Cultures

There are essentially four main operating components influencing your business today: the internal culture, the external culture, the market culture and the very distinct super culture.

The culture of any company is a complex entity existing within and outside of your brick and mortar or digital landscape dynamics. It is as much they way you perceive yourself, as it it is the way you perceive others in cooperation with yourself. It is as much about you thinking about the world as it is the world thinking about you.

It is a sense of character that is passed down from the very top of the company to the most fundamental personality in your company. Culture isn't any one thing, it is a combination and an amalgamation of many things - some very human by nature and some in the design and execution of the way you do business.

Think of the culture of your company as a living organism that evolves with the company's growth, and grows in the way it best perceives - on whatever level that perception takes place- how that organism identifies it must grow in order to live and to thrive.  In any living process where thought and consequence are as important to survival as available area and resources are to the most elemental organisms on the planet; the company culture takes on a uniquely significant role. Here instead of some basic cell growth and division, we witness how the founder(s) replicates his or her characteristics throughout the growth of that company. 

This determination and imposition of behavior on others to evoke our will is as basic to human nature as anything else we do - it 's manifest destiny-  whether we do this for the good (Mother Theresa) or the for evil (Hitler). The stronger the will of that organism to impose it's perceived values and the more important that value is to the other organisms that attach themselves to this cause, the more directly these characteristics define a company. History is replete with these examples. Just because we do this on a much smaller scale, doesn't mean in some ways it doesn't have the same impact. How does your boss perceive quality? Pricing? Integrity? How does your Founder treat subordinate employees? Does he(she) hire to compliment their egos or to offset their weaknesses? 

When all is said and done, the people who believe that the end result of how they treat others is just as important as how many widgets they sell offer and how good their widgets look will be the people and the companies that we remember and support. It starts from the top down and then in a mad market of individuals, policies, competitors, pricing and selection - the companies with character as their culture stand out.

The Internal Culture is the natural evolution in the behavior people create and modify as they assimilate into environmental changes. It is the manifest evidence of people growing individually yet as a group. It’s about how they relate to one another - how they get along with management and how they talk about your company to people outside your doors. It’s about cliques, emails, phone calls, lunches, break room conversations and all the elements that make a culture a separate, living and thriving entity. It is the singular yet collective manner in which this body of people represents themselves to you, your managers and ultimately to the Market Culture (the people who buy your products and services).

The External Culture is made up of the people (sales, management, technicians, phone support, etc.) who represent your company with their own unique personalities. They sell and support your products and services directly to the Market Culture - hopefully with the same sort of enthusiasm and energy which originally built and defined your company.

The Market Culture is the most complex culture outside the Super Culture. Like all cultures, each in some way affects the other, but in the case of the Market Culture, its affect drives your business. It is the combination of your client’s employees working with your employees - interfacing to create their own distinct community. It is the market share exerting its influence on your company with the law of supply and demand. It is your buyers reacting to pressures from competition, market changes and new economic perspectives. It is the nature of business evolution as it turns, morphs and opens new doors of opportunities. It is the source of energy to inspire The Super Culture.

The Super Culture is where the spirit and personality of your company reside. It is the energy created from the results of all these influences converging in the hearts, minds and thoughts of employees, managers, salespeople, marketing people, clients and even competitors. From all these like and disparate components we learn the secrets that will inspire and impact your market. It is the juncture where the observational and quantitative values we’ve obtained from the Internal and External Cultures are processed to form the recommendations for adapting company structure and accelerating sales and marketing.

The Residual Impact is the anticipated but unidentified benefits that will result from our combined strategies and programs.

To learn more about how the dynamics of your company are defining and either inhibiting or increasing your growth, email Frank Bosson at frankb@thebossongroup.com for a frank discussion on how values are more important today than ever before, both in our lives and in our businesses. 

• 
• 

Genevieve leaves the Guf

The world…life…is filled with sudden and loud endings that force us to face new beginnings. If not for these events many of us would have certainly found much easier or at the very least more appealing paths through life. It is not to be so. It is these constant concussions sometimes seen and sometimes seen and denied that are woven in blood and tears through the fabric of our life. It is this cloak we wear that becomes heavier with the blood, darker absent the life and less colorful as we age. It is the face that people put upon us drawn in crayon like blue clowns poorly traced in a toddler’s coloring book; and all from their own, very carefully sallied chair looking out their personally arranged window to gaze upon their very particular lawn revealing to them a uniquely packaged kind of world.

Then there are the people who dance across the top of your life and tickle you with their laughter.

The special few that comfort you with their love and boost you with their support.

They are the laughers, the talkers, the care-givers the special bonds that make life so wonderfully artful.

So important they are like your special secret – Oh how could she see me as so wonderful…I know what I am…dare I tell her? She knows and that’s what makes her so important…

The kind of important you tuck so perfectly and neatly away in the very near fold of your heart. There her song is always sung and private moments are continually replayed - forever.

How many times did we say that? How many times did we forget? How much of that matters when it really is the music of your voice I so desire? Did I call you last or did you call me? How did I get to be so special to someone so special to me?

The child and the lady…The sister and the friend. Of course I loved her…she was the only one who accepted me with all the dents, dings and doubts that I clumsily dragged about. But whatever else I know, I know a secret that I can now share. She was exactly who she needed to be, to be the best she could be to every person who needed to lean in her direction and she did it with grace and a truthfulness that made you believe that no matter what…in her eyes you were just fine.

All the louder and more devastating the concussion. If you wake up on some every other morning and the world is missing a particular sound that even though you heard it very seldom, still it meant so much to you that you instantly know your world is quieter, less colorful, sadder. Something really valuable and important is gone. Not a piece of the pissing random muddle of human defecation that smolders over liquored up foul-ty or the rum-a-dum-dum of the next big deal…

No, this is that very special song that is as much a remnant of the tune you made as it is the one you made together…. A sound that if it could be seen would glitter like gold, taste like the finest of wines and the sweetest of cakes. It is a visceral element of being who you are and what you are to the secret you that only you know lives inside your broken shell…and to all those “other” people and most especially other people like her. Only the few are able to achieve such a vital and wondrous place inside you. A place that when you open it’s hearts door to listen in, however rarely, you were properly jerked from the patter of your silly scurry to know that marvelous melody over and over again.

Then that concussion. It hits so hard. It doesn’t care about night or day, cold or hot, near or far –BOOM- and the world grows eerily quiet as you adjust to a new world. Something important has ceased to be a part of the music that created the equanimity that balanced your oddly shaped life. It is a silence that drowns out all the other music that you might hear. It is a noise that scratches across the surface of your skin and makes you shutter to the bone. It is everything about living and dying that we so oddly stuff away from sight…until the BOOM.

It isn’t the loss that you fear. It isn’t the impact that it will selfishly have on your life. It is the realization that the sound you once danced to was far more important than the force march your life and body continually sustain for purposes that are of far less value and when weighed and measured come up wanting and are at best, queer. You would have been wiser to embrace that dance – especially for the part of me in which she resided.

An hour ago a phone rang. A voice of someone I used to know and still love weeping- a person who had taken responsibility for keeping that wonderful music in my life for so long. I heard the music pass away even before she blurted it out between her suffocating sighs. One light goes out and many others are in their own way forever dimmer. The music that once held a place in my mind where I could go to when I needed to hear her song is yet another hole in my soul. I will cling desperately to the memory of her face, laugh, touch, song and kiss but they will go to grey before long; until the day we are once again allowed to play together and make a whole new kind of music. Along with this comes the death of that part of who I am and more importantly who she is inside me. Now it becomes the concussion that moves me either to the left or the right – subtly or dramatically to another destination I could not have anticipated.

Another soul leaves the Guf. Another time Gabriel will reach into the treasury. One more minute we are all closer to becoming a concussion in someone’s life. A moment in time when our song becomes more fleeting to some and more important to others–

Our light a bit dimmer and burning more brightly depending on every facet and which way we turn our face.

It is a symphony and each note is connected to the last and to the next.

It is a dance that we all dance by ourselves and all together.

It is every twist and turn whether we race or pace, run or crawl, scream or whisper, sing or curse, love or hate.

It is the scent of every move, every note which will waft across your silly little galaxy drenching those closest and sprinkling just a twinkle on those who revolve in the furthest away rings of the air – the atmosphere of our own magical privacy.

SHE WAS A GIANT CONCUSSION.

There is a screaming silence from the music I allowed her to occupy in my sad, little and lonely kingdom. I can feel myself and others so intimately connected and so foreign to my life already changing our dance. As they dance away I can only pray that their lives are absent too many of these monstrous shockwaves .

I have designed my life to avoid as many of these as possible. Of course the tradeoff is that I will not create much of one on my own on that strange and certain someday when my soul drifts from the Guf and into the Hand of my Lord.

God Bless

PART II: THE DIGITAL LANDSCAPE

Contact us:
fbosson@thebossongroup.com
209 333 7786

WHAT ABOUT THOSE PESKY SOCIAL MEDIAS?

There has never been a time in the history of our country’s business infrastructure when we had at our disposal such a diverse myriad of free venues which could, potentially -when working in harmony with a greater strategy -have an enormous impact on your bottom line! This is true for every company no matter how large or small. But as we discussed in Part I, this blog is meant for the larger portion of our clientele, the small to mid-size business.

Before the onset of theses free venues (Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and the plethora of RSS opportunities etc.) companies went to great lengths to deliver their message:

· Paying big money to create videos (television commercials, online videos etc.) in order to get their name, message and business products or services in front of their proper audience

· Contract expensive marketing programs to deliver messages whether through complex mail systems or costly email programs

· Find ways to engage their clients in relevant conversations which would demonstrate their superior awareness of the industry as it applies to client needs (conferences and conventions)

· Find creative ways to certify your rightful position in a crowded marketplace and display the significant solutions you offer

· Spend a lot of money to clearly define your core competencies so clients won’t dismiss you as a small package but rather view you as a unique adjunct

In fact these forums validate some distinct market positions through which (when used with other more traditional business tactics) you can communicate directly with your client privately and all just for what it takes to know which to use, why to use them and how you anticipate they will impact your company.

Consider that in the last ten years we have seen an explosion in social media sites including; FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, YouTube and others. Now ask yourself, how are you using these networks to augment your sales?

“How are you using your social media?”

The Bosson Group interacts with many different types of businesses but we always start with their digital presence. Almost every time we begin our analysis we run in to the same problem; a poor digital position and an even worse understanding of what their cyberspace experience should include and why it should include what we recommend! Our job is to come in to a company define the market needs from the buyer’s perspective, provide solutions, structure, definitions, strategy and sales. The first thing we see virtually on every site and almost invariably is series of social media icons. And just as they almost always have some hyperlinked social media icons, they have an unused social media programs.

“I hardly ever use them?” “I don’t know why I have them!” “I don’t have time for them? “ “I have no idea what to do with them?” “I’ve got them but I don’t know what they do or how they can help me!”

In almost all cases when we talk with our clients about how they are using their social media programs, one of the above statements or questions is the response we get. If you are one of those businesses that has no idea why you have the programs or what to do with them; this blog will be useful.

If you are one of our clients and using our Tethered Communities™ sales solutions or you are using your own inside sales program then this little blog will provide critical information in making those ghostly hyperlinks power tools.

How and why should I use social media?

As we are primarily interested in addressing those companies that tie their efforts to inside sales which is almost all of our clients and most small to mid-size businesses. Let me say that most of the information in this blog will relate to an inside sales environment. And let me address why I expect this applies to all small to mid-size businesses. The reality for sales today is that to maintain the costs associated with an outside sales force falls to much larger companies with money to burn (and burn they will). By default, small to mid-size companies don’t have the cash flow for such a frivolous waste of their money. They are by nature of the beast, forced to conduct their business over the phone and through email so the addition of these social media functions are likely to impact their business significantly either way.

But that’s not bad news that’s the good news. If you start your company off learning the proper habits and carefully analyze how and what works best to acquire the most predictable outcome, then you are building a productive long term telephone sales and marketing program. This way as your company grows you can manage and anticipate your growth far more accurately without falling into the outside salesperson trap. Every business owner knows that it’s important that they deliver the right message to the proper audience.

Today’s business owner also knows that they should be using their digital tools like the website, emails, SEO to develop their business but they are uncertain and confused about how they should go about it. Let’s clear up some misconceptions and bring this into focus.

Social Media as a Strategy

If you are one who sees all of your social media links as one big black hole sucking up your precious time and resources, it’s time to bring your use of social media under control.

• Don’t think of them as all one kind of thing doing the same thing in different formats. Each has a unique structure and speaks to your audience in a very specific manner – understanding how each application works best and designing your free media to get the most out of each platform will help you make sense of how and why you need each format
• Get to know your audience as they relate to each social media and exploit those venues that make sense to you and don’t engage those that don’t
• Use them as individual strategic steps; each contributing in a different way to educate, inform and entertain prospective buyers with the overarching goal of driving buyers to your website where they will conduct business
• Remember everything revolves around your website, so design your site to do business and not to act as an online brochure.

The Website

I’m going to cover a lot of ground in a little time but this should give you some basic guidelines on how to make your website more than one in sixty million online bookmarks. You website should be built to do business. If a buyer can’t hit your home page and in under a minute answer these three questions…

• Why me?
• Why you
• Why now?

…Then your website doesn’t work.

Clients often tell me that they have the problem of explaining why they are unique – forget about that. Every site is unique – if they are at your site they want to know why it’s where they should spend their money. Few people surf the web to read sites and if you structure your site properly it will be visual, quick and easy for the client to understand who you are, what you do and what makes you special. Social Media sites express your individuality - your site is where you should conduct business.

If you are a consultant or if you offer complex services that require that people leave information about who they are and what they need, then provide that ability for them in at least three different formats. Every landing page should have:

• Testimonials (when relevant) upfront and where they can be seen
• A picture story about what you do or who you are (what you do if you do something – who you are if they are buying your time)
• Calls to actions everywhere
• Click-thrus to access clearly spelled out services and products
• Options to call, email, access your people or the person
• Video introduction to products and services and if you can include in under a minute the unique position you hold in the market – that to
• A resource library at the bottom of the page for access to linsk, news, information, employment etc.
• A navigation bar absent “Who we are” “Mission” or “Company History” (put these in your resource library if you feel they are relevant)

SEO

If you are spending money on SEO services STOP!

Let’s end the talk about SEO here and now. If you don’t have a Wordpress site or a self-managed site with a built-in Content Management System, get one. Until then if you have your managed site, take the time to make sure your webmaster knows how to get all your key words in the places they should be. Don’t forget that Google owns YouTube and you will be seen there as well (keyword section). Start using a blog and distribute it to prospects, they will be seen by search engines. Send your blog to clients and prospects through email.

If you don’t know where and how to use keywords and set up your SEO and you don’t think your webmaster does either then go to YouTube and find about a zillion tutorials on them. Or Google SEO and learn all the tricks and continuing changes search engines make to insure clients are reaching the right company the first time they type something in.

Google is not interested in whether you get a fair shot at the first page and companies pay a lot of money to have their names show up there. So the best you can hope for is to get your name on the same page as larger competitors. You don’t go do a private bakery because it’s cheaper than Walmart. You go to a private bakery because it has better bagels than Walmart’s pre-made fifty pound bags of bagel dough! Don’t pick a fight with Walmart.

If your buyer is looking for cheaper and doesn’t care about quality, outcome, attention to detail and personal interest in their success through your specific offering then you are probably not the solution they need. I tell all of my clients that they need to bring their sales conversation to a place and time absent their competition.

FACEBOOK

Think of FaceBook as digital geography. This doesn’t mean that you need your buyers to be local to get value out of FaceBook but that’s how it should be used. If you think about “Starbucks” and their FaceBook protocol then you understand the “geography” concept. How many people get “new products” and deals from Starbucks on their Facebook?

Use FaceBook to pull together your products or services in way that makes it logical for buyers in a digital geographic community. If you offer services in financial consultation nationally or internationally than make your efforts through FaceBook take on the look and feel of the general community of financial services as they relate to the whole of your industry. It’s a digital geography – it simply means that you are a part of the conversation that is relevant to the client-base either because you are local or you are a part of the larger online community that deals in similar aspects of your industry. You carve out your place by location or industry – you make it relevant by providing services or products in a way that is consistent with the person you want to visit and re-visit your FaceBook page.

• Host conversations that make sense to the people and companies that occupy your digital landscape.
• Every time someone leaves a business card, asks for information online and provides their email or any time you are using the phone and acquire email addresses have a process for developing that lead.
• Create your CRM, and begin to cultivate new leads on your social media.
• Have a short but convicting email to send them to in order to convince them to “like” your FaceBook page (we will discuss invitation to other venues)
• Liking your page generally happens because you are hosting a variety of information, headlines, news article and comments all valid to the people who populate your geographic online community (buyers, Human Resource Managers etc.).

In other words, don’t just talk about you and your company, make your FaceBook a page where you moderate discussions on a variety of topics relevant to your population and not just your business.

If you are talking about serving people in a general location, talk about the community, the town, the area. If you are carving out a landscape by community then host conversations, links, articles and information that relates to the person or company in that community. Nothing gets a client’s attention more than showing them that you are current in the industry and have strong opinions and observations about how current events can improve their company culture.

Pictures of your family, your vacation and any other personal material are totally inappropriate so keep them off. Don’t use your Avatar from some online war game as your profile picture anywhere at any time. Keep your profile points business relevant; no one wants to know your relationship status as it relates to business

TWITTER

Probably the most misunderstood and maligned of the social medias, Twitter stands alone as one of the most enigmatic digital strategies. This platform, when used in conjunction with a probably structured FaceBook , LinkedIn and/or RSS pages, acts in concert and independently of any other strategy beside your website.

It is easier to tell you what Twitter is not then to help you understand what it is.

• It is not a popularity contest where ten thousand random and unrelated viewers are just stacking the list to make you appear important - this is extremely transparent and leaves your prospect asking whether you don't know how to use Twitter or you are falsely trying to inflate your Twitter value with anonymous followers
• It is not a competition to see how many followers you can get - look at who chooses to follow you and look for people that you think fit your purpose on Twitter - which may be altogether different then the message you create in LinkedIn and different form either in FaceBook
• It is not a place where you as a professional go to make inane comments, clichéd and spent quotes or links to riddles and jokes
• It is not a place to spend hours of time fooling around with icons and symbols in an effort to repeat a story told a hundred other times or one that has little or no value to the audience

So, what is it? Recently, The Bosson Group, after years of development has produced a first-of-its-kind in preemptive analytics tool, Tethered Communities™ (now Trademarked). This process maintains over 2000 fields of data which are compressed, compared, valued and defined by 12 different analytical programs (including our own organic algorithm for extemporaneous conversations specific to a particular function). We used Twitter as a way to build a following of people and companies that might regard our findings and follow them to determine both accuracy and relativity. We did this with calculated invitations to an entirely new level of prospective client as a way to prove our value. We may have only 400 followers but the body of them are key people in the industry (Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News Financial., Jim Cramer, Moody’s etc.)

What does Twitter have to do with me?

Twitter is an excellent format to provide definition and depth to who you are and what you do. Create short but meaningful statements that link your reader (follower) to information in your resource library or directly to pages within your site related to your products or service

• It is a place to tie yourself to important information and announcements in your company
• It is a place to define the character of who you are and what you do
• It is a place to continue to show your clients and prospective clients that you have your finger on the pulse of your industry and you know what’s happening
• It is a way to gradually bring clients to important locations in your website or on other social media platforms

Twitter is a digital organism and like any organism you must continue to feed it or it will die. This is a social media and it is contingent upon you to look for and invite the followers you feel will get the most out of what you say. This is definitely a place where you can show your astuteness, intelligence and awareness.

If someone offers you 10,000 followers for $500 and you think that’s a good deal. You are not using Twitter properly.

LINKEDIN

Now we are entering the first of my two favorite social media platforms; LinkedIn and RSS. LinkedIn is one of the most underrated and underused venues in all of cyberspace. Here is a place where you can start or join discussions in your field or vertical markets and get seen by some of the real innovators and leaders in industry. You can explore cross-sections of your market as wells as following new industries to round out your opinion and knowledge base to make you more fit for discussion engagements in LinkedIn. It is a place where you can personalize your position and personality in cyberspace.

LinkedIn is unique in the way in which it can level the playing field for you. Here you are equal to any other President or CEO and you opinion is as qualified and regarded as any other. You are for all intents and purposes on equal terms – take advantage of this opportunity but know your stuff before you make yourself known. Naturally when you are in the company of intelligentsia , some of the good glitter can rub off on you and some of the bad stuff rub against your prospects. But, two simple rules can help you here:

• Don’t debate issues in which you are not certain you can at least hold your own on and secretly believe you can win.
• Don’t engage in conversations that end up being cyber-slanted arguments with people you do not know and are on an equal level with you. The last thing industry leaders want to participate in is an argument between two potential vendors.
• Take the high road and bail out of any hostile conversation without even a good-bye. The sooner ended the sooner forgotten. Besides prospects will respect you for not wasting their time in what otherwise may have been a valuable discussion –pick it up at another time when you archenemy is not participating

Twitter is a place to go and make your presence known – especially about all you know in the presence! It is also a motivation for you to begin reading, studying and educating yourself about the entire culture of your market. A couple of well written and thought out conversations have more than once led me to a new or prospective client.

RSS (REALLY SIMPLE SYNDICATION)

We are now taking over 90% of our clients into YouTube, blogs, online radi for a number of different opportunities; “How To’s”, “Did you Know?”, “Learn This” and so much more. With over 20 million people visiting YouTube every day we are using this process in concert with other venues such as LinkedIn and FaceBook and Twitter to help create significant positioning for our clients.

But it isn’t just YouTube it’s so much more. It’s using the technology of the web to digitally enhance our client. It’s a way for us to engage our client’s prospects and our own prospects in a time and at a place that is absent our competitor. Whether we are doing time-lapse photography for construction or monetizing learning events on YouTube’s private channel, we are finding new ways to define our clients using online RSS (radio, blogs, videos audio even Webinars) .

In online programs we are teaching our clients about making videos without spending a fortune. What to say and how to get it in front of the right audience. We are helping them with webinars, radio blogs, blogs and even online meetings like Webex.

Many of the places and events that we have clients involved in are no cost forums. In these cyber-channels we can help our client’s find and define their voice. We use our own proprietary highly graphical, totally interactive, instant notification email, AlphaByters.com to communicate to vast numbers of prospects for as little as .60 cents per contact (that includes an introduction and communication with a potential client under controlled circumstances).

SUMMARY

By blending these individual social media components in cyberspace to obtain a specific goal, we are able to educate, inform and entertain prospects outside of our website – leaving our website the responsibility and focus of conducting business with our clients; new and old.

Our rule of thumb is one hour per week per venue. That’s all the time you should need to create, build and engage prospective clients through these FREE venues. If you are using these venues properly and with regularity, you can expect to see real results with a direct impact to your business in as little as six months.

For more information email frankb@thebossongroup.com

Frank Bosson
CEO, The Bosson Group
www.thebossongroup.com
www.alpahbyters.com
209 333 7786
209 642 2821

Next in Part III, We will talk about the phenomena of Telefluence and our own highly graphical, permission granted, instant notification email program Alphabyters.com. Learning to combine strategies to make better use of your phone for sales

TO PHONE OR NOT TO PHONE

FIVE PART SERIES ON SELECTING, SUPPORTING AND EXECUTING INSIDE SALES

Over the next five weeks we will look at the different ways and reasons that companies are moving part or all of their outside sales to inside sales and what they need to know in order to get there. PART ONE: TO PHONE OR NOT TO PHONE looks at the two most common reasons that many companies are migrating as quickly as they can dial it in from outside sales to inside sales.

PART TWO: EXPLOITING THE DIGITAL LANDSCAPE
We will cover what a company must know about inside sales before moving their sales experience inside. Which digital programs will best support your unique brand and model? What other less obvious ancillary digital applications must be integrated into the overall process? How does your Internet experience support your online and over the phone sales? What is Telefluence and why should you know about it?

PART THREE: INSIDE SALES VERSUS INSIDE SALES
Companies struggle to determine how much of the inside sales they should take responsibility for and how much they need to pass off. How does marketing work in this new digital landscape with inside sales? What type of inside sales will best work for you? What are the challenges in hiring, training and converting to inside sales?

PART FOUR: GOOD MATH – BAD MATH
This is a bottom line look at each component, how long it will take to get your program up and running, and what kind of “other” costs you can expect. How to build out a realistic ROI? What is an inside O.R. and why should that matter to you? How to count your beans and have enough left over to run the show? Creating a budget with milestones and timelines that make sense and when you can expect to see your money start returning!

PART FIVE: BUILDING YOUR OWN INSIDE SALES PROGRAM
Companies are stacking inside sales components one on top of another like a Lego Log fort but is that really what you need or should do? How do I build an inside sales force and what should I expect and when should I expect it? Should I outsource? What are the pitfalls to inside sales? How is the inside sales culture different and what will that mean to me and my employees? What should I outsource? How do I use online meetings, social media, email programs and digital appliances to support, analyze and compliment my sales program? How do I insure I capture the knowledge I build into this program and maintain it for the company’s security?

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PART ONE: TO PHONE OR NOT TO PHONE

Today many companies are looking at their sales approach and trying to figure out how they can move their outside sales inside. Plagued by rising costs, inefficient use of time from outside salespeople and increased competition companies understand they are faced with the imminent need to construct an intelligently balanced, hybrid, inside sales experience and the race is on to build the best mousetrap. But before we look at the actual construction of these unique, growing in popularity, cultures, let’s understand why they are a matter of absolute necessity in most cases.

Cost and Reach

An average outside salesperson spends less than 40% of their week in front of buyers. Most outside salespeople have support staffs which set appointments, send out sales and marketing materials and develop written communication and more in some cases. On top of the redundant attendant costs for each outside salesperson, the average outside salesperson is not trained and is therefore unproductive using the phone for cold calls and lead generation. Even when they are available for the phone and are even somewhat productive, it isn’t like the other 60% of their time can simply be spent on the phone. With 40% of their time in front of buyers they spend another 10% of their time preparing for each call and drive time, to and from each call typically consumes another 20-25% of their week. When you add up all the numbers there is little time for them to be on the phone. Even if you consider how much more work can be done in the car today, that work can only be done if you are trained and structured to conduct business the moment you get in a car. Imagine the time it would take to program in all the calls you would have to make to generate new business while in traffic (hands-free).

When you consider the costs for an average outside sales force equal to the same results needed from an equally constructed inside sales force – your cost factor is somewhere around 2.5 to 1 dollars outside costs to inside costs. And this is an average – if you use the services of a company like The Bosson Group for the construction of the inside model , the end result will be much more efficient and professional , with a cost factor of 4 to 1 dollars outside to inside sales.

Costs for the outside salesperson compared to the equally successful hybrid inside position today simply make outside sales an untenable alternative.  Compared to a decade ago when better than 75% of the Fortune1000 Companies supported expensive outside sales forces to today when less than 10% of those same companies maintain an outside presence or have severely restricted their outside sales programs. More companies today are opting for cleverly constructed inside sales teams that can make good use of social media, email programs and the myriad of other tools so readily available in our digital landscape.

But the more important issue in choosing between inside and outside model is not the cost. Hard to believe, right? The real issue today for any company making this decision is the company’s sales reach. Today we have shrunken the world to make global sales not only possible but necessary. Emerging markets overseas (please don’t even get me started on China) are becoming realistic targets for most company offers. If you had to put feet on the street in order to sell to a global market you better expect to stretch out your ROI significantly. Don’t take my word for it, do the math yourself.

So for the practical reasons of cost and reach today’s leaders are forced to reconsider their sales model and strongly consider a 100% inside sales practice. Constructing a sales cycle that excludes outside salespeople means companies have to be more aware of which digital tools will best augment their sales program. They need to understand sales as a more abstract structure and how to build their inside sales force to convey that same sense of personalization over the phone. For most companies converting outside sales to inside sales in any variation on the theme requires the assistance of professionals like the team at The Bosson Group.

The company looking at the various social medias, SEO and YouTube will have to know which elements work for them by answering the bigger questions of the “why” and “how” for each process. Then each environment will have to further understand why each digital element from their website to their email campaign is important to the way they influence and impact the buyer. Where one company may find their reach is effective by exploiting Facebook another may find that they can make a more beneficial impact using YouTube. Having access to many different and often “no” or “low cost” marketing elements is only useful if you know how they will integrate into your system and ultimately improve your chances of getting to the “yes”. In the end it’s all about constructing a process that is cost effective, pliable, powerful and deliberate… with good math to back it.  

 Frank Bosson
CEO, The Bosson Group
209 642 2821
frankb@thebossongroup.com
www.thebossongroup.com
www.alphabyters.com

A Peek at Peak Oil

I don’t know how many of my faithful followers are old enough to remember the scare of the 1970’s when gas stations literally ran out of fuel. For a short time in our lives a long tome ago hopeful and sometimes frightened commuters formed lines sometimes thirty or forty cars long, bumper to bumper hugging the "far-off" skinny of the road leading up to the gas station pumps waiting for their turn to purchase oil. Cars just sitting with there, windows down and drivers patiently and some not so patiently, waiting for their chance to pump some of what little gasoline there was to spare. Many stations rationed gas altogether. In those places you'd pull up to find you could only get ten gallons per car, sometimes less. Once in a while you would be inching up closer to the pumps anticipating your turn in line only to see the owner come scrambling out of his office head down, taking no questions and slapping up a cardboard sign on which he had scribbled “No Gas” and dashing back inside for safety.

For many of us living and commuting back then it was a nightmare. You planned your week around when you would get your gas, because no matter when you decided to do it, there would be a limited amount of stations opened and a limited amount of gas to get. You would have to find the location and plan on spending as much as an hour or more waiting your turn. I don’t know how many people I helped push up to the gas pumps because their car had run out of fuel while waiting. I do remember it happening to me once. The crowds were generally tame and polite – but there were under-rumblings deep below the calm surface of many drivers and I think if it had gone on much longer or gotten much worse, we would have seen tears in the fabric of our society. I guess, even though I was young, I was struck by how sheer that fabric actually was - when I deep down had thought it to be much more durable.

Peak Oil became a term with which we were all too familiar. It meant that the earth had reached the point of producing the most crude it would ever produce and from that point on the amount of crude we would develop would be on the decline. We had “Peaked” and now although there would be fuel, it was not going to be replenished. The fact is that it wasn’t quite true – not literally anyway. We had more oil and they developed new ways to find and covert fossils from the earth into crude for your car. But the idea of “Peak” oil is a valid concept. Oil is, in fact, a limited commodity and we are running out.

In 1973 it was an embargo by the oil producing countries in the Middle East. That, we were told, was the reason we were in so much trouble. I don’t know how many people believed that – we knew that as a country we had enough petroleum products in our own backyard to handle the situation, but people further up the food chain, for whatever reason -politics, conservation or greed - decided to slow the flow down to a trickle. It scared us… it angered us… and that was back in 1973. Can you imagine where we are today in terms of availability of fuel? Can you imagine what would happen if the pumps had crumbled pieces of brown cardboard scripted merely with those two words “No Gas”?

If we passed peak oil in 1980 then we have been on the decline since. With more countries demanding more petroleum, America is just another consumer pulling up to the Middle Eastern gas pumps. It’s not going to take long for the bottom to start racing up to the top. Then we won’t have to bottom out, we’ll be crushed between a falling ceiling of gas availability and a rising floor of gas and oil costs.

It was in 2005 the famous Hirsch Report came out declaring that our situation on oil and gas use here in America had gone from frustrating to downright horrifying. The report presented to Congress in 2005 stated that we were in a crisis level of fuel dependency to availability. That was six years ago. Why all of a sudden are things getting that much worse? One of the big reasons is the sudden success of China and their need for several hundred times the amount of oil they needed only a decade ago.

As more people flood the highways and more countries move their populace closer to their idea of middleclass, the demand for energy fueled by petroleum will escalate from something of a problem with soaring prices and gas rationing to a sudden emergency order to remove cars from the highways; maybe letting you run your vehicle on alternate days or weeks – who knows? This could occur within the next two to three years.

So what to do?

Tethered Communities ™ by the Bosson Group is the only viable and proven method for taking fixed positions in a work environment and successfully transferring them to home, making them less costly and more effective. This one element will provide an enormous relief across America’s economic landscape.

Deconstruct and Reconstruct

The program uses our proprietary analytics tool nTelegenz® - a one of a kind, Preemptive Method of Analytical Processes instead of a Predictive Method of Analysis. What’s the difference? Predictive Analysis is what it sounds like…a guess, a good guess, but it’s a guess based at what will happen rather than what we know now. Preemptive Method means we have a plan for solving the problem today.

nTelegenz® compresses over 2,000 fields of data reconciled by a dozen analytical programs, algorithms, statistical and organic data analyses, economic and historical comparisons, expansions, contractions and our exclusive Rganx® program which provides valuation of fluid, dynamic job processes like conversations, both extemporaneous and on script , in sales or customer support.

Using this model we are able to deconstruct any fixed job position (office based) and reconstruct that same position as a more productive and cost effective remote value. We can then pick it up and set it down anywhere to work flawlessly - whether you are in an airport, hotel or working from your home. As an at-home program, we provide seamless home to work environments that are more effective and less costly than the traditional fixed positions.

Let’s look an example:

If you were to take a company that only had 5,000 employees and you were only able to take 5% of that workforce and successfully move them to a home work environment, you could:

• · Take 250 cars off the highway at rush hour every day
• · Have over 75,000 actual days of car use per year eliminated (300 days figured in)
• · Free up 3,750 gallons of gasoline a week
• · Reduce the use of more than 180,000 gallons of gasoline per year (48 weeks with holidays and vacation)
• · Reduce our carbon footprint in traffic by 1.5 tonnnes (estimating every car emits 2.6 tonnes and more than half of this is used for transportation to and from work)
• · Reduce costs for your company by 1.5 million dollars (costsin addition to basic salary include some taxes, health care, workman’s compensation, utility costs for equipment, utility costs for energy in the office, office space, depreciation of equipment and so much more - based on a yearly income of $26,000)

That’s huge, right?

The Top 2,000

We did some checking and here is what we came up with:

· There are 1,956 (almost two thousand) companies right now in America which employ in excess of 5,000+ (five thousand plus) employees. In fact they employ 39,798,812 employees (almost forty million) paid employees sitting in offices around this country.

Let’s say that we exercised nTelegenz® to deploy Tethered Communities™ for the top 1,956 companies in America. And, to be conservative, we were only able to reduce the number of employees to work from home by 3% (that number is deliberately deflated for expression purposes only. Realistically we can expect to reduce this employee number by as much as 8% to 10%).

But let’s look at 3%, using the same low numbers we did in the one company example of 5,000. So, it’s 1,956 companies moving 3% of the nearly 40 million people to a seamless home to work environment would:

• · Take 1,193,964 (one million, one hundred and ninety three thousand, nine hundred and sixty four) cars off the highways in rush hour everyday
• · Total 358,189,200 (three hundred and fifty-eight million, one hundred and eighty nine thousand and two hundred days) HIGHWAY FREE DAYS EVERY YEAR
• · Free up 17,909,460 gallons of gas every week (seventeen million, nine hundred and nine thousand, four hundred and sixty)!
• · Save more than 859,654,080 (eight hundred and fifty-nine million, six hundred and fifty-four thousand and eighty) GALLONS OF GAS SAVED PER YEAR!
• · Reduce our carbon footprint by 1,790,946 (one million, seven hundred ninety thousand, nine hundred and forty six) TONNES PER YEAR.
• · Cut costs for those companies by $7,163,784,000.00 SEVEN BILLION, ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY THREE MILLION, SEVEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS SAVED IN ONE YEAR ALONE.

Would we need to ship jobs overseas anymore? I think not! Could we significantly reduce our dependency on foreign oil? You betcha! And how about some other fairly legitimate observations:

• · Once we deconstruct a fixed position and reconstruct it as a remote position, we increase productivity by as much as 10% when eliminating redundancy
• · We allow corporations to hire who they want as the best person for the job because they are no longer dependent on location
• · Simpler functions that are sometimes cobbled together with other tasks to improve efficiency tend to do just the opposite, while in this scenario you could find the right person to work only the hours required
• · Companies can easily begin to outsource tasks that drain employees and middle management of key time; spam, sales calls, emails, outside sales and a host of other interruptions in any key position

The Bosson Group is the only company that has taken a scientific approach to solving America’s two largest economic problems; fuel and loss of jobs overseas. You don’t have to have 5,000 employees to use Tethered Communities™ either. This program is scalable and it is designed to help smaller companies evaluate and select sub-contracting components that better compliment their environment and personality.

Take the time to talk to us about Tethered Communities™ for your company.

Frank Bosson
CEO
The Bosson Group
www.thebossongroup.com
frankb@thebossongroup.com