Professional Outside Sales

Slide make-over secrets by Idea Transplant

SR — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 07:03:23 +0000

You do not have to pay a professional presentation designer to do basic chart make-overs. Here are the secrets:

Take out ugly reflections, bevels, and huge shadows
Center things properly
Align and distribute any object on the slide
Cut words on bullet points
Group bullet point lists in sub categories
Take out random colors and replace with those in the logo
Remove Times Roman and Comic Sans and replace with Arial
Take out italics and underline
Round chart numbers and other financial information
No ticks on chart axes
Chart gap width to 50%
Titles all in the same place, on 1 line (chop words if necessary)
Replace fuzzy logos with hi-res ones
Fix hanging bullet points (i.e., the next line starts under the bullet, rather than at the indent)
Reset images to their original aspect ratio

After this, no need for a slide-make-over artist.

http://disqus.com/forums/slidesthatstick/presentation_design_blog_idea_transplant_presentation_slide_make_over_secrets/trackback/

Law of Comparative Advantage

SR — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:01:44 +0000

The Start-Up Law of Comparative Advantage

I can type faster than my assistant. If she is reading this blog, she may dispute this (and we may have to have a show down with the help of an online typing test), but I’m a pretty darn fast typer.

But, if my assistant were to sit in on my board meetings for me while I stayed back in the office and typed, I’m not sure my entrepreneurs would be very happy (at least, I hope not!).

Thus, despite the fact that I may be a faster typer than she on an absolute basis, it’s way more important for my job as a VC that I maximize my time working with entrepreneurs, something I am comparatively better at than she is.

This simple example is derived from an economic law discovered by David Ricardo that has always fascinated me, called the Law of Comparative Advantage. This law says that it does not matter whether a nation is better at producing a particular good on an absolute basis as compared to another nation. What matters is whether a nation is comparatively better at producing a particular good as compared to other goods it can devote its resources to producing relative to another country.

Unfortunately, I see too many founders ignoring the entrepreneurial corollary to this law, the Start-Up Law of Comparative Advantage. I’m no David Ricardo, but it seems to me that if entrepreneurs followed this “law”, the gains to their start-ups would be akin to the gains attributed to free trade. Here’s why: founders are typically gifted, multi-talented, versatile professionals. As such, they get sucked into spending time doing things that they may be better at than the others in their organization on an absolute basis, but that, comparatively speaking, they are worse at in relation to the handful of things that they are uniquely suited for.

I work with one founder/CEO who is so talented, I think he literally could perform the job function of each of his direct reports better than they could. But if he spent all his time doing operational project management or tactical sales activities, he wouldn’t be able to spend time on the things that only he uniquely can do relative to his teammates.

In a fast-growing start-up, a founder needs to be very protective and strategic with how they spend their time. Founders are always complaining that they are spread too thin, are overwhelmed with the job at hand, and struggle to figure out how they should be prioritizing their efforts.

I would submit that, above else, there are two areas a founder should not delegate: product and people. Product-related activities include developing customer intimacy (studying the “voice of the customer”), designing features, thinking through product strategy and setting priorities. People-related activities include hiring, setting the culture, coaching and mentoring.

If a founder finds themselves spending the bulk of their time on issues not related to product or people issues, they are violating the Law of Comparative Advantage. They need to rethink whether they’re delegating in the wrong areas, and not being (appropriately) obsessively hands-on in the right areas.

I remember reading once that in the early days at Microsoft, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer would review each other’s calendars on a monthly basis and give feedback to each other on where they should be spending their time. That concept has always stuck with me, and my partners and I endeavor to do the same periodically.

Try the following exercise: at the end of the week, write down the top 6-8 categories of time spent on your start-up (e.g., product, people, project management, operations, marketing, sales, investor relations, miscellaneous). Just as a lawyer would, track your hours at the end of the week by “billing” each of these buckets. When you step back and analyze how much time you are actually spending (as opposed to how much time you think you are spending), you may find you can make appropriate adjustments to better deploy your time.

Adhering to the Start-Up Law of Comparative Advantage may not earn you the Nobel Prize in Economics, but it will help you direct your time more productively when starting your company.

Posted on July 28, 2011 at 10:26 PM | Permalink

http://bostonvcblog.typepad.com/vc/2011/07/the-start-up-law-of-comparative-advantage.html

Chicken chicken chicken

SR — Tue, 24 May 2011 02:51:28 +0000

The Sullivan nod

SR — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 01:26:50 +0000

The Sullivan nod is a sales technique used to create a subconscious suggestion to a customer to purchase one particular item out of a list of like items. It is used most frequently by bartenders and waiters when reciting lists of items (such as alcohol or wine) in the hopes of getting the customer to select a particular brand. A Sullivan nod is executed by nodding slightly, by approximately 10–15 degrees, when the item it is hoped the customer will choose is reached. The key is to make the nod perceptible, yet subtle, so as to not distract. Originator, restaurant consultant, Jim Sullivan, claims that it works up to 60% of the time. (This in itself is another subtle form of manipulation, as “up to 60%” is essentially meaningless.) Sullivan developed the nod technique as a method to increase appetizer sales.

The term Sullivan Nod is referred to in the training pamphlet “A Hospitality Style of Service that Sells” given to new employees of the Bertucci’s Italian Restaurant chain. In an illustrative dialogue with a guest, it is suggested that the server propose a bottle of Chianti and the suggested dialogue concludes with ‘ “Shall I get you a bottle?” (Sullivan Nod)

Source; Wikipedia

Are Your Clients Friends?

SR — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:51:58 +0000

Making Meetings More Expensive – By Seth Godin

SR — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 06:33:50 +0000

…might actually make them cost less.

What would happen if your organization hired a meeting fairie?

The fairie’s job would be to ensure that meetings were short, efficient and effective. He would focus on:

Getting precisely the right people invited, but no others.
Making the meeting start right on time.
Scheduling meetings so that they don’t end when Outlook says they should, but so that they end when they need to.
Ensuring that every meeting has a clearly defined purpose, and accomplishes that purpose, then ends.
Welcoming guests appropriately. If you are hosting someone, the fairie makes sure the guest has adequate directions, a place to productively wait before the meeting starts, access to the internet, something to drink, biographies of who else will be in the room and a clear understanding of the goals of the meeting.
Managing the flow of information, including agendas and Powerpoints. This includes eliminating the last minute running around looking for a VGA cable or a monitor that works. The fairie would make sure that everyone left with a copy of whatever they needed.
Issuing a follow up memo to everyone who attended the meeting, clearly delineating who came and what was decided.

If you do all this, every time you call a meeting it’s going to cost more to organize. Which means you’ll call fewer meetings, those meetings will be shorter and more efficient. And in the long run, you’ll waste less time and get more done.

Secrets Behind Popular Presentations

SR — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 06:28:40 +0000

1. Popular presentations have more slides. While most presentations are short (19 slides on average), popular presentations are longer (63 slides on average).

2. Popular presentations use fewer words. On average popular presentations only used 24 words per slide.

3. On average women use fewer slides than men. Women use 18 slides per presentation while men use 20 on average.

4. Nationalities present differently. Japanese language presenters use the most slides on average—42 slides per presentation. English language presenters, on the other hand, use the fewest slides per presentation—19.

5. Apple Keynote users make popular presentations. While Keynote was only used by 2% of the presenters, 16% of the most popular presentations were made using Keynote.

6. Business, trends and statistics dominate popular tags. Tags are words used to describe presentations on SlideShare. The most popular presentation tags for 2010 included business, market, trends, research, social media and statistics.

7. Popular presentations don’t use serifs. While 10% of popular presentations used the serif font Times New Roman, the majority of popular presentations included fonts without serifs such as Arial and Helvetica.

The Ugly Truth by Timothy Taylor

SR — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 06:14:05 +0000

Facing down a world wracked with financial turmoil, Mark Carney brings many strengths to the table on behalf of Canadians: Harvard and Oxford training, years of experience in the private sector at Goldman Sachs. But Carney may also have another, less obvious competitive advantage: The current Governor of the Bank of Canada happens to photograph very well.

We’ve known for many years that good-looking people hold a special sway in the marketplace. As far back as 1994, a study by Daniel Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle (from the University of Texas and Michigan State, respectively) proved the existence of a “beauty premium”—in other words, attractive people tend to command higher salaries than their average-looking peers. The researchers based their study on data from the United States and Canada, but have since found similar results in the United Kingdom, Holland and China.

But why beauty premiums exist has always been a complicated issue. Sure, we like being around attractive people. But in competitive environments, it seems unlikely we’d happily pay for this privilege unless there was some other value added.

One suggestion is that income is less associated with looks than it is with self-confidence, to which good looks tend to contribute. At least, that was the conclusion of a Penn Institute for Economic Research study, published in 2004, on the correlation between height and income. The researchers confirmed that tall adults earned more. But they also found that tall adults who were short in high school did not earn a premium, while adults who were tall in adolescence did. Since we tend to develop our sense of self-esteem

during our teenaged years, this data support the theory that good looks and height are associated with premium wages because having those qualities when we’re young contributes to a lifelong sense of self-confidence. The marketplace, in this explanation of the beauty premium, rewards good-looking people for presenting and carrying themselves well.

That theory remains paradoxical, however, because presentation does not equal performance. Just because a person is cocky does not mean they’re competent. The explanation, then, could be that the rest of us are gullible. Markus Mobius of Harvard and Tanya Rosenblat of Wesleyan University explored this notion in their 2006 paper “Why beauty matters.” They found that good-looking people were indeed no more capable or productive at a simple maze-solving puzzle, yet, regardless of their skill, they tended to rate their chances of success much higher than average-looking people. Put simply, pretty people buy their own hype. And, crucially, so do employers, who in the same study consistently predicted higher productivity rates for good-looking candidates than for less attractive ones.

This version of the story isn’t very flattering to anyone, but it’s especially uncomplimentary to those living in North America, where beauty premiums for men and women run at 4% to 5%, according to Hamermesh and Biddle. (A 2004 study, published by the Journal of Applied Psychology, pegs the premium at an extra $789 annually per inch of height—meaning that if you’re six feet tall and your college buddy is only 5 foot 8, you’ll have earned $65,000 more than him before you meet up at your 20th class reunion.) It remains an open question as to why beauty premiums are only 1% in the U.K. Perhaps beauty and self-confidence are less persuasive there than a good family name. By the same reasoning, you’d expect North American culture—supposedly oriented to individual accomplishment and merit—to be less influenced by an attribute based on dumb genetic luck.

Both of these explanations of the beauty premium—call them the Self-Confidence Trick and the Gullibility Gap—lead to paradoxes that may suggest a third explanation entirely. Perhaps the market is efficient after all, because a real return is being generated for the beauty premium—only it’s in a currency that has so-far defied our ability to measure it. I’m referring to the possibility that we pay for beauty because we are prepared to pay for hope, just as we do when we buy lottery tickets. In this case, we’re paying a premium to convince ourselves that those we admire for being beautiful do indeed warrant admiration for being as good as they seem to think they are.

In this analysis, the beauty premium could be thought of as a kind of placebo effect, where some real value actually does derive from nothing. It simply makes us feel better, as much as science (or economics) tells us it shouldn’t. Which carries a certain intuitive elegance anyway, when we consider where the modern placebo story originated. Apparently

an Allied army nurse in southern Italy, under heavy German bombardment and in the absence of morphine supplies, was able to relieve an injured soldier’s agony and prevent the onset of shock by administering a syringe full of saline solution.

A clear market inefficiency, unless of course you imagine—through that soldier’s eyes, at that particular moment—how beautiful that nurse must have been.

Timothy Taylor is an award winning novelist and journalist. He lives in Vancouver.

Original Post Here

Losers Sell to Customers.

SR — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 06:06:18 +0000

How Hard do you Push a Prospect?

SR — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 02:10:25 +0000

How hard you can push a client or prospect depends on the size of your market, an obtuse example of selling Brushes door to door you can push as hard as you want… there is always another house just a few steps away.

If you were selling parts that only fit a Boeing engine… you only have one client and your ‘push’ has to be strategic not impulsive.

How big is your market? Should your pitch be pushy and impulsive or do you need a slow strategic campaign? Instead of a ‘push’, how to you get your client to ‘pull’ you into the sale?