Productivity

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Productivity is getting lots of buzz right now. I’m exploring several tools to see about improving my personal and professional productivity.

Asana – looks very interesting and my experience so far is very positive

Evernote – amazing how many capabilities are included; everyday I learn something new about it. I’m looking forward to playing around Evernote Hello and have heard rumors they’ll be creating an Evernote Task list. I haven’t tried the premium version yet as the free version is more than meeting my current requirements.

Who@ – just signed up as their “pre-pitch” is intriguing; curious to see if it lives up to my internal expectations.

Gist – very cool tool for tracking your network and keeping in touch; I really like how it allows me to quickly review content posted across multiple networks easily and quickly. They were purchased by RIM, makes me nervous given the difficulties (both market and self-inflicted) that they’ve been going through recently.

Connected – interesting tool, after one week of use with this and Gist, I feel Gist is the stronger product. But I do like the daily update that Connected sends. They were purchased by LinkedIn, interested to see what happens next.

Of course, all the usual suspects are still in use – Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook (not often). The tools above allow me to be more productive in my daily life at work and home while making it easier to stay connected.

 

Rhetorical Question: Have We Shared Too Much With Facebook, Google, and Apple?

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The team at Focus.com posted this question the other day.  And they included this wonderful chart which I’m providing here.  This touches on a topic that Peter Bordes raised at the Identity Edge blog regarding social media users fearing ads more than identity theft.  Take a look at both posts.   Clearly social media users, and all  Google and Apple users (regardless of their use of Google and Apple social media capabilities), have shared far more information than they understand.  The risks grow daily and require consumers to take proactive measures with their identity and their online footprints.

 

The Merging of Sales and Marketing

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Ardath Albee has a great post up on the collision of sales and marketing.  I agree with her findings – sales and marketing need to become more collaborative.  I posted this comment in response to her blog post.

“They are two parts of the same process.” Concur. And they are increasingly merging into one process in the B2B space. As buyers take control over when and how they evaluate solutions using content made available by marketing, the process of selling moves more into the marketing realm.

It’s true that sales can jump the gun. But in the enterprise environment, communications with customers must be collaborative. It’s not enough to provide information about the service. You must be able to understand the needs of the buying enterprise, the buyer/evaluator/influencer/reviewer in their role, other organizations within the enterprise and how they all tie together in order to provide true value during any conversation. Each conversation and every interaction is a buying point – you’re not selling the product, you’re convincing them to continue their engagement. Whether continuing engagement via a new whitepaper, blog post, introductory call or full sales meeting, the point of marketing/sales (sales/marketing?) is to keep moving the process forward.

Sales needs to become more involved in marketing – it’s the beginning of the sales process. And marketing needs to become more involved in sales – it’s the fruition of marketing strategy and execution.