Power to Prosperity

Cutomer Relationship Intimacy

I have been reading bits and pieces from Chip Conley's book 'Peak'.  Love it.  He talks about Customer Relationship Intimacy.  In today's world, where we see a very different "customer" compared to say the 80's where a customer went to buy a car from the local Used Car dealer in Norwood, Ohio. How I ended up there is a story unto itself.  Which I will save for my friends after a few too many Mojitos. :-)

Going back to Customers ... here is what Ron Johnson (Apple's Sr. V.P in charge of Retail Stores worldwide) says in Chip's book; ...

"We will help you get more out of your Mac so you can get more out of your life"

Guys! stop the music and listen up.  Do you get how deep that is?  This perspective is totally centered in the "listening" and "interests" of your customers.  It has nothing to do with you, your product and your survival / fear need to make a transaction.  Very powerful.  That will come in time, that will be the end result.  Let me show you how and what I mean ... from my own personal experience.

I am benefiting from this at the moment - I am a Mac user and have the one-on-one program, where I get an hour of training at the store every week.  I get 52 such classes with the low investment of $99.00 a year.  Guess what, I go - I am usually there at 7:00 a.m. on a Monday morning. It is so useful, they show me all the many things I could do with my Macs.  They totally help me get more out of my life by helping me get more out of my computers.  They also got a lot of my money - 4 laptops, 1 time capsule, 1 iPod.  Sorry no iPhone ... Verizon has the better Network.

So, are you doing this? What do you think might happen if you started asking your customers how you can help them get more out of their life when they buy what we have to offer them?

Please try it out.  Like I have always said, sales is really Problem Solving.  Here is that link to the Video Interview where I said that.

Managing your Collective Wisdom

I was having a wonderful conversation today with yet another CEO, this time with a services company in the Silicon Valley.  Wonderfully intelligent gentleman with an absolute twinkle in his eye.  It is not common that you come across people who have a clarity about themselves that is overtly obvious.  It was beautiful.  Then he tells me he just came off a 12 day silent Vipassan retreat.  Very cool stuff.

Anyway, back to tapping into the collective wisdom in your organization. 

We were talking about his need to redesign his organizations "go to market strategy" so he could take revenues from $10M to $100M.  His current success of getting to $10M in 2.5 years is itself fantastic and so I had to ask ... So what was your single greatest contributor, that supported your growth? His answer humbled me.  He said it was his employees, his staff - the people in the organization.  His consultants did such a good job that business pretty much grew from referrals, introductions and word of mouth marketing.

Moving forward - he obviously believes that this trend will continue, but we were looking at how he could support them by developing technologies, resources, tools and practices that would support that corporate culture and winning formula.

Enter among many others... my thoughts and leveraging RawSugar.com.  As you must know by now I am very biased to the value that RawSugar offers organizations.  Here is one more "Application" as to how it could be used.

With over 75 consultants on staff, there are lot of smart people with a lot of good experience and wisdom that could be leveraged effectively. He is not currently tapping into this collective wisdom in any "organized manner".  Now, you do not grow to $100M by chance.  So I suggested we do many things, one of which would be that he develop a RawSugar Index that would allow his consultants, thought leaders and customers to Grab and Tag "good content" whenever they saw it; from any Internet property they had access to.  In addition, RawSugar offers people the ability to capture and idex "User Generated Content" in very intelligent ways, - they would be able to ask questions of his experts or even submite unstructured content in the form of a blog or submission of some sore they could type out or upload.

The magic of this approach is that all this "good content" will be tagged with Folksonomy that makes sense to his organization and his customer's businesses. 

This would be tremendously valuble.  It would allow him to do some of the following ...

1. Become a Thought Leader in his market place
2. Demonstrate and access his collective wisdom
3. Offer his customers a valuable knowledge resource
4. Develop trusting relationships with is customers and partners 
5. Develop an ongoing marketing program that developed his new valuable Brand

the list goes on ....

If you do not know much about  Folksonomies - please see what Thomas Vander Wal is doing at InfoCloud Solutions or check out this Presentation of his on "Tagging That Works" - that he presented at the Web 2.0 Expo in 2007.

There's a New Sheriff in Town ...

it's the Customer!!

This is something I just remembered, a conversation I had with Gerhard Gschwandtner the CEO of SellingPower.com and the magazine with the same name.  But it came back to me again to day as I was talking to the owner of a business that needs help.  Revenues are down, everyone is making some money, but they are leaving too much on the table and not getting anywhere near the revenue levels they could be achieving.

We went over some of the details and it was so clear to me that they were selling the same way they have been for decades.  But guess what - their customer's "listening" has changed.  Customers want to be spoken to, danced with, interacted with and sold to in different ways today.  Are you listening???

I am selling a new technology these days, as some of you know (RawSugar.com) - a fascinating piece of search technology that does something nobody else does - it creates the space to capture your thinking as to why a piece of content might be useful to you or your audience.  It also changes your whole Content Generation and Management strategy on the web.  I give you this background, because I am trying to sell this very cool next generation technology and I keep getting amazed at how differently my prospects and customers are listening to me.

The biggest difference now, compared to say not even 3 years ago, is that "our" customers want to be seduced in a ways that are non-intrusive, in-direct, on their terms, on their time and in their language.  I mean - this is totally different from just a few years ago.

• Are you listening to your customers now? 
• Are you reading their Digital Body Language?
• Are you leveraging the same Web 2.0 technology they are using?
• Are you communicating with them in ways they want to be spoken to? 

Guy's, every customer is different and you better be listening.  God knows ... I am trying to.  Best of luck, but more than that ... more power to you ... step up, get in and close a deal.

Now for those of you, that love to read - I just found a guy (S.Swaminathan) that really seems to know his stuff.  His company does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to providing indepth services to manage customer relationships and customer experiences.  Check it out - here is the link - http://customerworld.typepad.com/swami_weblog/

Its about the people ...

I have been doing some writing about my approach to helping companies increase revenue and in doing the research and talking to thought leaders and others, it is so apparent ... yet not so to some people, that just having the structures and the processes for organizations to deliver results is simply NOT ENOUGH.

For one - what good is any system or Standard Operating Procedure ... if you do not have the right person managing it?  I remember helping a company a few years ago - who had been around for quite a few years, had good people, rather nice people in fact, had a great product, they were virtually the best of breed in their market place - yet their revenues were not where they were could have been.

Here are some of my thoughts as to what helps bring out the best in your people teams.

1. Have the Right Person in Right Seat on the bus: (Jim Collins)
   Make sure you have the right person for the job.  I have interviewed employees of the companies I worked with and asked them how they liked what they did.  Surprisingly, I have had quite a few people fess-up that they hated what they did and would rather do something else.  I helped them get the best fit possible within the company and for others, we helped out-place them.  This is absolutely necessary.  If you do not have the right people in the right jobs - you are starting off with a disadvantage.  Notice, I did not use the words  ... qualified or experienced. That is backwards facing and does not necessarily prove they will solve your problems today.
   
2. Make sure each employee is mentally on-board - most organizations do not do a good job at this, because I will be the first one to admit it, it is not easy to do. But I have done it, get their involvement, their input, respect their leadership and create the space for their creative genius to come through. This is a corporate culture thing. This needs to come down from the leadership.  GE did this well, to some extent.  I have also seen smaller organizations do it very well.
   
3. Humility to know what you don't know.
   In my opinion "humility" is one of the most misunderstood words out there.  I believe its true meaning is ... Knowing ones true worth.  In Bushido philosophy we have a tradition of always being sensitive to "knowing your position".  This is useful because you begin to build a sensitivity to knowing what you do not know.  Which will prove tremendously useful when you are committed to delivering an outcome.  Knowing what you know is good, but that comes easily and naturally.  Not knowing what you do not know is also natural - but very dangerous, because we might not be able to avoid the consequences of not knowing something.  So having the insight to know what you do not know, will allow you to get the help you need to deliver on your commitments.

In business, what we really have is only our commitments.  We commit to delivering something and that's it. Not delivering on a commitment leads to pain and suffering.  Making sure you have the right people you can trust do help you deliver is the most powerful approach one can take to delivering on your commitments.  Every SOP, new product, service or opportunity is meaningless, unless you have someBODY working it. In every sense of the word.

Put the right teams together, get the right people and then take the time and initiatives to bring out the best in them, as it related to your business and the commitments you have made.

Ethics of Profitability

I was asked an interesting question from a friend this morning - it related to seeking guidance on the ethics of prosperity and profitability.  Here are my thoughts on the matter.

The short answer is that - everything you do should be ethical.  In business it is practical - because being ethical will reduce costs associated with doing business with yourself.  What I mean by this is that people you transact with will build trust and transact with you more often simply because you are the low risk alternative.  It is much better for business.  As someone who has done a lot of selling in my time, one of my mantras for Sell once and service forever.  Its about being ethical.

I define a "close" as ... helping your customers make a decision, that is good for them and you.  Very ethical.

From a spiritual perspective, most traditions have a version of the narrative we have in India called Karma.  Across the world - people, believe that you should do unto others as you would like done unto you, because what goes around comes around.

Given all that and more, my perspective is that once you anchor on my 1st principle - that of "purpose" you will have some guidelines on what "you" need to accomplish for yourself and your business.  With your sense of clarity of knowing "why" and "what" you need to accomplish; you can begin to move powerfully in the market place ... in an ethical manner.  You will find it very risk free.

Taking it further, this is the rest of the narrative - Step 1. Purpose, once you have specified your purpose you create the space of possibility for the rest of the strategy.  You will have set the foundation to then make assessments needed to specify how much money is needed to accomplish what you have made a commitment to accomplish.  Step 2. The Principle of Money and Profitability.  How much money and profit will you seek to generate.  Step 3. deals with Process - what are the business processes needed to generate the profit you have specified.  Which leads you to Set 4. the People.  Nothing of significance is accomplished without good people.  You will need to design powerful ways to motivate the people in your organization and business teams.  Step 5. is about Practical Leadership - to help you  accomplish your business goals; you will need to move powerfully with practical leadership.

These principles also work for your individual lives or projects that you might have.  They are very scalable, experiment with them.

All the best,

Its Amazing! ... www.BizMazing.com

I recently got wind of an interesting project that came out of the Hoover's company.  Their "Marketing Guru-ess" Chris Warwick and her team came up with the idea of providing the Small Business community with a source on the web for good content as it relates to their world ... welcome to www.bizmazing.com

Check it out - it is very well organize and well thought through.  The content is well layed out and you get the benefit of them doing a lot of work ... making sure that everything there is useful, good and trustworthy. 

Here is one of their Topics ...

Check them out and spread the word, this could end up being a cool place for serious people to go for the right answers. 

What do you really do with all this noise on Google ...
I searched for "small business" and got ..

Its about Training

Did you know that J&J offers about 80,000 course in their eUniversity?  Heck, they even have a 3D University - check out this article from 2007.

What' the take away?  ... simply put - Practice makes Perfect.  It is absolutely important for people to be prepared for and practiced in what they are required to do in the market place.  Our market places are too competitive to reward mediocrity and the big guys get it.  The largest companies in the world get it, GE has its Leadership and Learning center in Crotonville - where they spend over a $ 1Billion a year - getting some of the smartest people in the world trained on how to be good at what GE wants them to do.

Let the sink it ... GE takes their smartest people and then spends an additional $1Billion to make them good performers on their team.

So the questions to you are the following;

1. What are you competing for? 
2. Who are you competing with?
3. How are you preparing to compete? and
4. Are you monitoring your performance?

If the biggest companies see the value, may I suggest you NOT decide to cut your training budgets when you see the first signs of trouble.  Your employees need to be the best they can be to win, you need them to be exceptional. Make sure you design and build a culture that supports learning, training and communication.  Its about bringing out the best in your people ... however small or big your company is.

Thanks and have a profitable day.

Portals are out - Vertical Sites are in!

Given the fact that we are in the business of selling RawSugar, the next generation of Search on the Internet.  I have been following some Advertising people, one of them is Matt Freeman, the ex CEO of TribalDDB one of the largest Interactive Ad Agencies in the world.  He recently left and joined GoFish ... in and interview he gave, here is one comment that impacts what we do at RawSugar ... "Freeman claims that time spent on GoFish is fairly high, indicating strong degrees of engagement. Secondly, he cites the decline of portals and the rise of vertical sites"

To read the rest of the story - go here ... http://biz.yahoo.com/paidcontent/080606/1_324228_id.html?.v=1

The Conclusion - is that, having a vertical site that captures only the subset of useful information that is relevant to its specific audience; makes that property much more powerful and valuable.  RawSugar is about the only application that allows users to grab and tag good content from any other website.  Besides, they can also capture their thinking as to why it is useful, giving those pages different names and labels, so their peers and customers can find useful information fast. The approach to search we use is called "Discovery" and it is a very intelligent way to go about searching for useful information.

Check out www.rawsugar.com for more and a list of sites powered by it.

New Thinking with Web based Commerce

I have been getting exposed to different people sharing light on the current trends on what is happening. For one, I was at a SellingPower.com conference a couple days ago in Philadelphia and the Founder and CEO, Gerhard Gschwandtner gave us his thoughts on what he called the 3 legs to his Sales2.0 methodology. AND ... I like it.

It is sound advice for anyone wanting to be effective in today's market place, given our dependence on the web and the new business trends that have emerged, because of it. Here they are ...

1. Social Networking - get and stay connected to people who can support you in what you want to accomplish.
2. Share Content and information - simply put; content rules! We and our customers, more importantly need good information to transact.
3. Synergistic Co-creation - get creative, partner with people and organizations to make better offers in the market place. Come together and win ... synergistically.

The reason I got excited about this perspective and approach that Gerhard talks about is because our RawSugar application, supports this narrative in many ways.  Here is how ..

• Social Networking - It allows users to connect with and put each others tagged content in "Watch Lists" - thereby allowing users to network around ideas of interest.  Imagine people involved on the same project or with the same customers.  They put each other on their "Watch Lists" and access useful information and research that the other does. People come together and move together around points of relevance.
• Sharing Content  - RawSugar is an Index of content, so it makes ever so easy to share content that us useful.  Find something on Google then tag it in your own "Folksonomy"  and let your peers find it.  Nobody else does that.
• Synergistic Co-creation -  Thirdly, for companies that have RawSugar, they can invite their partners, vendors, customers and others to participate in this eco system. Imagine a manufacturer inviting thought leaders and experts from their partner and vendor community to share useful information that their customers can use. Going further, they can tag content with language that relates to their collective products and services. ... Very powerul.

If you have not seen what we are doing with RawSugar, please go to www.rawsugar.com and see a list of B2C sites that are using RawSugar to some extent.  There are others that are being used as Intranet sites - call me if you have any interest in this, would love to brain storm on you can leverage this technology.

Process of Personal Transformation

I had a restful weekend with my wife and hope you did too, but also had a couple of sessions with a friend that needed help shifting through some things that were causing her much suffering.  So thought I would do a Podcast on the subject - because it gets easier to tell a story and just write it down. 

I have been using this process for years - since way back in 2001 when I designed it.  I have helped CEO's, Business Owners, Sales People, 5 dan Black Belts, Social Workers, hundreds of people in Brazil, Argentina and Japan and quite a few others here in the US shift through pain and suffering with this process.

My only word of advice in addition to all that I say in the Podcast is to use this process for something powerful, something that will help you do well in society.  I need to spend more time on that subject - because I feel that most people do not really comprehend how intense and indifferent the system we call our society really is.  More on that soon, .... I promise.  Now - here is the link to the Podcast ... Click Here.