My Introduction to TechBridge

By on May 13, 2013 in ATL

April and I had the opportunity to join our friends at the Digital Ball over the weekend. I had heard about TechBridge and knew its general mission but never realized how powerful the organization was. This group is 100% focused on bringing technology solutions and answers to the non-profit community.

The best way to learn more is to watch this short video:

Some highlights of TechBridge and the Digital Ball:

  • Over $1.2 million cash raised this year for non-profits
  • Tens of millions in software licenses donated to non-profits
  • Over 100 non-profits served since this time last year
  • The annual Technology Innovation Award went to The Atlanta Center for the Visually Impaired

I’ll sign-off with a quote spoken this weekend by the CEO of TechBridge, James Franklin:

Nonprofits Have the Vision to Change the World. TechBridge gives them the tools to make it happen.

So cool.

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5 Bad Habits Routinely Exhibited by Entrepreneurs

By on May 9, 2013 in Sales, Starting-Up

There are things in business you know you know you should do, but yet you still don’t do them. Below are the most common I routinely witness. I’m also guilty at one point of my career for every single one of them. They’re goals of mine to avoid them now.

5 Bad Habits Routinely Exhibited by Entrepreneurs:

1. Not following up after networking

Here’s the scenario I’ve seen time and time again: Someone approaches me at a networking event, especially after a speaking opportunity. They want something from me and through discussion they commit to follow up with a question, need or some sort of help. More often than not, the followup never happens. Commonly, in fact all I’ll receive will be a default LinkedIn invite the next week. That’s not going to get you anywhere.

2. Not practicing enough for a presentation 

You think you’re ready but you’re not. Actually you probably know you’re not ready but you make excuses and think it will work out ok. But why settle for ok? If you’re gonna get on stage and give your heart away you want to be your very best. I once practiced a presentation somewhere near 100 times…and I still hiccuped when I went on stage but I can guarantee each practice round reduced my mistakes and enhanced my confidence.

3. Not sending follow up sales information rapidly

I’ve been selling to enterprises since 2005…and one of the most annoying things I’ve seen with sales professionals is watching them wait days  to send across their sales proposal after the customer requests it. Now you definitely want to hammer out most of the basics before sending a proposal. Once most of the terms have been agreed upon, I recommend sending them rapidly. This serves two purposes 1) you exceed the client’s expectations & 2) you can fill up more opportunities if you aren’t focused on the upcoming proposal.

4. Beating around the bush in emails and in person

It’s important as an entrepreneur to know what you want and to ask for it. The faster you ask, the faster you’ll get your yes or no, and be able to move on. And the more the other party will respect you for not taking up too much of their time.

5. Canceling on others last minute or showing up late

Being a master of your calendar as an entrepreneur is vital. When you break commitments and show up late, it breaks trust and respect. Often times people won’t say it, but they’ll certainly remember it. I always urge my self and others to think from the perspective of the receiving party.

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Those are some bad habits that stick out to me. They’ve really become pet peeves of mine. Do you agree with the ideas here? What would you add?

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Downtown Las Vegas, The City as an Accelerator

By on May 9, 2013 in Starting-Up

A few years back, Tony Hsieh and his crew started doing something I’ve never heard done before. They’ve taken over a city, crumbled and riddled with an unsavory reputation and are building a legacy of change and community through the downtown project.

I had the opportunity to visit and tour downtown Las Vegas this week and was quite impressed.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

  • $350 million in the total Downtown project fund
  • $50 million allocated to each of the following: tech startups, real-estate, education, and small-business
  • 90 employees focused on building and growing downtown Las Vegas
  • Motto of “City as an Accelerator”
  • 2 coworking spaces
  • Zappos new headquarters
  • Container park, an urban work/play retail center
  • Massive land & building assets
  • Goal to create density of 100 people per square acre (They’re at <20 now)
  • Focus on ROC (return on community) over ROI.

Here are a few pics from my journey.

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Startup logo members of Work in Progress

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Work in Progress “Upstairs”

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Tony’s “Plant Room”

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Tony’s Blueprint war room

I feel this will be a very special project that we’ll hear a lot about in the coming years. If you’re headed to Vegas anytime soon and would like some intros/tours…please let me know!

 

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Just ask for What you Want

By on May 6, 2013 in Sales, Starting-Up

I sent an email to Tony Hsieh of Zappos last week. I’m touring the Vegas Tech scene and asked him for introductions to the leaders of the community.

I’ve never met or corresponded with Tony ever. But guess what? He responded and gave me what I asked for.

All too often I get cold calls, cold emails, or approached at events where the other person wants something from me but instead of asking for it, they beat around the bush.

They tell their story and maybe why they want what they want but they have a hard time turning their need into a simple question and asking it.

Of course you’ll still need to establish credibility and show the other person why what you need is valuable to them. But once you do this, cut to the point and ask the question.

It’s the easiest way to get what you need.

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Tell Stories Like Sir Elton John

By on May 5, 2013 in Marketing, Sales

Tonight I got to cross something off my bucket list. I saw Elton John live.

EJ

He’s a badass and he taught me a strong business lesson:

Never stop telling awesome stories.

I’ve seen tons of shows from many artist around his era: Paul McCartney, Clapton, Eagles, Stones, etc. But none of them told stories like Elton. In fact, just think about his famous songs: Candle in the Wind, Daniel, Your Song, etc. Elton John is a fantastic story teller.

Between almost every song tonight, he talked about its particular origination and the important times he’s performed it. He always held his fans and the crowd up as the winner in each of his stories.

Great entrepreneurs, salespeople and marketers are the same way…except their fans are customers and users.

Plan to learn about great story telling from legends like Elton and you’ll do a better job weaving the art of storytelling into business.

Here’s a clip I love which highlights Elton’s story-telling capabilities. Here he puts a melody and song to a random story from a random audience member’s book. You see he can take virtually anything and tell it in a way that conveys meaning.

Just imagine the power of the stories that actually do mean something to him:

So tell better stories. Study from the best to get better.

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Mastering Complicated Platforms is a Competitive Advantage

By on May 4, 2013 in Starting-Up

I’ve never met a developer writing code in the salesforce.com ecosystem that said it was easy.

Quite often in fact, you’ll even hear complaints and woes on why it’s so hard to work with their API.

But there are over 120,000 companies using salesforce.com spending nearly $3 Billion every year and increasing at double-digit percentages. That’s an opportunity in my book and obviously why we love this ecosystem at SalesLoft.

In fact, the challenging nature of the salesforce.com API offers the opportunity for a competitive advantage for those who can get really good at it. API changes, inefficiencies, ambiguities are all opportunities to make your mark on an industry.

We certainly feel this way with salesforce.com. Do you look at platform integration skills as a core competence for other businesses? I’d love to hear your input on this one.

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Sketch-notes & 3 Takeaways from B2BCamp

By on May 3, 2013 in ATL, Marketing

Tonight was the first ever B2BCamp weekday event. It was a lot more condensed than a standard Camp but full of fun, connecting and knowledge sharing.

The speaker lineup was phenomenal and the content super helpful. Here are my big three takeaways:

  1. In a perfect world, we’d never go through sales professionals to buy stuff. It’s important to understand the reasons why and to engineer less required sales face-time into your distribution strategy. It’s equally important to realize that it ain’t a perfect world and sales is vital. In most cases, sales is still responsible for sourcing over 60% of the leads that close.
  2. One of the most important things you can do with marketing campaigns and content marketing is create rhythm. We talked about creating a weekly content schedule and staying close to the reader while focusing on improvement and feedback.
  3. Agile marketing is getting closer and closer to agile dev…user focused and complete with iterations and on the fly adjustments.

Lastly, I wanted to highlight something I found to be quite awesome. Tonight I met Jenny Trautman and she sketched this during the event. She posted about it here.

Screen Shot 2013-05-02 at 11.59.47 PM

If you made it out today. Thank you. Please email me with ideas and suggestions for improvement.

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Hypepotamus is About to Do Something Thats Never Been Done in ATL…Again

By on May 1, 2013 in ATL, Starting-Up

Hypopotamus is about to shake up the startup scene in ATL. Over the next few weeks you’ll see them transform and create the ATL startup newsroom.

Ask yourself: Why did over 200 people show up for Tuesdays Atlanta Startup Village? Why do over 10,000 people subscribe to David Cummings blog, and why week after week does ATDC set the biggest and best companies in the city up to meet with startups?

One reason: the ATL Tech Scene is getting hot. And when shit gets hot, there’s got to be somebody there to release the word.

That’s what Hypepotamus is about to do.

I had the opportunity to talk with Scott Henderson tonight. In describing Atlanta, here’s how he put it:

“Fragmented awesomeness”

I get that. We have neighborhoods, burbs, Midtown, East side, West side, Buckhead, Alpharetta and the Gwinnetians. We have ATDC, ATV, Hype and more. The Hypotamus’ goal straight from the mouth of Scotty is to: “Create Connected awesomeness”

And that’s what’s about to happen.

Hypotamus is transforming itself to become the publication of record for the ATL scene.

I’m talking collaborative media, an aggregated calendar of events, the center of Atlanta’s startup mojo, videos, guest posts, startup overviews.  A place where students get involved, corporations, investors, creators, entrepreneurs.

Look for changes from the Hype over the next few weeks. Follow them on Twitter and subscribe to their blog. After spending the evening with the guys at Hype, I couldn’t be more proud and excited for the ATL startup scene.

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One of the Best Cold Sales Emails I’ve Received

By on April 30, 2013 in Sales

I received a stellar sales email today from someone I didn’t know.

He got my attention & respect in one cold correspondance. Anyone in sales could learn from this story. Here it is:

First, I went to the company site and experienced a super easy tutorial of their product (it took <20 seconds). I passed along my email. Here’s what followed:

  • I received an automated (but sincere) email immediately from their CEO thanking me for coming by and letting me know somebody would be reaching out soon.
  • I got an email from the sales rep 10 minutes later with the subject line: “Your 20 Quotes Blog“. He was referring to one of our recent blog posts.
  • He referenced our post in the body copy and tied in a relevant joke.
  • He genuinely expressed learning about my business so that he could help us accomplish our goals around his product’s focus.
  • Lastly, he had a simple ask: for 10 minutes of my time.

The correspondance had it all: a touch from the CEO, a caring sales professional who took the time to learn about us, humor and a great call-to-action. To follow it up, he forwarded our product to people on his team and they signed up.

I’d say textbook, but it was creatively beyond that.

I wrote a note to the CEO and told how well a job his rep was doing. He was doing just what we’ve talked about here and was selling with sincerity. It was memorable.

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Saying Goodbye to Michael

By on April 29, 2013 in Starting-Up

This week is bitter sweet at SalesLoft. While we’re growing and gaining traction, we’re losing two core elements of our company…our trusted interns. We’ve already written about how awesome Aswin is but we’ve never shared the story of Michael. As he gets ready to spend his summer in Barcelona for study abroad I wanted to write a thank you and share with you how great he is.

I’ll start with the legend about Michael

He can solve the Rubik’s cube. BLINDFOLDED. Don’t believe me? See for yourself:

This wasn’t the last special thing we found out about Michael. He’s also an actor, singer, songwriter and the guitar player in his band. Most of all however, Michael is an amazing programmer and wonderful team-mate.

Michael created our prospecting tool in under 6 weeks, then he scrapped 90% of the code and rebuilt it for scale. He knocked out every single development task we ever gave him and came back asking for more. Here’s Michael in our prospecting video (the cheesiness was all me – he had nothing to do with it!):


We really enjoyed working with Michael this semester and know he’ll do amazing things in his career. We wish you the best brother and please let us know how we can ever be helpful!

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