One of things we do is have quarterly themes for our products. Themes are a good way to keep everyone focused on the big picture direction for a period of time. Our products’ themes for this quarter include:
I’d recommend having one theme per product per quarter. Set the theme and then do your best to rally your team around it.
We’re adding weekly sales training workshops to our training program. They work the same as our manager training where we each come up with a few topics we’d like to discuss, write them all down, and then pick two each week to do experience sharing around. Here are the topics we came up with:
We just started a new weekly training and workshops program for the managers in the my company. As part of it, we had everyone come up with a few topics they’d be interested in discussing in future meetings. Here are the topics we’ll be discussing using the Gestalt Psychology experience sharing methodology:
I was talking to a very successful entrepreneur a few days ago about sales rep compensation plans. In his model, they sell an annual subscription for several thousand dollars to their service. What I really liked about it was that quota was done on a monthly basis whereby no commission was paid at all until 60% of quota was reached for that month.
After 60% was reached, commission was paid on all previous deals and more sweetners were added when additional percentages of quota were reached. The result was that sales reps worked hard and that there was a spike in deals at the end of each month, when the reps could make the most money.
This has come up two times in the past couple weeks making it worthy of a blog post: don’t add too many features to your produt before soliciting customer input. In fact, in some cases, you should sell your prospects on the idea of a new feature and/or product just to get their feedback to see if it is the right direction to go.
As a rule of thumb, you should be able to build and launch your web application in three months tops. If it takes longer than that, you’re making it too complicated. We made that mistake with one of our products and are now spending hundreds of hours refactoring the back-end and actually removing some features from the product. Don’t let it happen to you.
For one of my latest projects, I decided to try and see how cheaply I could get a really nice logo and web design done for Shotput Ventures. Here’s what I did:
Of course, it is powered by the eCrowds Community Management system and Pardot Marketing Automation system, but that’s a different topic.
I think the site and logo turned out pretty nice for under $1,500.
I’ve been enjoying Twitter more and more over the past two months, once I made the resolution to participate and understand it. Here’s my recommendation for getting value from Twitter:
Good luck with Twitter and try it for a full month to fully appreciate it.
For 2009 we started a new strategy of daily check-ins from the bottom up every day in the office. This means that every department does a scrum-like daily check-in answering the following questions while standing in under 10 minutes:
Then, the department leader asks if there are any ideas for improvements as well as any heroes to recognize for outstanding work. We do this every single day! People that telecommute (we have a one day a week telecommute policy for everyone) dial in to a conference number.
This is a bottom up daily check-in as everyone does at least one and up to three of these in a row in the morning. It works as follows:
This way, any issues are immediately propagated across the organization and can be worked through by the leadership team within 20 minutes of finding it out.
There’s an awesome buzz of noise every morning when this takes place. I’m a big fan of it.
Last week’s Twitter snafu involving the hacking of several celebrity Twitter accounts and posting commercial and lewd remarks was found to come from an individual hacking into a Twitter support person’s account. The gist of the story is that an individual wrote a script to automatically try every word in the dictionary to break into an online account. It turns out that the password was ‘happiness’ and was found relatively quickly.
For programmers and online entrepreneurs, the moral of the story is to only allow a few login attempts before the account is automatically locked. How is the account unlocked? The account can be unlocked by contacting support, if applicable, or by going through a forgot password sequence that involves answering a question or having a link emailed and clicked.
One of the hardest things to do for a fast growing company is to get everyone aligned and on the same page. One business guru said successful businesses are 1% vision and 99% alignment. Here are some good books for entrepreneurs once they get past $1 million in revenue:
What are your thoughts? What books do you recommend?
David Cummings on Startups 