Apple and Google prepare for mobile ad war

CNN, 8/26/10

The mobile advertising business is puny. But don’t tell that to Google and Apple.

Advertisers are on track to spend only $1 billion globally on mobile advertising this year, compared to $45 billion on all online ads, according to Sandeep Aggarwal, analyst at Caris & Co.

So it might surprise some people that Google and Apple are making a sizeable bet on mobile advertising. In January, Apple bought mobile advertising company Quattro Wireless for $275 million. In May, Google completed its purchase of Quattro rival AdMob for $750 million.

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The Social Web: Mature Enough for All Media and Marketers to Participate

Thursday, August 5, 2010
Matthew Yorke

I have spent a lot of time this summer discussing the merits of social media, the main players, why social is so important and how we at IDG are working with it. As the long days of summer start to ebb, I thought it made sense to write about what I hear from clients and what people talked about during a few panel discussions that I attended or moderated. These thoughts are in no particular order—a little bit like a series of Facebook updates I guess.

Social media is free. This comes up a lot with technology marketer clients who are new to the social world. To create a Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn presence is free today. What is not free is your investment in terms of time to understand what is going on in the social world, how best to interact with prospects, create content that users engage with and recognize and reward user engagement. None of this is free or very easy. It’s no different from believing that after talking to a few publishers you could craft a media plan. Social media is indeed “earned media” in that you are doing all of the above to earn the attention, time, trust and endorsement of your target audiences, but it isn’t free.

There is a lot of discussion about the value of the many of emerging social metrics. The one that garnered the most amount of debate is the value of a retweet or comment to a tweet. Some people feel that this is worthless or close to it. I strongly disagree. I find a retweet or comment on content to be more valuable than someone who is unknown, clicks on an ad and may spend just a few seconds on a marketing page before disappearing. In social networks someone has decided to follow you or a brand, consume content and may choose to comment or share the information. That simple act of sharing or commenting is an implied endorsement of the content with the added support of a link. Now that’s valuable engagement for publishers and marketers.

Location-based social networks such as Foursquare, Booyah and Scvngr are seeing phenomenal growth rates, and it’s not just U.S.-centric. But marketers and non-users are treating these companies just as they did Facebook and Twitter in their early days. The common refrain is, “I don’t get it,” “who cares” or “it’s just a fun thing for kids.”

Well, there’s some truth in all that. Sure it’s a bit of fun and also for a younger generation today, but Foursquare passed the 1.3 million user mark this summer. There is a trend here as Facebook has passed 500 million users. These new applications and ways of communicating and sharing with each other start as consumer plays, perhaps dominated by youngsters and leading digerati, but they quickly become mainstream and from there ultimately become a business imperative. I saw a statistic in July that 87% of all U.S. companies have a social presence. Still think it’s for consumers and kids? The shocking thing about this stat is, what on Earth are the other 13% thinking?

So what do location-based services have to offer marketers? Well, it’s very early but you are beginning to see frequent users get rewarded with offers from Starbucks and other neighborhood stores. I have read of Las Vegas hotels giving free champagne to Foursquare users who check in when at a property. Why would a Las Vegas hotel do that? After all, hotels are experts at taking your money, not giving away theirs. The hotels see value in building relationships and rewarding customers, who in turn have in some tiny way endorsed the hotel or at least promoted it to their friends and social connections by checking in.

Sharing is becoming commerce quickly. We are moving from a world of social media dominated by status updates to a world of social commerce. Look at the incredible success, valuations, money raised and growth rates of companies such as Groupon and Gilt. They are starting to transform retailing and marketing. Groupon has built a business around getting people excited via their social connections in a product or service with a heavily discounted price for a limited time. Gilt uses many of the same techniques with limited time offers. Sheer genius that points to the future of social commerce.

Lastly, what is very clear is that last year everybody wanted to talk about and try social media but were largely terrified by their own lack of knowledge and control. This year everybody wants to talk about social media because they realize it’s here to stay and has a tangible impact on brands and sales. Indeed, we are close to dropping the “social” from social media as all media—Web-based, mobile and location-based—becomes naturally social.

Channel Marketing Automation – When CRM is not Enough

Gerald Murray, Research Manager, CMO Advisory Service

7/28/10

Whether you pursue a lead through direct sales or a partner it doesn’t really matter how you get the lead. But what happens next? With your direct sales, you track the nurturing process as the lead develops into an opportunity. You measure your sales reps by the number of meetings they get, the deals they close. You may even have a closed loop reporting process that shows the efficiency of your marketing and sales funnel.

With your partners, your lead gets passed off and … then what? Does the partner accept the lead? Do they follow up? Do their marketing outreach programs conform to your policies and expectations? How much time and how many touches does it take them to close? How do you decide which partner is qualified for which leads? How do you efficiently identify the productive partners, those that need encouragement and those that should be dropped?

Multi-Billion Dollar Channel Management Questions

These are critical questions that have a tremendous impact on businesses with significant indirect revenue. A recent IDC study of large IT companies found that on average channel revenue was $2.4B. It was generated by 34 channel marketing staff managing 8,500 active partners. That equates to $45 million of revenue per channel marketing staff member but only $1.2 million per partner. The dirty little secret – there are also on average approximately 19,000 inactive partners!

Source: IDC’s 2010 Best Practices Study in Channel Marketing (n=13)

A Better Way

Your CRM and SFA are not going to answer any of the critical channel management questions – although many companies think their CRM system is where they should be “managing partners”. In fact, a partner management system fulfills a role more like an SFA – it tracks all the activity that occurs after the lead is generated. It should also facilitate the process of lead distribution – managing all the partner credentials and accreditations need to qualify for a particular lead. Then there’s deal registration where the partners accept the lead so that it is not poached by another partner or … ahem … the direct sales force. And when you consider some of the other requirements of partner management, the CRM fallacy becomes clear:

• Recruitment and on-boarding
• Training and development
• Business Planning and Reporting
• Compensation and Incentive program management
• Marketing and Sales support

Are these capabilities that your CRM can provide? Your SFA? Would you even want them to? The answers should be no, no, and no. Don’t be thrown off by that last bullet – the marketing and sales outreach your partners require is very different than the corporate outreach that marketing operations is doing. They rebrand, reschedule, embed, and otherwise repurpose marketing content, making a direct translation from corporate marketing to partner marketing wholly inappropriate.

If you have (or want to have) a significant amount of revenue going through the channel, you need a dedicated partner relationship management (PRM) system to automate more than just marketing and sales activities. Don’t look to your CRM, SFA, or even the newer marketing automation vendors to provide you with the full set of capabilities necessary to effectively manage channels. Those solutions are focused on a very different set of requirements. They may have slideware and inch deep functionality, but that’s typically it. Do ask about integrating a PRM with these systems as reporting should roll up easily across direct and indirect sales.

A number of key capabilities to consider when implementing a platform channel marketing automation:

• Manage partner profiles and contacts
• Deliver and track training, certifications, etc.
• Set business rules for lead distribution
• Handle deal registration
• Provide a single system of record for partner and channel management
• Provide detailed performance reporting (12-month rolling review)
• Track partner outreach campaigns
• Manage market development funds (MDF) and co-op spend

With these issues on the table, it should be clear that automating channel marketing requires a dedicated, purpose-built solution. It will be costly and painful and meet substantially lower expectations otherwise.

Rise of the Sales Operations Function

Michael Gerard

7/27/10

Sales costs are outpacing revenue growth, sales organizations are increasing in complexity, and IT buyers continue to indicate that sales reps are out of touch with their needs. What actions should sales executives take in response to this difficult environment? One of your first steps should be to expand the roles and responsibilities of your sales operations (SO) team. This team’s responsibilities should no longer be limited to the more tactical roles of sales IT maintenance, order management and sales administration. If you’re striving to create a best-in-class sales organization, then your SO team must be in a position to drive productivity changes across your key process areas, taking on a more strategic role.

Some starting points for enabling the rise of your sales operations team include addressing the following questions:

• What should sales operations be responsible for?

IDC defines the sales operations function as follows: Global and local sales staff responsible for developing and orchestrating the processes and systems required to enable an efficient and effective sales organization: strategic planning, financial management, sales performance measurement, sales infrastructure, marketing and sales alignment, and overall sales excellence. The sales operations function encompasses: Sales strategy and planning, sales forecasting, sales analytics, sales compensation, sales enablement, quote-to-order sales operations and sales automation infrastructure

• How big should my sales operations team be? IDC resource allocation guidance is for total SO staff to represent approximately 10-15% of total sales staff, with centralized SO staff representing approximately 1/4 to 1/3 of total SO staff.
• How do I determine where to start in transitioning my current SO team? Assess your team’s current gaps and weaknesses, which will provide valuable information toward developing the subsequent strategy for improvement. Clients of IDC’s Sales Advisory Service can leverage IDC’s Sales Operations Maturity Matrix to aid this process, as well as the following figure.
• What’s the ideal organizational structure for a global SO team? My typical consultative answer would be, ‘it depends’; but let’s get a bit more prescriptive than that. The success of the next-generation SO team will depend upon establishing a center of excellence organizational structure. A few key facets of this team include establishing a global VP of sales operations reporting to the global sales executive, a global SO team driving consistent process and technology changes across the organization, and alignment with SO teams and other internal groups across the world collaborating on improved sales productivity.
• Does my current SO team have the skill-sets and competencies to be more strategic? The SO team skill sets and competencies must be improved to enable the transition to more of a strategic than a tactical role. In addition to developing the ability to improve key processes, the SO team must also be in a position to spearhead next-generation technologies that will be key enablers of improved sales productivity (e.g., automation of sales enablement and customer intelligence for sales).
• How do I measure the impact of my sales operations team on sales productivity? Establish a clear set of objectives and quantitative and qualitative metrics to assess your SO team’s impact on the sales organization. Leverage benchmarks data from IDC’s Sales Productivity study to aid this process. (Contact me at mgerard@idc.com to complete our 2010 survey and get access to industry-level productivity benchmarks data)

The sales operations team must be the key driver and catalyst for increased productivity across the sales organization, setting the vision for its future and maintaining the path toward this vision. However, significant organizational and structural changes are required with sales operations teams to achieve this goal. With the right strategy and individuals in place, sales operations teams have the potential to be the catalyst for establishing a best-in-class, agile sales organization.

The IDC Sales and Marketing Automation Framework

Gerald Murray, Research Manager, CMO Advisory Service

7/23/10

Sales and marketing organizations are seeing a rapid evolution of solutions for automating their core business processes. While we are years away from anything like an integrated ERP-class solution that can manage the full range of sales and marketing activities, the building blocks are available today. CRM vendors have established that a single system of record is within reach for the sales team, and an emerging group of companies are is starting to prove that this goal is attainable for the marketing side of the house as well.

However, automating these two organizations will be a major undertaking for large companies. There will be significant process, cultural, and technical challenges. But the benefits are self-evident: lower cost, higher efficiency and productivity, greater accountability, better performance, improved customer experience, and potentially shorter sales cycles.

The Need for Alignment
The 80/20 Rule and the 50/50 Rule: IDC research shows that up to 80% of the content marketing generates is not used by Sales, even though a lot of it is specifically created for Sales and Channel enablement. Additionally, customers say that Sales reps are insufficiently prepared for their initial meeting 50% of the time. Clearly a massive disconnect is at work.
IDC’s Framework for Sales and Marketing automation is, therefore, focused on the tight alignment of key Sales and Marketing processes. This framework represents only those processes that must be coordinated (potentially integrated) between the two organizations. It is not meant to be a comprehensive map of all the processes in which each organization must engage to be successful – there are many activities on each side of the dynamic that do not have a corollary on the other.
Each high level process in Sales that has a counterpart in Marketing must share:

• A common set of definitions for inputs and outputs
• Proportional allocation of budget and resources based on overall business objectives
• Phase-appropriate performance metrics
• An integrated IT ecosystem

Source: IDC, 2010

Implementation
IDC recommends that sales and marketing automation efforts be tightly coordinated across both organizations so that the customer experience and lead management processes are handled seamlessly by all parts of the infrastructure. Even if a marketing implementation will have no sales users and vice versa, the data definitions and flow will be critical for both organizations. IDC recommends that:

• Senior marketing and sales leaders meet regularly to plan, review, and asses automation projects
• Marketing operations and sales enablement teams are especially critical, they should have representatives from both organizations with senior level sponsorship.
• Marketing needs to be very cognizant of how leads and lead details will flow into the SFA/CRM environment.
• Sales needs to be diligent in making sure marketing is capturing the high priority prospects and the high priority details so that lead acceptance criteria is routinely fulfilled.

Next Steps
One of the key issues for automating sales and marketing is establishing a shared automation road map. Upcoming research from IDC will help you: prioritize your plans based on business impact and implement best practices to be most successful.

You’re Spending Too Much Time in Front of Prospects

Michael Gerard

6/23/10

What? How can we ever spend too much time in front of our buyers? Well, if your reps aren’t well-prepared, then the point of diminishing returns for prospect interactions will certainly be hit quickly. And this is what IT buyers are saying about their vendors based upon IDC’s 2010 Buyer Experience Study:

• Over 50% of sales reps are insufficiently prepared for customer meetings
• 47% of buyers are dissatisfied with the quality and value of information from IT vendors
• Sales reps are unable to put aside the generic sales pitch to have deeper conversations with their prospects/customers
• Sales reps don’t know when to bring the right people to the table (i.e., from their organization) at the right time

And what are sales organizations plans for customer interactions in the next 6 to 12 months?

• “We need to get our sales reps to spend more time in front of prospects.”
• Sales organizations want to increase the time reps spend directly interacting with customers by 20%. [IDC's 2010 Sales Barometer study]

Sounds like we’re forgetting about the age old saying “work smarter, not harder”, not to mention an inability to listen to the voice of the customer.

Part of working smarter is investing more time and resources into helping sales reps better prepare for customer interactions. IDC research indicates that only 17% of rep time is spent on activities related to ‘preparing for customer interaction’. We can argue about the value of data that comes from time motion studies that are the source of this type of data or even how much time a rep should really spend here, however, the main point is that the quality of time spent preparing for customer interaction is poor. This provides an ideal opportunity to improve sales productivity.

Where to start? Talent management and sales methodology are certainly two areas to evaluate. Other areas of opportunity and investment that have historically been neglected include sales enablement and customer intelligence. Although we have a long way to go, much progress has been made in the past 12-18 months in the area of sales enablement. Customer intelligence (CI), on the other hand, has yet to leave the starting blocks.

Some questions to ask regarding your CI capabilities include:

• Who is accountable for CI in your organization? The importance of CI to the sales organization requires sales operations to take a leading role in ensuring that this productivity lever receives the attention that it deserves.
• Is there one source of truth for sales reps to access customer purchase and relationship history?
• How easy is it for sales reps to leverage CI information as part of their standard sales process – both internally developed and externally sourced information? (e.g., CI embedded within your SFA of record)
• Are you leveraging more sophisticated CI analysis? (e.g., share-of-wallet information, up-sell tools)

Certainly more to come from IDC’s Sales Advisory Service in these areas as we complete our annual benchmarks study and other sales operations research. Contact me to participate in our research. 

Does it Feel Like a Media Renaissance?

I was recently at breakfast, a sort of meeting of the minds involving a media company, technology companies, market experts, and CEOs of start ups, arranged by a venture capital firm. Someone commented (and yes I wish it had been my statement) “do you think Leonardo knew he was part of the Renaissance at the time?”

That single question pretty much redirected the entire conversation as the table began to talk excitedly about the recent and likely coming developments in the technology and media spaces.

So if history is truly a guide to the future then I thought it made sense to look back so I could do a better job of looking ahead.

The term “Renaissance” means “new birth” and referred to the revival of art and learning that occurred in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. This period was characterized by the prolific and fabulous works of art by Da Vinci, Michelaneglo, and Raphael to name but a few. A few factors spurred this new interest in art and learning: the black death wiped out most of the peasantry in western Europe giving rise to a new middle class and in 1454 The Gutenberg Bible was published.

So did Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael believe that they were in The Renaissance at the time? I don’t think so, but some of the parallels to today are fascinating.

Back to Gutenberg, the printing press revolutionized learning and the flow of information. The Renaissance press could print 3600 pages a day compared to 40 by hand printing and a few pages when copied by hand. By 1500 there were 20 million printed volumes in circulation and that number jumped in the 16th century to between 150-200 million volumes. It was not until the 1700’s that the first newspapers arrived and then 1815-1820 when The Times of London became the first paper to print on both sides of a page, producing a cheaper product that more people could afford. In 1830 the first penny press newspaper arrived that cost 1/6th the price of other newspapers.

Does any of this sound familiar to today’s media and technology worlds? So maybe the black death is a bit extreme, but the publishing industry generally has been hit over the head again and again: first the Internet, then the rise of search and Google, and finally, a devastating recession. This leaves many of those in media wondering when will it get at least a little bit better. Everybody should know that it is never to going to be as it once was in the golden days of print with organized information dissemination tied to a steady stream of profits. But how many of us feel like we are in a period of Renaissance?

It took almost 400 years from the arrival of the printing press to the production of newspapers that the masses could afford. For context it took radio 38 years to hit 50 million listeners, TV 13 years, Internet four years, the iPod three years, and Facebook added 100 million users in nine months. We are living in a period of unheralded change and transformation. People now access content in real time all the time whether on the Internet, the mobile Internet or via an application.

It was only three years ago that the iPhone arrived and turned the smartphone and mobile Internet experience on its head: suddenly content looked great on a phone. Then came the applications that provide rich user experiences and now some 200 thousand apps exist on the Apple platform alone. Recently, Apple introduced another revolutionary computing and communication device with the iPad. It’s a game changer.

Every major media company is excited by this development and the slew of tablet devices from the Nook to the expected competing devices from PC makers. Mobile changes the user experience with content that supplements the wired web.

All of these rapid fire developments revolve around content and users who are connected almost ubiquitously to infinte streams of information and rich multimedia. It took 400 years for information to be democratized during the Renaissance. In less than 20 years since the advent of the Internet media and technology have combined to create a world of democratized media, learning, and creativity.

Content in this new world is once again King, but the delivery mechanisms keep changing. The King is dead, long live the King.

Despite all of the challenges of the past two decades, will we look back and reference this period as a media Renaissance?

Minsider columnist Matthew Yorke is president, IDG Strategic Marketing Services.

1-800-Flowers Social Ads See Phenomenal CTR Lift

Last month, SocialMedia.com created an engaging social ad unit for 1-800-Flowers. Kevin Ranford, Director of Web Marketing at 1-800-Flowers.com explained:

“You need to get folks engaged. We have had some significant wins with our social media programs, so how do you get that type and level of interaction in our various ad buys? When SocialMedia.com approached us, we thought it was a great way to achieve this.”

SocialMedia.com’s custom social ad combined the performance power of Social Overlay with the branding power of a Twitter stream. The Social Overlay displayed a dynamic and targeted social message relevant to each user, and the Twitter stream showed real messages about 1-800-Flowers, from real users on Twitter. Users could navigate between the two screens in the ad unit. Results show significant CTR lift when comparing the original ad unit to the Overlay ad unit and the Overlay+Twitter ad unit.

Results:

InternetRetailer.com wrote more about this successful campaign in a May article which can be downloaded here (pdf).

Performing Loss Reviews: A Look in the Mirror

Michael Gerard

5/18/10

Many companies take the time to reflect back on their key sales wins; however, few companies have a consistent process in place to learn from their losses. That is, achieving a true understanding of why recent deals were lost, what were the root causes for these losses, and what actions can be taken from a strategic and tactical perspective to minimize these types of losses in the future. Based upon IDC’s recent Buyer Experience Study, it was found that over 2/3 of IT buyers switch vendors due to a poor relationship with the sales teams or due to a better relationship with another vendor. This type of information is important to gather to not only understand what went wrong, but to also ensure that losses like these do not happen again. Within IDC’s Sales Advisory Practice, we recently spoke to a handful of large IT companies to understand what they’re doing regarding loss reviews. Here are just a few of the responses we received:

Loss reviews conducted directly by the sales organization:

•  All lost opportunities over $100k get looked at on a weekly basis through their standard CRM. Specifically, management picks 2 wins and 2 losses weekly directly from the CRM. Management then goes in to extract and populate header data from the CRM and sends a questionnaire directly to the sales reps to fill out. Some of the questions on the questionnaire include: 1) What were the reasons for the win/loss? 2) What were our competitor’s top advantages/disadvantages for selling against us? 3) What can we improve upon in the future? On a weekly basis, this data is then provided to the CEO. The challenge, as with most data collected directly from the sales teams, is to interpret what are in many cases very biased responses. (Source: Multi-Billion Dollar Telecommunications Company)
• When a loss occurs, the rep marks an opportunity as lost in the CRM system. They are also forced to specify a reason. Each week, there is a report that is published outlining significant deals that were lost that goes up to the VP of Sales Ops. The VP of Sales Ops relies on Sales Managers to inspect the information for accuracy. Once a quarter, the VP of Sales Ops has a meeting with the sales leaders to go over the larger losses in detail. By utilizing the sales leaders, the VP of Sales Ops can decrease the subjectivity of the responses. (Source: Billion Dollar IT Services Company)
•  Loss reviews are performed formally in an internal quarterly business review (QBR). Each rep prepares a slide to discuss a key loss in the previous/current quarter. This allows for open dialogue between participants in the QBR. Participants may include Sales Managers/Directors, Technical Personnel, and other sales team members. (Source: Multi-Billion Dollar HW Company)

Leveraging an independent group (i.e., outside of sales) for loss review of large opportunities:

• Internal Group: The Competitor Analysis Group at one company we spoke to has several responsibilities, including understanding what the market is all about, how effective internal products/services are in the market, benchmarking themselves against their competition, as well as understanding the customer decision making process. This internal group is responsible for getting on the phone and talking to customers about recent losses. All output is documented and goes into a report that is produced monthly. (Source: Multi-Billion Dollar Telecommunications Company)
• External Group: A best practice would be to perform loss reviews by not only gathering data from the sales teams, but also having an independent third party interview customers regarding recent losses. This would help reduce the challenge of trying to interpret sales’ biased input (e.g., no budget, no real need, wrong timing, etc), and thereby help the company with identification of root causes and development of a better improvement plan.

We were pleased to see that the companies we spoke to have a strategy in place to review key sales losses. While the losses may be unfortunate, learning from these losses can help prevent their recurrence in the future and improve the sales teams’ overall productivity. [Michael Gerard and Irina Zvagelsky]

MIT Sloan’s 2010 Sales Conference Highlights

Michael Gerard

I recently attended MIT Sloan’s annual Sales Conference. A good BtoB sales event overall, with something for the value-based sales folks, the volume-based sales folks and managers and entrepreneurs just starting to think about their sales strategy. Here are just a few of my take-aways from the sessions that I attended:

• Polly Sumner, Chief Adoption Officer, Salesforce.com: Polly provided a good overview of key success factors for today’s sales organizations:
  • “Our sales people that we hire, in fact, all of our employees must be evangelists.”
  • “You must focus on stories about your customers’ experiences with your products” [Customer intelligence and sales enablement are certainly key ingredients to equipping your sales force with this type of information.]
  • As Salesforce.com tracks revenue, pipeline metrics and other metrics across their sales teams, they’ve identified “breakpoints” to identify when they should shift resources. (e.g., If inventory within the earlier stages of their pipeline are low, they will evaluate the need for greater investment in lead generation)
  • Track competitive win rates (e.g., “top 10 competitive wins”) (MG. . . she didn’t mention loss reviews (e.g., review losses at your sales review meetings, have your CI team conduct loss reviews))
  • “We have success seminars for our sales people in order to present and discuss the results of recent Salesforce.com wins. This helps to motivate the sales teams as well as providing reps with the opportunity to learn from their peers.” (MG. . . think tribal knowledge)

• Bill Aulet, MIT Entrepreneurship Center, moderated a panel on how the largest and best organizations optimize their sales organizations (panelists: Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM)
  • “The importance of the incentive compensation strategy cannot be underestimated.” (MG. . . especially in a complex organization with many overlay teams and multiple products that can address similar solutions)
  • What if you have multiple products in an organization that can solve the same business need? (i.e., competition within your organization)
    • Oracle: The key account manager manages the strategy, minimizing risk to the customer and maximizing account success and value provided to the customer
    • Microsoft: Give the customer the options and collaborate with them to identify what’s best for their business economically and what best aligns with their business. (avoid impact of Microsoft’s internal politics on the customer)
    • Cisco: Similar to Oracle, the account manager controls the strategy-“one throat to choke”.
  • What do you do for on-board training of new hires
    • Cisco: No sales school or set training for on-boarding new hires.
    • Microsoft: New hire readiness strategy includes 1 to 2 months online program – ~30 hours total; 20% of training from mentor, 70% OTJ training; 10% classroom (new hire)
    • Oracle: 1 week new hire training in-person (“tribal knowledge is critical for us, therefore, that first week is in-person”); many tools provided to reps that allow self-service training;

• Connecting with Leads – Craig Valentine, Motivational Speaker and Speech Coach
  • Craig had some great tips to share regarding how to better connect with leads by using storytelling. Here are just a few of the words of wisdom from Craig:
    • Craig had a good storytelling model – click here for details
    • “Always sell the belief before the relief”
    • “Never sell a product, always sell a result”
    • “Too many speakers try to get across too much info. in too short amount of time”
    • And a great tip for working with customers, managing your subordinates or working with your peers… “When you make others visible, they make you valuable”