Author Archives: Jason

Welcome!

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Carpe diem lashed out at me and I decided to start a blog on stuff I’m interested in. My initial focus is on business, productivity and strategy but I’ll also write about random topics like raising kids, working at salesforce.com, or sharing cool exercise and diet articles. I must admit I “leveraged” the first 5 posts from my days at Groupswim. I actively blogged before we were acquired by salesforce and I miss.  Please comment here or on any of the posts and I’ll respond; feel free to suggest topics as well.  I have no doubt it will be crickets in the beginning but hopefully it will get fun before long. Thanks and enjoy.

3 Ways to Make Your Company Extinct

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The current economic climate is challenging companies like no other. The advent of new technology and financial upheaval is only accelerating change. The internet and changing workforce demographics present both opportunity and challenge, but few companies are really addressing them. Industries like automobiles, newspapers, financial institutions and entertainment are prime examples. No company is immune will eventually need to take steps to address this shifting landscape or will go extinct. Here are a few mistakes that are easy to identify and cheap to avoid.

1. Rely on Email (Inboxychus)

The vast majority of companies continue to utilize traditional tools to communicate and collaborate. Do you know of many companies that don’t rely on email and sending documents back and forth? It is no secret that relying on email is both archaic and wholly inefficient. It is foolish to think that maintaining this reliance is anything but a drag on a company’s efficiency. The amount of information that workers in a dynamic environment need to function continues to grow, but the tools they have to access and manage it stay the same.

How to avoid extinction? Companies MUST invest in technology to help their employees better collaborate and communicate with one another if they really expect to get more from less. There are plenty of technologies to try including Chatter, instant messaging, internal communities, etc. You best start establishing priorities and get busy, or your employees will continue to trod around in the mud.

2. Bore Your Customers (Stagnasaurus)

Many companies communicate with customers and partners through emails and static websites. Consumers and business customers are accustomed to having information on-demand using Google, Wikipedia, Twitter and a host of other sources that have changed the way people find what they need. Companies not upping their game furnishing better information for their customers will soon be left behind.

How to avoid extinction? Invest in building a customer community or other web presence that is dynamic, searchable and easy-to-use. Some companies are even changing the way they market themselves. They offer products, services and community as the core of their offering, not just a “product”. When you buy a product or service from a company, you are forming a relationship with the company. The better experience the company provides aside from the core offering, the more likely they are to keep that customer and sell them more stuff.

3. Install Software (Technologicus Wrex)

It never ceases to amaze me how many companies are still out there insisting on purchasing software that “must” be behind the firewall. Like anything else, there are exceptions and I’m sure readers will pile on that this is crazy, but is it? The only two legitimate reasons to install software in a data center are security and performance. Well, I’ve got news for you. Both issues can be addressed without getting into the business of maintaining software.

How to avoid extinction? Invest in solutions that don’t require hardware, software, training, customization, etc.. Most business applications are now available through the Cloud and they are awesome. They are out there if you look hard enough, and meet 80% of your business needs. I’m willing to bet most of them are more secure than your data center.

Evolve and Thrive

These three areas are critically important for companies to improve in this environment. All are often ignored and difficult to pin down with a measurable business case, hence why they don’t get funding. In economic times like these, companies put off investments of this nature because the benefits are difficult to measure with precision; this is true. You could make the same case for management training. Companies invest millions of dollars training managers, but how can you measure if someone is a better manager? Finanical results, employee retention, and other kinds of metrics are used, but can they be linked back to particular training class or skill; I don’t think so. Most companies make a leap of faith that investing in their people and training will yield benefits in other areas. I submit the same logic holds to investing in the three areas listed above.

Where do you think companies should be investing to stave off extinction?

IT Must Learn to Bend or Business Will Break

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This is a blog post from ReadWriteWeb, where I used to write.

This current economic client is having a devastating effect on almost every business around. In order to adapt to changing conditions and opportunities, businesses will need to use flexible, adaptable systems to survive. The days of expensive, year long implementations of behind-the-firewall software will be few and far between.

I recently attended a Forrester Briefing and listened to comments from Peter Burris, who is very smart. They’ve done a host of studies showing that technology will be a growing part of how businesses compete and differentiate themselves in the future.

While systems and software used to be very “behind the scenes” and often transaction based, it is the case no longer. Consumers and businesses alike buy differently, consume differently, and recommend differently. Trends like social networking, video on demand, ecommerce will continue to force businesses to adapt to keep up with their customers. They cannot rely on systems that take years to implement and most don’t have the budgets to make large investments, at least for the next couple of years.

The growing focus on SaaS, cloud computing, application platforms, etc. are all responses to this growing trend in the market. There will be other solutions in the future for mobile, etc. that we haven’t even imagined. They all support the need for businesses to utilize systems that they can deploy, change and retire quickly. In my real job, I remember meeting with a venture capitalist who talked about how their firm looks for opportunities where they see lots of “wiggling”. He couldn’t describe what that really meant, or how one gets paid for wiggling; I thought he was a lunatic.

In retrospect, he does make one good point. Things happen quickly on the internet and in this changing global economy. When a business sees wiggling (or opportunities) either positive or negative, they need agile systems to respond. One size fits all software and packaging is going the way of the VCR. I think this will continue to grow in importance and focus as enterprises evaluate new systems and invest in new technology. What do you think?

SEO Primer: Improve Your Business Website’s Ranking

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I originally wrote this blog post on ReadWriteWeb.  You can access it here.

We went through an SEO overhaul of our company’s website. There is definitely a combination of art and science that I never appreciated until having to do it. So, to save others some time, here are some very basic things that any business should do to optimize the ranking of its website in search engine results. Nothing explained here is necessarily a secret or difficult to find out. The trick is to find a good cookbook and a process that is easy to follow.

  1. Keywords. Decide on a manageable number of keywords to weave into the content of your website (I chose 10). This falls into the category of art. You need to think of words that people would potentially use to search for what you’re offering, similar to the process you go through when starting an AdWords campaign. You need to climb into the brain of your customer and understand how he or she might try to find you. For example, our company often refers to itself as a SaaS company. However, potential customers might first think of the words “online” or “hosted,” instead of SaaS. Tools exist that can help with this, but the end goal is to list important keywords.
  2. Site changes.Depending on what software or hosting services you use, you may need to tweak this process differently, but here are some general ways to influence how your site gets indexed:
    • Page title. These are the words at the top of the browser window that describe the current page. Search engines look at these words. Be strategic here. For example, if you have a page devoted to a product that allows online document collaboration, don’t use “Product” in the page title. Use “Online document collaboration” instead. Also, don’t put your product name first. Search engines will hopefully already know what that is; they tend to look at the first three words, so make them the most important.
    • H1 tags. Use the same strategy. Search engines prioritize H1 tags, so use important keywords here. Try to stick to one H1 tag per page.
    • URLs. Same deal here: use keywords. For example, instead of http://mycompany.com/product, use http://mycompany.com/online-document-collaboration. Separating words with hyphens is best.
    • Keyword density. Make sure to use your keywords in the body of your pages. Density is important; i.e. 2 keywords for every 5 words counts more than 2 for every 15.
    • Meta description tags. This will sound redundant but… use keywords. This is also where you should put a 25-word description of your site. Search engines sometimes display this description under links in search results.
    • Links. Link to other pages on your website, but (get ready for it!) use keywords. For our example, use “online document collaboration” as the link text, not “product name.”
    • Content. Create pages on your site that focus on your most important keywords and topics. And then link to those pages using the method described above. Do not copy content from other sites because this only confuses search engines.
  3. Link love. We all know that the more inbound links pointing to your site, the better. Get people to write and comment about your business. We also know that the quality of the site linking to yours is very important. What you may not know is that the words in links are important, too. Try to ensure that the text in those inbound links contains keywords; for example, use “business collaboration software” (see how I’m learning) instead of something generic like “click here.”

You can do other, more technical things, like create an XML site map and submit it to search engines. Our company brought in SEO experts, and that can be very beneficial if you need help in this area. Regardless, the entire process makes you really focus on what your company does and how you describe it. It isn’t easy, but it can pay great dividends with leads and site traffic. How do you practice SEO? Any tips or strategies that I missed?

7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People

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Many of us in the business community grew up with Stephen Covey’s excellent book, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It is both influential and insightful. Unfortunately, Mr. Covey never wrote an important follow-up identifying the traits that people should avoid. Without further ado, I give you the 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People:

  1. Be the smartest person in the room – You have all the right answers so why ask others. It is a terrible waste of of your important time to wait for people to follow your train of thought. Chances are that you are absolutely right, so why bother? When you are the smartest person in the room, take advantage of it and don’t waste time soliciting input or advice you don’t need.
  2. Avoid making decisions – Making decisions is very limiting. Things change, markets evolve, and trends emerge. If you make a decision and set yourself on a defined course of action, you may miss a big opportunity. Plus, your organization doesn’t like having clear direction because it may stifle innovation.
  3. Maximize benefit for the present – The world is a turbulent place. Saving for a rainy day is for suckers. Spend your budget like every quarter could be your last. Nobody ever got a big payout or kudos for anything by coming in third. There is a good reason why the most highly paid baseball players are the home run hitters.
  4. Be dramatic – Most effective people I know command a room just by walking through the door. Communicate as if every thing has life or death implications, even when they don’t. Anger, fear and embarrassment are great motivators. Plus, being dramatic gets all the cards on the table. Bring every petty thought and personal emotion to bear in all situations. People will really understand you.
  5. Don’t listen to your customers – Think of the old saying about Henry Ford that if he listened to his customers, he would have built a better horse. Customers don’t know anything. They need to be led by the hand and require an enormous amount of overhead just to turn on their car. Are you seriously going to waste time listening to these people? They should be grateful that you are making products or services for them to buy.
  6. Interrupt people and talk loudly – Don’t be the person sitting on the sideline or in the corner with nothing to say. Put yourself out there. Interrupt people. You are smart and have insightful things to add. They will respect you for cutting them off. Also, it is very important to pitch your voice as loudly as possible to minimize any chance that someone doesn’t hear you.
  7. Why do something today when you can do it tomorrow – It is a very rare situation when something has to get done NOW. Most things are easily put off to another time. Deadlines are arbitrary and milestones are contrived. You are much better off doing things on your terms and timeframe.

There are many more ways to be very ineffective in life, but if you can pull off these 7, you are sure to be a complete failure. Did we leave anything off?

P.S. Thanks to Luke Ball for helping with this post.

Best Practice for Collaborating on an RFP

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spreadsheetI love RFPs – I hate RFPs. I love them because they mean I’m competing for qualified business and new customers/money are on the line. I hate them because they are a pain in the a$$ to do. Fortunately, there are ways to make them easier to process. Here are some best practices on how to respond to an extensive RFP. This post deals primarily with the process for getting the RFP done. I don’t get into the content or strategy for the actual response.

  • Receive the RFP – The prospect will usually email the RFP to you. It typically takes the form of a Word or Excel document. Some have web tools but these are rare. Instead of just forwarding the email to the 10 people on your team who usually help you, upload the file to a collaboration solution like Chatter and create a group for it. There are many benefits for doing this:
    1. Archive the RFP as a master document
    2. Make it easy for people to find it in the future
    3. Link to it as you complete other activities
  • Plan the work – Don’t just dive in and start answering questions. Treat it like a mini-project. Read it thoroughly and figure out who the best person is to respond to the different questions. In some cases, you may do the entire thing and this step is either very fast or irrelevant. In other cases, you may have upwards of 10 people who are responsible for contributing. Once you’ve come up with your plan, document it and communicate it in your group. This allows people who are working on the RFP to know their assignments clearly and will serve as the place to add status updates on progress. Have them update the group as they complete their work so everyone is on the same page, literally.
  • Create a template – Instead of 1) sending out the document, 2) asking people to fill in certain portions, and 3) pasting them all together, you should create a template using a Google doc or some other online document. This allows you to track progress more effectively, eliminates issues with version control or people overwriting each other or hand offs, and makes it very easy for your contributors to work. They don’t need any software, just a browser.
  • Review the RFP sections – It is crucial for one person to own the final RFP and complete an edit. If you are like us, we have multiple people writing copy for the document. Each person has different writing styles and phrases. It is best for one person to do a final sweep through the entire document to make minor edits and ensure the voice, style and demeanor of the document is consistent.
  • Send it to the prospect – There are two ways of doing this. The first, and most common, way is to take the content out of the Google doc and paste it into the original RFP document (make sure to save it as a different version for future reference). One trick I’ve learned is to use a Notepad editor to strip out any HTML tags that come with a normal paste.  This keeps the final document neat and retains its formatting. The second way is to share the Google doc with the client so they can collaborate with you in real-time. This way, they can ask questions or get clarification in the actual document and your team can see their feedback. Trust me, the prospect will be impressed with your professionalism and technical saavy.

For one page RFPs, this process may be overkill and unnecessary. For long multi-section documents, this is absolutely critical for processing the RFP quickly with a high degree of quality. The added benefit of following this process is the work is captured and searchable when the next RFP rolls in.