Beer Friday

February is the shortest business month of the year. You could count December with the week break between Christmas and New Years, but in February you only have 28 days total, and only 20 business days. Then add in President's Day, Valentine's Day, and the fact that is snowy in a good portion of the US, it is hard to get anything going in this month.

If you had ran your January effectively, you could have set a good number of appointments for this month. Or better yet, the appointments you set in December for January are starting to gain traction and hopefully move toward reaching a deal.

However you decided to work your sales strategy this month, it is in my humble opinion that if you can have a good month in February, you can have a good month anytime throughout the year.

Today is the last Friday of the shortest month. If you've been able to make February a good month, time to have a beer to celebrate.

If you were unable to get through, use the final day on Monday to make March a good one. End of quarters usually are a good thing. But today, it's Beer Friday. Time to accept the month for what it is and move forward.

Have one with friends and/or co-workers. Blow off some steam, don't be sloppy, and turn up your radio.

Sales people need time to reset. And as the saying goes, it's 5:00p somewhere. Well, If you work in the east coast, let's start 5:00p right now.

Have a safe weekend and congrats to you for getting through February.

JB

The Cloud and AD

When will AD move to the cloud?

What will happen when it does?

In my humble opinion everything is becoming virtualized. It is only a matter of time until it happens to AD.

I think the pathway is first going to happen with Exchange. Since exchange is going online with Outlook Live (and I've seen Live@edu for education), this appears to be a test run for early adopters of cloud technology... at least for Microsoft.

Google is making a big move into markets, issuing their applications seen in business, education and government. I wouldn't be surprised if they transitioned  into an android based desktop system where they develop their own version of AD which would be cloud based. But I digress.

If IT departments get used to life on the cloud and its benefits, they will be more open to taking their AD online.

Once we get through the first wave of testers, and the flaws are addressed and fixed, it should penetrate to the next level of those interested in new technology.

In the book Good to Great, they talk about cycles of adaptation. My guess in 10 years that this discussion will be hilarious, thinking of local servers, etc.

Helping versus Selling

I wrote the other week that helping is better than selling. It is so true.

My mindset has been altered because of this new focus. I really think that those who help are going to be looking from the perspective from the customer much more than yourself.

The word "sell" instantly makes you think of the "seller." Gitomer talks a lot about "people don't love to be sold, but they love to buy." His theme is focusing on the needs of the buyer, which is a step in the right direction.

I've read a little of Darren Hardy recently, where he wants you to get into the mindset of replacing the letters "Sell" with "Help."

This approach works better for a couple of reasons. Mainly you still think in terms of you when you "help." But your actions are selfless and focus on the next person. At least for me, thinking from the other person's point of view is difficult, because everyone is unique. I can generalize and think about how I think they will act, but truly it is a guessing game.

When you think of "help," you know yourself and how you can help. The conversation becomes more about their needs without performing an internal brain-switch. You listen better to what they want versus guessing what they want, and you can control your actions in terms of helping them.

Getting deeper in conversation and truly helping your client (or friend, family, whoever), the word "selling" is almost forgotten.

I need to research who said this, but it was a good quote: "whoever can help the most people will be the most free/successful." Please correct me on this, doesn't sound right. But you get my point.

People are rewarded for helping others. Be the best helper you can be.

What can AD do in the future?

What do you think the 10-20 year plan for Active Directory should be?

I think that it's core strength is the security and integral function it has with connecting users and businesses at a company. For authentication purposes, having a consistent user name and password in your organization will help keep the management of user accounts.

As companies and IT departments keep adding databases, software, and other applications, managing user accounts are going to be more complicated, requiring increased connectivity of new programs and legacy products.

ERP programs are going attempt to pull away the central source of data and user management away from AD, while AD is going to try to hold its ground by integrating with other programs. The key to AD's success is the ability easily integrate with new applications via their authentication tools.

Especially as new programs become hosted on the cloud AD needs to be able to security provide means to identify users.

Let's not forget social media.

Facebook is authenticating users more and more. They're the largest web-site visted in the world every day. How soon before they develop a tool to connect users to their company and tie in company certified/approved resources? Today, you can use Facebook to authenticate Groupon, share with Pandora, Yahoo, and much more.

Perhaps if AD could serve as a back-end to a social media-like site for companies? The database is already in place for storing information, what it needs to do is allow for simple authentication between programs with a point and a click.

I would venture (hope) to say that the Active Directory of the future will look more and more like a website and their tie-ins to other programs will be more standardized, so deploying new solutions will dump/share AD data easily for these programs to use at your company.

And from a management perspective, if AD can keep up with the latest trends of new applications, managing users will be as easy as managing privacy settings on Facebook (well, they still need to figure that out. But you get my point).

JB

Manage expectations

Have you ever been trying to manage expectations of yourself and your customer? It's a very delicate process indeed. Truly, it is about the customer. And the golden rule is simply this:

Whatever you promise, make sure you over deliver.

Not a lot of time this week do dwell on the blog, but enough food for thought to consider when you are sizing up your opportunities and the opportunity your customer sees in you.

JB

A quick look at ADAM

My company has been working with ADAM or ADLDS for some time. They work much more on Active Directory nowadays, but there have been instances where ADAM has been the directory of choice at customers.

A coworker showed me how easy it is to build an ADAM directory. If he didn't fat-finger a key or two, he could have done it under 1 minute. Do that with active directory and you have yourself a career for life.

We went over how you can basically test with ADAM, screw up, throw it away and just build another one. Since it is so light (that's what the L stands for in ADLDS), you can experiment and keep what you like and toss what you don't.

Try that with AD, and you have a world of trouble. AD is tied to too much and is much too heavy.

What was interesting to see was how unfriendly their native tools are to manage attribute information. The AD native tools were pretty straight forward. They're the least ugly of the two step-sisters, but you get nice and neat forms to enter logical data. ADAM's tools are so basic, you truly need to know what you're doing.

When you go in to enter a date, you have to save that in terms of number of milliseconds that have passed since the year 1602. Why God, why?!

There are many other ugly examples, but it still can be very useful.

If you want to keep a database of users, customers, or other sets of people separate from your AD or other databases, ADAM can be the way to go. There's much more to say on this topic. I'd be curious to hear what others think about this view.

JB

Always Learn More

In sales, which is equally a similar microcosm of life (forgive my dramatic pause early in the blog.), you are taught in the old-school sales books to remember ABC. In life, that's your ABC's.... in sales it means:
A - Always
B - Be
C - Closing
"Always Be Closing" - Alec Baldwin's famous speech in Glen Gary, Glen Ross (language)

Well, there are lots of things we should be doing "always." Staying in shape, eating right, working hard, etc. The focus of today is Always Be Learning (and if just watched the Glen Gary clip, I crack up thinking if Alec tried to get us to "Always be Learning " with the same speech).

There's always something to learn. If you read a sales book, I'm sure there's at least one nugget you can take and apply to your profession. A good book would be worth lots of nuggets. Sometimes you catch things you never noticed when you reread a good book. But unless you make time for it, you're going to be missing out on a lot of nuggets.

The same can be said for live events. How hard are you seeking to get nuggets from a live session? There are lots of seminars going on all around you but you aren't going. You not only have a big learning opportunity, but you also have a large networking opportunity.

Who else goes to seminars? Those who are proactive in their learning process. And I would be willing to bet money that those people also do better at their job than their peers.

I found two sources of good information for webinars, seminars, and reading: BuyGitomer.com and Success.com. Sign up for their free weekly e-zine. But here's the trick, especially if you already subscribe:

READ THE ADVERTISEMENTS - that's where you'll find more reading and events.

If you're going to stand up ahead of the competition, not just competitors but also those who you work with, Always be Learning. It's a discipline you have to make time to do.

JB

Learn by Doing

Sometimes the biggest teacher in life is experience. Making mistakes, figuring out solutions, and getting your hands dirty is a great way to learn any process.

In my line of work I talk a lot about IT software and work with a number of customers on business solutions. A lot of times I have to answer if we solve a problem. Most of the time we can, but I take for granted the amount of work required to get the job done. I would imagine life of a consultant would be similar.

As an added value, I started doing some of my own "pre-sales" work with my software. I am reading the docs, trying to install the program, customize it, and make it look like the solution my customers have wanted.

When I worked in advertising, we called that a proof. I suppose that you would call that a "use case" or "proof of concept" in software. The idea in advertising was to get the account to see their name in lights. That way it reduces the amount of creativity you ask the customer when visualizing the solution. If your customer can't see themselves in it, it is that much harder to move forward.

That's what I'm doing with my solutions. Essentially I'm removing the part of the process that involves asking the customer to "imagine your company using this program." Instead, I'm setting the program up in a layman's version (very layman in my case) of how the solution would work.

So to all techies out there, if you are looking to help move your solution into production, painting the picture will not only uncover challenges with your ideas, it will teach you more about the process and allow for a better discussion. No one should buy on hypothetical.

JB