, prices will increase. Check back on the Smartpen website for updated price details.

We still have stocks available of the 2GB pens, A4 notebook packs, ink refills, and A5 journals.

Livescribe Smartpen comes to the fore

I’ve just left Chicago having had the opportunity to attend the Selling Power Sales Leadership conference on Monday. Selling Power assembled a brilliant list of speakers including Neil Rackham – author of SPIN Selling; and one of the founding fathers of modern sales thinking.

With such a stellar cast of thought leaders, I was really looking forward to the event and also using my Livescribe Pulse Smartpen to capture the audio. Starting with Gerhard Gschwandtner’s opening address, I was able to capture each session and across the day captured over 6 hours of notes and audio. Each session has its own page and includes key comments, illustrations and audience questions. In a large room, distant from the speakers, Livescribe really shows its worth.

Given the uncertain times we’re faced with and the climate of fear being propagated by the press mongrels from around the world, Gerhard gave an inspiring address to the audience. It’s a fantastic example of the power of positive leadership – something lacking in political leaders everywhere at the moment. I’m going to upload the opening remarks of Gerhard to the Livescribe website and make the file available by invitation. If you’d like to listen, post a comment and I’ll add you to the access list on Livescribe

Three of the presentations really stand out as being incredibly valuable and I’m extremely happy to have captured them:

1.       Malcolm Rees – Global Head of Sales for DHL Express. Managing a sales group of 6,000 is not without it’s challenges and Malcolm gave a really interesting, detailed insight into how he extracts maximum performance from his global team

2.       Mary Delany – CSO at CareerBuilder.com. Mary chaired a panel discussion on Coaching Salespeople. Her opening remarks were a real highlight of the conference and she went on to chair a very interesting panel discussion on coaching.

3.       Neil Rackham – Author of SPIN Selling. Neil is one of the founding fathers of modern sales leadership thinking. Neil’s comments were very interesting an quite an inspired take on the current situation we’re all facing.

The audio is a bit scratchy at times, primarily as I was on a noisy table, but overall, the quality is sufficient for someone to create transcripts if required.

Sales Leadership Conference

I’ve just arrived in Chicago for the Selling Power Sales Leadership Conference. I came up from Australia back in March for their Las Vegas event and found it so relevant and informative that I’ve made the effort to come back for this event.

The agenda looks really interesting and I’m pleased it’s got a strong focus on leadership and culture. I spend a lot of time on these two topics as I find they are always at the heart of the issues and challenges that we are engaged to deal with for our customers. I’ve noticed that Sales 2.0 seems to have really taken hold in the US, but is still virtually unknown in Australia or APAC for that matter.

This event kicks off two weeks in North America for me. I’m hitting Atlanta, Boston, and San Mateo also – speaking to a range of vendors and potential partners. A number of these are really exciting and represent the opportunity to work with some really smart, innovative people.

Hopefully I’ll have some downtime to catch up with my buddies in Boston, maybe catch a Patriots game and get re-acquainted with my good fried Sam Adams.

The Role of Social Media in a B2B Sales World

I noticed a really interesting post over on SalesBlogcast – Doyle Slayton’s sales blog. The post introduced a question from a member about the emergence of blogs and social media for sales professionals.

I posted a response as this is a really interesting issue and one that I’ve been spending quite a bit of time researching and trying to get my head around. So much so that as I’m now in the US for 2 weeks, I’ve made contact with a number of thought leaders in this space to try and get a better feel for this and what we should all be doing.

Personally I’m very excited about this direction and I’ve been talking to our customers and prospects about this trying to get it onto their radar (with some success). I love researching my prospects and customers and using this information to give myself an edge – I guess that’s come from years and years of competing against much larger foes (like Oracle and SAP) – timely relevant knowledge was our competitive advantage and we’d spend hours looking for facts and building this information into knowledge. What we’re seeing now is the power of this technology to do that for us. It’s like an application of neural network technology in a way that sifts and organises information en masse.

Interestingly, I feel we’re in phase 2 of this revolution. The first phase started when Google really got going. Google started the information overload Tsunami and has now swamped us all. What we’re seeing now with solutions like Avitage, MindTouch (their Dekki for CRM is quite amazing), Mzinga, Brainshark. These guys and a few others are really pioneering the business oriented application of Web 2.0

Where it then gets exciting is how we can use these new information organisation type services with the next generation of CRM/Sales Automation that we’re now seeing – the guys at InvisibleCRM, and SugarCRM (the open source leader) are starting to apply this technology in new ways so that it’s easier to evolve the role of the sales person. I’ll come back and create another post about the discussions I’ve had with SugarCRM around mobile CRM as this is a really interesting space now that we’ve FINALLY got some useful devices like the iPhone, BlackBerry Bold, HTC, as well as some of the emerging/proposed devices from Google and Sony Erikson.

The question is how quickly will we evolve as sales professionals so that we take advantage of these new generation tools?

How do we time manage ourselves when in most cases the culture is still one of ‘hit the number’ above all else?

Are these tools going to deliver the process improvements required so that we can do more with less and more?

Will these tools actually detract from core skills development in new sales people? Are we automating too much? Relying too much on non-personal information?

I’ve been reading a really interesting book that’s related to this topic – Groundswell – Winning in a world transformed by social technologies and the authors seem to address some of these points with their notion that social media is another form of listening (the core skill of any good salesperson).

The question I can’t answer is how the revolution will deal with this…

Livescribe Pulse Smartpen is go

We finally got our hands on the first shipment of Livescribe Pulse Smartpens last week so we’ve been extremely busy filling orders, playing with our new gadget, and getting the word out.

If you haven’t seen the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen yet, have a look at the Salesnet website where we’ve created some content and excitment around this amazing new piece of technology.

Everyone we’ve been showing the pen to has been really excited and has turned into advocates for us – a special mention to Meyrick Adams from Gen3Media who’s determined to sell a million units for us…

We’re hoping Gizmodo will do a review for us soon. I’ve also asked Adam Wallace from Too Easy to drop in here and give us a review as he’s a happy new user.

If you’d like more information on the product, let me know and we’ll get in touch.