Category Archives: Technology

How Do You Increase the Value of Social Network Interactions? Five Thoughts

Situation: People participate in social networking sites for several reasons – to network, to promote their businesses, products or services, and to gain insight through crowd sourcing. For these audiences, how do you increase the value of social network interactions?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Encourage participants to move from a short-term to a medium-term focus. Short term focus is about lead generation, immediate results and buy right now. Think of the man in the flashy sports coat selling his products on late night television. This may generate a sale but with low engagement and commitment. Alternatively, if you focus on engagement you start to build growth which is more sustainable. Growth which will persist with more momentum.
  • Clarify your objectives. Are you interested in sales or influence today or this quarter? How much effort do you want to put into it and what payback do you seek?
  • Be patient. Take the time to develop quality content. This time is an investment which pays back both in the medium and long-term.
  • Don’t treat people as though they can be manipulated into buying from you. There is a karmic cost to this approach. Look instead at the potential benefit that you can provide that will attract people to your content. Think in terms of reciprocity – give first and let others decide how they will respond.
  • Try an experiment. Propose a simple question: “What do you want?” Ask the question three times, each time with a different thought in mind – first annoyance, then confusion, and finally empathy. Rather than speak the questions, send them via instant message one after the other. The words of the message were exactly the same each time, “What do you want?” Without tone of voice, expression or body language, the receivers could instantly tell me what I was thinking in each case. The same works in social networking. People can read where you are coming from based on how you position your content. If you want to increase the value of what you have to say or offer, offer it openly and invite your audience to respond.

Thanks to Kenneth Vogt for his contribution to this discussion.

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How Do You Present Your Solution to Potential Clients? Eight Recommendations

Situation: For an engineering solutions company, one of the challenges is engaging potential customers with the idea that a domestic solution can cost-effectively meet their needs. If you can combine a manufacturing solution with the service solution this helps. How do you present your solution to potential clients?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Know your clients. Clients have expertise of their own. However, they may lack expertise in all the disciplines necessary to create a full product. How will you fill that gap?
  • Know your strengths. Design is an iterative development process. If you increase process efficiency you can complete more process cycles in a given timeframe, advancing to final product more quickly.
  • Know your key differentiators. Target clients for whom your differentiator is a critical need. For example, do not encourage all of your clients to manufacture overseas. However, if they insist and lack experience managing overseas vendors, be prepared to handle this for them. Consistency of personnel across the life of a project is important, particularly the core team.
  • Know your competitors. How do they handle similar challenges to those that you face? 
  • Know your vendors. “Right-sizing” your contract manufacturer to your client’s product is important. Things will go wrong, and you must assure that the contract manufacturer will give you the priority to get things back on track to meet your launch date. 
  • Know the risks. Invention and innovation require a plan to mitigate the risk that new solutions represent. Develop the design along parallel paths and stage higher risk components or pieces of the design that represent critical path inventions such that they are proven prior to moving forward. If necessary take that feature out of the current design in order to develop it to a production-ready solution for the next product on the client’s roadmap. 
  • Know the situation and client expectations. Sometimes an invention or innovation is the reason for the new product.  In these cases the key is managing the client’s expectations regarding the significantly elevated risks that come with invention. Proceed with your and the clients understanding that the phase gates and even the production dates will slide according to the progress against developing that critical path invention or innovation.
  • Know your expertise. Expertise in material selection and understanding what can be done with materials in the manufacturing process is not trivial. The same is true of vendor qualification, particularly when the project involves new materials.

Thanks to Eric Bauswell of SurfaceInk for his contribution to this article

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How Do You Build Meaningful Social Media Participation? Seven Thought Starters

Situation: A company has built a good online community. Between their site and newsletter, they are contacting tens of thousands of executives weekly. The CEO constantly seeks new ways to encourage active participation in the discussions. What have others done to effectively build regular participation in discussions? How do you build meaningful social media participation?

Advice:

  • Know your audience and focus on topics that engage people. For example, one company does a semi-annual compensation survey. This generates great response when the results are published.
  • Another company has found that they learn more from mistakes than they do from success. People love to talk about business blunders, particularly if the discussions include well-intentioned humor.
  • Reach out to individuals with interesting backgrounds, experience and situations. Encourage them to post, or feature them in a discussion.
  • Another company sends out weekly emails with titles and synopses of articles posted in the last week. This enables newsletter recipients to quickly scan topics and click on those of interest.
  • A common challenge is filtering posts which are trivial, self-promoting and lack relevance to the focus of the site.
  • The bottom line is that there is no magic bullet. Social networking sites are rapidly evolving so it is important to continually seek creative additions. This takes time, work and investment.
  • Consider your own experience. What has drawn you to a social networking site? What have this site done to effectively build regular participation in meaningful discussions?

Thanks to Ken Ross of ExpertCEO, Inc. for his contribution to this article.

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How do you Boost Value in a Commodity Market? Five Suggestions

Situation:  As a result of the technology revolution, products in established markets have become commoditized. For example, advances in medical technology has driven down price while increasing incidence and prevalence of diabetes has driven up demand. How do you boost value in a commodity market?

Advice:

  • Taking a broader view of the market is critical. Analyze the entire customer experience, not just your segment of the market. Assess markets and industries surrounding your primary offering and look for un-served opportunities and gaps. Where you find opportunity, elevate your offering to the next level by integrating your product as component. Create a compelling advantage but avoid unnecessary adaptation of your existing product or service. Can your technology become part of a broader service offering, or even part of a personalized solution? Are there opportunities to move higher up in the value chain?
  • Begin your transformation at the first signs of commoditization. Being first brings a huge advantage.
  • Once you identify an unmet need, consider working with related industry groups to create new standards addressing these gaps. Implementing the resulting standards will give you a new competitive advantage against your competitors.
  • Find other applications for your product or service. Consider new applications for the components used in your current offering. Find new customers outside of your historic customer base. Consider alliances with other companies experienced with the new opportunities you find.
  • Within your own organization begin a process that routinely analyzes the customer experience and general needs beyond your current offering. Working with an outside consultant can help by adding a new perspective.

Thanks to Dirk Boecker for his contribution to this discussion.

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How Do You Boost Acceptance of a New Product? Three Solutions

Situation: A company is introducing a new product that enables devices to monitor patient medical conditions via smartphone. This can improve early detection of disease and lower medical costs. However, bureaucratic inertia within major medical providers can inhibit the adoption of disruptive technologies. How do you boost acceptance of a new product?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Take an inexpensive ultrasound device as an example – a device that can both provide the results of a breast scan for cancer and transmit the results to an individual’s physician. A device like this can be emotional for some women, and they may be reluctant to use a product not recommended by their doctor. Therefore it is critical to gain physician acceptance of the device. this can be achieve this by: publishing medical studies demonstrating the efficacy of the device, building and leveraging relationships with medical societies and groups through white papers and presentations at meetings by champions for the device, and participating in high profile events such as American Cancer Society events or the Race for the Cure.
  • Consumer awareness of the device can be built through targeted advertisements in women’s magazines and gaining the support of high profile female spokespersons who have experienced and recovered from breast cancer. This can generate radio and television talk show appearances, infomercials via TV and the Internet, Blogs and generating discussion about the device on disease-specific web sites to generate viral marketing.
  • Do not be afraid of researching non-traditional activities. For example, there is significant potential for a device like this in portions of the Muslim world, where women won’t see a male doctor and few female doctors are available. This results in breast cancer death rates three times higher than those seen in the West.

Thanks to Kenneth Purfey for his contribution to this discussion.

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What are the Best Avenues for Raising Capital? Six Points

Situation: The technology sector is booming with AI and other exciting new technologies. Whether you want to fund a new company or a new effort within a smaller company, what are the best approaches? What are the best avenues for raising capital?

Advice:

  • Funding and credit markets are opening but still tight. The bar has been raised because too many people are chasing too few available dollars.
  • The venture capital (VC) sector has consolidated. The primary focus is on technology, software and medical. Much less goes to the consumer sector. It is important to target angels, VCs or investors who specialize in your technology, market and business model. Research current VC portfolios.
  • Angels now act more like VCs – particularly structured angel groups. Initial investments are typically under $1 million.
  • If you have a technology, investigate the grant world – e.g., NIH or DARPA. These organizations fund research, but not marketing, distribution or sales. Look for specific programs or RFPs that align with your technology. Target your grant request toward prototype development and studies. Search LinkedIn for military people who can introduce you to contacts within programs like DARPA.
  • Investigate SBA Grants, and foundations with an interest in your technology or application. Foundations sometimes will grant funds ($100k) to support the work of individual scientists and researchers. Call on friends and family who believe in you and your work.
  • Whoever you approach, these rules apply: (1) Do your homework. Choose sources that align with your project and profile. (2) Presentations must be crisp and easily understood. Investing in professional assistance is wise. (3) Be able to make your case in 15 minutes or less. The first minutes are most crucial, so have your ‘elevator’ pitch perfected. (4) Your model and financials must support a high multiple exit, 5-10x their investment in a reasonable period of time – about 5 years. (5) Team, Team, Team – credentials, experience, presentation – be a team with whom the investor can work.

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How Do You Outsource IT? Seven Suggestions

Situation: Fast growing companies often find it difficult to scale internal IT management to keep pace with database (dB) growth. There are typically 1-3 people in charge of dB management in a small to medium-sized business. Crisis hits when there is an abrupt system shutdown for up to 48 hours and a significant disruption to company operations. How can this be avoided? How do you outsource IT?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The difficulty is that small infrastructure teams often don’t have the range of skills to diagnose dB issues. Calling Oracle, SAP, etc. for assistance gets expensive fast.
  • One option is to outsource business intelligence and dB management to a specialist. Quality offshore resources exist that can take over support of company business information (BI) and dB management, offering a full suite of services from anti-virus to preventative diagnosis of subtle misalignments.
  • For example, InstaDB replicates the dB in a remote data center so that they can monitor the system for errors, develop solutions, and remotely resolves errors with no interruption to users.
  • In addition, some outsourced specialists include calls to Oracle, SAP and so forth as necessary to resolve problems at no cost to the client.
  • In a pilot study in a company with 5 servers, the offshore outsource partner provided a full suite of services and was able to increase uptime from 95-97% on a daily basis to 99.97%. This level of performance should be the goal.
  • Your outsource provider should have 24/7/365 support services.
  • Your provider should provide you with a service-level agreement (SLA) prioritizing issues so that the most critical issues are resolved fastest.

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How Do You Maintain a Healthy Work-Life Balance? Six Solutions

Situation: A CEO says that he typically works long hours and frequently works weekends. This taxes his family life and he is neglecting activities that were previously enjoyed. Are you living for work or working for a living? How do you maintain a healthy work-life balance?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Life is more than work. Just the fact of you’re asking this question indicates that you already know that too much focus on work is not good for you.
  • Develop and devote time to your hobbies. The CEO and engineers in one company developed a company robotics club, and participate in robotic competitions. This has a number of benefits. It provides fun away from work while keeping their creative engineering skills sharp. As they compete, they meet and form relationships with potential business partners and customers. It builds camaraderie and cohesiveness within the team. They have the opportunity to involve their kids in this activity. In addition, they translate this into a public service by assisting local schools who have their own robotics clubs.
  • Regular exercise, particularly with a group, helps you to be more effective at work. This is supported by substantial objective research.
  • Involve other people – friends and family – in your hobby or exercise activity. It will help to both strengthen relationships and resist distractions.
  • To assure that this becomes part of your life, put it on the calendar and don’t let other priorities displace it.
  • Learn to say “no” to things that would displace this activity.

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How Do You Facilitate a Move to a New Space? Five Recommendations

Situation: A company has taken advantage of favorable lease rates to secure a larger space. How can they minimize work flow disruption during the move? How do you facilitate a move to a new space?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Plan the move in detail: electrical, intranet and telephone needs; office space and facilities; design or production space and facilities. If you can’t move everything over a short period of time – like a 3-day weekend – consider moving in steps, a series of discrete moves over time, each with its own requirements and timetable.
  • If you carry inventory, pre-build inventory to see you through critical steps of the move. If you have a major customer with strict delivery deadlines, try to negotiate a delivery window during which you can conduct the move. Determine if there is seasonality to order delivery that makes a particular time of year more convenient to move critical operations. Custom work will require special planning.
  • If you plan to upgrade equipment, consider purchasing, installing and operating the new equipment in the new location instead of your existing location.
  • If you will be leasing the new facilities and possibly be even if you are purchasing the facility, ask the new lessor or seller to provide cash to: (1) finance delayed shipments at a price discount and (2) cover expenses of the move and outfitting the new location to your needs.
  • Consider converting to a wireless intranet and telephone system to avoid the expense of wiring the new facility. Look at plug and go options.

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How Do You Access Key IP? 3 Steps to the Dance

Situation:  A company is moving from a specialty solution to a complete solution. They have identified a partner with intellectual property (IP) that will help them fulfill this vision. How should the CEO approach this company to access their IP? How do you access key IP?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • There are two aspects of any deal: technical feasibility that will produce both value and the emotional needs of the principals of each company. The technical aspects are the most straightforward and easiest to value. Frequently, a favorable deal hinges not on technical feasibility, but on the desires of the principals and their ability to trust one-another.
  • If you are convinced of the value, you must convince the other party that their best option is to work with you. This accomplished, you can negotiate the specifics. Sell your vision: the technologies together are much more valuable than they are alone: 1 + 1 = 5! If control of the technology is an issue, negotiate an arrangement where they are comfortable with your control. Do you and the other party have a trusted advisor in common or is there an individual who is respected by the principals of both companies? A person like this can help communicate your good intentions.
  • If your best efforts do not produce an appealing arrangement, your fallback position may be a partnership. If the partnership is backed by modest investment with options for future purchase, this can be another way for you to eventually gain control of the technology.

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