Dylan “commands” my iPod while riding shotgun on the way to school in the morning. He repeatedly plays his favorite song: “Better Way” by Ben Harper.

His favorite verse:

Fools will be fools
And wise will be wise
But I will look this world
Straight in the eyes
I believe in a better way

There is no better description of him and his personality than this (see: “Dylan has flipped”) , nor is there a better way to describe his approach to his school work.

Last week Dylan and 3 classmates completed a major Medieval term “paper” project for their middle school humanities class. They wrote, storyboarded, filmed, edited and produced an 8.5 minute video short of a palace coup in an Irish kingdom set in the middle ages. They completed all of this in about 8 hours over two week-ends. They submitted the video 3 weeks ahead of schedule; the class and the teacher loved it. What was most important to me is these 4 boys were motivated and engaged in this form of expression.

I spoke about this at a recent SIIA CEO council event. My point was that this up and coming generation has personal communication tools and skills we could only dream of. I remember entering the workforce in 1981 and having my “secretary” (remember them?) gloating about her Exxon Information Systems Qwip memory typewriter. It had 16K of memory and a 32 character LCD display through which she could recall templates from memory for subsequent editing. What a far cry from a teenager with a video production studio of his own, consisting of:  a flip® HD camera, laptop, studio lights, a USB memory stick, and editing software.

I firmly believe that “video processing” applications and skills will be for this decade what word processing, desktop publishing, and website content management were for the last two decades. To remain relevant and current (see: “Relevant and current”) we will need to master, or at least be comfortable with, video processing applications and this medium of expression.

You see, I believe in a better way.

Wordle cloud

I met my wife while out on the road (see: “But, I got the girl”). When I arrived in town for our second date she informed me: “…tomorrow night, we’re having dinner with my mother. OK?” As Jeff P. says, no matter how I answered, there were consequences to my decision.

When I worked with NEC, we often used our Annual Users Group meetings as a strategic part of our selling process. We were involved in very complex decision processes, often lasting as long as 36 months; the customer life cycle was 15-20 years. The Users Group meetings were a way for both parties to size each other up.

There is no substitute for dinner with the family. It is almost a pre-requisite for all long term relationship decisions, whether personal or professional. Invaluable insight is gained by observing people in settings involving their most intimate relationships.

Prolifiq is in the midst of an equity raise involving institutional capital. On one of our investor calls, the managing director of a fund invited me to one of his quarterly portfolio meetings. As with my wife, there were “consequences” no matter how I responded. I rearranged my schedule in order to attend -- I’m glad I did.

I met all the principals; I saw how they interact. I heard the counsel and advice they provide; I witnessed how they treat their portfolio companies. And, I interviewed the CEOs of the portfolio companies (privately) to get an unvarnished perspective of the firm. And as one of the key members of the due diligence team told me: “….I didn’t realize how valuable this would be; it gave us a really good chance to do due diligence on you.” My sentiments exactly.

Excuse me, could you please pass the potatoes?

Wordle cloud

One thing we are proud of, and in some cases struggle with, is that for some, our applications and capabilities are ahead of the market and outside of their comfort zone. An example of this is our video messaging capabilities.

The very first commercial iteration of our product was what we, in 2001, called “personal video messaging”. This function allowed individual users to activate their web camera (think Logitech) and to record, edit and insert a video in personal email. The video was captured on their PC, encoded, and moved to our file servers in the cloud. An attachment-free message was sent to the recipient, and when opened, the video would activate and stream to their PC. Our technology managed all of the technical aspects so the user and the receiver of the message didn’t have to be technically proficient.

A division of a very large Connecticut based multi-national corporation deployed this in their call center to allow telesales agents to establish a “personal” connection with their customers. Some of the agents took to it and produced some of the very best and creative messages I have ever seen; one involved a replica of the opening scenes from the old TV show Bonanza and ended with the guy’s cowboy hat catching on fire. He definitely caught people’s attention with that one!  Other people were camera shy, and refused to use it to project their images to their customers.

I used the capability to “cold call” the chief marketing officer of a very large multi-national technology corporation. I spoke to him personally, telling him how I thought we could transform his sales operations. It worked – four days later we had a contract to proceed. They bought from us because they learned their customers wanted to hear from their salespeople, not from some nameless, faceless entity in marketing@greatbigcompany.com.

Over the last eight years this company has been a stalwart customer to Prolifiq, deploying us globally and integrating us with their sales and marketing workflows. Their own employees and those of their channel partners are among our most active users. We deliver all forms of content, from a plethora of sources, all distributed through the sales force (this is what Gartner Group calls “sales content management” and is on the “slope of enlightenment” of their CRM Hype Cycle model (see: http://blog.gartner.com/blog/crm.php).

Most recently, this company has made using video in personal and corporate communications a priority. With the advent of high-quality, personal video cameras and the integration of web cameras into laptops and netbook computers, this is becoming a widely accepted form of personal expression, and will soon be a very common business communication tool. Plus, the under 35 crowd is not as camera shy (one need only look at Facebook and MySpace to see this); they now represent a large percentage of customer facing employees. It is only natural that they want video capability in their corporate communications as well.

So, this large company recently decided to embrace our legacy capabilities by including personal video messages of their most senior executives in communications to their largest customers. They will be using our latest release of Video Messaging. While we are proud that we envisioned this back in 2001, we are even more proud they chose Prolifiq to do this – it is a testament to our technical proficiency and superior user experience.

Thank you.

So, where are we going? Back to the future.

Wordle cloud

Anyone who has ever worked in sales has worked in a “bullpen” – a mainstay of the corporate world – row upon row of cubicles. A hidden advantage of the bullpen is the ability to prairie dog (popping up over the cubicle wall to see what is going on). This “cubicle collaboration” is used by sales people to share and learn “best practices”. Sales people are highly iterative people, constantly refining their repertoire to increase their effectiveness.

Searching Google for collaboration returns 82,100,000 results; it is obviously a popular business topic. Wikipedia defines collaboration as:

Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus.

Telecommuting, hotelling, WebEx, Starbucks and WiFi, and smartphones are making the sales bull pen a corporate relic. The demise of the bull pen is also making cubicle collaboration more difficult. It is no wonder why sales folks flock to social media – it is a way for them to share best practices.

Prolifiq embraces salespeople’s need to collaborate; this is standard with our platform. Any authorized user can create messaging and “push” these messages to others in their team, department, company or eco-system. What this means is content and best practice messages can be quickly deployed, used, measured and refined – supporting sales’ iterative nature.

This is very effective for program or product managers to produce and distribute product marketing material. Sales managers use it to execute sales plays or periodic “push” programs. It is also very effective at providing rapid-fire responses to changing circumstances, such as the electronic syndication of breaking news photography or videos.

We introduced this based on feedback from many of our visual media and high technology customers. It has turned out to be our most widely used feature within the application, and we just released our third iteration of sharing last week.

When you need to rapidly share information with your sales people, and have them get it to customers quickly – remember the Prolifiq “push” is on.

Wordle cloud

I’ve spent the last 30 years selling innovation and change. I competed against “the phone company” prior to the break-up of AT&T; I was involved in the introduction of voice messaging in the early 1980’s; I led a unit that introduced computer telephony integration (CTI) to the US Healthcare industry; I helped a start-up introduce web-telephony before most knew what voice over internet protocol (VoIP) is; and now I do what we do.

I’ve encountered thousands and thousands of decision makers in many industries and companies. Human beings bring all of their personal idiosyncrasies, experiences and biases to the decision making process. A key component of my job is to understand these motivations and learn how to appeal to them. Psychologists and marketers have studied these motivations, and slot buyers into “categories” on a product adoption curve:
 
Invariably, Innovators and Change Agents are the first to adopt new technologies, concepts and products. They are whom I’ve interacted with my entire career.  Many have become strong personal friends; some have become employees and co-workers. They are unique: they “get” things very quickly. They act decisively. They are bold. And they believe rewards for swift, bold, game changing action outweigh perceived risks.

Five of Prolifiq’s employees were attracted to us because they are clearly “innovators”, seeing significant opportunity to change the world working with us as opposed to working for just one company. Each of them impacts our business – every day:

Getty Images and Seattle University alum Linda Ranz is the first person, in 2003, who connected Prolifiq to a customer-owned visual media content repository. Her novel concept: use visual media to sell visual media by including it within the daily conversational messages of her sales force. As a senior VP, she helped build Getty Images into the visual media powerhouse it is today. Linda serves on Prolifiq’s Board of Directors and guides our thinking about using visual media in the selling process.

Tektronix and University of Oregon alum Lisa Parker is the first person, in 2004, who projected hosted, managed content through a distributed sales force.  Her first deployment included inserting 1,500+ discrete content elements into her salespeople’s conversations. Lisa is our Director of Marketing and develops and manages our message, content and go-to-market activities.

Palm and UC Berkley alum Sylvia Vu is the first person, in 2005, who deployed Prolifiq messaging on a smart phone. Like Linda, Sylvia executed the novel concept of using a product to sell a product. Palm used Prolifiq to introduce the Treo 650, distributing marketing content from the phone and providing immediate information request fulfillment. Sylvia is a senior account manager and manages deployments and customer relationships with Life Sciences Companies; her mobility experience and Cognitive Computing degree heavily influence her thinking about how our customers use Prolifiq.

Corbis, Accenture and Wellesley alum JoAnn Ollila is the first person, in 2006, who programmatically inserted visual media content and staged messages for individual salespeople’s daily use in conversations with customers (trigger messaging). JoAnn leads our media, entertainment and technology unit and manages our professional services engagements with our largest customers. Her visual media and systems integration experience eminently qualify her for this role.

US Surgical, Cordis, AtriCure and Duke University alum Maureen Shaffer and her staff were the first, in 2007, who deployed Prolifiq and revolutionized the selling process for a Life Science company and protected them from regulatory compliance violations. She used Prolifiq at two Life Sciences companies prior to joining us. Maureen is our Vice President of Life Sciences and plans and manages our activities in this dynamic market. With her industry experience and Biomedical Engineering degree, she knows how we impact our customers.

Smart, innovative and ambitious people are incredibly valuable and hard to find. We’re humbled and grateful that Prolifiq fit the personal and professional ambitions of each member of our “Big 5”. Our customers are the ultimate beneficiaries.  We continually receive high marks for “customer empathy” – it is embedded in our corporate DNA. When we talk with customers and prospects, we hope we come across with: “do not as we say; do as we have done”.

Wordle cloud

Jeff Farnsworth is our lead architect, and he imprints his style across our entire suite of products (see: “A Duck, a Beaver and a Pilot”). We’ve kept him and the entire team busy the last 18 months, and Pandian has imposed very rigorous quality control processes on our development and deployment teams. Here is Jeff F’s response:

Anyone in the software world can relate to his sentiments. Geek humor at its best.

My question is: since Jeff is obviously Robin and all in Jeff’s direct chain of command are mentioned, who’s Batman? Care to comment, Jeff?
 

Beaverton Mayor Denny Doyle and the Beaverton City Council recently honored and publicly thanked Prolifiq by recognizing us at a City Council meeting as part of their “Beaverton 4 Business™” campaign. This is part of an ongoing effort the Mayor’s office has made to be business friendly (see: “Beaverton for Business”). Because of his efforts, we now count Denny and his staff as official friends of Prolifiq.

Because of the recent passage of Oregon Ballot measures 66 & 67, whereby the State of Oregon increased the taxes on businesses in the state, the Hon. Richard Daley, Mayor of Chicago – the city of “Big Shoulders”, boldly announced he was going to actively solicit and “poach” Oregon companies to move to Chicago.

Well, Mayor Doyle, being a Chicago “fighting-Irish” Democrat, couldn’t and wouldn’t let this go unchallenged. I reprint his response to Mayor Daley (as printed in the Sat. February 6, 2010 Chicago Sun Times):

Dear Mayor Daley: No way you're stealing our Oregon jobs
Chicago Sun-Times
Sat, 6 Feb 2010 04:00
BY DENNY DOYLE

There's nothing like a Chicago brag to get you going. I read of Mayor Daley's plan to invade Oregon ["Daley wants to raid Pacific Northwest talent," Jan. 28] and lure businesses to Chicago, given that Oregon voters have approved a new business tax.

From one Irish mayor to another, I suggest Mayor Daley hold off packing his bags.

My city is Beaverton, Ore., population 86,000 and next-door neighbor to Portland. Compared with Chicago, Beaverton enjoys a lower cost of living in categories such as housing, groceries, utilities, transportation and health care. Then there's that pesky 9 percent Illinois sales tax. I also hear there's the Cook County sales tax. Did I mention Oregon has no sales tax?

Don't get me wrong. I admire Chicago. I was born at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, lived in Des Plaines for 20 years, then married and moved back to Chicago. My wife and I started our family there. I graduated from Illinois State University and spent five years working in Springfield before moving to the city's 49th Ward. And yes, I still bleed Chicago for the Cubs, Bears and Bulls. But I digress.

Washington County, Beaverton's home, has no sales/use tax, no business and occupation tax and no local business income taxes. We're acutely aware of the additional tax burden Oregon businesses now bear. Like your economy, our economy continues to take a beating. That's why our city business development team works even harder to help local companies grow and recruits others to relocate here.
Come to think of it, rather than engage in this exchange, I'd prefer to meet with Mayor Daley to discuss how we can collectively create new jobs and take back all the family wage jobs we've lost overseas during the last two decades.

But let's delve further into the comparative. Take property taxes. As recently as two weeks ago, I was reminded that the property taxes on my late father's 1,250-square-foot home in Cook County are almost 10 percent higher than on my 2,600-square-foot home in Beaverton.

And for what it's worth, the 70-year-old Tax Foundation, a non-partisan tax research group based in Washington, D.C., reports that Oregon's state/local tax burden has fallen 16 places, dropping it into the lower half of all states.

I have a soft spot for Chicago, and I dearly miss Wrigley Field. But I also remember a day in January when the temperature at Grayslake was nearly 30 below zero. Sure, it rains in Oregon. But spring, summer and fall are pleasantly sunny, often warm and mostly comfortable.

Consider also that Beaverton is about an hour from the mountains and the Pacific Ocean. It's green here, too. Thanks to innovative Oregon business minds, it's getting greener every year. I also admire the green, sustainable path that Chicago is following. It inspires all of us to do more.

OK, I'll admit that the pace of life in Beaverton is not as fast as in the Windy City. But there's an upside. We're rated the safest city in the Pacific Northwest and, because of our great schools and parks, BusinessWeek has ranked Beaverton as one of the best places in the nation to raise kids, and No. 1 in Oregon.

Speaking of the outdoors, I'm thinking about taking a trip: to recruit some of Chicago's forward-thinking companies to Beaverton and to touch base with Mayor Daley. He runs a great city. I'd like to pick up on some of his recruiting techniques!

Nothing like the bravado of Midwestern Irishmen – Mayor Doyle, I love your style!

Wordle Summary

George Clooney’s latest flick, “Up in the Air”,  chronicles the life of a detached and lonely road warrior. From 1990 to 1999 I was a road warrior. Seven cities every 5 days. Three flights a day. 150,000 air miles a year. 2,600 hotel night stays. 5,200 meals in hotel restaurants. 3,500 sales calls. These ten years influenced who and what I am today.

My quirky habits come from my days on the road. I always know where my stuff is. I never unpack my toiletry kit. My shirts are always folded. All my leather, shoes and socks are black. I have a blue-based monochromatic “mix and match” wardrobe. I can pack a bag in 10 minutes. I can travel for 10 days in a single, carry-on roll-aboard. I am highly efficient at passing through security, check-in, check-out, and rental car counters. And, I don’t have time for “dawdlers”.  Mobile minimalism influences my thinking for Prolifiq’s products.

The road warrior lifestyle is not conducive to fostering meaningful relationships, requires hyper efficiency to save time and money, and encourages de-personalization.  I needed the right content to support me wherever I went, so I spent a fortune on FedEx.  No matter how well Holly (my admin) and I planned, invariably something went wrong – either I didn’t have what I needed, or I couldn’t quickly and easily tailor it for different circumstances. I carry these experiences with me, and I impart them to the team as we empathize with our customers. Our platform helps build meaningful, personal relationships and minimizes time and expense. And our users can make every customer’s message unique to them, and include the perfect content.

Clooney’s character was a poignant and personal reminder of the life I left behind. After achieving his dream of 10 million miles and lifetime Executive Membership, Clooney decides to give up the road to build relationships of value in his life: with the woman, with his estranged family, and the possibility of children in the future. I made the same choice; I got the girl. She’s my wife and has been for almost 16 years. And, I am helping others build meaningful relationships one conversation at a time.

Wordle summary

Think Globally, act Locally – watchwords for business. Globalization and the Internet. These words speak volumes about the global economic transformation in the last 15 years; and in fact they feed on each other. The internet facilitates globalization; globalization drives up the use of the internet. We accepted this as a given when designing our platform; we built a global platform from the very beginning.

Our first customer took us global almost immediately. Our customer’s users, external to the US, saw what we did for the US market and wished to adopt these “best practices” to accelerate their sales. The Internet provides almost no “friction” to us serving these users.

One gating factor in all of this – not everyone speaks English. Users need to communicate with their customers in local languages, and most of our customers’ content starts as American English source. We quickly realized the availability of localized content was critical to our customers’ success.

The solution ― incorporate localization workflows within our content libraries. Hence the relationship we announced yesterday with viaLanguage (see: Prolifiq and viaLanguage Announce Partnership: Accelerate the use of localized content by sales teams).

viaLanguage joins our solution “ecosystem”. They are an easy choice for us: smart people, phenomenal culture, great products/processes, and our customer base and market strategies are almost congruent in the high-tech, life sciences sectors and financial services sectors.

With this relationship, our respective customers quickly load content, initiate localization requests (by language(s)) needed, and have the content in the hands of their sales force and distribution channel in short order.

Together, we quickly allow salespeople to speak in local tongues.

Wordle summary

Great salespeople listen more than they speak.  By “tuning in”, they learn learn, understand and appreciate what motivates people to buy.

At Prolifiq, we place high value on listening. It is an element of our culture that consistently ranks in the top 2 attributes on surveys of our customers.

So, we’ve been listening. Here’s what we know from our Life Sciences Good Promotional Practices (GPP) initiative (4 months post launch), in rank order.  If we didn’t get it right, please let us know – we’re all ears. 

1) The Digital Dilemma – first movers are companies that have made considerable investments in converting content and building “digital” libraries that salespeople and customers “go to” to get content. A classic “pull” mode of content distribution.  The “dilemma”: salespeople and customers don’t use them. Why? Because it requires them to “do” something – namely navigate to a site, then search and find the information they need.  Then, because the systems don’t “cover the last mile” – distribution - sales users have to pull the content out of the library and find a way – usually email, to get the content to their audience.  These companies see our mobile applications, and quickly conclude that coverage of the last mile with a delivery and tracking application resolves the dilemma.  Now users can “push” at the time of need.   Gartner suggests this is the preferred solution for delivering content to and from mobile users (see: “Appartgeist Part II: Gartner and the Mobile Web”). This topic is discussed in our most recent whitepaper: "Good Promotional Practices (GPP): Are You Ready?".

2) Brand Projection – most companies struggle with a consistent “brand” presentation to and through their sales forces and sales channels. This is exacerbated when assimilating people through an acquisition. Our customers find us to be an effective and efficient way to solve this problem and ensure the brand message is conveyed in all daily electronic customer communications.

3) Compliance – our Good Promotional Practices/Good Reprint Practices content management and workflow functions are often what first captures a customer’s attention. FDA prosecutions and settlements have galvanized companies’ awareness of the need for sales and marketing compliance functionality. Our customers find that our content management, revision level control, approval workflows and electronic communications history record (eCHR) ensure their employees’ behavior matches corporate intent and compliance with regulations.

4) “Chatter patterns” – our Customer Conversations Dashboard provides unprecedented visibility into who is talking with whom; about what; when; with what content; and how customers interact with this content. Our customers find this advances progress towards a unified “closed loop marketing” (CLM) methodology – including front-line sales activity – that enhances message relevance, builds customer intimacy and helps optimize marketing content spend.

I find several things interesting about this ranking: item #2 is the primary value proposition our first customer recognized and embraced when buying from us; item #1 was the primary motivator behind the development of our product suite, so we often – and incorrectly – take it for granted. Item #3 is the core of the capabilities we specifically developed and fine-tuned for the Life Sciences industry. Item #4 is something we first deployed in Life Sciences; however, we know it applies to all of our customers and can be viewed as the “holy grail” of marketing.

We have also heard several requests for enhancements to our applications. We are studying them, understanding their implications, developing business cases and modeling, and we are prioritizing their release timelines. Not all of them will make the list; however, we will continue to write about these in upcoming posts.

Thank you to all who share your daily experiences, buying processes, and feedback with us – your feedback is invaluable. Keep pushing and pulling us – I assure you we will continue to respond.

Wordle summary