We are looking for the following skillset. Please respond to info[at]enria.net to follow up.
Good core java skills.(preferably java 5 +), Understanding of struts frame work, Understanding of spring hibernate (latest which has annotations.), Knowledge on JDBC, sql(queries), Knowledge on servlets, jsps, html,xml, Experience in enterprise application development, Experience with Mysql, Experience with Linux RHEL 5 above.
This will be a contract position for 6mo with an option to convert to a permanent role.
Following my post on the Cisco EOS system, this is a continuation of the theme by developing a simple framework for SMEs for their websites.
There is a rush to embrace technology that is being thrown at companies at breakneck pace. Cloud computing techniques have enabled numerous service offerings which businesses have to contend with. Typical questions facing any small business are:
1. Should we blog?
2. How to use twitter?
3. How can we develop a community of users/customers?
4. My website looks stale compared to some others out there.
5. How do I deploy video? Should I?!
To answer these, consider a basic framework for classifying your assets and customer needs. This framework is specifically targeted for SMEs that have limited resources and want embrace technology in manageable chunks. It allows for reuse of core assets in a targeted fashion without disturbing the permanence of a stable home website.
The picture below illustrates the framework. This consists of primarily three categories: The Home Site, Microsite(s) and the Landing Page(s):
The Home Site:
The Home site is the basic information repository for a business. It presents Financial, Legal and Product Information in a structured format. It sets out the branding philosophy, ethos and strategy of the company. The site is mostly static, permanent and low maintenance.
Microsite(s):
Microsite(s) are deployed to stay current with the times and attract new customers. A microsite may share the company expertise in a specific area, or may be put together to capture all interactions during a seminar or event. The microsite needs to accomodate continuous change, be able to serve multiple media assets, and allow for someway to sense what customers are interested in. This is a primary place for business social networking and creating a buzz about something new. Ideally these sites will allow for some form of moderated customer interaction.
Landing Page(s):
Landing Pages are designed for handling specific transactions such as customer data capture, payment etc. It is important that there are no distractions on a landing page such as For Info Links or Pictures and Media. Validating data at the time of capture is the best way to keep your database clean. A well designed landing page will accomplish just this along with using modern (Web 2.0) techniques to incorporate intelligence in data capture.
The three sites described above are fundamentally different from each other. In future posts we will explore what engines can be used to drive specifically the Microsite and Landing pages that offers out of the box functionality to deliver effective sites. Developing a strategy for presenting all company data using the above framework is a necessary and sufficient condition for achieving most business goals. Organising your company assets to be served effectively through these three ‘channels’ can help significantly improve your communications and customer engagement.
The Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group) has recently been incandescent with enthusiasm. A new protocol called Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) is set to unleash a new era of machine to people communications.
Why Bluetooth?
Bluetooth is by far the most successful communications protocol. According to Mike Foley, the head of Bluetooth SIG, there are around 20m bluetooth enabled devices in Healthcare applications alone. Made popular by the hands free headset for mobile technology, Bluetooth is also the connectivity of choice for mobile phone to laptop connectivity, especially for transfer of images and content. The Bluetooth protocol is also designed to be secure, license free and largely interoperable.
Why LE?
The Low Energy protocol is new to Bluetooth. In fact, the specs are still not complete and will be released later this year. In simple words, Bluetooth Low Energy is a cut down version of Bluetooth standard to the point that you can run Bluetooth enabled devices for an extended period with a coin cell battery. This has huge implications. Suddenly, every sensor based device you can imagine can send signals indicating its reading to a local collector. Using Gateway technology, this collector can forward on the reading to a web address that can record and trend the readings. If the collector Gateway is your mobile phone, you can pick up reading from whereever you are and send it to your personal recordbook on the web. A practical example could be a Bluetooth LE sensor enabled pedometer that transmits a record of distance run to your personal fitness portal. Or your prize rose bush that is in full bloom indicating that its lower roots feel a tad dry today.
So Whitter? I mean Why Twitter?
It is just a mashable extension of possibilities that there is an opportunity for converting machine talk into useful streams of information delivered through twitter. The Low Energy standard has defined very specific parameters that will be transmitted by the LE device. The standard ”Attribute Protocol” identifies the Attribute itself (such as temperature), its value ( 20 degrees) and its handle ie. an address to access it. The devices are optimised to send and receive Attribute data quickly with minimal power consumption. There is no processing of the data in the device, instead this is all expected to be done at the server end. This approach enables the server to query the attributes at periodic intervals and create meaningful conclusions from the trend. These conclusions can be converted to short messages of information which can then be broadcast (or recorded privately) by the server.
Herein lies the opportunity for making meaningful twitter streams from LE devices. A lamppost could count the number of people passing by it and twitter about how busy it is today on the street (not very useful) AND if required twitter that its lamp is failing (very useful). A rain sensor outside your Devon holiday home could twitter about the weekly rainfall it has seen. Your 8AM train can twitter that today its running 15 minutes late and is carrying a full payload!
For public information systems and environmental awareness, twitter could be a possible platform to make LE devices communicate useful data in plain English. You could ofcourse choose not to follow!
Cisco has jumped into the content management race with its EOS platform. Build specifically for media rich sites, EOS claims to be highly modular, flexible with skins and practically code free for the content publisher.
The focus is geared around content delivery and user experience. The platform is merely a vehicle. Cisco is leveraging its strength in bandwidth infrastructure and taking a bold step into the world of CMS to enable underlying demand. Delivering media and rich content will eventually drive bandwidth hunger. By providing a single platform and an SaaS model for customising, publishing, monetising and reusing content, Cisco EOS is promising to raise the game in rich content delivery.
As a start check out a Brand Manager experience with Cisco EOS in this video. The modular nature comes across neatly in the channel grid layout of the UI. This help keep the look clean and content in its place. Site parts are logically separated into Site Pages, Global Nav and Footer and Modules for User Interaction. User profiles appear to have good level of customisation differentiating between administrators and developers - roles which may have intense interaction but at different stages in the page life cycle.
Cisco EOS has also done a thorough job of identity management. The philosophy of associating web identity with behavioural tracking inbuilt into a profile enables people to meet like minded individuals through interacting with content. It is your personal ILike Bulter, connecting people with similar interests. However, this makes it even more critical to keep identities safe as well as hack proof and there is literature to show depth in thinking. For this and more user experiences, check out their website.
With more people going onto broadband delivered media, someone will have to monetise the quality of delivery. Could Cisco have a possible play? BT and Cisco already have close working relationships in the commercial sector - don’t be surprised by more alliances.
So what are the shortcomings? For one, the platform wont be affordable by all. The cost is likely to push this to be viable for the biggest of the media houses and content owners. When costs are under pressure, the likely give is on the aesthetics. This will potentially create less sexy websites, but with unmatched functionality which will keep them popularly sustained. Pure speculation, but time will tell. For now, EOS seems to be rapidly leaving behind the paralysed Sharepoint-Silversomething camp and the cacophonic Drupal-Joomla-WP opensource community.
And just as I was writing this article, the government has announced their 50p tax on landlines to pay for broadband connectivity to rural depths of the nation. More video to the digitally starved, more freedom! More demand for easy content delivery and user engagement. Well timed Cisco!
When times are tough, people look for advice and reference. Are your customers recommending YOUR services when they are consulted? How do you measure its likelihood and direct your organisation’s efforts to achieve this specific goal? An approach described by Fred Reichheld, called Net Promoter® Score or NPS® has been effectively converted to a program that could drive this focus.
An NPS program can energise your organisation to focus on what is most important for your business – happy customers who become your best salesmen. NPS begins with a survey question – “On a scale of 0 – 10, what is the likelihood that you will recommend Company XXX(us) to your friend or colleague”. The basis is simple, a satisfied customer is more likely to recommend your product or service to their colleagues. Customers that actually recommend you drive faster adoption through their reference and directly influence new customer acquisition. The NPS approach puts a skew on the results by calling customers that respond with scores of 9 and 10 as the Promoters and those with scores of 6 and below as the Detractors. Your NPS score is %Promoters minus %Detractors, with scores of 7 and 8 simply being ignored as Passives.
Reichheld goes on to present data that shows the NPS score is directly correlating to organic growth of businesses, citing examples from the US business history. However, there is also much controversy about this approach with traditionalists berating the obvious simplicity of the program and the arguing that the converse relationship is untrue. Yet, from our experience, the learning has been quite the contrary. While the NPS approach is simplistic, it is a great platform to re-energise the organisation if applied within a system that drives ownership and action. Here are some lessons from our experience:
Asking the key question is only the first step. However, before this is done, it is important to understand the touch points of interaction with the customers. What are the points of interface, both from transactional level of payment or delivery and from a relationship level of advise or assistance. Then, after starting a dialogue with your customer, it is imperative to take the logical next step to understand the reason for the score. Carefully crafted questions can help identify that one bone of contention that troubles the Detractors, or the one aspect of your service that gets Promoters so excited. The design of the questionnaire needs to mirror the operational infrastructure of the business. A thorough analysis of responses needs to be carried out and translated into action applied at various levels ensuring accountability for successful completion. Of course, senior management sponsorship is critical to ensure the program’s success.
Enria’s experience in NPS has helped unearth subtle but critical elements of customer pain within organisations that has helped design corrective measures. Our methodology has also helped reveal services that are perceived higher by customers than what was internally understood.
® Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Visit their site.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is now well entrenched. Google broke the Seattle dominance of user apps, and Salesforce.com transformed customer contact. You dont need to run fat applications or download virus laden software anymore. A web ID or mobile number is the ticket to all the computations you will ever need to process for decision making. This is because providers of SaaS have convinced you that its the service you are really interested in, not the fancy application.
Marketing as a Service (MaaS) is built on a similar premise. You have traditionally managed marketing by bringing on a team of researchers and ‘market experts’ to understand your customers in greater depth. Then product managers and marcomm professionals targeted each customer segment based on ‘established’ demographics. Well, in the world of digital identities, all that is set to change. Consider these three paradigms that are driving this change.
Customer Perception: From Gathering Feedback to Observing Behaviour
Gathering customer feedback has always been a researchers raison d’etre. A tempting automation of this has been now implemented - pop up surveys and never ending radio buttons. Now these are fast reaching the end of their shortlived existence. They are impersonal and ineffective. Businesses are realising that it pays faster to invest in observing behaviour instead. Customers vote with their actions. Every customer shows signs of switching off before actually doing so. Are your business antennaes up? What are you doing to observe behaviours of your existing customers?
Market Forces: From Industry Externalities to Customer Events
From Porter’s ‘Five Forces’ to Hamel’s ‘Strategy as Revolution’, the pundits have always professed that grand external or internal forces will transform the fortune of incumbents. Yet, much of attrition faced by businesses today is not from any of these major changes, but the steady opportunism of competition paying more attention to your customer when it matters. As an incumbent, isn’t it equally important to pay attention to individual events affecting your customers as it is to follow market forces - contract anniversaries, birthdays, engineer visits, local emergencies, unusual usage of services. Each of these events are far more important to an individual customer than any of the fat brush market forces predicted for all. And its only whats important to your customer that should be important to you.
Segmentation: From Regional Demographics to Individual Valuegraphics
Your marketing team spent hours debating who was your best customer - Are they Social Grade C1? or should you market to “Esteem Seekers”? The number crunchers made it easier by classifying the entire population into these buckets. A bit more sense prevailed in the B2B world: but even here customers were classed by SIC code or sector. Yes, demographics do matter - but isn’t a ’Settled Suburbian’ that happily subscribes to your Premium Package more valuable than a never-satisfied-penny-pinching ‘Aspiring Single’ on a Basic Plan? The bottom line is that decisions are made by individuals, not by their demographic avatar. Generating a value metric that can be applied to each customer is a great starting point to revamp your marketing approach. Value may not necessarily mean profit generated - ability to influence, potential to upsell, probability to cancel are some other examples of what may drive value.
So whats the relevance to Marketing as a Service?
Here is the premise. Marketing in the new era is really the ability to address these paradigms effectively. Doing so requires:
A different strategy for every customer
Generating and maintaining individual valuegraphics
Measuring behaviour internally and with published external sources
Engaging on an event trigger in addition to regular calls
Supporting every real interaction with above information
Analytics for the above need to be generated and offered as a service level to customer facing teams. Maintaining and mining digital identities is critical to be able to attain this service level. This approach brings in the basic question of the structure of the marketing team to provide this service level. The approach is clear, the canvas is blank. The plan needs to address similar concerns that SaaS presented: Security, Privacy, Availability etc. We will explore these considerations in future posts.
One of the lasting images of the Serengeti is the scene of millions of Wildebeest migrating in search of greener pastures. It is estimated that 2 million of these ungainly creatures migrate over 250 miles, twice every year. This event is a high point in the lives of many a predator that benefit from this movement, abundance and opportunity. A few practices of the successful hunters presents interesting insights to consider.
The landscape is vast and flat and it is difficult to visualize the thousands of prey from the usual hidden approaches of the elephant grass. The big cats seek the outcrops of large rock called ‘Kopjes’. These mini-mountains offer a perfect view of the stretching plains and help identify the high density locations of prey and the best approaches to the quarry.
A strategically placed Kopje is critical to understanding where and how your target is positioned.
Though vast in number, Wildebeest are not easily hunted. Strong, fast runners and formidable in groups, they need to be outrun as well as targeted with persistence to be overcome. Four in five chases are usually unsuccessful. And once alerted, they take a while to settle and drop their guard.
One should never take success for granted looking at the abundance of opportunity. Targeting and persistence pays off only over the long haul. The key to success is activity levels. Building a full diary of customer targets and managing your time effectively will yield the well deserved one-in-five success.
In the Serengeti, few hunters take the approach of lying in wait for the passing prey. However, in the backdrop of communal migration, this strategy handsomely pays off. The Mara river crossings are particularly precarious for the Wildebeest. The herds plough through fast moving currents in a bid to reach their destination. There is little thought or reason as they jump headlong into the feeding grounds of alligators that congregate just for the occassion.
In the George Casey documentary “Serengeti”, the narrator says - “There is neither malice nor remorse on the Serengeti. A hunter kills to eat, and to feed its own. Nothing more.”
Businesses need to understand migration and change within their customers to look for opportunities for growth. How well does your business do this? Do you have your own Kopje that can give a full picture of this phenomena? Are your sales personnel chasing the right customers and doing it often enough? Are you positioning to offer services that the migrating customers are bound to require?
Have you witnessed a change in your customer base and benefitted by positioning for this opportunity? Give us your thoughts by comment or write to us.
All things important come in threes. The three apostles, the three colours of a traffic signal, the three seasons - well almost, atleast the ones that matter! And so, as it happens there are three things to remember while building a sales team that is bound for success:
Talent, Thrust andTechniques
Lets explore them in a little detail:
Bringing on the right talent is critical to the success of the team. There are some excellent references on this subject, but a concept that stands out from the crowd is the work of Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman summarised in the book First Break All the Rules, is a great showcase of how the worlds best managers drive talent maximization in their teams. They do break the commonly held notions, for example: They do not believe that, with enough training, a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They do not try to help people overcome their weaknesses. And, yes, they even play favorites! If you are involved in team building, this book is a must.
Thrust comes in the form of targets and training that need to help channel individual strengths (styles) towards developing lasting customer relationships. Setting achievable but challenging targets needs to be complemented by collaborative coaching which involves classroom training followed with on the job oversight by management. Nick Gartside, our resident Sales Training expert describes a robust three (see, again!) step Core Selling Skills Course. For Strategic Selling, we have found the Miller Heimann Approach to be the very effective, especially in a consultative Service Sales environment.
Techniques can be something as simple as presentation aides or could be sophisticated lead and opportunity management systems. Effective data mining techniques and holistic customer interaction systems can substantially improve sales productivity by qualifying and nurturing prospects, understanding customer detractors and implementing transactional promotions. To explore some of these techniques, please view our Overview Presentation.
And just like fine art, these can be mastered only with rigorous practice, continuously improving over the long term. The downturn is a perfect opportunity to start from the basics, pare down and rebuild teams and put in place new customer engagement strategies that will help maximise opportunities when the turnaround comes.
Hello this is Nick Gartside of PGP Training with information on our Core Selling Skills Course.
Our course is based on a simple but robust framework that can be applied for any consultative selling process and is described by the following three steps:
Selling Skills Framework: Copyright PGP Training, All Rights Reserved
An overview of how this course is developed over a two day period is provided below:
Day I
UNDERSTANDING THE SALES PROCESS
This session helps the delegates to understand the stages of the sales process, what should be covered at each stage and where they fit into the process. It looks at the qualification, bid development, negotiation and implementation phases and reinforces the importance of selling as a continual process in which all customer facing personnel play a part in identifying opportunities and developing and selling solutions It also reinforces the importance of relationship building through a consultative approach.
PLANNING FOR QUALIFICATION VISITS
Qualification is the first stage of the sales process. This session stresses the importance of planning before conducting the visit(s), why it is critical to set objectives that are achievable, measurable and realistic and the need to have fall back positions. It also looks at how the visit should be structured so that objectives set can be achieved.
CONDUCTING QUALIFICATION VISITS
Delegates are made aware of the importance of structured questioning in order to identify qualification criteria, what questions should be asked and how to control the meeting through the use of note taking and active listening behaviours. The output from this session is that delegates will have identified what information is necessary in order to qualify a prospect.
QUALIFICATION ROLE PLAY
Delegates will practice the qualification phase of the sales process in groups of three, customer, salesperson and observer. Each group will also be observed by a Trainer / Manager. Each person in the group will play the roles above. The output from this session is a greater appreciation of the qualification process and the skills required in conducting a sales interview.
PROOF PHASE
This session looks at the structure for putting together a persuasive solution to the needs identified at the qualification stage, the importance of selling benefits as opposed to features or advantages and the structure of a formal and informal presentation. It also covers the structure and content of a sales proposal.
Day II
PROOF PHASE (CONTINUED)
During the presentation of solution, prospects raise more questions and objections than at other stages of the sales process. Delegates are made aware that in many cases these are indications of interest and may even be buying signals. Delegates are shown how they should be handled.
DECISION PHASE
This session looks at how the sale progresses from the proof stage to the negotiation and close stage. Delegates are made aware of the dangers of discounting (giving valuable things away, money, time etc) without getting something in return. The concepts of currency trading and achieving a win-win outcome are discussed.
PROOF DECISION ROLE PLAY
From information gathered at the qualification role play delegates carry out a presentation of solution role play in groups of three . This makes them aware of the importance of matching solution to need and in handling questions and objections. Basic negotiation is also possible.
SUMMARY
The programme takes delegates through the various stages of the sales process and shows them what should occur at each stage. They are also given practice at conducting meetings at two key stages, qualification and proof which helps to reinforce their overall understanding of what the sales person does and the key skills required to perform the sales role.
If you would like more information regarding the Core Selling Skills Course, you may email Nick Gartside.
Reichheld goes on to present data that shows the NPS score is directly correlating to organic growth of businesses, citing examples from the US business history. However, there is also much controversy about this approach with traditionalists berating the obvious simplicity of the program and the arguing that the converse relationship is untrue. Yet, from our experience, the learning has been quite the contrary. While the NPS approach is simplistic, it is a great platform to re-energise the organisation if applied within a system that drives ownership and action. Here are some lessons from our experience:
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