No-Vacation Nation

No-Vacation Nation: 'As Long as There's WiFi ... I Am on the Clock' - The Atlantic

There's a lot to dig through at the link, and as it's vacation season, feel free to dive down that rabbit hole instead of working on something productive. Because what you'll see pretty quickly is that our national commitment to working ourselves too hard is ubiquitous, compulsory and unproductive.

With my company, even if I am sick or on vacations, I have...my laptop and mobile phone. I've gotten out of bed with 104F fever to speak with clients. I've left my mother's hospital bedside to return a call about a shipment. I've been in a kayak on a mountain lake and had a text...!' 

Emphasis mine. So who thinks that this worker's best abilities were brought to bear on the phone call from the hospital? How about the call returning the text, from the kayak? One of the most frustrating and least effective meetings we held this year was around the table at main office with a partner conferenced in from her own health care.

I like what I do, and it's (mostly) a pleasure to deliver results to SJN's clients. But I've also been in an ER, on the table, after a mountain bike crash that left me with 2/3 of a working lung.

The highly trained team of people who made a purpose-built port in my chest wall, got me breathing again, and set me up for a long life with a floating rib within 30 minutes after I came through their doors dying? They need to be on call 24/7, unless someone with similar skills is available to take over the tiller.

For the rest of us, the urgency we feel about being available for work is just a feeling.

"Can Software Prod Us Into Being More Civil?"

A nudge toward civility, professionalism and the kind of manners Mom would be proud to see?

Might not be a bad idea. For the whole team, not to single out anyone particular.

Nudge, Nudge: Can Software Prod Us Into Being More Civil? - The Atlantic

Hey, where is everybody going? It's not Xmas yet

The holiday "dead period" was , in each of the past three years, our busiest season. We are on track for this year to bring in even better sales numbers for our clients. The number one revenue day for our firm in 2010 was December 29.

 We keep year-by-year data on which companies, contacts, and projects within companies have a year-end spend-down habit. During the holiday season we focus more than our usual efforts on making sure that those targets have great opportunities to do their year-end buying with our clients. We also track which client companies use year-end to bring on new employees and make sure that those clients have all of the tools and services they’ll need to bring new hires into full productivity quickly.

The conventional wisdom that fall or spring is the best time to sell B to B services and solutions has not been borne out in recent years. The wisdom goes that by November and December, most companies have given up on fourth quarter sales and moved on to planning a more successful next year. However, we've noticed a trend against that CW.  Client solutions and services are moving, these last two months of the year, because buyers are pushing to implement, or at least purchase, new services and technology solutions before the end of the year.

Why?

• So they can qualify for current-year tax deductions and make certain that they don’t lose funding to some other department or initiative while they are out for the holidays.
• Many corporations, from huge to very small, try to have new employees in place for the first of the year. Managers want those new employees productive, quick. We motivate lots of sales by reminding our customers that new employees are the last people on earth you want finagling with out-dated systems or overwhelmed servers, or backed up service providers.
• In our era of economic uncertainty, many companies hold back on purchasing until their own year-end numbers are nearly locked before deciding which project and technology investments to fund.

In addition to our data-driven approach to recent year-end sales cycles, we also encourage our clients to put a full sales press into the field during the holidays because that effort, even when it does not result in November and December sales creates a critical mass of conversational invitations to close sales on January and February rather than starting the conversation in first quarter.

The holidays tend to feature two kinds of conversations, "Call me after the first of the year," and in-depth discussions with people who are not overwhelmed with their own work flow because "it's the holidays." Those conversations and access to key people who are ordinarily pretty tough to reach, keep us working through the season. Our clients start each year well ahead of competitors who are starting from a near blank slate when they return to the office after New Years.

Can we use Blogger to criticize Google?

More specifically, if you found us through Google or its search engine copycat (what, Redmond's water prevents you from writing algorithms?)--thanks for stopping.

But as a B2B sales and marketing firm, we're extremely concerned. SJN Sales depends on our clients, and their customers, accessing a web environment that balances accuracy and crowd-sourcing.

As shown in today's NY Times, the search behemoth makes it pretty easy to maliciously clobber a competitor's business, and they are giving some real lip service to trying something that might help with the problem in the future. Maybe.

Why Texting Is the Most Important Information Service in the World

Marketing 2.0 experts, all aboard. SMS is it.

Why Texting Is the Most Important Information Service in the World - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/why-texting-is-the-most-important-information-service-in-the-world/242951/

Good news for marketing 2.0 experts

Bad news for all the rest: Coke's marketing director for global agrees that SMS is the future of consumer marketing. For obvious reasons--mobile platforms are ubiquitous in developing economies chief among them--a web site isn't going to do it.

Google + and your leads

This could be the start of something big.

If you've asked yourself, How can my business integrate social networking, positive peer pressure and sales? we may be onto something here. SJN Group is developing a Google+-centered workshop for professionals who know they need to network, and would prefer to do more from the couch and less at cocktail parties. Watch this space for webinar announcements.