December 11, 2009 by mikemicucci
We’re happy to announce that the GroupSwim team and technology are now part of salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is a great company and shares our vision for cloud computing and collaborative social applications; we couldn’t be more excited. Stay tuned for some great stuff.
We deeply appreciate all the support from our team, customers, investors and partners. We could not have achieved what we have done without everyone’s enthusiasm, support and feedback. If you have questions or need help, you can reach us via the Pool or help@groupswim.com.
Thanks for your continued support.
Tags: GroupSwim, SalesForce
Posted in GroupSwim | 2 Comments »
October 7, 2009 by Jason
I just read a really excellent article “To Change Effectively, Change Just One Thing ” by Peter Bregman on the Harvard Business website. The premise of the article is focusing on one thing only is the best way to drive change. His primary example is dieting. Several studies on dieting show that they all achieve about the same results. Some combination of carbs, proteins, and fat will make you lose weight, but the combination really doesn’t matter. His deal is he quit eating sugar and lost weight. Sounds simple enough. He then goes on to cite other examples in the business world that are equally effective and true.
This got me to thinking about collaboration. We all get caught up in working hard and in the same way. On the other end of the spectrum, we often try implementing new tools or processes with lots of hoopla and effort. Changing habits is really difficult. By following this simple plan of changing one thing, you can achieve a positive result collaborating with your team or partners. Here are some ideas:
- Use a wiki page for all team status reports or meetings moving forward
- Assign one note taker for all meetings and rotate so that every meeting is documented with discussion points, decisions, and next steps – no exceptions
- Don’t ask any questions through emails – use a forum or other mechanism
- Use file-based documents as a last resort or only if you have to send them out externally. Otherwise, use a sharable web document of some kind
If you do any of these things, you WILL see a positive result in productivity. The point is it doesn’t really matter as long as it is one thing and meaningful. What is the one thing you would change?
Tags: collaboration productivity
Posted in Random | 3 Comments »
August 11, 2009 by Jason
Many of us in the business community grew up with Stephen Covey’s excellent book, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It is both influential and insightful. Unfortunately, Mr. Covey never wrote an important follow-up identifying the traits that people should avoid. Without further ado, I give you the 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People:
- Be the smartest person in the room – You have all the right answers so why ask others. It is a terrible waste of of your important time to wait for people to follow your train of thought. Chances are that you are absolutely right, so why bother? When you are the smartest person in the room, take advantage of it and don’t waste time soliciting input or advice you don’t need.
- Avoid making decisions – Making decisions is very limiting. Things change, markets evolve, and trends emerge. If you make a decision and set yourself on a defined course of action, you may miss a big opportunity. Plus, your organization doesn’t like having clear direction because it may stifle innovation.
- Maximize benefit for the present – The world is a turbulent place. Saving for a rainy day is for suckers. Spend your budget like every quarter could be your last. Nobody ever got a big payout or kudos for anything by coming in third. There is a good reason why the most highly paid baseball players are the home run hitters.
- Be dramatic – Most effective people I know command a room just by walking through the door. Communicate as if every thing has life or death implications, even when they don’t. Anger, fear and embarrassment are great motivators. Plus, being dramatic gets all the cards on the table. Bring every petty thought and personal emotion to bear in all situations. People will really understand you.
- Don’t listen to your customers – Think of the old saying about Henry Ford that if he listened to his customers, he would have built a better horse. Customers don’t know anything. They need to be led by the hand and require an enormous amount of overhead just to turn on their car. Are you seriously going to waste time listening to these people? They should be grateful that you are making products or services for them to buy.
- Interrupt people and talk loudly – Don’t be the person sitting on the sideline or in the corner with nothing to say. Put yourself out there. Interrupt people. You are smart and have insightful things to add. They will respect you for cutting them off. Also, it is very important to pitch your voice as loudly as possible to minimize any chance that someone doesn’t hear you.
- Why do something today when you can do it tomorrow – It is a very rare situation when something has to get done NOW. Most things are easily put off to another time. Deadlines are arbitrary and milestones are contrived. You are much better off doing things on your terms and timeframe.
There are many more ways to be very ineffective in life, but if you can pull off these 7, you are sure to be a complete failure. Did we leave anything off?
P.S. Thanks to Luke Ball for helping with this post.
Tags: 7 habits, Business, Habits, Success
Posted in CMC, GroupSwim, Random | 3 Comments »
August 4, 2009 by Jason
I love RFPs – I hate RFPs. I love them because they mean I’m competing for business and new customers/money are on the line. I hate them because they are a pain in the a$$ to do. Fortunately, there are ways to make them easier to process. Here is a best practice on how to respond to an extensive RFP. This post deals primarily with the process for getting the RFP done. I don’t get into the content or strategy for the actual response.
- Receive the presentation – The prospect will usually email the RFP to you. It typically takes the form of a Word or Excel document. Some have web tools but these are rare. Instead of just forwarding the email to the 10 people on your team who usually help you, upload the file to a collaboration site like GroupSwim. There are many benefits for doing this:
- Archive the RFP as a master document
- Make it easy for people to find it in the future
- Link to it as you complete other activities
- Plan the work – Don’t just dive in and start answering questions. Treat it like a mini-project. Read it thoroughly and figure out who the best person is to respond to the different questions. In some cases, you may do the entire thing and this step is either very fast or irrelevant. In other cases, you may have upwards of 10 to 20 people who are responsible for contributing. Once you’ve come up with your plan, document it and communicate it with a wiki page that is linked back to the document. This allows people who are working on the RFP to instantly link back to the original document and will serve as an instant status update on progress. Have them update the wiki page as they complete their work so everyone is on the same page, literally.
- Create a template – Instead of 1) sending out the document, 2) asking people to fill in certain portions, and 3) pasting them all together, you should create a template using a wiki page or multiple wiki pages. This allows you to track progress more effectively, eliminates issues with version control or people overwriting each other or hand offs, and makes it very easy for your contributors to work. They don’t need any software, just a browser.
- Review the RFP sections – It is crucial for one person to own the final RFP and complete an edit. If you are like us, we have multiple people writing copy for the document. Each person has different writing styles and phrases. It is best for one person to do a final sweep through the entire document to make minor edits and ensure the voice, style and demeanor of the document is consistent.
- Send it to the prospect – There are two ways of doing this. The first, and most common, way is to take the content out of the wiki page(s) and paste it into the original RFP document (make sure to save it as a different version for future reference). The second ways is to share the wiki with the client so they can collaborate with you in real-time. This way, they can ask questions or get clarfiication in the actual document and your team can see their feedback. Trust me, the prospect will be impressed with your professionalism and technical saavy.
For one page RFPs, this process may be overkill and unnecessary. For long multi-section documents, this is absolutley critical for processing the RFP quickly with a high degree of quality. The added benefit of following this process is the work is captured and searchable when the next RFP rolls in.
Posted in CMC, Enterprise, Release | Leave a Comment »
July 15, 2009 by Jason
A prospect asked me an excellent question today. He wanted my opinion if Q&A (one of our upcoming features) would work for sales people. The typical objection he described is “sellers need answers very fast. Rather than using an on-line application, they will either walk down the hall, pick up the phone or send an e-mail directly to the expert who knows the answer. Therefore, for sellers at least, using some kind of Q&A technology, is futile.”
With most of the current slate of products and services available on the market, I agree with him. However, I think things are evolving fast and this objection and situation will be gone soon. Companies are going to need new technology (like GroupSwim) to harvest the critical information that passes back and forth in these emails and meetings to compete and scale their sales force. We all know it can take weeks or months to bring a new sales team member up-to-speed. A great question and answer solution like ours:
- Ensures the answers are right
- Involves other teams who can contribute to the “knowledge base”
- Makes it easy to use and find answers fast
This new technology DRAMATICALLY reduces the time a new sales executive needs to start working on prospects. One of our customers who is a VP of sales told us he had a new sales account exec ready to go in a matter of days when it used to take weeks or months. The benefits are even great if the product or service sold is complex or varies in different situations.
The content in the question and answer application also accelerates sales cycle. Once many of the typical questions get answered and documents are added, the sales team simply searches for what they need and then continues with the pursuit. They don’t need to walk down the hall, pick up the phone, or send an email any more – this saves time so they have more cycles to continue working on their quota.
As the technology matures and people can use it in the course of their work, it will become more natural to use for sales teams. I think for now, the VPs and executives who realize this are already forcing change (some of our customers). I think more and more of them will come to this conclusion over time.
As for the speed of response, the RSS feeds, Q&A workflow and email alerts can be tuned so that answers won’t sit unanswered. It also allows other experts (professional services, engineering, etc.) to participate which improves the quality of the answers. Finally, I think we’ll see goals and bonuses tied to participating in Q&A solutions in the future. What do you think?
Tags: collaboration, GroupSwim, QA, Question and answer, Sales
Posted in GroupSwim, Strategy, Trends | Leave a Comment »
June 29, 2009 by Jason
Many companies use contractors frequently to support their business. These virtual or “temporary” employees serve significant roles that a company doesn’t have or doesn’t wish to retain on an ongoing, fully employed basis. They perform important tasks such as:
- Sales augmentation
- Marketing
- Public relations
- Web development
- Human resources
These are core skill sets for a company’s ongoing success. Ironically, these people are often poorly connected into their clients and rely on email to perform their work. They struggle to communicate and collaborate effectively with the company, whether it is in their best interest or not. When their contract ends, they walk away with the majority of the experience and learning they gained. This isn’t something they intend to do – it is simply the way it works in most situations.
There is a far better way to work with contractors to not only retain their valuable knowledge but also make them more effective while working for you. Using GroupSwim, you can make them a part of your company without the overhead or trouble:
- Collect documentation and processes to ramp new contractors up quickly
- Create groups for different firms or contractors and work with interactively
- Use web documents (wiki pages) to track versions and work collaboratively with them
- Discuss issues and questions using a private forum
- Document issues, track milestones, and measure results
- Amass emails from prior engagements and add new information as it is created
- Manage important files and documents to find them in the future
GroupSwim offers the features and flexibility to maximize your investment in contractors. Using email as most companies do is wasting money letting valuable information walk out the door.
Tags: collaboration, Contractors, GroupSwim
Posted in CMC, Enterprise, Methodology | Leave a Comment »
June 10, 2009 by Jason
I don’t do this much on the Diving Board but I’ve recently used 3 products that completely blow my mind. Here they are:
ZipCar – this service allows you to reserve cars in large cities. It is an awesome process to see unfold. You reserve the car on the internet, go to one of many lots where they sit, flash your card on the windshield and you are ready to go. You can extend your reservation through a very easy to use phone system, gas and insurance are included, and it could not be easier to sign up and get started. If I lived in a big city where ZipCar was available, I would use it in a heartbeat and not buy my own car.
The Kindle – I doubt I’ll ever buy a physical book again unless it isn’t available on the Kindle. It is very comfortable to hold and use. The interface is intuitive and quick to learn. You can download books instantly and start reading. This is actually dangerous because it is so easy to spend money. I even got two bonuses I didn’t expect. First, I’m reading much faster. I know it doesn’t take much time to flip pages, but it does take some time, you need re-balance the book in your hand after you flip, etc. With the Kindle, you click a button and keep reading. There is no time elapsed between pages and you literally read faster. Second, you can email in long PDF documents that sit on your desktop that you never read or have to print out. Things like white papers, analyst reports, etc. are much easier to read on the Kindle than reading on the computer.
Safari Browser – I use many browsers these days, and Safari is much better than FireFox (which I’m completely done with) and better than Internet Explorer. It is blazing fast and extremely easy to use. I recommend trying it.
Posted in CMC, Random | Leave a Comment »
June 9, 2009 by Jason
Gartner is currently hosting a Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit in Orlando. One of the sessions was to present the Cool Vendors in Portals, Content, Collaboration and Social Software. Go figure but we were voted the coolest. We found out by seeing a bunch of folks at the conference tweet that we won on Twitter. I’m not a big Twitter user but I have to give it a shout out in this case.
Tags: Cool Vendor, Gartner, GroupSwim
Posted in Analyst, CMC | Leave a Comment »
