By Eliot Burdett
Eliot Burdett, co-managing partner of Peak Sales Recruiting, shares his thoughts on last week’s launch of a new initiative in Ottawa to help build stronger sales-based companies.
The Sales Leadership Initiative hosted its first event last Friday morning, with bestselling author Jeffrey Gitomer speaking about the importance of sales culture and what it means to build dominating sales organizations.
More than 200 execs and sales leaders packed the event, which was sponsored by Peak Sales Recruiting, RIM, Bell, Telus, Corel, the Ottawa Business Journal, CFRA and Sherwin Kaldeway. The OBJ also reported on the event.
The Sales Leadership Initiative (SLI) is a not-for-profit, community-based organization that launched earlier in the year to help Ottawa technology businesses grow larger and faster. The organization will increase and develop the pool of sales talent and leaders and raise the profile of Ottawa as a center of sales excellence.
As SLI co-founder Brent Thomson put it at the opening of the event, “we are very strong at creating technology in Ottawa, but we have struggled to build companies that can outsell their competitors worldwide. For many of our companies, sales is an afterthought, when it should be the only thought. We are here to help make that happen.”
Peak supported this event because we believe that local companies need powerful sales functions in order for the city’s economy to thrive. We have clusters for technology, marketing, finance and even operations, but until now, there has not been an initiative focused on making sales paramount. The irony of this is that with the current limited availability of investment capital, there can be no marketing, engineering or operations unless there are strong sales. In effect, sales have become the fuel for the engine of innovation (if it wasn’t always). This is a critical issue for Ottawa.
Without sales (and revenue), the part of this town that is not funded by an external source – government or VC – will wither or die and that is hard for us to watch. The executives who formed the Sales Leadership Initiative have an immense amount of sales experience and want to leverage their success to help the community be stronger…and the Sales Leadership Initiative seems a perfect venue.
By Linda Forrest
It’s true, a lot of a PR consultant’s time is spent writing; writing news releases, backgrounders, bylined articles, biographies, blog posts (ahem)… all in the hope that interested journalists or editors will take what we’ve written and repurpose it or use it as source material to develop their own coverage of our client or its product. But an integrated approach to media relations recognizes that while a lot of the stuff we’re pursuing is print or online coverage, there are other media channels and formats that strongly influence decision-makers in the B2B marketplace, including radio and television. Each format has its place in your program and can have valuable impact when properly incorporated into your media relations activities.
The Buggles had it wrong, I’m afraid – video did not kill the radio star, at least when it comes to B2B marketing.
According to a recent article from btobonline, radio is very influential in this arena. “A study by Media Audit found that 55% of business owners, partners and corporate officers listen to the radio between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m., compared with 45% of the general population. The telephone survey, which took the pulse of 6,860 business executives in 88 U.S. cities in 2006 and 2007, also found that on an average day, 75% of these executives tune to radio, compared with 68% of the general market. According to the survey, the top radio formats for reaching business executives are: news/talk (21%), public radio (17%), country (12%) and talk (11%).”
We are lucky in Ottawa that we have a supportive and interesting radio program in CFRA’s Business @ Night. We often have our clients appear on the show, capably hosted by Greg Hebert, and have had a lot of anecdotal feedback from interviewees that not only does Greg do his homework but that they’ve been approached by customers and prospects to say that they heard the interview. When targeting a local initiative, this penetration can be very valuable and help achieve goals relating to local investment, attracting and retaining staff, and building corporate goodwill by highlighting the company’s activities in the community, among others.
National radio programs, like the Business Network on the CBC every morning at 5:45am, hit a much larger audience both numerically and geographically, and can provide a useful venue for your company’s leadership team to demonstrate their subject-matter expertise or contribute worthwhile dialog to conversations about pressing business issues.
Television has not yet been eclipsed by the internet as a key influencer of the business elite in America, those top executives who have the final say on purchasing decisions. According to the Ipsos’ BE: USA 2007, The Media Survey of the United States’ Business Elite, 70% have watched network television and 60% have watched cable television in the previous day, where just over 50% went online. The convergence of video and the web, though, has gained traction with nearly half having streamed or watched a broadband video from their computers in the last month.
As other bloggers have previously reported, print remains king. “The business elite turn to national newspapers first for deeper understanding of the issues that matter to them, particularly financial and business news (18% of the projected C-suite universe), as they trust newspapers to have the best journalists (28%) and reliable reporting (23%) … For keeping abreast of technology, this group of decision-makers prefers business magazines (22%), such as weeklies BusinessWeek (20%), bi-monthly publications such as Fortune (18%) and Forbes (17%), and monthly publications like CFO (15%). Business magazines are also this group’s primary resource for informative advertising (15%), general business help (32%), and information to manage their career development (29%).”
When targeting your customers, keep all forms of media in mind, not just print and online. There may be other channels that are more appropriate to deliver your message and your PR agency should recognize and pursue these avenues to ensure that your coverage is having the greatest impact on your target audience.
By Francis Moran
A fascinating array of new applications, ranging from a web site allowing private pilots and other airport nuts to share their enthusiasm and knowledge, to a sophisticated new system to reduce intellectual property contamination while writing software code, were demonstrated to a standing-room-only crowd last night at Ottawa’s ninth DemoCamp.
A new twist on the well-established forum for code jockeys and entrepreneurs to show off their latest projects was its move to the second-floor Velvet Room in the Byward Market, a literal and figurative step up from the grotty basement venue in which it had appeared in the past. While there were a couple of glitches, most notably a speed-challenged internet connection, the new room was a great venue.
As an inveterate traveller and wannabe pilot, my favourite demo of the evening was David Megginson’s Our Airports. David’s information-rich web site, clearly a labour of love, features details on virtually every airport in the world, with the site’s users adding their own particular insight, everything from the cheapest aviation fuel and reviews of the customs facility to where the closest java can be obtained, the latter being critical information for what David called “coffee-starved” pilots.
You don’t have to be a pilot to enjoy the site. Anyone can join, create a list of all the airports they’ve ever been to, and plot those airports on a map of the world.
A presentation by SIMtone CDU of what it called a “virtual personal computer” had at least one member of the audience scratching his head. I missed a good bit of this first demo but others clearly were wondering about its utility. The concept seemed sound and a logical extension of utility computing. Put everything — storage, CPU, applications, printing, the works — in the cloud and allow access to it from a browser, soft client or hardware terminal. Problem is, you need a computer to access your virtual computer which kind of obviates its value proposition.
Protecode, an Ottawa company that rolled out a few months back, demonstrated its intellectual property management system that allows every piece of code, whether originally created or imported from some other source, to be reliably classified and tagged, with code that might create IP contamination issues down the road flagged as soon as it is imported. The benefit, its developers argued, is that the exact provenance of every line of code is established.
An interesting application, Stockify, allows value investors to calculate whether a stock is fairly or over-priced, or represents a buying opportunity. I remain a bit confused by the application’s ability to amend an inputed growth rate for the company being researched, with the tool altering the growth rate both historically and going forward. I have promised to get together with the developer to further thrash out our competing math theories.
And, finally, PicSphere appealed to the former commercial photographer in me with its nifty browser-based application allowing on-site shooters to swiftly organize and offer for immediate sale the pictures they take at sporting and other events.
By Leo Valiquette
Print is dead.
That was the sentiment floating around when I returned to school to study journalism in 1997. The internet will be king, was the thought of the day, and that was still years before the pervasive, bandwidth-sucking web services we take for granted today.
But here we are and print still lives, though it is taking a back seat to the avenues for “citizen journalism” presented by the blogosphere and Youtube, as well as RSS feeds and other means of getting the latest news anywhere at anytime in the palm of your hand.
Nontheless, a media executive in a prime position to sing print’s funeral dirge still believes it has a future, even if it is likely to be somewhat diminished compared to the past. That man is Paul Miller (pictured), CEO of Tech Insights – a division of United Business Media that operates the prestigious tech journal EE Times. His team was in town recently to meet with local marcomm professionals and, among other things, explain how their company is incorporating the operations of local reverse-engineering firm Semiconductor Insights into its range of services.
Miller discussed the premature claims about the death of print in the broader context of the death of traditional media as the prime source of news and information. We live in a chaotic time, he said, in which companies with marketing dollars to spend don’t know what to do. Should they focus their spending on Google AdWords? Should they try to stimulate interest in their company’s technology and their own subject matter expertise in the blogosphere? Is there still value to be had through traditional media, be it in print, online, or both?
His take was that, despite all the sound and fury surrounding the funnels of community discourse now available online, there will always be a need for trusted sources of information with a track record of accuracy and impartiality. And for a company to adequately generate the right kind of buzz about itself, it can’t depend on any one avenue.
As we agreed in a chat after the event, it’s difficult to vet much of the content and the sources of that content in the blogosphere, never mind ensure what kind of audience is being reached through that avenue. As for Google AdWords, well, it can be a powerful tool. In the past week I’ve heard two different CEOs say how most of their new business now comes from Google hits. But once you have drawn that traffic to your website, what will visitors find? Are they greeted with concise and impactful information? Can they easily find what they need to have a clear understanding of your value proposition?
In other words, have you generated the right content to sell yourself with what visitors find on your website? And that brings me back to the start of this piece – the often exaggerated death of print. Print may diminish in importance, but the need to generate clean, accurate and compelling content will not, no matter which side of the PR-journalism fence you’re on. In this age of internet chaos, the need for expert storytellers as part of a well-rounded public relations and marketing strategy is greater than ever.
