Business and Karma

If your business is to succeed, you must remember to sit on your customer's side of the desk to keep you centered and to make sure you are providing the true value of your experience.

Too often, when we are focused on getting the customer to buy, it's hard to for us to get out of our own way. Ask yourself this question; When you are visiting with a customer, are you ACTIVELY listening to what they are saying? Are you listening to only what you want to hear?

We often find when visiting with a customer that their previous engagements were more manipulative and directed than open and focused. If you are attached to you own success and not focused on making the best possible recommendations, you create potential roadblocks by limiting the customer's comments, your ability to engage on key issues and you may loose the deal or a long term relationship.

Listening can be tough. Sometime they are telling you that your solution won't fit. Sometimes they are telling you they may not have confidence in your abilities. That's OK! The more you can get your customer to open up, the greater your ability to craft a solution and a proposal that hits all the points. You can also powerfully position your organization as the "best of class" in the way you engage and provide relevant insights.

If you take the steps necessary to engage and listen with intelligence, your success will go beyond closing that deal, but rather business karma will keep you and customers open to everything and attached to nothing. It may also create references and referrals to other business that will reward your patience and diligence in delivering the best solutions and an attentive ally in meeting their needs!

Be Equal to the Challenge

With a great President-Elect on deck, the challenges will no doubt be huge and will demand every ounce of strength, intelligence and support our new Commander in Chief can muster!

There are equal challenges in the business and financial marketplace, which should be helped by the new government's awareness of the pain the economy and world events are creating.

You might ask, what can I do? The answer is to re-think you and what you are doing to improve your situation and by default, those who depend on you! In the good old days, it can sometimes be easy to be complacent and forget how you got where you are in the first place.

When considering marketing and web applications as technologies, a similar self-examination needs to take place. Customers are SO BORED with flash and confusing web pages . . . they don't have time. Any technology seeking to draw their commitment is: 1) not going to insult their intelligence and 2) will be intuitive to their search criteria.

Can you honestly say that your lead capture tech creates this environment? If not, there are specialist like us that have taken the time to understand and leverage the true advantages that exist on the Internet, if properly deployed, managed and executed.

In these dire financial times, interestingly enough, the uninformed start cutting marketing and advertising resources. Be equal to this challenge by getting ahead of the curve and create understanding around how your company can TRULY achieve more sales with less.

That may take the target reticule off of you and focus it on other dead wood that doesn't have the same drive and aptitude represented by you making intelligent recommendations and crystallizing the opportunities to accomplish reduction with an uptick in lead conversions and sales productivity!

It's out there . . . and it's all good! Go, Do, Be!

Be Relevant

In this day of shrinking budgets, it's increasingly necessary for technologist within organizations to take an active role in advocating technology driven by cost optimizations. There are several reasons this technology "evangelism" will highlight your evolving role as the next generation, instead of what exists.

Understand, it's not IT's fault. The traditional mode is being ignored when things are working fine and vilified if something breaks. Noone in my experience really "enjoys" the constant pressure of IT, wringing more from less, managing challenges and long range planning in the same timeframe. Inevitably maintenance and moving parts allow the system to take on a life of its own because path of least resistance replaced migration and re-thinking how to assemble MAT applications into a cost-efficient and cost-effective way to manage leads and prospects.

Here are the reasons why you should become a technology advocate:

1. Being advocate broadens your role - providing better visibility and can develop a charter that exceeds the normal ho-hum of back-office maintenance.

2. Outsourcing Applications - makes more room for your team and staff to have better control of your monthly costs, offering the potential to "package" certain funtions that can be done more effectively via outsourced organizations.

3. Cross Application Advantage - means you have exposure to more resources in solving problems that are similar to MAT, and offer solutions that are relevant to that department and their application issues or problems.

4. Poised for Change - means you're not waiting for the CIO or CFO to have the "budget" conversation. You can present your manager with answers that have been researched with the future and smooth, seamless migration, instead of knee-jerk reaction.

Whatever your goals in your IT organization, MAT is a great way to sell the sizzle and inject yourself into a world in which results bring money, credibility and career success.

You also start remembering why you got into IT and the potential that intelligence of forethought can render technology answers that offer orders of magnitude in response to your prospects, customers and important internal constituents.

Stand up and be noticed - Be relevant!