Some complain about the economy while others do something about it

Remember the saying, Everyone complains about the weather but no one does anything about it? At SJN Sales, we hear complaints about the economy. All. The. Time. Business is sluggish, even when your best clients make an order they want to discuss a payment plan, new clients want to try it free, etc. We've heard all these complaints and more from our customers. The way to feel better about your firm's economy is to do something about it--and you can. If your B2B channels aren't keeping you busy, let SJN Sales review your marketing strategies and evaluate how we might be able to help. We may even refer you to a lead generation vendor, or a social media consultant--if we can't do anything for you. But the first step is to take action.

The Fall Sales Season Wins Again

Thanksgiving is in the rear view mirror. Can you believe it. But wait, it's not time to review the year just yet. It's time to bring in new business and make sure that we don't end the sales year with any complaints that the SJN Sales team left revenue on the table.

Fall is the sales season that many senior SJN sales staffers look forward to all year. Once everyone is back from vacation, back to school season, and even Halloween are behind us, the real fall sales season kicks into overdrive at SJN Sales.

Since the early years of SJN, back before Facebook, we have noticed that as the first hint of the holidays approaches many organizations simply move into molasses-like slow motion and mentally cash in their chips and call it a year. At SJN, next week continues our very best opportunity to build sales for our loyal clients.

Revenue drives every action. We at SJN Sales close more Q4 business than at any company I have ever worked for. I think this is because we rigorously track patterns and activities, all year long, and of course year-over-year , of who will buy before the year ends because they have developed needs or budgeting systems that demand year-end project activity.

Reviews of staff changes, new product or services projects, and various real (and imagined) budget strategies allows our SJN Sales project managers to make well-timed and genuinely welcome fall closing calls on prospects who frequently tell us that, "other vendors have written off them until next year."

Our clients are confident that from now until New Years Eve, SJN sales project teams will be talking to every contact who murmured something earlier in the year, at a convention or conference, that causes us to believe contact will be welcome now. Wins happen, and the seasonal timing looks magical.

If we are not exactly on target we emerge, in over 80% of our calls, with a specific invitation for a meeting in the key building months of January and February. SJN clients do not complain about requests to make sure to "deposit that check before the last day of the year."

So if you've been considering a project through SJN's outsourced sales teams, this is a great time to take advantage of the 2014 pricing in your proposal. If you haven't asked for a proposal for services, it's a good time to do that.

If it's summer, The Educators are Meeting

It has been pointed out to me that my blog posts, during spring and summer conference and trade show travel, have dropped off to a nearly invisible level.

In my own defense: typing out posts about the cancer, biology, oncology, and other clinical science research and specialty medicine meetings on my calendar gets a bit repetitive. Especially for those who just aren't that jazzed by the latest development in customized gene therapies or sequencing speeds that boggle the mind, bring costs down for researchers, and eventually patients. New products, new proteins, new technologies, but no real bold-print, headline-grabbing buzz.

Now the longest day of the year is in the past and I am awash in education industry meetings. Educators meet during summer break - for obvious reasons. Less obvious is their taste for meeting locations that feature hot, sticky, humid weather and often minimal facilities. Budget conscious, I guess.

In any case: the big kahuna, The International Society for Technology in Education, is expecting over 18,000 attendees to plow through hundreds of booths offering, you guessed it, technology for education, and over 900 presentations presumably presenting positive ways to implement all that new tech. Atlanta, meeting the hot and humid directive, does feature fabulous facilities for all of these ed-tech geeks to meet, greet, and figure out how to get their favorite technology into budgets and classrooms, across the land.

School Nurses, the Online Curriculum Associations, Distance learning, Math teachers, Science curriculum specialists, College Financial Aid Officers, College Bursars, a plethora of Common Core and other curriculum working groups, school psychologists, principals, school boards, accredititation organzaiotns for every educational level and region, and many more educational specialty organizations, that I'll remember when I pull into San Antonio or Raleigh, are all meeting now, in late June and throughout July, with time off for fire works.

Each of these meetings has grown, is better attended, and has buzz, based directly on whether they are buying into the technology in schools buzz. If they aren't, they're still pretty small. Add automated health checks for students, empowering school bursars to auto debit fees, and voila, growing meetings and growing sales opportunities for the hundreds of start-ups flooding into the education technology space.

SJN Sales specializes in building sales for technology companies and service providers who leverage technology to make their customers' lives easier, more effective, and more profitable. Up until three years ago, SJN had one dedicated team that served all education specialty markets and those five people were plenty to handle demand on both tech companies wanting our services, and schools etc. needing what our clients were selling. Now everything has changed. SJN Sales has three full ed-tech teams and is hiring for a fourth. These specialized education market salespeople are in addition to the many SJN salespeople who sell security, infrastructure, and other enterprise solutions into schools and colleges.

Education technology is a market that has grown from a huge amount of money, a few years back when K12 and some of the earlier e-learning firms built sizable bases, to a start-up funding figure that, no-one agrees on as a number but all agree exceeds the total capitalization of several pretty developed countries.

Online resource explosion, 1 to 1 computing commitments at schools from preschool through university, Common Core (love it or hate it, everyone's got a new curriculum or tool for CC), STEM initiatives and their attractive funding bait, and perhaps most importantly, the realization that teachers decide what technology actually gets used in their classroom, have made one to one sales, based on relationships and knowledge of the whole education market landscape, including budgets, politics, and how both really work, critical to the success of every ed-tech vendor hoping to gain enough marketshare to stay in business, and grow.

I'm on the road with our education technology teams and I promise I'll report back with the latest developments and some predictions for what will sell and how SJN Sales will select the right ed-tech clients for the next years of change in US classrooms. 

HIMMS Orlando. Big Meeting. Big Announcements

The annual HIMMS meeting is on the must-attend annual meeting list for all SJN Sales healthcare team member calandars. There is simply no bigger, or better organized, way of checking in with the broadest spectrum of healthcare leaders, vendors, technology, and policy innovators. All in one place. A very crowded, map and game-plan required place. But its Orlando so we know its nice outside. There is no-one outside.

Sessions for everyone from those responsible for physicians coding patient data into the latest and greatest Patient Record Management systems, are especially popular. Now that EMR (Electronic Medical Records) are pretty much pervasive in provider organizations, good tips on how to get doctors and others who don't interact with th syste daily, or easily, are all the rage. I guess its no surprise that providers who see 50-60 patients a day, and enter the system to order tests, add chart notes, etc. get comfortable and faster, with an EMR than the specialist or even part-timer who enters his login far less frequently.

Technology innovations this year seem focused on making meaningful use, easy to achieve through easy to use solutions. What may seem obvious to an SJN Sales IT managed services provider or solutions developer, has been, as a rule, pretty slow to arrive in healthcare. There is still plenty of room to innovate by creating better UI, easier work flow steps, and more intuitive data entry.

It will take the rest of the week to chat with all the vendors and report on the really NEW, new solutions. But efficiency and ease of use, especially where coding comes in, are likely to be big take-aways at this meeting.

It's early. The first full day really so I feel certain that the exhibit hall will see more action as the various learning tracks leave time to explore.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is the Keynote Speaker on Wednesday -- Don't count on a seat if you haven't already registered. I think it says a great deal about the policy importance, as well as the high-level influence of attendees, that the keynote trnascends meaningful use, ICD10, and the other nitty-gritty topics we're hearing about in every nook and cranny of the Orlando Convention Center.

Have a good day. Call us if you're here and want to meet.

Work hard. Be Nice. Don't Holler at Anybody. How hard is this?

I just read a really thoughtful piece by Christina Trapolino, theoretically about the latest bad behavior, by David Marcus, the Paypal leader (who you would think would have learned from last years' PR melt-down). and the disappearance of internal communication in business. This is an important topic but I think a point buried in the lower paragraphs warrants a bit of thought:

"[the rise of] unchecked emotions from very visible corporate leaders, ... communications that should have been internal but did not stay that way"

At SJN Sales we have seen an upsurge in client and vendor interactions that reflect a lack of training in the business boundaries regarding emotional outbursts at work.

• Work hard. 
• Be nice. 
• Don't holler at anybody. 
• Leave the F word and your temper at home. 

Your colleagues at every level will respect you for it.

A belated thanks here,  to the fine people at the old-guard companies, IBM, Cerner, HP, AT&T, HCA, Pfizer, Roche, Glaxo, CISCO, Symantec, and others, that gave most SJN salespeople our training (including you George Tuning RIP). You were right: cleavage and cursing do not belong in business or church. Neither do loud emotional outbursts, name calling, crying, anything in a memo (now email) that you wouldn't post on a billboard, or firing anyone in public.

Happy President's Day from SJN Sales. And more sympathy to our snowbound colleagues and SJN Sales staff members. Weird winter weather is no fun during trade show season.

SJN Sales is growing fast enough that we need 3-5 new salespeople with extensive managed services, IT security, or professional services, industry experience, and a well developed sense of how to act at work. If you're interested in joining one of our teams, email me a note at dtaylor@sjnsales.com or Google+ me. We pay everyone a salary and bonuses. Even interns but that's another post.

Snowlanta Sympathy Card

To anyone who has the unfortunate fate to be spending an unscheduled overnight in an Atlanta area Home Depot, school, or Piggly-Wiggly, this sympathy post is for you. If you are one of those unlucky souls, the entire SJN Sales team, many of whom have slept on some pretty hard airport and Metro-Rail floors from time to time, send their best wishes for a speedy thaw and a rapid return to more normal seasonal conditions.

For you who suffer in unplanned storm shelter, we offer only a brief reminder of what a genuinely good reason to take a personal day is: you’re in it. Call the office (if you have battery) and tell them you’re offline until the giant ice-rink clears.

Do not attempt to muffle or down-play the sounds of the hundreds of people around you who are each calling their own offices, or trying to reach their kids’ school. Remind anyone, in less storm-stuck territory, how much confidence you have in their ability to handle anything that comes up, during Snowlanta, and then politely hang up.

Snow Days. Happen

This year’s polar vortex, snow-storms aplenty, etc. have given the clients and vendors that SJN Sales works with multiple opportunities to practice the skills of being productive, while working from your (generally quite comfortable) snowed-in home.

Email works pretty well for most communications. Yes, email is sometimes less than ideal for completing projects, deals, etc. But it has the undeniable advantage of maintaining radio silence between you, whomever is sharing your snow day with you, and the folks you do business with all year long.

This year, we are seeing an avalanche of bad outcomes from snow day communications that do not have the upside benefits of email.  Specifically, we have witnessed multiple conference call train wrecks over the past few weeks. Conference calls that left business in worse shape than if one or more of the participants had simply called off. Conference calls that made a few people laugh and one professional squirm. The conference call of too much information, that may yet lead to a divorce and the re-homing of an apparently nice dog, have led the SJN team to have a little chat about when conference calls are not worth the trip.

Conference calls are a way of life these days. The SJN Sales healthcare IT team, that I lead, has no less than a dozen conference calls planned in an average week. The advantages of linking people across geography, and companies, without schlepping on Southwest are well known. These advantages make most people’s jobs far more pleasant than in the old, on-the-road-again, days.
If you work from home frequently, you probably have a quiet sanctum where you can conference call to your hearts delight. It’s a great way to wait for the cable guy or avoid the worst commute day of the week. It also has made it possible for legions of salespeople and other road warriors to accommodate requests for call times outside normal business hours. So far, so good. Everyone wins with accessibility and fewer hours in the car.

Snow days, however, may change your conference calling environment, even if you normally have peace and quiet at your disposal. Kids home from school on the fourth snow day of the year are not as likely to maintain their inside-voice, volume controls, as the smiling cherubs who celebrated with snow angels, back in November. Pets, other adults trying to work beside you, and the occasional drop-in neighbor who thinks that everyone being home means it’s time to roam…your block, are all reasons that you too may need to call off, take a snow day and reschedule the call.

Failure to honestly evaluate whether your snow day calling environment has deteriorated to a level that makes rescheduling the call a good plan, is of course, a judgment call. But keep in mind, as you blithely offer to schedule calls from your home office, that it is far easier to schedule a conference call than it is to get out of a conference call gone terribly wrong. Your mute button will not save you from an ambient noise level that sounds like Bronco Stadium. Your mute button will help with a brief tickle in your throat, but will not rescue you from the impression left by a crying baby backed up by a seven hungry puppy orchestra.

“Daddy, daddy. I am not interrupting because it’s a real ‘mergency, this time.” will effectively end any productivity that the call you are on may have achieved. Odd pounding noises will cause everyone on the call to evaluate their own environment, and end focused-forward motion, even if no one knows that your house is the source. Hanging up and dialing back in, after you remove the hammer from Timmy’s hands, will let everyone know that the noise originated at your home, in Newton–but will not restore the sales call or project progress. End the call, and be thankful that most of us don’t have video conferencing to add images to the mayhem in the background.

We have technology to make seamless communication available throughout virtually any natural or personal calamity. But take a hint from Old Man Winter, and the veteran sales teams at SJN, who have heard your kids whine, your dogs howl, your adorable screaming babies, yipping puppies, and even the plumbing contractors fixing your frozen pipes. Send us an email. We’ll take care of the essentials in your absence. Reschedule the call.

Snow days happen. Go make snow angels with the kids.