The Secrets of a Successful Sales Team
Recently I was interviewed by Britt Johnsen for the latest quarterly issue of ROI Magazine.
UPDATE 11/13/09- The article is no longer available online
I thought Britt did an excellent job summarizing the best practices of Central Minnesota sales leaders in her cover story “The Secrets of a Successful Sales Team”.
The following are the “Top 10 Ways to Build a Sales Team” as summarized by Britt-
1) Hire the right sales people
2) Hire the right sales manager
3) Maintain relationships
4) Check your motivations
5) Standardize approach
6) Develop metrics
7) Make a plan and a strategy to follow it
Keep an organized system
9) What makes a great sales team makes any great business
10) Continue learning
For both 5 and 8, Britt cites specific examples I shared with her about W3i’s very talented sales team.
Twin Cities Young Entrepreneur Award Pictures
About a week ago on Twitter I posted a link to a picture I took of Daren Cotter (Cotterweb founder), Ryan Weber, and myself with the new Minnesota Timberwolves head coach Kurt Rambis as a part of the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal’s Young Entrepreneur Award event.
The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal posted quite a few more “official pictures” of the event on their Shutterfly page- http://minneapolisstpaulbusinessjournal.shutterfly.com/
To access the pictures, use the password- pictures
and click on the collection called “Young Entrepreneurs”. You’ll have to browse around a little bit to find the ones of the Weber brothers.
How Brands Can Drive Mobile Application Distribution
This post is in response to Ad Age’s How Brands Can Build a Successful App Strategy-
12 Lessons From Benjamin Moore, Bank of America, Kraft and Others article.
Is it about creating a niche application (see mickeylonchar’s comment), or is it about having an application distribution strategy?
Social media and existing assets can certainly provide a spark to your application distribution strategy, but what do you do if you don’t have many fans to begin with? For the #13th lesson learned, consider “Get other popular applications to recommend your application.”
I’ve been looking at vendors which might be worth considering to drive application recommendations. Here are a few I have come across-
AppsFire
PurpleTalk
MobClix
Pinch Media
Medialets
Mobile applications are a great tool for advertisers to increase engagement with their fans if advertisers can successfully generate wide distribution, but what about other application types? Other large media and e-commerce players are quietly getting very significant results from Windows applications and hybrid applications like Adobe AIR and Firefox add-ons. See white paper
GenY Entrepreneurship
I just started reading Donna Fenn’s new book, Upstarts (http://www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk/html/0071601880.html). I first heard about the book when Donna contacted me as part of her research. Donna has a great perspective on what drives today’s young entrepreneurs. Her perspective on GenY reminds me of a book I read on vacation a couple of months ago called Growing Up Digital (http://www.growingupdigital.com/Fthebook.html).
Two entrepreneurial stories in the book really hit home for me. The two stories were Nick Thomley’s Pinnacle Services and Matt Brezina’s Xobni.
Now 29, Nick created Pinnacle Services in 2000 to provide employment, housing, and in-home services to seniors and people with disabilities in Minnesota. Nick and I actually went to school together for a couple of years when we were very young. I bumped into him a number of years later through my sister-in-law Jennifer Castillo who does program planning for Hennepin County. More recently, Nick and I were honored as young entrepreneurs of the year by the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal (http://twincities.bizjournals.com/twincities/stories/2009/07/27/). Although I am not at all involved in the type of work Pinnacle does, I have a great sense of admiration for the risk Nick took to build a great socially needed business, and now topping $9 million in annual revenue, no one can argue with his success.
Matt Brezina co-founded Xobni in his late twenties. Xobni is a plug-in that brings Outlook to the Web 2.0 era. I have been a big fan of Xobni since I started using their application in March of 2009, and we became business partners in April 2009. The company I co-founded, W3i (http://www.W3i.com) helps distribute Xobni to massive amounts of new Outlook users. As Donna describes in her book, when it came to Outlook, would we have expected this kind of new innovation to come from software executives in their 40’s? Hardly…
Congratulations on a very interesting, well researched book Donna! I look forward to reading through the rest and sharing it with other young entrepreneurs.
Connecting the Dots
For my first personal blog post, I thought I’d simply list some of the other places you can find me active online.
1) W3i Blog- http://blog.W3i.com
2) LinkedIn- http://www.linkedin.com/in/robertjweber
3) Twitter- http://twitter.com/robertjweber