A Summer Term at Harvard, Yale, Brown, …

A summer term at Harvard, Yale, Brown or another elite institution is a very viable option for capable, ambitious undergraduates, regardless of their home institution. Most but not all elite universities offer a summer session that is open to visiting undergraduates including Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, Penn, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, Northwestern, Berkeley, U VA and Washington University, St. Louis. The degree to which these summer sessions reflect the regular academic year varies from institution to institution so be sure to research several options before settling on one. Below is some basic information to get you started.

Keeping Your Lead Generation Representative Productive

As a sales executive, your lead generation representative is one of your most valuable human resources, if not your most valuable human resource. In my observation, most sales executives invest only nominally in their lead generation representative by merely expressing their thanks when appropriate. Imagine investing more. If you could close one more deal this year by investing in your lead generation representative, how much time and effort would you be willing to invest to get that one more deal closed? Or perhaps, you are now officially the manager of a lead generation team. There are plenty of articles online about empowering lead generation teams to be more effective. Most of them are about metrics. This post is focused on what I consider the most important things to do to make a lead generation representative as productive as possible, regardless of the metrics.

The Changing Role of the IT Department

Once upon a time, the Corporate IT Department was where the magic happened. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) had recently been promoted from reporting to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) to reporting directly to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO). The IT department was suddenly cool because it had moved beyond making sure all of the corporate transactions were recorded in the financial system to actually making a positive difference in people’s lives, improving productivity, automating boring tasks, informing and empowering front line workers and providing executives with never-before-available business intelligence. The IT Department created the company of the future, found and procured the best third party software, built what could not be bought, and partnered with third party IT consultancies to add targeted expertise. But at some point, the fairy tale ended.

Six Keys to Winning the Swift Tactical Purchase

Typical enterprise software sales take six to nine months, if not longer. But not all sales are typical. Some can move very quickly from initial discovery to closure. I call these Swift Tactical Sales. The customer interaction and sales process for Swift Tactical Sales are different enough from typical sales, to warrant their own chapter in a sales manual. Here is a quick summary.

Eight Ways Workaholics Are Actually Unproductive

The word “workaholic” is often misused to describe someone with stamina, ambition and a strong work ethic whose contribution far exceeds the norm and often includes long hours. For this honorable set, a different word needs to be coined. For the purpose of this post, I will be holding to a stricter definition of workaholic. By the word’s etymology, a workaholic may put long hours, but the motivation is off base, and the contribution is rarely above par. Workaholics are compelled by an addiction to work rather than a passion for results. In my observation workaholics far outnumber superlative contributors, but more disturbingly, their counterfeit behavior often passes for superlative contribution to the inexperienced or casual observer. Here are eight ways workaholics are actually unproductive, so you can recognize and address the problem early.

Seven Reasons to Put Sales Executives into High Profile Buying Roles

As a sales executive, when was the last time you were deeply involved in a major buying decision for your company? Alternatively, as business leader, when was the last time you made one of your sales executives a primary decision-maker in a major company buying decision? By a “deeply involved primary decision-maker” I mean more than merely evaluating a new source of leads or a sales CRM tool. Instead, I am talking about involving the sales executive for the entire buying cycle as the number one, two or three deciding principal. Few readers can answer with currently or recently. For many, such things simply aren’t done that way and to do so would be a violation of company culture. But here are seven reasons this should be a regular occurance at any small, growing business-to-business enterprise, if not a larger established enterprise as well.

Nine Sales Priorities (in order) for Final Negotiations

With the enterprise sales cycles normally lasting six to nine months, gaining a verbal closure from your Buyer puts you into the last stage of the sales process which is typically called Final Negotiations. While the automated computations of your sales CRM may put the odds of closure at ninety to ninety-five percent (90% - 95%), your actual odds probably fall into one of two categories. The first is a near certainty (somewhere around 98% to 99%) because the need is great and your solution is the clear winner. In the second, you are merely the top choice, so the actual odds are much lower (more like 75% - 85%).

In either case, more than at any other stage of the sales process, Final Negotiations will require you to put your sales strengths, particularly your listening and empathy skills to task. To execute the Final Negotiations process most effectively, you must have a clear understanding of your priorities and their relative importance to one another. While each business situation is unique, here is a standard priority order.

Seven Keys to Finding The Right Safety School

If you’ve started the process of identifying which schools to target in the college/university admissions process, you’ve probably heard about ensuring you apply to reach, match and safety schools. You’ve also probably gotten some basic advice about how to qualify a good safety school. While this basic advice is well-meaning, it normally falls far short, especially if you have high ambitions. For the academically ambitious, identifying the right safety school is normally the most difficult part of the college search process. Here are the seven keys to finding the right safety college.

Five Things Applicants Should Know about LinkedIn Jobs

More and more businesses are using LinkedIn as their primary or exclusive job-posting site. Likewise, more and more applicants are finding LinkedIn’s solution to be the best source for finding gainful employment. Despite this significant trend, most applicants do not have a clear picture of what recruiting professionals and hiring managers actually receive. Having just been involved in recruiting a new employee, I now know what and how LinkedIn provides information about applicants to employers.

Six Ways to Break out of the Home Office Bubble

Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer stirred up the business media with an edict to abolish telecommuting among Yahoo! employees. Despite the fact that online collaboration tools have never been as effective as they are today, Mayer claimed the decision was about creating a culture of collaboration. She also claimed her decision only affected about two hundred people, but elsewhere Mayer complained about empty parking lots, as well as rows and rows of empty cubicles. Lastly, Mayer claimed it was about productivity, but her CFO’s analysis of VPN logs indicated the decision had more to do with a conviction that telecommuters were displaying a poor work ethic. Mayer’s policy forced several employees to put their small children in day care, but Mayer herself had a private nursery built right next to her office.

Because of the controversy surrounding the Mayer edict, observers have taken a keen interest in the value found (or lost) in both the conventional office and the home office. As someone who works from home often, I am familiar with both the benefits and pitfalls of telecommuting. These same pitfalls are felt to varying degrees by every multi-site enterprise. Here are six ways to reduce or even eliminate those pitfalls, either as an individual exercising these behaviors, or as a company fostering a corporate culture that expects these behaviors from everyone.

Four Keys to Selling Like the Department Dumb-Dumb

The story is all too common. And the shock is felt by perhaps hundreds of thousands of early-career sales executives every year. After working diligently to earn top grades, assembling the perfect resume and jumping through endless hoops of interviews and references, a brilliant promising sales executive we’ll call Sam Shotwell lands his dream job with a leading company. Everything seems to be going as planned until our Sam meets his polar opposite who we will call Moose Maxwell.

Minipost: LinkedIn Endorsements - More Social - Less Data

LinkedIn Endorsements are not even six months old. In September of 2012, LinkedIn created its own version of the Facebook Like button or the Google +1 button that allowed individuals to endorse the skills of others with a single click. It seemed like a good idea. Endorsements took less thought and effort than crafting a meaningful written recommendation. But almost immediately, I noticed a serious problem. Many no-doubt well-meaning colleagues were Endorsing skills I know they had not actually observed me execute. Today, a quick scan reveals roughly half of my Endorsement points fall under this “here’s a favor - wink – maybe you could return the favor” category. LinkedIn’s idea has proved too casual for anyone to trust the data. Hopefully, LinkedIn will find a way to fix this problem. Until then, I have elected to “hide” my Endorsements and I encourage others to do likewise.

B2B Startups Need to Leverage Retargeting

For those not familiar with retargeting, it may take a moment for the concept to take hold. For nearly all of media history, mediums that attracted a certain demographic of readers, viewers or listeners could sell advertising to those who targeted that same demographic. The internet added a new twist by giving people new ways to segment demographics. Google leveraged users’ search terms (key words) as a way to identify a target demographic while Facebook collected seemingly everything about each user: age, gender, address, like-clicks, relationship status, etc.