April 18 Cut-off; Josh Bernoff; What Every Sales Person Should Have

"…keeping you great"

HEADLINES:  

April 18 – Hotel Cut-off — if you and/or your team are planning to invest 48 hours to garner ideas directly from Greg Brenneman, Marshall Goldsmith, Josh Bernoff, Darren Hardy, Mark Aesch, and Graham Weston (hopefully you know of these people and their contributions to business – critical to stay current) at our Fortune Leadership Summit May 10 – 11, Houston, the hotel cut-off date is next Monday, April 18 to guarantee you'll get our conference rate of $159/night. Here's the link.

Empowered and Groundswell — two of the leading business books of the past 30 months have been co-authored by Josh Bernoff, who is responsible for identifying, developing and promoting some of Forrester Research's biggest ideas as Senior VP of Idea Development. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies documents the fundamental changes that have occurred in how we communicate with customers; Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business is the exact "how to" book providing a framework for getting all your employees involved in communicating with customers – a way to share the load/burden so it doesn't fall all on the backs of your senior team who is already busy enough!

Four Steps to Connecting — Bernoff describes a framework your organization can use to reach out to "connected" customers. The four steps in this "IDEA" framework are: identify mass influencers, deliver groundswell customer service, empower with mobile, and amplify fan activity. Bernoff is keynoting the Fortune Leadership Summit May 10 – 11 and will be expanding on these four key steps.

Ideas For Your Sales Team — book club members will be receiving your copy of Empowered next week. For anyone picking up a copy, go immediately to chapter 2 and have your sales team read the opening story. In essence, it's time your sales team pick up ideas and get in the act of creating videos – video of competitors' products; customer testimonials, training videos enhancing presentation skills; videos documenting their challenges, their product features, and the solutions that worked best in sales situations; etc. The key is getting the proper IT support, sales people with Flip video cameras, and some simple video editing equipment.

Ideas For Your IT Team — then go to the last three pages of the book to the section entitled "IT staff must find ways to support HERO projects" and have your IT person or team read the following two pages. It's the best manifesto for what IT should be doing for your company that I've read – and how they can be more impactful in their job, giving your IT team a more customer-focused mission. Bernoff outlines four specific activities for your IT team – something I'm asking him to cover at the Fortune Leadership Summit.

CLE and CPE — Lawyers, doctors, accountants, and other professionals are required to remain current in their profession through continuing education i.e. continuing legal education (CLE) for lawyers, continuing professional education (CPE) for accountants, etc. However, there's no such requirement for business professionals. This is one mission of our two-day Summits – to provide you and your team with two days of continuing education to keep you current. Again, if you're not intimately familiar with the ideas from our Fortune Leadership Summit faculty, you're not as current as those who are familiar with these ideas in your profession. Stay current even if you're not going to utilize the ideas immediately.