My New Year’s Resolution: Reduce Cortisol; Increase Oxytocin

To describe my New Year’s Resolution requires a short lesson in biochemistry. Briefly, Cortisol is the “stress” chemical and Oxytocin is the “love” chemical. Among knowledge workers, the former is a productivity and creativity killer, while the latter is a productivity and creativity booster. In a small, growing, knowledge-based company, I want my colleagues to be producing at their peek. And even if I do not work with them directly, I can have a positive (or negative) impact on their performance.

Eight Rules of Professional Leadership on Twitter

Earlier this month, I reviewed who I was following on Twitter and reduced the number by roughly forty percent. In the process, I was shocked by how many talented and accomplished professionals had allowed their tweets to descend into a chronic state of irrelevancy. As an example, the vast majority of tweets from one highly regarded startup CMO were boasts of his accomplishments in an online game. Another senior executive’s Twitter feed was a litany of delight without any detail about how many interesting people he was meeting at various conferences.

Used wisely, a Twitter account can be a powerful tool in one’s professional arsenal. But too many otherwise business-savvy people tweet with little insight into how they appear to those who read those tweets. On the one hand, the guidelines below are merely common sense. But on the other hand, there is clearly significant confusion over how to leverage this social media juggernaut. Too many professionals seem to be following the guidance or behaviors of others without fully understanding what they are actually doing or why. The eight “rules” below provide basic guidance a professional needs to get back on track and to stay relevant.

Selling Enterprise Software to Right Brain Professionals

We have all heard about the two hemispheres of the brain. The left brain is the scientific hemisphere. It embraces logic, mathematics and objective thinking and generally stays inside the proverbial box. The right brain is the artistic hemisphere. It embraces emotion and subjective thinking and is more inclined to think outside the proverbial box.

Decades ago, the digital revolution first penetrated businesses where the left-brainers worked, such as accounting and finance. In those early days, the role of the “CIO” typically reported to the CFO rather than the CEO. Today, the enterprise software footprint is still growing among left brain professions. But it is growing much faster among right brain professions. The growth of “big data” and “social media” has empowered entrepreneurs to create an entire new generation of solutions targeting the final frontier of right-brained professionals, particularly those in the marketing department.

Channel Partnerships – Anemic or Vibrant?

Your startup or growing small company has an innovative but very new and targeted solution. Likewise you have a brilliant but very small and busy team. Everyone is looking for opportunities to scale. A large company with established, complementary and most importantly non-competing solutions has the potential to deliver that scale through a well-crafted channel arrangement. Unfortunately, it is far too easy to veer off the path to an effective channel partnership by following intuitive impulses rather than creating and ideally codifying a strategy that leverages the power of mutual interest.

MBAs, Elite MBAs and Their Alternatives

Earlier this month, the New York Times Magazine took the appointment of a new Dean at the Yale School of Management as an opportunity to muse on the value of graduate management programs and the value of elite graduate management programs in particular. While Yale enjoys a premier status among the world’s leading Universities across a multitude of programs, to date that premier status has eluded Yale’s School of Management. While the new Dean has some challenging work ahead, the questions posed in the New York Times Magazine will continue to be debated in the public domain about the value of an MBA relative to all its alternatives, and what makes some MBA programs special and other MBA programs a mere commodity. For individuals beginning their business careers, the answers to these questions are significant. Here are some guidelines on how to answer them for your own circumstance.

Marketing-Initiated Sales

Earlier this year, Forrester Research published a study titled, B2B Marketing Trends and Predictions For 2012. In it, Jeff Ernst and his colleagues predicted a significant investment increase in marketing automation technology with 19% of B2B organizations planning to implement marketing automation this year, and another 17% expanding their usage.

The Challenge of Incumbent Indirect Competitors

The definition of an indirect competitor is the subject of some debate and is nearly always stated in contrast to the definition of a direct competitor. When it comes to selling a newly developed technology, the difference in my mind is rather clear. Any solution that addresses the same need, relieves the same pain, or delivers the same benefit as your solution is a competitor. The distinguishing quality of a direct competitor is that your solution and the direct competitor’s solution are mutually exclusive. The only way to win a customer when there is a direct competitor is for the direct competitor to lose.

Some Recruiting Software Really Needs to Grow Up

First impressions count both ways. Too many companies who should know better are using embarrassingly outdated recruiting software. The following features that I encountered multiple times in my last search made each company using the outdated software look both unprofessional and out of touch. In all such cases today, these features are shoddy and do not reflect well on the company using the software.

News Reflection - The Naked Emperors Club

Back when Scott Thompson attended Stonehill College, the school did not offer a Major in Computer Science as his resume to Yahoo! indicated. When I first heard about the controversy surrounding Yahoo!’s new CEO, I had wondered if a quasi-acceptable explanation would be found in his having taken a significant number of Computer Science courses before the school had officially established the Computer Science Major. A few more detailed articles on the subject later, I learned the school had only offered a single class in the subject titled “Introduction to Computer Science” while Mr. Thompson was in attendance.

News Reflection - Dressing Down for Professional Impact

Facebook’s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is known for wearing jeans, ostentatiously puffy sneakers, a tight medium grey t-shirt and often-times a darker grey “hoodie” with something Facebook-blue barely revealing itself between the grey t-shirt and the darker grey hoodie. (What is that, Mark: A soccer jersey?) It is not a far cry from Apple’s famous co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs who was known for dressing casually, and in the end exclusively wearing jeans, grey running shoes and a black mock turtleneck.

In most business environments today artists, engineers and other creative people look their professional best when dressed casually. In contrast senior executives and sales professionals have traditionally looked their best in more formal business attire. But cultural normalcy is still undefined in those situations where the creative and high-tech worlds intersect with the sales and senior executive roles. This was underscored recently when Mark Zuckerberg travelled east to meet with potential investors and elected to wear his signature hoodie.

Classroom Reflection - Get the Sales Hire Right

Class continued at Stanford University. During the second week, our focus moved away from the power of lead-nurturing to the importance of getting the sales hire right. On average a bad sales hire at the senior level costs a company one million dollars. This figure is the summation of recruiting costs, training costs, and the foregone sales resulting from both the bad sales hire as well as the ramp time of his replacement. While the world’s largest and most successful sales organizations invest heavily in making the right hires, a chronically high percentage of new sales executives, including eagles recruited from other firms, still fail.

Nine Key Choices When Selecting Your Business Laptop

If you work for a large or even a medium-sized company, normally someone else will select all of your business computing resources for you. But if you work as a sales executive for a small company or a startup, this responsibility for selection will normally fall on you.

As a sales executive, you are going to need something portable. Portable computers come under many different category titles, including laptop, desktop replacement, notebook, ultraportable, netbook and tablet, but herein I will simply use the term laptop. Over the past decade, I have selected my business laptop three times, and I have learned a lot each time. So while there are many generic guides available, this guide is specifically targeted toward the sales executive at a startup or a small company. Nonetheless, others will certainly find value.

Classroom Reflection - How The Cloud is Radically Transforming Enterprise IT Sales

I recently signed up for a fantastic single-credit class at Stanford University through the school’s Continuing Studies program. I attended the first of six on-campus sessions this past Wednesday. Nothing discussed inside the classroom caught my attention more than how the “cloud” is transforming enterprise IT sales. In short, the future looks bright but not familiar.

Minipost - Multi-Lingual Email Courtesy

I work in a multi-lingual company and am the only native English-speaker today. The rest who natively speak Russian all take the time to write to me in English. It is something I greatly appreciate. I would like to return the favor but I don’t know a word of Russian.

Seven Strategies to Land a Great Sales Position with a Hot Startup

Startups hold huge appeal. Once a promising company has a market-ready solution, it is ready to hire its first dedicated sales executives. It is a great opportunity for the right seasoned sales executives, and occasionally ambitious entry-level or early career professionals.

Landing a great position with a startup is different from landing a great position with a mature company, or even a growth company. While much has been written to guide engineers and programmers in finding a great position with a startup, I have yet to find anything providing guidance for sales executives. Having just gone through the process successfully myself and now looking from the inside outward, I have isolated seven strategies that I believe are most important if you are looking to land a great sales position with a hot startup.

Jumbo-Tweet - Coverage in Forbes

I'm honored to be part of something mentioned in the global business press. Forbes Magazine's latest article on Russian investment in startups included a quotes and information gleaned from an interview with my CEO Alexey Aylarov. Note that winning those first customers is top-of-mind at this stage of a company's growth. Also note Zingaya now has ten employees, including me (employee #4) in Santa Cruz!

Minipost - Managing the Dual Benefits of the Sales CRM

Most Enterprise Data Systems offer the dual benefit of management reporting and operational efficiency. Sales CRMs offer these same benefits but Sales CRMs are unique in how they deliver operational efficiency. They deliver operational efficiency by giving each sales executive a set of tools to manage and maximize her own personal productivity. Contrast this benefit to the management reporting benefit. For the management reporting benefit to be effective, data in the CRM must be uniform across all sales executives. But for the operational efficiency benefit to be effective, the data structure of the CRM must be flexible enough to allow each sales executive the freedom to use the tool in the way that makes her most productive.

Minipost - Even in a Startup, Sales & Marketing Can Trip over one Another

We learn the most when we make mistakes. On Monday, I discovered I made a mistake. Fortunately and to the credit of my colleagues I discovered and remediated that mistake before it could do any damage. While our marketing consultant was preparing a corporate press release to announce the enterprise version of our core technology, I was working on a separate press release with my largest client.

Introducing "The ComPreneur" Blog

This blog presents a unique perspective. One can find no shortage of blogs written by startup founders, CEOs, CTOs and investors. Likewise, one can find no shortage of blogs on the topic of sales and marketing for established products and services. But after searching very hard to find one, I could not find even a single blog written by a non-founding sales or marketing executive working for a startup.