man blind date

I met last night with a guy I was introduced to by mutual friend Seth Levine named Tim Merkel. We had a long conversation over draughts of Guiness about ideas and company formation. As it turns out Tim is doing professional services for the product my last company (Dante Software) created which was later purchased by WebMethods, and then again by Software AG. Tim's a great guy and was interested in how I came up with the idea for Dante and how we launched it. We were hitting it off great and the waitress came over to take our appetizer order. At this point we both had different but overlapping ideas about what to order and were busy deferring to the other when it struck me that this was so similar to the Seinfeld episode where Jerry has just met Keith Hernandez and Hernandez asks him to come help move his stuff. Kramer and George are both appalled that Jerry would succumb, having barely formed a relationship with Keith. It's the male equivalent to going to bed on the first date. Very funny episode. Anyway, just made me think of that awkward moment on the first date when you're picking out food at a restaurant. Sorry for the dating reference here Tim, but I think we had our first man date. I hope you had a good time Tim; maybe we could do it again sometime. :)

coffee and marketing

I've been helping on the marketing front and as far as I can tell there are five primary components:

1. Evangelism - If the market is not mature you need to create a value proposition that will resonate with buyers and educate the market. Note, this can take a while and is also why it is good to have competition. Didactic distribution.
   
2. Positioning - Know your product vs what other people are selling, accentuate the differentiators using as many keywords as possible. Note, this can be over engineered.
3. Landing - Build a compelling website and landing pages that are informative, appealing, and again, have lots of keywords. Design as a funnel to gravitate people towards certain pages that will result in a trackable lead.
4. Analysis - analyze where people are coming from, how many leads each source generates, and the quality of those leads by how many translate into prospects and customers. Use this analysis to improve lead generation and lead quality.
   
5. Coffee - Purely anecdotal but every good marketing person I talked to likes great coffee :)

Happy Marketing!


Coffee art courtesy of The Cup in Boulder

Larry David endorsing Obama

I think it's hillarious that people even acknowledge celebs endorsing particular political candidates. I mean can you imagine the number of candidates who would pay Britney to endorse their rival?? Huffington had this post today about Larry David's endorsement of Obama. I must say they are at the least, entertaining.

From Larry David:

"I mean, haven't we had enough with Bushes and Clintons and Bushes?" he continued. "The country needs a shower, a good, long, hot shower. That's what Obama is, a hot shower. So fresh you can smell him. Delicious."

Predicting polling outcomes

One of the flat out coolest things about the technology we're working on at Collective Intellect is the analytical output. We have a model in place using our proprietary sentiment algorithm and volume to analyze blog posts leading up to caucuses and primaries. It is fairly accurate in it's predictions, much more so than just analyzing traditional media. You can check out the full post on our company blog that goes into more detail and see below our summarized results of the NH primary.

yoda or ET?

I have this wonderful painting of Yoda hanging up in my condo (yeah, pretty geeky I know). Anyway, the owner of the condo is trying to sell the property so I have to endure showings about once or twice a week. Anyway, the tourist of the week took one look at the painting and said, "ooooh, it's E.T." Who the hell mistakes Yoda for E.T.???

Quarterly Management Meetings

Meetings, meetings, meetings. They're sort of a necessary evil to running a business. People need to communicate in order to synchronize efforts within and across groups. They can be a huge time suck. At Collective Intellect we were having weekly management meetings. These became laughable at some point due to the overall activity in the company. People were either traveling or knee deep in some project or other with too little time to formally sync every week.

Through the tangible and immediate need to get projects done the team has naturally moved towards more frequent, informal hallway, and highly efficient meetings. So the meeting needs have become more about steering than rowing. We recently decided to solve this gap by instituting quarterly management meetings. This is a technique we borrowed from my last company.

After being purchased by webMethods in 2003 I became part of the management team. We held quarterly meetings that were one quarter strategy and three quarters execution planning. We applauded the accomplishments from the previous quarter, discussed the failures, and talked about what we wanted to accomplish in the next quarter. Each department would present how they planned to support those quarterly goals. We would typically do two days and have dinner together on the night in-between. The dinner was a great opportunity to blow off steam and enjoy each other's company out of the trenches of day to day business.

We've had one of these thus far at Collective Intellect. It wasn't perfect. We've got work to do. But it's a great step forward in the maturation of the company.

hay field ice storm

Driving across Kansas last Thursday I came across this eerie hay field scene. I seem to be mesmerized by ice covered nature lately so thought I would share.

Eating your own dog food

Often in companies in which I'm involved, the quote, "eat your own dog food" occurs. The etymology of this phrase is apparently based on a circa 1970s Alpo dog food commercial where Lorne Greene professes the benefits to be so great he feeds it to his own dogs. This allegorical cry for using one's own products and services is neither appropriate nor in many cases doable. For instance, if you're Lockheed Martin you likely don't have a real need for a drone helicopter missile launcher, no matter how much you would like to use it on your competition. Closer to home, in my last company we built an enterprise software package for business activity monitoring (coined by Gartner as BAM). Using the software in a small but growing concern the size of Dante Software would be complete overkill where a simple spreadsheet would suffice.

We're in another round of similar discussions at CI and in this instance it seems altogether appropriate. In the current business we baseline, measure, and analyze the impact of word of mouth on a company's industry, products, and services. In this case, eating our own dog food is not just an exercise forced upon some unsuspecting corner of the organization, it is critical to our survival and growth.

wicked ice

Formed by water dripping off of other icicles off my roof.

success at sales

Just concluded another sales call this morning. Seems like I'm doing more and more of this as my career progresses. There's an inherent need in any technology company to be able to communicate the vision of the company and the industry in a comprehensive and credible way that co-opts the customer into a sense of purpose. Having been the evangelist and not the closer I've had an interesting vantage point into the selling process. I was talking to Glen Springer about this process today and here is what he outlined as the successful sales genome:

- Keep your promises
- Follow up on time
- Ask open ended questions
- Ask for the order

He also said that he had heard 78% of sales people never ask for the order. That's a fairly amazing statistic given how obvious the advice is, but I believe it's likely to be true. A great sales person has a killer instinct and knows when to go in for the close. I think most people in sales are just really great at socializing and while they do perform well they never become great. Having been in and owned startups during the bubble this was especially obvious. Selling in the bubble was like bobbing for water. Anyone without hydrophobia could do it. Once the bubble burst only the great sales people survived.