It’s called preemptive negotiation.

Imagine you’re closing a big deal. It could involve technical integration, professional services, or client adoption in order to achieve success. Both you and your customer can imagine roadblocks that might inhibit success. Thinking like a customer company, it’s helpful to get those situations out on the table when you’re still experiencing the relationship highs of the closed deal rather than the stressful moments when things come up later.

Here’s a simple way to weave preemptive negotiation into your onboarding (taken from the book Let’s Get Real or Let’s not Play):

We might say:

When they say no, we can continue,

Let clients get out their list of challenges first, and then talk about them:

or

or

Then we give our list. We might talk about change of scope, their failure to meet commitments on time, changes in personnel, missed deadlines, etc. Set up lines of good communication now; if something occurs, we will know how to talk about it effectively, and we are not caught up in the emotions and fears of the moment.

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Behaving in this manner allows us to preemptively negotiate responses and expectations of future outcomes. The more complex the solution, the more powerful this can become.

Do you see the value in this approach?

It’s about being sincere and honest and focused on serving others whom you can best help.

It’s about growing, learning, empowering yourself to be more. It’s about finding what you’re passionate about and going out and grabbing it.

Social media helps my tennis game, my cycling, my faith. It helps me be a better husband and one day a better dad. It helps me connect with my family, friends and those I look up to.

Social media is the world’s knowledge and audience at your fingertips.

(I’m publishing this old draft to test my RSS feed and email. For some reason my MailChimp plugin has not been working so I deleted and rebuilt it. If you subscribe through email or RSS, feel free to give me a shout to let me know it’s working

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:

So cool.

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?

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.

Startup logo members of Work in Progress

Work in Progress “Upstairs”

Tony’s “Plant Room”

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.