techslog

Most people have read the Dr. Seuss tale "Green Eggs & Ham", either as kids or to their children. What is interesting is the relevance this story has to selling. Learn the secrets of Dr. Seusus's selling technique and build your sales.

"I am Sam. Sam I am. Do you like green eggs and ham? Would you like them here or there? Would you like them in a box, would you like them with a fox?"

3 Step Selling Technique From Dr. Seuss

1. Sam is selling a product and although his prospect is not initially interested, Sam doesn't let that deter him from asking.

2. Sam consistently offers the prospect a choice when trying to close the sale.

3. He refuses to give up. No matter how many times his prospect says "no", Sam keeps offering alternatives.

He offers fourteen options before finally closing the sale.

I am not suggesting that you pester your customers but most people give up too early in the sales process. We hear a few "no's" and decide to turn our attention elsewhere. It is your responsibility as a business owner to ask the customer to make a decision - you cannot expect a customer to do the work for you.

If you have been effective in learning about their specific needs and presented the appropriate solution to your prospect then you have earned the right to ask them for the sale. Here are a few selling techniques that will help you reach this point:

Tell Me More: Avoid launching into a lengthy discussion of what you can do for your client until you thoroughly understand what business challenges they face. Use open questioning to gather this information and avoid jumping to conclusions too quickly. Listen carefully to what they say and clarify anything that is not clear. Ask them to elaborate by using prompts such as "uh-huh," "tell me more," and "what else?"

Many Options: When it comes time to present your product or service, try not to limit the prospect to one option. Provide a choice of solutions that meet their specific concerns. Explain the benefits of each option, and when necessary, discuss the drawbacks of each alternative. Do not present so many options that the decision becomes overwhelming. Be prepared to tell your prospect which option best suits their needs if they ask.

Speak Easy: Speak in terms they can understand, avoiding the use of terminology they may not recognize. Case in point; as I developed my web site, I found myself talking to people who were extremely knowledgeable but they used terminology that sounded like a foreign language to me. I found myself getting frustrated, and in some cases feeling a bit dumb, because I had to keep asking them what they meant. Be very cautious how much jargon you use in your presentations and make sure your customer understands what you are saying.

Objections Are Common: Recognize that objections are a natural component of the sales process. It's common for a customer to express several objections before they make the decision to commit to the purchase. Don't take these objections personally and do not assume that it means the other person is not interested. Understand that your prospect will likely have specific concerns about making a decision.

Dig Deep: Clarify their objections to uncover the true hesitation - do not hesitate to probe deeper to explore the real issues preventing them from making a decision. In most cases, your prospect will give you the information you need providing you keep your approach non-confrontational and neutral. Learn to handle objections in a non-argumentative manner. When you uncover their true objection keep your response brief and to the point. Talking too much will seem that you are trying to justify your product or price. Plus, you can sometimes talk yourself out a sale if you aren't careful.

Ask: Ask for the sale. As long as you do not pressure them into making a decision, they won't be offended by your request. Develop the confidence to ask for the sale in a variety of ways and begin asking every qualified person for their commitment. Recognize that many people want to be given permission to make a decision and look to the salesperson for that permission.

Use Polite Persistence: Take a lesson from Sam and learn the importance of polite persistence. The most successful sales people ask for the sale seven or eight times and don't give up at the first sign of resistance. Research has shown that these individuals consistently earn more than their coworkers and peers.

Use these selling techniques and you are sure to win like Sam I Am.

Dr Seuss article

Posted by hope at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The way salespeople conduct themselves is often a reflection of the company's sales compensation program; and how well the company does is often a reflection of the effectiveness of its commission program.

Salespeople are a company's ambassadors to the world. They actively promote the company and its products and services. They are the front line between the company and its customers, and are typically the driving force of revenues - top-line company growth. These employees have a direct impact on how the marketplace perceives their employer and its products.

The way salespeople conduct themselves is often a reflection of the company's sales compensation program; and how well the company does is often a reflection of the effectiveness of its commission program. A well designed sales compensation program focuses salespeople on activities that support the company's business objectives, and, in turn, rewards those salespeople for their contributions.

Base salary, commissions, and sales prizes make up the bulk of a typical salesperson's compensation package, but the specifics vary by industry. Stock options grants to salespeople are becoming more widespread too.

A salesperson's commission is typically based on either a percentage of sold revenues or profit margins. Commissions usually account for 30 to 50 percent of a salesperson's cash compensation package, which means that commissions routinely run between 43 and 100 percent of base pay. The percentage that commissions contribute to a salesperson's compensation depends on factors such as required technical knowledge, sales cycle time, product profitability, and whether the sale is dependent on the skill of the salesperson.

Commissions will account for a larger portion of pay when the sales cycle is short, the sales highly profitable, and sales dependent on the skills of the sales person. Commissions play a smaller role when the sale requires greater technical knowledge and when the sales cycle is long.

This is not to say that total compensation is necessarily lower for salespeople with greater technical knowledge or those selling products with slower sales cycles, rather, the mix of pay is weighted more toward base pay and less toward commissions so that the total cash pay earned is reasonable. Companies don't want to penalize salespeople for selling products with less commission potential if those products are an important part of the corporate strategy. Similarly, if a salesperson is responsible for a product that's an easy sell, the company wants to make sure there is the maximum incentive to sell as much as possible - therefore, less emphasis on base pay and more emphasis on commissions.

Commissions can vary within a commission plan, reflecting the priorities of the company. If the company wants to build market share, it may pay larger commissions for selling products to new clients. Commissions are also higher when new products are introduced., especially if they are more profitable. Clearly, commission plans are constructed with great care. A poorly designed plan can have unintended results such as rewarding employees for the sale of new products that cannibalize more profitable ones.

Most commission plans place no limits on what a salesperson can earn. In some instances, if a certain sales threshold has been met, the commission percentage can increase. Regardless, commissions are one of the simplest and most direct forms of pay-for-performance. Underlying the commission plan is one of the appeals of a sales position: unlimited income potential.

sales comp article

Posted by hope at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our hall of shame of tech failures includes McDonald's $170 million ERP fiasco, an electric-company software bug that wiped out power to much of the northeastern U.S. and Canada, and more. Get the sordid details and find out how you can avoid a disaster of your own.

IT is complex, famously and infamously so. Thousands of variables factor into the success or failure of a high-profile project. Will your career be defined by the data warehouse, delivered on time and under budget, that uncovered a thousand business opportunities? Or the ERP fiasco that forced the CFO to put one of those ugly footnotes about an unanticipated supply chain shortfall into the quarterly SEC filing?

Here we recount eight tech blunders--costly mistakes for the people involved and lessons for the rest of us. They range from application upgrades gone awry to wholesale strategy shifts that landed in the muck. There's the publicly traded company that prematurely unplugged its accounting system, the federal agency whose failed upgrade opened the door to fraudsters, the utility company that plunged much of North America into darkness because of a failed server reboot, and more. What follows are business technology fiascoes, some lesser-known, that continue to serve as shining examples of what not to do.

Nothing funny about a $170 million write-off

Rule #1: Don't Bite Off Too Much

McDonald's Restaurants undertook a project so grand in scale and scope that, well, it couldn't be done. In 2001, the fast-food chain conceived a project to create an intranet connecting headquarters with far-flung restaurants that would provide operational information in real time. Under the plan, dubbed Innovate, a manager in the company's Oak Brook, Ill., headquarters would know instantly if sales were slowing at a franchise in Orlando, Fla., or if the grill temperature at a London restaurant wasn't hot enough. McDonald's always has been tight lipped about Innovate--the company didn't return calls seeking comment for this story--but there's no doubt about its far-reaching scope. According to a white paper by Mpower, the consulting firm McDonald's hired for early planning and technology procurement, the idea was to create "a global ERP application that will eventually touch every one of McDonald's stores." In other words, about 30,000 restaurants in more than 120 countries. Piece of McCake, right?

According to Securities and Exchange Commission documents filed by McDonald's, the company realized the project was over the top only after it spent $170 million on consultants and initial implementation planning. McDonald's ultimately signaled Innovate's demise in a paragraph buried within a 2003 SEC filing, which noted the write-off and "management's decision to terminate a long-term technology project."

The filing revealed what most experienced IT project managers could have told McDonald's from the start: An attempt to create a worldwide network delivering real-time information to thousands of stores, some in countries that lacked network infrastructure, was destined to fail. "Although the terminated technology project was projected to deliver long-term benefits, it was no longer viewed as the best use of capital in the current environment, as the antici-pated systemwide cost over several years was expected to be in excess of $1 billion," the filing says.

Among all companies, the billion-dollar IT extravaganza has gone the way of the McDLT sandwich: It's more than anyone wants to bite off.

Rule #2: Troubleshoot With Care

Tech disasters sometimes ripple far beyond the company that messed up. At First Energy, an Ohio utility that distributes electricity to 4.5 million customers, a software bug contributed to a power failure that wiped out service for much of the northeastern United States and parts of Canada three years ago.

The blackout was blamed on cascading failures that occurred when falling trees in Ohio took out power lines and upset the balance of electrical inflows and outflows in the Northeast grid. But the real failure occurred in First Energy's computer department, where managers appear to have forgotten a fundamental rule of operations: Adhere to basic IT management protocols, such as those specified by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, regardless of how much tech automation is in place or how experienced your staff is.

A failed system alarm left more than just IT in the dark

What's not widely known is that the blackout could have been limited to a local problem if a software alarm system at First Energy, designed to warn engineers about unstable conditions, hadn't failed. That's the thing about alarms: By the time you find out they're not working, it's too late. "It didn't cause the power to go off, but it was a big contributor to the lack of response by First Energy," says Stan Johnson, manager of infrastructure security at the North American Electric Reliability Council.

At about 2 p.m. on Aug. 13, 2003, IT staff at the utility discovered that the servers hosting its General Electric XA/21 energy management system's alarm module had crashed. The staff rebooted them in an effort to fix the problem, but when the servers revived, the alarm remained off-line. GE later said in a statement that a software coding error caused the alarm application to go into an infinite loop rather than come back online. Control room operators at First Energy facilities in Ohio were unaware that this line of defense was kaput, because IT didn't verify that all systems were back online after the reboot. Meanwhile, unstable power conditions were mounting rapidly.

Ignoring IT management best practices, staff didn't bother to check with end users to ensure that they had regained full use of the critical system. Among other things, ITIL recommends that IT departments create a call list of affected users that administrators must contact following the reboot of a critical system. In its final report on the blackout, the North American Electric Reliability Council chastised First Energy's IT department for its lack of communications.

First Energy declined requests for an interview, but Johnson says the company has complied with recommendations contained in the council's final report on the blackout. Among other things, the council urged First Energy to create precise, written protocols for managing the testing, deployment, and backup of key hardware and software systems, including methods for performing system upgrades, patch management, rollbacks, and maintenance. It also said the company needed to establish well-defined communications protocols in the event of a system failure. Sound advice for all companies.

Rule #3: Sweat The Details
Imagine working as an accountant in a company with no accounting system. That's what happened to Dale Shinskey, a finance professional who in 2000 landed at oil recycling company Earthcare. The company had snapped up International Petroleum, Shinskey's unit at his previous employer, World Fuel Services, for $35 million. Unfortunately, Shinskey says, "Earthcare was making acquisitions, but they weren't paying attention to the details."

Under the deal, World Fuel Services was to maintain the Oracle accounting system that Shinskey and his colleagues used to keep the books for their unit. But a problem surfaced: Shinskey maintains that Earthcare forgot to pay World Fuel Services for the system's upkeep, and after a short time it was switched off. "For three months we didn't have anything," Shinskey says. During that time, Earthcare simply estimated financial performance for the group, ballpark figures that ultimately were never justified. "They tried to true it all up, but they were never able to," he says.

Sloppy bookkeeping may have reflected larger problems at Earthcare. In 2001 it was forced to pay $1.75 million to World Fuel to settle disputes related to the acquisition of International Petroleum, and in April 2002 Earthcare filed for bankruptcy. Shinskey left the com-pany that June when Earthcare sold International Petroleum to U.S. Filter Recovery Services.

That's not the end of this story. After a year at U.S. Filter, Shinskey and his accounting team were moved from Sage Software's MAS 200 application to a system called Uptime from Uptime Software. "It was so bad we called it downtime," Shinskey says. The problem was that U.S. Filter was using an outdated version of the software from the early 1980s and didn't want to spend money integrating Shinskey's unit into the company's Oracle environment. "There were no drop-down menus, and if you didn't have a million cheat sheets tacked to your computer you couldn't use it," he says. It was so migraine-inducing that accountants and bookkeepers left U.S. Filter "in droves" to escape it, Shinskey says. Representatives from U.S. Filter, now a unit of Siemens, didn't respond to our inquiries.

The lesson here, he says, is that companies must think through all the operational implications when business units are brought together in mergers. That includes having the right tools to support corporate governance.

Rule #4: Don't Marry For Money

Some try to avoid IT foul-ups by sending work over the wall to an outsourcer. One major insurance and financial services company became so enamored of the concept that it bought its own outsourcing company. That decision, however, turned into a huge case of buyer's remorse.

In the span of 15 months between 2001 and 2002, Indianapolis-based Conseco bought India-based outsourcer ExlService.com--and then turned around and sold the company it had just acquired. ExlService was a fledgling outfit that provided customer service functions from low-cost centers in India. It was a tantalizing morsel for Conseco's CEO at the time, Gary Wendt, who had risen through the ranks at pioneer outsourcing user General Electric. Under Wendt, Conseco acquired ExlService for $52.1 million.

Wendt thought ExlService would provide a way for Conseco to cut costs and improve customer service in one swoop. He didn't have much faith in the homegrown talent available in Indiana. "I'm convinced there's better customer service in India. It's no good here," he told the Indianapolis Star in response to a question about why he was bent on moving the company's customer service operations abroad.

That's one explanation, but Wendt also stood to gain something more from the deal; he was a co-founder of ExlService and owned a 20% stake in it at the time of the transaction. Wendt and his wife netted 692,567 Conseco shares from the deal, worth about $9.7 million, according to SEC documents. The shares were restricted until Conseco realized a positive return on investment from the transaction. Conseco didn't return calls requesting comment.

Conseco shifted more than 2,000 customer service jobs to ExlService in India after the purchase. In a regulatory filing, Conseco said it lost $20 million as a result of divesting ExlService in November 2002. Wendt's shares were voided.

Some Conseco execs blamed the venture's failure on bad timing, according to the Indianapolis Star. Conseco's India-based call center went live on Sept. 10, 2001. After the next day's terrorist attacks, call center agents with foreign accents had an immediate disadvantage.

What's the takeaway? Beware the pitfalls of outsourcing? Choose your partners carefully and for the right reasons? Never underestimate Indiana? All of the above.

Rule #5: Smorgasbords Cause Indigestion

The United Kingdom's National Health Service IT modernization program may be one of the great IT disasters in the making. It's two years behind schedule and $10 billion over budget, giving Boston's Big Dig a run for its money. One of the main contractors, health care applications maker iSoft, is on the verge of going belly up because of losses incurred deploying its software across the network. The company can't book revenue until its applications are actually deployed, so delays are killing its bottom line. The initiative has been plagued by technical problems resulting from attempts to weld incompatible systems, resistance from physicians who say they were never adequately consulted about program features, and squabbling among contractors about who's responsible for what.

IT executives and government ministers in charge of the program have been bumbling along for the past couple of years trying to get the project on track. But serious problems continue. A massive computer outage this year disrupted operations for four days at 80 health care facilities in England's North West and North Midlands regions. The fault originated in a server that stores patient records and other health care data on millions of Britons under the NHS's care. For days, doctors in affected regions were unable to access appointment records, creating significant delays in patient care. In a statement, the NHS said patient safety was not jeopardized.

The broader problem, says one Cambridge University computer science professor who has studied the NHS overhaul, is that government officials divvied up the modernization project among too many vendors that aren't particularly good at cooperating with one another. "It's different software, different standards, different everything," says professor Ross Anderson, who leads the Foundation for Information Policy Research, a think tank that has been critical of the modernization plan. NHS officials have conceded that the program has had problems, but they've insisted that improved patient care will be the ultimate result.

In many cases, Anderson says, systems installed aren't compatible. "This isn't just a matter of wasting billions [of pounds]; it could cost lives," he warns. The systems may become more compatible by default. One integrator working on the project, Accenture, last month dropped out, handing its share of the contract to Computer Sciences Corp. Accenture has set aside $450 million to cover losses from the project.

The trend in big outsourcing projects is to split work among multiple vendors. The idea is to reduce risk and instill competition among the contractors. There are more than a dozen vendors working on the NHS modernization, including subcontractors. It's a technology Tower of Babel. Risk mitigation is important, but there are downsides to multivendor arrangements, too.

Rule #6: Murphy's Law Applies

Not everyone hates IT miscues. Tax cheats, for instance, are thrilled about them when the organization at the center of the screw-ups is the Internal Revenue Service. That was the case earlier this year when the IRS botched an upgrade to its fraud-detection software. "If anything could go wrong, it went wrong regarding this particular project," says Margaret Begg, assistant inspector general for audit with the Treasury Department.

The IRS planned to launch the system in January, in time for the 2006 tax season and one year after the original implementation date. In anticipation, the tax agency's IT staffers pulled the plug on the old system. The new version, which is being developed and implemented by Computer Sciences Corp. and is fed by a database that holds more information than any other IRS system except its master database, didn't work. Not good for a piece of software that's been on the drawing board since 2001. Now, the Treasury Department's Office of Inspector General estimates that the lack of a functioning anti-fraud system cost $318 million in fraudulent refunds that didn't get caught.

If anything could go wrong with the IRS's fraud-detection system, it did, Begg says

A four-month investigation by the House Ways and Means Committee found "incompetence at all levels," committee chairman Bill Thomas, R-Calif., wrote in an August letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Among other things, IRS IT leaders erred when they classified the effort as a maintenance project rather than a major upgrade. That led to insufficient oversight and funding, Thomas says, "despite the critical importance of the system ... in protecting federal revenue." Not to mention that the system is one of 19 IRS assets the federal government has deemed part of the nation's critical infrastructure that must be protected from terrorist attacks.

In January, when the system was supposed to go live, users generated 534 problem tickets. One problem was that the electronic fraud-detection system project office wasn't communicating with the Criminal Investigation division of the IRS, the main user of the system. In fact, communication was breaking down all over the place. When one development team made a change, it didn't notify other development teams whose portions of the system were affected by the change. As a result, the IRS's System Acceptability Testing team would encounter another problem in another place. This would cause the SAT team to write another problem ticket, which would go back to the contractor, requiring another software fix, according to a report by Begg. In an interview, Begg says the IRS lacked the project management discipline to pull off an upgrade of such a critical application. "They lacked testing rigor, and they didn't have program management activities set up where there's a defined plan and that they could execute against," she says.

This, of course, isn't the first big IT snafu for the IRS. The agency has been trying to upgrade its overall computing infrastructure for the past eight years, at a cost of more than $8 billion. A Government Accountability Office review of that effort found multiple instances of cost overruns, waste, and inefficiency. Part of the problem is that IRS IT personnel are retiring in droves and qualified replacements are tough to find. "They've lacked the stability and consistency you need to implement certain activities," says Begg, adding that IT management turnover has been particularly high. The IRS is in the process of booting up the old system in time for the 2007 tax season, while plans for the Web-based system have been shelved. Brace yourselves.

Rule #7: Check The Shelf Life

In 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation killed off its problem-plagued Virtual Case File system, a custom-developed software application that was supposed to let agents search across multiple criminal databases in the hunt for perps. That capability has been a Holy Grail for the bureau as far back as the 1980s, when software company Inslaw alleged that the Department of Justice purloined Inslaw's Promis case management software for use by the FBI. Inslaw ultimately lost the case. The need for such a system took on new urgency after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The failure of the $170 million Virtual Case File effort, part of the FBI's Trilogy IT modernization program, likely won't result in any criminal charges, but in launching the program the FBI did break one unspoken law of IT planning: Don't build a long-term project on technology that will be outdated by the time the project is completed. Project planners must think about what the overall tech environment will look like, and what technology will be widely used, once an initiative is completed.

In planning the Virtual Case File in 2001, the FBI chose custom-developed software, although cheaper, more flexible off-the-shelf apps were coming into favor among many large organizations. "The pace of technological innovation has overtaken our original vision for VCF, and there are now existing products that did not exist when Trilogy began," the FBI conceded in a report last year on the demise of the project.

The VCF project also suffered from having nine program managers and five CIOs in its short, unhappy four-year life.

To its credit, the bureau appears to have learned its lesson. It's ditched the VCF program in favor of an information management system called Sentinel. Sentinel will be based on cutting-edge technology and should have a long shelf life: It will be Web-based, and a service-oriented architecture ensures that it will be able to connect to external law enforcement databases and other information sources that incorporate Web services standards.

Sentinel's first phase will provide FBI agents, analysts, and other personnel with a portal that will let them access the soon-to-be-replaced automated case-support system and, later, data in the new case management system. It also will include a case management "workbox" that will summarize a user's workload (the case files an agent or analyst is working on) and provide automatic indexing in case files according to person, place, or thing.

In March, the FBI awarded Lockheed Martin a $305 million contract to help with the implementation of Sentinel. Subcontractors include Accenture and Computer Sciences Corp. CSC's Dyncorp unit was one of the original contractors on the Department of Justice's efforts to implement Promis. Let's hope things go better this time around.

Rule #8: Beware The Rush Job

In the mid-'90s, tech execs at Nielsen Media Research, the provider of viewer statistics to the television industry, learned the hard way about the perils of rushing a critical project. The company wanted a major rewrite of its core ratings system. It wasn't a matter of altering some peripheral piece of back-office-ware, but of overhauling the main engine behind Nielsen's billion-dollar ratings business. Unfortunately, IT execs accelerated that conversion. As a result, the coding was botched, millions of dollars were wasted, a lawsuit was filed against the lead vendor, and now, a decade later, Nielsen is still trying to complete the project. "They wanted it done in a hurry, and they're paying for that to this day," says an insider on the project.

The project entailed converting the ratings system from its assembler code base, written for a mainframe, to a client-server architecture, with a goal of improving user-friendliness and flexibility so Nielsen could create more precise data cuts to sell to its broadcast industry customers. Given the complexity of the project, tech staffers at Nielsen calculated the data conversion would take three years to complete, wrapping up before the Y2K rollover.

But that timetable didn't sit well with upper management, who wanted the new system rolled out within a year, according to our source. The rush was on.

Want a robot that can run your IT department? Somewhere out there is a vendor that will claim it has one. So it's not surprising Nielsen found an outsourcer that swore it could complete the project within a year. In 1997, Nielsen signed a software development contract with TenFold. "They made the decision, and everybody had to go with it," the source says. TenFold and Nielsen both declined to comment.

Staff-level technicians at Nielsen were skeptical from the beginning, and signs soon emerged that they were right. An inspection a few months into the project revealed that TenFold was creating flat files for the ratings system, even though the contract called for object-oriented code.

The rationale: Surprise! TenFold didn't have enough time to do the job properly. During one code review, an IT manager at Nielsen found that a TenFold staffer had written the following into his notes: "We have to do this crap because we don't have time to do it right," according to the source.

Despite the concerns, Nielsen's senior IT executives told internal staff to back off TenFold. "We were told not to upset them and cause a lot of grief," the insider says.

Ultimately, however, Nielsen's IT decision-makers got fed up with TenFold's lack of progress. They terminated the project and, in June 2000, sued the company for $4.5 million. The sides reached an undisclosed settlement, but Nielsen's problems didn't end there. It's still trying to put an upgraded ratings system in place, almost 10 years after the project began.

IT blunders article

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BRUSSELS, Belgium - Microsoft Corp. said Monday it had given security vendors Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc. some of the information they want to make their products work with Microsoft's new operating system, Vista.

Microsoft spokesman Tom Brookes said the software interfaces for the Windows Security Center — Vista's new "security dashboard" — were uploaded to a Web site for software developers.

Both security companies have complained that Microsoft was withholding key information they needed to develop software compatible with Vista before it is handed over to computer manufacturers next month. Consumers should be able to begin buying the new operating system in January.

Microsoft also said it planned to talk to both Symantec and McAfee to discuss changes they want made to Microsoft's anti-hacking tool, Patchguard. Symantec wanted its software to be excluded from Patchguard's scope so it would not be wrongly identified as a threat to the system.

Symantec and McAfee were not immediately available for comment.

On Friday, Microsoft said it had changed key aspects of Vista to soothe European antitrust worries. But the EU antitrust office refused to back Microsoft's optimism that European concerns had been met. "The jury is out," EU spokesman Jonathan Todd said.

The EU and Microsoft have fought for years, and the 25-nation bloc levied a 497 million-euro ($613 million) fine on Microsoft in 2004.

Microsoft article

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Finding the right attorney or plumber in the yellow pages has never been easy. It's not just any professional or tradesman you may be after, but someone who comes recommended and at a fair price.

LinkedIn, the biggest social network for business users, late on Sunday said it will offer members a way of choosing business service providers based on recommendations instead of just random listings on traditional yellow pages guides.

"No one should be picking a lawyer from the yellow pages," said Konstantin Guericke, vice president of marketing for the Palo Alto-based company. "Recommendations based on personal connections are important."

Service listings represent the second marketplace LinkedIn is opening for the 7.7 million people using its business social network to find recommended providers. Initially the service is in English only and targeted at the U.S. market, but the company has plans to eventually expand overseas.

LinkedIn does not claim to be creating a wholesale replacement for the Yellow Pages or their online equivalent, only listings in a select set of categories in which relationships count and friends rate businesses, Guericke said.

"We are in the very beginning of building this marketplace. It's the sections of the Yellow Pages people use most," he said.

Web-based social networking takes advantage of the power of relationships among friends, and friend of friends, in social settings. Similarly, LinkedIn relies on connections with business colleagues and, in turn, their colleagues.

FRIENDS OF FRIENDS

In the case of LinkedIn's directory of service providers, users can search narrowly for services recommended by friends, or they can widen their search to friends of friends. Failing that, a global search capability is offered to allow users to search across the full LinkedIn network.

Making the system work will depend on whether LinkedIn users bother to write recommendations for other businesses, building on an existing feature within LinkedIn that encourages colleagues to recommend other colleagues.

It also could draw in new users. Most LinkedIn members currently are executives, professionals, sales people and other office workers. The new directory could attract trade workers.

The service provider directory is designed so that businesses can go online and list their services without having to remain online -- encouraging non-computer, blue-collar service providers to join LinkedIn.

About 7.7 million people worldwide had signed up for LinkedIn by September, up around 54 percent from 5 million users in March. Revenue is growing twice as fast as members, Guericke said.

"We see this growth in free members as the engine that runs the business, he said. "We are building different marketplaces on top of that."

The firm's revenue comes primarily from premium service subscriptions that start at $60 a month and go up to $2,000, then from job listings and then advertising fees for its free audience.

linked in article

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What's worrying you right now? A majority of Americans, asked to choose from 14 possible recently experienced problems, pointed to "rising prices," according to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive.

Seventy-four percent of those surveyed said rising prices are an issue in their lives, followed by 56% who said "too much to do" and 53% who said they have "trouble sleeping," according to the online survey of 2,747 adults in September.

Fourth on the list is "concerns about money for emergencies," a recent problem for 53% of respondents, followed by 43% who said "concerns about health in general." Thirty-six percent said they're worried about the illness of a family member and 36% said they don't have enough money for basic necessities.

When asked how stressed they feel, most of those surveyed -- 47% -- said they have "some" stress in their lives. But 23% said they have a lot of stress. Meanwhile 27% said not too much stress and 3% said none at all.

The fact that money woes were among the key concerns for many respondents didn't surprise Stephanie Marston, a practicing family therapist, stress-management expert and author of "30 Days to Sanity: Create a Life You Love."

"Money concerns are certainly a huge stressor for people. People are working long hours, there are two-income families -- and yet people are still struggling to make ends meet," she said. Marston is based in Santa Fe, N.M.

Sometimes stress worsens those money woes, she said. "When people are stressed out, rather than thinking about what they can do to reduce their stress, they often overshop, overeat, overdrink," she said.

"Our culture is so consumer oriented, we figure if we buy ourselves something nice, buy that new appliance, that new car, it's going to make us feel better. It may for a very brief period of time, but then the bills start coming and it just adds to the already overextended lifestyle we're living."

With age comes less stress

Surprisingly, the younger you are, the likelier you are to feel stressed, according to this survey.

Just 9% of those older than 60 said they have a lot of stress in their lives, compared with 29% of 18- to 29-years-old, 28% of those 30 to 41 years old and 25% of those 42 to 60 years old.

Meanwhile, women are more likely than men to cite heavy stress loads, with 29% of women saying they face a lot of stress versus 18% of men.

Thirty percent of households with children said they face a lot of stress compared with 20% of households without children.

But stress did not vary much across the income spectrum: 25% of those with income less than $15,000 said they face a lot of stress, compared with 23% who earn $75,000 or more.

Tips for coping

So, we're all facing some stress. What to do? First, figure out your priorities, Marston said.

"The notion that you can have it all is a myth. You can't have it all," she said. "Most people are simply living like rats on a treadmill. We're going through the motions of living."

To overcome that feeling, list your top priorities in life, she said. "It's important for people to slow down long enough to ask themselves, 'What's most important in my life? Is it my friends, my family, my faith, my finances, my physical well-being?'"

Then, every morning before starting your day, figure out which of your top priorities matters most -- and then focus on that priority that day, she said. For instance, your daughter has a soccer game. For that day, family is your priority and your goal is to attend that soccer game. "On another day, you might have a huge report due, so that's your priority. On another day of the week, you realize you haven't been to the gym for the entire week. On that day, self-care is a priority," she said.

"Do that on a daily basis. You have to be selective," she said. "Before you look at what you have to do, look at what you choose to do."

Attitude shift

Another strategy is to change your attitude towards stressful events, said Scott Sheperd, a psychologist and expert in stress management, based in Toledo, Ohio.

While it's not easy to do, with practice you can shift your thinking from negative thoughts to strategies for action, he said. For instance, when faced with a financial setback, say to yourself, "OK. This is the way it is. I don't have the money. There are two things I can do: How do I cut down on my spending, and how do I try to increase my income? Are there some strategies to do that?"

Training your mind to react to stressful situations is similar to going on a diet to lose weight, he said. First, you need to eat less fattening food. "This is like having fewer thoughts in your brain that make it worse. 'I'm an idiot, I'm no good, life is no good.' The less of that, the better," Sheperd said.

Then, along with cutting out the negative thoughts, think about strategies to improve the situation. "It's just like the more you exercise, it helps you to lose weight. So the more you do things that take you in a positive direction, the better. You start planning. You start writing down strategies," he said.

"Maybe it's asking for a raise. Maybe it's that you like to eat out a lot so you cut that out, or maybe you have to ask for a loan. But whatever it is, you start writing down strategies."

Finally, focus on the power you have to make choices, he said. For instance, if you feel too busy, ask yourself, "Who makes out my schedule?" Sheperd said.

"You don't have to do any of that stuff. You don't have to do it. That's easier said than done, and sometimes it's tricky. You can get stuck. But at some point you say, 'No. This is changing.'"

Too often, Sheperd said, people forget "there are options."

Recent worries

Here are the complete results to the survey's question, "Have you experienced the following in the past month?" Respondents could point to any of the following 14 options.

Rising prices, 74%
Too many things to do, 56%
Trouble sleeping, 53%
Concerns about money for emergencies, 53%
Concerns about health in general, 43%
Illness of a family member, 36%
Not enough money for basic necessities, 36%
Too much information to process at one time, 33%
Being lonely, 29%
Problems with your work, boss or fellow workers, 24%
Problems with aging parents, 21%
Frequent or excessive noise, 20%
Problems with my children, 19%
Abuse of your personal privacy, 13%

Email your comments to acoombes@marketwatch.com.
stress article

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What are the best careers? CareerJournal.com found out by asking people what makes them satisfied in their careers and then finding careers with those qualities. Here are the results (in alphabetical order):

Curriculum and instructional coordinators
High-school special-education teachers
Hospital and clinic managers
Management consultants and analysts
Medical researchers
Physical therapists
Sales, marketing and advertising managers
Social workers, counselors and related managers
CareerJournal's
Best Careers

The Methodology:
How We Got Our List

What's Important to You?
Career Snapshots

Best Careers Profiles
• Health-Clinic Executive
• Social-Work Manager
• Management Consultant
• Special-Ed Teacher

Discuss: Which do you think is the best career?

How did we get this list? CareerJournal teamed with polling company Harris Interactive, to survey U.S. adults and find what qualities are most common in the jobs of highly satisfied career-focused people. The four attributes cited most were:

• Good intellectual stimulation
• Strong job security
• High level of control and freedom in what to do
• Extensive direct contact with customers/clients

These criteria in hand, we then looked to identify careers that best met them. We scoured occupational data and employment projections from the Department of Labor and interviewed experts. Our eight "Best Careers" fit the bill in each category.

These won't be the best careers for everyone. But relative to others, they are more likely to have the things that highly satisfied career-minded people say describe their jobs.

Read interviews with people who have jobs in the fields of special education, management consulting, social work and health-care clinic management, and come back to CareerJournal in the weeks ahead for profiles of people who have jobs in curriculum development, physical therapy, medical research, and sales, marketing and advertising.

What's the best career for you? To answer this question, first think about how you would describe your dream career. Then review this list of 14 career qualities and see a sampling of careers most likely to deliver on what's most important to you.

To learn more about CareerJournal's Best Careers list, read our methodology.

What do you think is the best career? Join other CareerJournal readers in a discussion.

Email your comments to cjeditor@dowjones.com.

-- July 11, 2006

best careers article

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If you sell for a smaller company that competes against the big guys, the age-old story of David and Goliath might come to mind. In this story, the giant, Goliath, was beaten in a fight by the small boy, David (later to become King David), because of the boy's ability to outsmart the giant. However, in today’s hypercompetitive, risk-averse, buyers' market, it’s Goliath that often has the advantage. If you're the David in this scenario, read on. By the way, if you're Goliath, you may want to see what David is planning...

When a sales team loses, whether they sell for the small company or the larger one, for that matter, it’s for one of two reasons: They didn’t properly qualify the opportunity, or they were outsold by the competition. There is no third alternative.

Let’s take a look at these two outcomes and explore specifically how to improve your effectiveness when selling against a much larger competitor.

Qualis

The word qualification shares the root, qualis, with the word quality. Qualification is the process through which we determine if it is worth our time and effort to continue to pursue a sales opportunity. Qualification is a process rather than a one-time event. It determines the quality of an opportunity. That means you don’t qualify your sales prospect only once, when initial contact is made. You’ll need to qualify vigilantly and unendingly. The reason? There are many. Buyers have been known to mislead sellers when they are losing. Things change during the course of the evaluation. In fact, these days, things change a lot, often. Budgets disappear. Influencers take on other responsibilities. Buyers who say they’ll buy from a smaller company—no problem—feel different tomorrow.

Every company must have a set of appropriate qualification criteria by which they determine (1) whether or not to pursue business and (2) how to pursue it. For most companies, these criteria will differ somewhat for each product or service they offer as well by geography, competition and market.

When you are qualifying your prospect, you are asking them and yourself many of the same questions again and again, such as:

Who is the real buyer, the person who is going to make the final decision?
When are they going to buy?
What are they going to buy?
Why are they going to buy?
Where in their company is the order going to get signed?
Does our product fit their requirements?
What is the decision process?
Who is the competition?
How will they pay for what it is that I am selling?
What is my unique value?
Why are they going to buy from me?
And many more

Qualification criteria for smaller companies who compete against the big guys must contain questions about the prospect’s buying preferences. For example, you need to ask yourself, “What evidence do I have that the prospect will do, or even more importantly, has already done business with a company of our size?” Also you’ll need to know what guidelines they must follow in terms of suppliers’ company size, revenues or financial viability. (You may think your company is in great shape, since you have a team of savvy venture capitalists who not only have invested in your company, but also sit on your board of directors. That may not be of any value to the CFO of a conservative manufacturing company. In fact it may hurt your cause.) You can read a lot more about qualification in chapters 9 & 10 in my book How Winners Sell.

Does Size Matter?

It’s hard to ask these questions, but it is irresponsible not to. You want to be certain that if you meet or exceed all the prospect’s requirements, that size—for size’s sake—does not matter. You may have the best product, innovative implementation services, committed people, stellar customer satisfaction levels, top product quality, most respected investors or anything else that you consider of value, but if size matters, little else will measure up. And if size does matter, and you can’t convince your prospect fairly quickly that it shouldn’t, you're out of there—and quickly on to another opportunity.

You’ll need to be careful here. Sometimes the size issue is less obvious. For example, your prospect may have a requirement that a vendor install and implement a demand chain management system in twenty-five plants within a year’s time. They may have no specific issue with vendor size, but do have a legitimate business requirement that is directly related to your size. And if you are a smaller supplier, without pre-established partnerships with service firms who are capable of delivering the service levels required for that size deal, your chances of winning are remote.

What all this means is that there are certain opportunities for which you should not compete, because you can’t win them. Sorry, but that’s a fact. If you do spend time trying to win business that you can’t win because your company is too small, you are squandering time and resources from those opportunities you can and deserve to win.

So They're Qualified. Now What Do You Do?

Here is where competitive selling comes into play.

You’re going to need to influence your prospect’s decision criteria, so that the perceived value of your competitor’s size as well as other size-related capabilities are diluted, neutralized or, in the best case, seen as a disadvantage. Many salespeople are accustomed to highlighting a competitor’s weaknesses. In the situations where you are competing against a bigger company, you will (professionally and subtly) attack their strength.

Here is a simple, well-used example. Let’s say I sell for a smaller enterprise software company and I am up against a major player. Based upon preferences and needs of the buyers, I may decide to use the “small-fish-in-a-big-pond” approach.

It goes like this: “Ms. Prospect. There are few people who would not be impressed by my competitor’s size, global reach and financial as well has human resources. I’m sure they proudly reference some very prominent customers. However, you might consider that a project such as yours, although highly critical for you, might very well not have the same level of importance for them and therefore may not generate the ongoing attention within executive levels of their company that their premier customers’ projects would. It’s only natural…”

From that point, you would discuss how you would meet their technical requirements and establish a business relationship going forward, stressing attention that would be paid to the progress by your executives. You’d convince them that your company’s success would depend directly on their success, not the other way around. You’ll be portraying them as big fish in a small pond, with the driving message being how important their business is to you.

If you are effective with this approach, you will have moved down in importance the size and impressiveness of their customer list and up in importance the attention paid to them by your executives as well as your company’s interest in their success.

Here are some ways that a larger competitor might attempt to exploit your size and potential considerations for handling those objections with your coaches and allies in the account:

Challenge: The competition questions your viability to the prospect. “What would happen to you, Mr. Prospect, if they were to go out of business or be acquired?”

Your strategy: Don’t wait for this to happen, as it most likely will. Immunize. Exploiting size is the first card most salesreps who sell for large companies play against the smaller guys. You need a solid story, prepared in advance—concise and compelling—which must be credibly and sincerely delivered first by you, then echoed by your most senior executives. Mitigating perceived risk is on the critical path to success when competing against a much larger rival. Don’t wait.

It is so important to know your prospect’s history regarding doing business with smaller companies. It may mean nothing to them, since they do it all the time. On the other hand, you may be the first and may have a long, bumpy road ahead

Challenge: The competition attempts to expand the scope of the evaluation into areas where you don’t have a solution.

Your strategy: Again, pretty standard practice for the big guys. Alert your prospect in advance that this may happen. Praise their efforts in defining their requirements as well as they have. Ask if they are prepared to have the scope of their initiative, project or investment substantially expanded. If they say no, alert them that other vendors may employ this “sales” strategy to differentiate themselves as well as to increase the size of their contracts.

Please understand that I don’t advocate negative selling, mud slinging or “slamming the competition.” On the other hand, when you have built relationships in your accounts with influential people who are willing to help you, you’ll need to provide them with the messages—the sound bites—to position your company advantageously.

Challenge: The competition attempts to impress your prospect with hordes of resources to demonstrate their prowess and convey a “safety in numbers” message.

Your strategy: Again, prepare your prospect in advance that this may happen. Suggest that these bigger companies have extra resources on board just to impress prospects to make a sale. If you know your competitor’s bid will come in considerably higher than yours, you may want to subtly suggest that using resources to win business may be a reason that their overhead is so high. And, remind the prospect that if they do go with your competitor, the meter will start running.

This approach is mandatory when you compete against companies who lavish prospects with toys, gifts, free trips and other goodies to try to influence their decision.

Challenge: The competition, because they are bigger, is willing to guarantee results in a way that you cannot.

Your strategy: They may be able to guarantee that their product will get installed (or service delivered) within a certain time, but what if they don’t? The customer may not have to pay the vendor any more cash, but what about lost business opportunities, reduced customer satisfaction levels and employee morale if things go wrong?

“Fire a Prospect” and Raise Your Competitive IQ

In the scenarios I portrayed above, you might have wondered how you could possibly know in advance what your competition is going to do? I call it raising your competitive IQ. That will require “firing” one or more unqualified prospects and investing the time you would have wasted on them to collect, then analyze information about past wins and losses against a few key competitors. When you do, you’ll start to see patterns of behavior that those companies and the people who sell for them use against you. Big companies often develop a default strategy they use against all smaller competitors.

I agreed that it’s hard to find the time to gather information like that. But you really don’t have a choice. If you don’t, you’ll constantly be surprised by what your competition does and therefore be in a defensive position. Tap into other sales reps in your company, your customers and business partners to find out how those one or two big competitors position against you and how the individual reps manage their sales campaigns. I talk all about what you need to know and where to get it in chapter 17 of How Winners Sell.

Learning to build sales strategies based upon accurate, up-to-date competitive information will enable you to begin to qualify out of deals you can’t win and to outsell your competitors on a consistent basis in those you can.

Remember the Two Components. You’ll Be Glad You Did.

Tough qualification combined with strategic competitive selling does work. After confirming that size did not matter in a face-to-face meeting with a division president of a $5 billion corporation, my client, the CEO of a small enterprise software company commanded that his team pursue a $2 million contract competing against a $750 million rival. Now there is a David and Goliath scenario.

I coached that sales team during the nine month sales cycle. Among other things, we diluted the competition’s apparent strengths and portrayed their large size as a liability, which in this case it really was.

My client’s team outsold the competition and won the business. And earned a lot more business after that, because they delivered what they promised to their customer. As the CEO related to me, elated with a contract five times larger than anything his team had secured up to that time, “the most important thing for me is that this process is repeatable.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About the Author
Dave Stein is the leading authority on competitive selling strategies and tactics. He is the author of How Winners Sell, and president of The Stein Advantage, Inc. You can visit his websites at www.howwinnerssell.com.

Big Guys article

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Vodafone's embattled chief executive Arun Sarin has made cost cutting one of his main priorities, as the company struggles with decline in its core European markets. Some 6,000 employees will be affected by the forthcoming outsourcing deals. Most of the impacted staff are expected to transfer to EDS and IBM, with the remainder to be retained by Vodafone.

Vodafone Group (NYSE: VOD) said it will outsource a number of key back-office IT functions to EDS and IBM (NYSE: IBM) , as the mobile phone giant slashes costs amid a steep slowdown in its core markets.

Vodafone said the two U.S. tech firms would take over application development and maintenance services for all of its IT systems across the globe.

Those functions ate up 560 million pounds (US$1.05 billion) last year, and outsourcing them should cut unit costs by 25 to 30 percent within three to five years, said Vodafone.

Contracts will be signed within the next couple of weeks, although Vodafone did not reveal how much it would pay EDS and IBM.

Vodafone's embattled chief executive Arun Sarin has made cost cutting one of his main priorities, as the company struggles with decline in its core European markets.

Some 6,000 employees will be affected by the forthcoming outsourcing deals, said a spokesperson for Vodafone. Most of the impacted staff are expected to transfer to EDS and IBM, with the remainder to be retained by Vodafone, he added.

© 2006 AFX News Limited. All rights reserved.

Vodafone article

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Globalization has added a whole new dimension to outsourcing. A host of companies are outsourcing to lower-cost countries -- from manufacturers moving production to financial companies relocating payment processing and customer service functions.

The U.S. economy may be slowing, but one sector is clearly revving up. American companies are outsourcing everything from accounting to human resources management and manufacturing -- some overseas and some to domestic companies focused on performing a task outside their customer's core competency. "The list of functions being outsourced is continuing to expand," said Robert S. Huntley, vice president and portfolio manager at North Star Asset Management in Menasha, Wis.

Outsourcing will generate about US$400 billion of revenue around the world in 2006, estimates Plunkett Research, based in Houston. The biggest chunk of that will be in the logistics, sourcing and distribution services area, followed by information technology services and business process outsourcing of things such as call centers and human resources management, according to Plunkett. The companies doing the outsourcing can avoid investing in things such as their physical plant or staff in non-core functions, and instead can put more resources into doing what they do best, Huntley said.

A Worldwide Trend
Outsourcing companies gain economies of scale from providing many customers with similar services, such as processing credit card payments, or payroll and benefits management. Globalization has added a whole new dimension to outsourcing. A host of companies are outsourcing to lower-cost countries -- from manufacturers moving production to financial companies relocating payment processing and customer service functions.

"There's no reason you can't do payment processing in India or some other lower-cost geography. The electronic connections we have now mean these things can happen all over the world," Huntley said. He and other North Star portfolio managers have bought for their clients shares in several companies they say should benefit from continued outsourcing:

First Data (NYSE: FDC) , Greenwood Village, Colo., processes electronic credit and debit payments for merchants and financial institutions. First Data has about a 50 percent share of the market, so "if you buy with your plastic, there's a one-in-two chance you'll be dealing with First Data in the background," Huntley said. First Data earlier this month completed a spinoff of its Western Union money transfer business to shareholders. That gives the company even greater concentration in payment processing, Huntley said. First Data's earnings will likely grow at rates in the low teens for the next three to five years, and the company's strong cash flow should produce a free cash flow yield after dividends of 6 percent or more, he said.

Affiliated Computer Services (NYSE: ACS), Dallas, provides business process and information technology services outsourcing. About 60 percent of the company's customer base is commercial, and 40 percent is government work, mostly from state governments, Huntley said. Affiliated has been moving out of federal government and some welfare work but continues to seek state governments who want to outsource everything from child support and employee benefits processing to management of electronic pass programs on tollways. "As state budgets become tighter and tighter, there's a big incentive to find lower-cost solutions," Huntley said. Affiliated's ability to win business has helped it increase earnings. Management is buying back stock, and its shares trade at a reasonable valuation, he said.

The company had pricing issues with several contracts that have held down profits, but will likely work through them by the end of fiscal 2007, Huntley said. Meanwhile, Affiliated is positioning itself by moving into doing more human resources functions for customers and shifting some operations to lower-cost locations, he said.

Plexus, based in Neenah, Wis., designs and makes electronic equipment such as routers and breast biopsy machines, and provides services to original equipment manufacturers in the high-end computer , medical, industrial, telecommunications , transportation electronics and defense industries. Plexus' stock soared in 2005 and early 2006 because Plexus had more revenue from defense contracts than anticipated. It fell from a high of $46.91 in May after the company warned that revenue would be lower than expected for the September quarter and into next year, and margins had likely peaked.

The company's tax rate also will rise next year. Huntley says the stock pullback got Plexus to a price that looks interesting. The company has about $3 a share of net cash on its balance sheet and is selling at 12 times 2007 earnings. Plexus has implemented some initiatives to improve manufacturing and is putting more accountability into its financial functions and operations, Huntley said. It is expanding production in Malaysia and intends to double its footprint in China. "Near-term, they'll have expenses associated with that, but longer-term, it will make them better positioned," Huntley said. Plexus has a low long-term debt to capital ratio of about 4 percent and a return on invested capital of 19 percent to 20 percent, he said.

Juniper Networks (Nasdaq: JNPR) , which represents 19 percent of Plexus' business, recently reduced earnings expectations and said it intended to consolidate its vendor list. But Plexus management is doing all the right things to retain Juniper's business, Huntley said. There's also a risk that Plexus' margins have peaked and may compress going forward if the company doesn't continue to do well at gaining defense contracts, he said. But those risks are reflected in Plexus' low price, and Huntley said he and his colleagues have been accumulating Plexus shares. These shares could go as high as $28 in the next 12 months, he said.

>a href="http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/P8lGnujD33s11W/Analysts-Outsourcing-Raising-Stock-of-Smarter-US-Companies.xhtml" Outsourcing article">outsourcing article
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With an ERP business line that is twice the size of Oracle's, there is little sign that SAP will be dislodged from its No. 1 position, said Jim Shepherd, senior vice president of research at AMR Research. "Oracle spent billions of dollars to go from a quarter of the size of SAP to half of its size. I don't know what they could buy to close that gap."

Growth in the enterprise resource planning market may have paused during the 2001-2002 recession, but it is now back to a steady pace, according to a new AMR Research report.

The consulting firm found that total ERP market revenue grew to more than US$25 billion in 2005 due to strong customer demand, as well as a number of acquisitions of smaller niche vendors. It projects that the market will reach $29 billion this year -- and that over the next five years, it will grow at an average of 10 percent.

SAP (NYSE: SAP) led the pack, with a 42 percent share of the industry's revenues, despite Oracle's (Nasdaq: ORCL) acquisition of PeopleSoft. Oracle's revenue share in 2005 was 20 percent, according to the report. Growing 12 percent and 110 percent respectively, these two vendors claimed the largest gains in the market. Many of the smaller players stayed flat or even shrank. SAP and Oracle increased their combined market share to 65 percent of all new license sales.

Mature Market
These dynamics are not new to the ERP space, Jim Shepherd, senior vice president of research at AMR Research, told CRM Buyer. "Growth over a long period of time -- 20 years -- has been stable, registering 9-10 percent annually. The last half of the 90s was a big spike, and we saw real growth acceleration. Then, in the recession, growth rates dropped precipitously. What we are seeing now is a recovery."

This is also a market where one or two vendors tend to dominate the top, followed far behind by a long tail of smaller vendors. "Who the large players are does change over time, but the structure of the industry seems to stay the same," Shepherd said.

He dismissed the notion that the ERP vendors ever completely saturated the market, stifling opportunities for new growth. "This is still a very healthy market. Vendors are expanding into new market segments, both in terms of vertical and client size as well as new geographies."

Oracle vs. SAP
With an ERP business line that is twice the size of Oracle's, there is little sign that SAP will be dislodged from its No. 1 position, Shepherd said. "Oracle spent billions of dollars to go from a quarter of the size of SAP to half of its size. I don't know what they could buy to close that gap." This is not to say Oracle's acquisition spree was a waste of time. "In percentage gains, its growth was enormous."

For its part, SAP is developing new go-to-market strategies to ensure that its position remains solid. A few months ago, for example, the company announced plans to roll out "enhancement packages" that would serve as interim upgrades between ,or in place of, the major releases. The enhancement packages will be introduced two to three times a year and are optional, Jeff Stiles, senior vice president for ERP solution marketing at SAP, told CRM Buyer. The first is expected this December.

"The point is to focus on those areas that represent market opportunities for SAP and those areas where customers are telling us they want new functionality," Stiles said. Those areas include human capital, account management, talent management, compensation, payment processes such as invoice to cash tracking, and industry-specific offerings.

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"The next 12 months are the next biggest wave of new products we have had in the history of Microsoft. I will be quickly deploying all the new products like Windows Vista, Windows Server (Longhorn), Exchange 12, and Office 12 -- all will be fully deployed at MS before shipping. All the log-ins are moving to two-factor verification. ... It is an exciting time."

Ron Markezich is the man Bill Gates tapped to head Microsoft's information technology. While the position of CIO is tough at any company, it is arguably more demanding at the world's largest and best-known software manufacturer.
As CIO and vice president of Managed Solutions at Microsoft, Markezich is responsible for delivering I.T. services for Microsoft, as well as for developing new ways that customers might improve the efficiency and productivity of their desktop environments.

Markezich's teams are responsible for increasing employee productivity through the use of Microsoft technology and for making those same benefits available to Microsoft customers.

Before Microsoft products are allowed to ship, Markezich ensures that they run on Microsoft's I.T. infrastructure. In addition, by working in managed solutions, he is able to get first-hand customer experiences that play a vital role in enhancing products. His responsibilities also include protecting the security and privacy of the company's digital assets, data, and intellectual property.

Before becoming CIO in May 2004, Markezich ran I.T. infrastructure and line-of-business application organizations inside Microsoft. During this tenure, the organizations received numerous awards, including the Alexander Hamilton Award for Technology and the Primus Luminary Award.

Markezich joined Microsoft in 1998. Before that, he was at Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) in the Electronics and High Tech group. He has a B.A. in management information systems from the University of Notre Dame.

He spoke with CIO Today about running Microsoft's I.T. on Microsoft products in a Microsoft-based world. He is an affable fellow who obviously takes genuine pleasure in testing products personally, deep inside the inner belly of the software behemoth.

CIO Today: What are your top concerns as CIO?

Markezich: First and foremost, hiring the right people. After the last several years of everyone saying I.T. jobs aren't going to be around anymore, there has been an impact on the level of I.T. people around. The myth is discouraging people from entering the field. But, in fact, I.T. careers have never been better.

The other concern is in ensuring that resources are allocated to the right technologies. I.T. drives business value and that requires creative ways of thinking about technology.

The third is to make sure we take advantage of opportunities presented by the Internet and connectivity. The types of things we can do arouses customers and partners and we need to capitalize on those.

CIO Today: Has the I.T. environment changed from five years ago?

Markezich: Five years ago was kind of the tail-end of the bubble. Money was spent on I.T. just for the sake of spending it -- just not much thought was given to the outcome. After the bubble burst, budgets were slashed just as recklessly. Now we are in the healthiest state I.T. has ever been in. For the first time, I.T. is in a state of balance.

What was promised by the Internet five to seven years ago is finally coming true: the landscape becoming a reality through the low cost of bandwidth, connectivity, and a great deal of innovation. So, I think there is a big change in opportunity and how we think about I.T. overall.

And everything is much more complex than five years ago. The environments were built without a lot of thought around the architecture during the bubble, and now all I.T. departments have to work through that.

Elevating the level of technology to make it more easily searchable and accessible also makes it more complex for a CIO to manage. It used to be you could just lock down the network, but now it is hard to control the network because you want to use it with partners, customers, suppliers, and others. It is a much more complex trend and difficult to manage.

CIO Today: How have new legislative demands affected the I.T. department and the CIO in particular?

Markezich: That is another category of things that have radically changed. I think Sarbanes-Oxley regulation has been great for the industry and for us but it does require a huge time commitment. Even so, I am probably at an advantage because I have the resources to readily comply. It does give us internal controls and great feedback, but the actual scope of the requirement is difficult to nail down.

The biggest challenge is in handling all the different laws in different countries, and even in different regions of the same country. Many of those laws dictate where you can store company data or even employee information. That makes it hard. I.T. loves to standardize, but such a scattering of requirements makes it hard to standardize compliance. Plus, the rules are constantly changing.

At some point, many of us in I.T. would like to see some consistency for managing controls and privacy, like a standards board that sets the bar across industries -- something along the lines of what accounting has in the GAAP, or generally accepted accounting principles.

CIO Today: Which enterprise component or technology will be growing most in terms of its slice of your company's budget pie in the next 12 months?

Markezich: As a standard course of my job, I run products within Microsoft before we release them to customers. The SQL Server 2005, for example, launched [recently] but we've been running our production systems on that database since August of 2004 -- a full 15 months before shipping that product.

The next 12 months are the next biggest wave of new products we have had in the history of Microsoft. I will be quickly deploying all the new products like Windows Vista, Windows Server (Longhorn), Exchange 12, and Office 12 -- all will be fully deployed at MS before shipping. All the log-ins are moving to two-factor verification. Passwords are pretty much phased out. It is an exciting time.

I am also bullish about what is going to happen in the network area. Wi-fi is much better than years past. We are redoing our wireless network with products from Aruba. There is a lot more functionality these days and we want to integrate data, voice, and video though mobile phones. IPv6 is the next version for our network; the security benefits and simplicity of use are astounding.

CIO Today: Can you walk us through the decision-making process of implementing a large-scale business process management initiative?

Markezich: Microsoft is very large company. We have four main business groups: Sales & Marketing, I.T., Operations, and Product and R&D Group. We work with the executives from those four areas and look at business strategies and then look at solutions to drive that initiative. Our business groups understand that there must always be a business effort to marry with an I.T. solution to support it. A dedicated I.T. team and a dedicated business process team then focus on the delivery.

The costs are approved by the business-executive sponsor that championed the process.

CIO Today: What are one or two software or hardware products your company uses that you would describe as outstanding?

Markezich: I don't want to sound too much like sales, but we do have some exceptional products. A new, lesser-known product is the Data Protection Manager. It allows you to do backup to disk instead of tape. It has saved us quite a bit of money.

When it comes to a non-Microsoft product, I would say Aruba Airespace -- recently bought by Cisco. It's fabulous wireless with increased bandwidth and has huge benefits.

The third, IP PBX by Interactive Intelligence for IP telephony. We have had great success with it.

CIO Today: Which emerging technology do you see as most important to the enterprise?

Markezich: Most important is the trend toward software as a service, where you take a function and give it to another company to run remotely. The other trend is something that we are going to do as well: getting rid of the password process and using two-factor authentications.

CIO Today: Where do you go to do your research on new technologies?

Markezich: I read online and paper magazines like CIO Today regularly. And, I spend time talking to other CIOs. As a matter of fact, I just got back from New York City, where I met with 25 different CIOs in one day. I also work closely with venture capitalists and start-ups. They have an option to present a pitch -- it's hard for them to get their products known otherwise. We also have a very large R&D department.

CIO article

Posted by hope at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With the company's former ethics officer facing criminal charges, Hewlett-Packard on Thursday hired a replacement to help put an end to spying scandals.

Jon Hoak was named HP's new vice president and chief ethics and compliance officer, the company said in a press release.

Hoak replaces Kevin Hunsaker, a central figure in a probe by the company to find the source of news leaks earlier this year. Last week, Hunsaker and former HP chairman Patricia Dunn were charged with four felonies, including identity theft, after HP acknowledged that some of the company's investigators obtained private phone records.

Hunsaker and Dunn resigned last month, as did two other HP executives. Besides being the subject of a criminal investigation, former HP officials have had to appear before a congressional subcommittee on the leak probe matter and the company faces related scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"HP has traditionally led the industry in adherence to standards of ethics, privacy and corporate responsibility," HP CEO Mark Hurd said in a statement. "With Jon's guidance, we will lead again."

One of Hoak's first duties will be to assist attorneys hired by HP to assess the company's investigative practices.

During its probe, HP investigators tricked phone company employees into turning over private phone records belonging to journalists, employees and HP board directors, the company has acknowledged.

Hoak is the former general counsel for NCR and a former attorney at AT&T.

HP article

Posted by hope at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

To succeed in sales, you must be able to find and close a sufficient number of qualified prospects. That points up the reason most salespeople that do traditional “cold calling” fail. They fail because most of the appointments they make are with Low Probability Prospects who cannot be closed. Furthermore, their attempts to get an appointment with everyone they talk to causes so much resistance that most prospects will not talk to them again. That prevents them from developing a favorable relationship with most of their prospects.

The ability to prospect efficiently, effectively and enjoyably will enable you to meet with prospects that need, want and can afford your products and services- now. Your confidence will soar, and empower you to develop a consistently superior income stream.

Follow these 10 Tips for Prospecting Success:

1. Start with a highly targeted prospecting list, consisting of people or companies that are most likely to buy your type of products and services. Use a highly reputable list broker to find such a list. The cost should be no more than 25¢ per name. Start with a list of no more than 500 names. You cannot afford to develop your own list, unless you already have a book of business. In that case, call your existing customers as if they are new prospects.

2. Call every name on your list every 3-4 weeks. Understand that only a small percentage of your list will be ready to buy the first time that you call. Many more will be ready each successive time that you call. Most prospects will not want to meet with you until you have presented prospecting offers at least three times.

3. Present a “prospecting offer” of no more than 45 words that clearly states who you are, what you are selling, and two features of your product or service. Finish up with “Is that what you want?” Each time you call, change the two features. That will prevent most prospects from getting annoyed. It will also eliminate most of the rejection that is caused by traditional cold calling.

4. If the prospect says “No” or “I am not interested,” you say “Okay, good bye.” Do not press for an appointment. Do not try to engage the prospect in a conversation or ask any questions. That will be the most pleasant sales call they ever get. It will assure that less than 1% of the prospects will ask you not to call again.

5. Schedule your prospecting sessions for 3½ hours. Take a fifteen-minute break between each hour. That is more productive than five prospecting sessions of one hour each.

6. Tape yourself. Use a tape recorder with an open microphone to tape your side of each call. Start the tape when the prospect answers. Listen to how you sound. The goal is to hear yourself using your usual conversational tones. Do not try to sound like a professional salesperson. Do not come across as overly enthusiastic, unusually friendly or enticing. Just relax and present your offer without persuasion.

7. Always be in a "Disqualification" mode. Be determined to spend your selling time only with High Probability Prospects. Disqualify low probability prospects quickly and courteously. Don’t allow desperation or anxiousness to deter you from that mission.

8. Accept the fact that prospecting really is a “numbers game.” The most important numbers are your Dials Per Hour and the ratio of prospecting Offers to Dials.

9. Keep accurate records of your prospecting sessions. We have trained thousands of salespeople to be successful prospectors. The most successful keep accurate records. The act of keeping records will cause your subconscious mind to constantly improve your results. Ask us to email the “High Probability Prospecting Activity Record” form to you if you need it.

10. Telephone prospecting is the most productive way to build up your sales volume, with very little up-front expense and a minimum of marketing expertise. Start with telephone prospecting, and eventually you will get so many referrals from your existing customers that you will need to get an assistant to do your prospecting for you.

About the Author:
High Probability Prospecting® is the first phase of the High Probability Selling® system. High Probability Selling is a leading sales training and sales consulting company founded in 1989. While High Probability Selling principles may seem quite radical, they have been proven to be highly successful on hundreds of thousands of sales calls by salespeople in over seventy industries.

Contact Information:
High Probability® Selling
103 Chesley Drive, Suite 200
Media, PA 19063
Foreign: (610) 566-1535, Toll Free: (800) 394-7762
Email: contactus@highprobsell.com
www.highprobsell.com

prospecting article

Posted by hope at 03:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, when the Europeans won the Ryder Cup, golf's team event, one analyst credited the win to the Europeans hugging. In fact, the European team was hugging… and high-fiving, and generally supporting each other throughout the match.

The Americans? Tiger Woods and the others played like they play on a typical Sunday afternoon. No talking. No eye contact. They were in their personal zones.

Unfortunately, we see the same thing in sales. Few of the teams I work with communicate with each other on a regular basis. With the exception of sales meetings and training sessions, many never interact at all.

Your team is a valuable asset to you if you use it. How? Contacts, tactics, support and more.

Here is an example…

In a sales meeting with a client, I had each member of the sales team write the name of one account that they have not been able to penetrate on a list. Next, we had the members of the team review the entire list and put their initials next to every account they felt they could help penetrate. One rep had listed Coca Cola of Atlanta as his tough account. He had spent a year trying to get a meeting with them. After the exercise was done, 10 reps had initialed Coke! That's 10 people in this company who believed they could help this rep penetrate that account. We put them together for 10 minutes and developed a plan that resulted in a sale within a month.

How's that for team power?

I know many of you are relieved that I am not actually advocating that you spend time hugging each other. But I am encouraging you to reach out to your team members and use them to your advantage.

Here are six examples:

1. Find a 'sales buddy' that will be willing to role play tough sales calls with you over the phone. You'll both get better.

2. Determine who the real experts are on your team and build a relationship with them. Make sure you ask them how they do what they do so you can learn from their experience. Most people are happy to help.

3. Find several peers who are as interested in getting better at sales as you are and build a 'master mind' group. Get together regularly to swap strategies and share problems. This is one of the secrets of highly successful people.

4. Do a survey of your sales team and find out who has inside knowledge of your key accounts. Some may have worked there and others could have called on the account in the past. Look beyond their current experience to what they did at previous jobs. You'll be amazed at what you find.

5. Start a sales 'book club' where each person reads a different sales book and then gives the group a summary of the key learning points. The collective knowledge you develop will be amazing.

6. Send congratulation notes or emails to colleagues who land big deals. Once it gets started, everyone will be cheering for each other and you'll learn why sports teams have a home field advantage!

Now it's your turn. What will you do to tap into the power of your team? Drop me an email at steve@waterhousegroup.com with your favorite tip so I can share it with others.

Happy Selling,

Steve Waterhouse

About The Author:

Steve Waterhouse is Principal and Founder of Waterhouse Group (www.waterhousegroup.com), a sales consulting and training company that helps companies dramatically increase their sales. He can be reached at 1-800-57-LEARN or info@waterhousegroup.com.

hugging article

Posted by hope at 03:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

MCLEAN, Va., Oct. 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- BearingPoint, Inc.
(NYSE: BE), one of the world's largest management and technology consulting
firms, announced today it will highlight a new suite of Oracle-based
solutions designed to leverage customers' ERP and technology investments
and provide an effective technology framework in preparation for Fusion
Applications at the Oracle(R) OpenWorld Conference taking place October
22-26 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Oracle OpenWorld is a four-day conference that includes product and
applications demonstrations, keynote speeches and roundtable discussions
from industry leaders, an exhibition hall featuring 250 Oracle partners,
and an Oracle user group forum.
For more than 13 years, BearingPoint and Oracle have combined
experienced resources to develop and provide customers with unique,
vertical solutions. An Oracle partner since 1995, a PeopleSoft partner
since 1993 and a Siebel partner since 1999, BearingPoint has completed more
than 2,000 Oracle, PeopleSoft and Siebel implementations and upgrades in 52
countries.
"BearingPoint offers a unique collaborative approach based on deep
industry and operational knowledge combined with significant systems
integration experience," said Robert Hershey, senior vice president of
BearingPoint's Technology Solutions. "BearingPoint has drawn upon its deep
vertical knowledge and its strategic relationship with Oracle to influence
the development of industry-focused solutions based on Oracle technology."
Some highlights of the Oracle-based industry solutions BearingPoint
will demonstrate at its OpenWorld Conference booth (#1624) include:
* BearingPoint's Corporate Performance Management solutions, including
predictive analytics, business intelligence, data management, business
process/change management and risk management applications, powered by
Oracle technology.

* ERP Optimization solutions, designed to leverage customers' core ERP
investment through integrating process and information between CRM,
Financial management, HCM and SCM modules, as well as verticalization
for professional services, leasing and add-ons such as field services,
EAM and case management.

* Fusion Technology Solutions, leveraging Service-Oriented Architecture
(SOA) for integration, composite applications, security and identity
management, collaboration and "Road to Fusion" planning tools.
Forrester Research revealed in a recent report that BearingPoint's SOA
offering received the highest score in "The Forrester Wave(TM): North
American SOA Integration, Q3 2006, Forrester Research, Inc., September
2006." According to the report: "BearingPoint's strong showing in this
evaluation is because its clients agree with most of its vision around
SOA: agility, cost containment, time-to-market, and strategic focus.
Few client references we interviewed were as well aligned to their
provider's vision as BearingPoint's. The success of SOA will ultimately
be determined by its business value, and BearingPoint is well
positioned for this business focus."
Highlighting BearingPoint's expertise in these areas, the company will
have a number of speakers and customers featured at Oracle OpenWorld:
* Greg Lomow, who will draw on his extensive experience helping c