I came across this video from McKinsey & Company titled “Making sense of Social Media – The Management Challenge” which provides thought leadership into what managers should prepare for when entering the social media realm.

David Edelman, Principal at McKinsey & Company, reinforces simplicity as a key component of your social media campaign. It is easy to complicate your strategy because the social media channel is complicated. Keep it simple and you’ll be more likely to witness success.

Managers must be willing to undergo changes, according to David Court, Director at McKinsey & Company. Court states that you must create the right content and hire the right people to monitor and measure your social media campaign which does require a shift in budget allocation however it is essential for success.

We know that we must be involved in social media and make the shift over time, so instead of doing it for the sake of doing it, learn about it, gain experience, and strive towards being a thought leader in this space – This is a great reason to play the social media game!

We have included a new section of Clive Smith’s Book, “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sales & Selling”. Chapter 3.2 Differentiation looks at mastering the art of differentiation so that you significantly improve your ability to win against good competition.

Click Here to see the Contents page.

The basis of all value propositions is that one product or solution is different in some way from the existing or alternative product or solution.

Differentiation is also the basis of competitive selling. In this book (and in my previous roles as sales manager) I mainly focus on enhancing the skills of the salesman because if you execute well and provide good service to the customer you will probably win the deal anyway as most customers experience poor selling skills and service from most salespeople, however if you master the art of differentiation you significantly improve your ability to win against good opposition.

The other “opponent” that differentiation helps you against is the Procurement or Purchasing Manager. Most organizations try to create competition between vendors for any significant purchase. The preferred approach is to make all the offers reach a threshold “it does the job”; to dismiss all differentiation and to make the vendors compete on price. So unless you want your sales career to be a series of meetings where you beg management to approve discounts, I recommend you think about differentiation.

The example of a computer server that needs less electricity is a small “difference”; whole companies have been built on differentiation. In the computer software industry one of the classic case studies would be Sybase, which was based on the differentiation of “client-server” as opposed to server based computing. Briefly the difference was a way of communication between PC based applications and the database server. This feature allowed applications to be structured and designed in a different way and (crucially) enabled a different type of application where the end user could use a PC for local processing and access data in a database on a server. So he had more “Client” power to use at his finger tips, the PC; (the alternative was a “green screen” terminal with no intelligence). Further he had the same “Server” power and was not limited to the capacity of the then very limited PC technology for his data which could reside on the server. Who benefited from this difference? A class of users called Knowledge Workers, the best example of which was traders in Investment Banking or some other electronic market. Within a few short years Sybase was the dominant database vendor in Financial Services globally and Oracle’s fastest growing and most feared competitor, approaching a billion dollars of revenues; some difference.

I was a Sales Director at Sybase at this time and I recruited a salesperson from Oracle who brought the Oracle competitive analysis of Sybase with him. I would not use it, for ethical reasons, but I could not help myself and I admit I read it. It was like looking at the world through the other end of the same binoculars. Oracle (product marketing) clearly understood the differences and their whole go-to-market strategy and sales training was a mirror image of the Sybase versions. They won their deals, we won ours. Until the market, technology and buyer needs changed and one company (Oracle) adapted and the other did not.

The pay off in developing a differentiated position is that the competitors find it more difficult to compete; it is easier to maintain your pricing; and customers who understand the value of your differentiated solution are more loyal. These are all outcomes that are worth having.

If your company’s product marketing information does not identify differentiated value from your main competitors, think it through yourself, talk to your more experienced colleagues and customers. This is an enormously valuable asset to a salesperson.

If you delve a little further into facebook, you will find a rich myriad of data and interesting articles. For example, click on the links below in yellow to see a sample of some of the facebook assets:

Facebook Marketing Solutions ANZ

The link above will take you to a page dedicated to the Australia and New Zealand region. In addition the link below will take you to the Facebook Studio:

Facebook Studio

Click Here to access and article titled “It’s time to measure business outcomes, not likes“.

The Users Group will commence from 3pm-5pm on Tuesday 15th may. We’re also providing drinks and nibbles to follow this event!

To register for the 3rd Oracle CRM On Demand Users Group, Click Here.

You are also able to view The Agenda for the Users Group on the CRMNow Website.

We look forward to seeing you there!

We have included a new section of Clive Smith’s Book, “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sales & Selling”. Chapter 3.1 Value Proposition discusses the Value Proposition as the statement of the value that is received by the customer by using the product. The simplest statement is “better, faster, and cheaper”. 

Click Here to see the Contents page.

Suncorp Life’s CIO Fiona Floyd reviews Hunter Muller’s book for IT Pro.

This book is not really about the cloud, but rather, the transition of the CIO role to being one of a transformational leader, and the role of the cloud in this. Therefore, this book is more about leadership and less about the cloud.

The author relies heavily on his previous book The Transformational CIO which I hadn’t read. This wasn’t an issue, as he substantially leverages that material in this book.

SOURCE: This article has been reproduced here in part from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Herman Mehling provides insight around Fusion CRM and the impact to Siebel CRM and Oracle CRM On Demand, Oracle’s current SaaS CRM.

A big selling point for Oracle could be that the same Fusion middleware software sold on-premises is available in the cloud and that the programming model for Oracle Public Cloud is the same open standards-based languages of Java, BPEL and Web services.

“This is in clear contrast to the walled gardens of most other PaaS offerings,” said Staten. “Microsoft comes closest to this value proposition as most open languages and web services are supported but the middleware services of Azure are not one-for-one with their on-premise equivalents.”

“Oracle is the only vendor that provides a comprehensive suite of enterprise solutions in the cloud, which includes both application services and platform ones,” Trip Chowdhry, managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research, wrote in a recent research note.

Click Here to read the full article.

Parts of this post have been reproduced from “Enterprise APPS Today” part of ITBusinessEdge.

Recent media coverage from ARN talked about their decision to select Oracle and Oracle CRM On Demand as their CRM.

“We are a new business and we needed a major and robust ERP system that will scale for growth, easily change and adapt as we grow but that is also cost effective from a maintenance perspective,”

Nextgen managing director, John Walters, said.

Click Here to read the full article.