William Arruda: There are lots of books on networking and relationship building. Why did you write this one, and what makes it different?
Michael Melcher: People “kind of“ know the value of relationships. But they get stuck because relationship building has a lot of nuance and can be quite complex. How do you reach out to someone you haven’t kept up with? When you ask, should you be direct or indirect? What if reciprocity seems impossible, such as when the other person is more senior or more powerful than you? How exactly are you supposed to find these mythical “sponsors” who can help you leapfrog ahead? I wanted to provide a coherent framework and set of tools that can help people move forward.
Second, a lot of networking books seem to be written by extremely extroverted, upbeat people whose message is, “Be like me.” But you’re not going to become another person. I wanted to provide a guide for being effective without thinking you have to change your personality first.
Third, for people who come to their careers as outsiders or first generation, relationships are the primary way to leapfrog ahead. Very few people realize that social capital is something you can build even if you come from very limited (or zero) financial capital. I wanted to lay out exactly how this works.
Arruda: How is relationship building different in the new world of hybrid work?
Melcher: A basic point of my book is how you move from “connections” to meaningful relationships with reciprocity and mutual understanding. In hybrid and distributed work environments, you just aren’t going to bump into people in the hallways or easily stop by their offices. The planning required for virtual meetings squeezes out a lot of random but extremely important interactions.
Therefore, when you are virtual, you need to identify ways to connect more broadly and deeply, since it won’t happen by itself. And if you are in the “live” contingent, you need to find ways to connect with colleagues who might seem “invisible” to you but who really aren’t.
Arruda: What’s the biggest mistake people make when building and nurturing relationships, and how can we avoid it?
Melcher: The biggest mistake people make is that they over-qualify. They try to predict whether meeting any given person will be valuable, and they try to predict whether any given conversation will be useful. But actually, you can’t predict any of this. Some of your most valuable relationships will be unforeseen, and many people who you think will be useful won’t be. Therefore, you need a balance between being strategic and being open to serendipity, and between having an agenda in conversations and being curious about where the conversation will actually end up.
Arruda: Although we all have the best intentions for staying connected to the people we meet, it’s challenging. What’s your advice for keeping relationships strong?
Melcher: Ping power. A ping is a message you send that doesn’t require a response. “Hey, I saw this article and thought you might like it.” “I passed our favorite coffee spot yesterday and thought of you.” “I hope you’re doing well. Here’s a new adorable pic of my twins.” When you send a ping, you are reminding the person you’re alive, reminding them that they like you, and sometimes sending along useful information—without giving them the stress of an expected response. Everyone has a big pile of to-do’s they haven’t done, and people love receiving positive messages that don’t require them to do anything.
Arruda: You say there are seven types of relationships we need to nurture to achieve our career and leadership potential. What are they?
Arruda: Most of those are self-explanatory, but can you tell us more about weak ties and beneficiaries?
Melcher: Weak ties are people you don’t know well, or who you once knew and with whom you’ve been out of touch. There is a ton of research about how much weak ties can benefit you. Beneficiaries are people you are helping, usually without being asked. One of the points in my book is that you can be a benefactor regardless of age or standing—you already know things that are useful to others, and when you share information, connections and resources, you empower yourself and create a good balance between asking and giving.
In a Salesforce survey of 11,000 global workers, few said their day-to-day role currently involves artificial intelligence. But with the rise of technologies like ChatGPT and a focus on boosting workers’ skills, that’s shifting quickly....getty
When Minneapolis-based Tony Nguyen lost his job as a manager at a sandwich shop during the pandemic, he decided his next move was to jump into tech. After spending his first five years after college in the restaurant industry, Nguyen wanted to learn new skills like process automation and data analysis.
To help, Nguyen turned to Trailhead, Salesforce’s training and workforce development platform, where he earned certifications, completed programs and eventually landed a job as an administrator managing data and analytics for Salesforce products.
“Growing up I loved playing video games and with computers—it’s always been a passion,” Nguyen says. The next skill Nguyen wants to learn? Generative AI.
In a global survey of 11,000 workers conducted by Salesforce, only one in 10 employees said their day-to-day role currently involves artificial intelligence. But with the rise in technologies like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the shift to skills-based hiring and an increasing focus on improving existing workforces amid the threat of a downturn, 80% of senior IT leaders cited a need to recruit and upskill employees in generative AI.
“[AI] is showing up everywhere, in every job,” says Ann Weeby, senior vice president of Trailhead at Salesforce, which is adding AI programs to Trailhead’s course catalog. “Skills are changing, technology is changing and workers are being left behind.”
The talent shortage for AI skills is widespread. When software firm SAS Institute polled managers at 111 U.S.-, U.K.- and Ireland-based organizations about the skills gap, 63% said they don’t have enough employees with AI and machine learning skills.
As bosses look to increase workplace development, venture capitalists are predicting AI, virtual reality and virtual-learning startups will dominate the education technology space this year. Universities are increasingly creating AI degree programs and resources, such as Carnegie Mellon University’s AI degree in 2018, MIT’s 2018 $1 billion investment in a new college for AI and Emory University’s upcoming Center for AI Learning.
But according to chatbot maker Tidio, nearly 69% of college graduates think AI could take their job or make it irrelevant in a few years. At SymphonyAI, chief people officer Jennifer Trzepacz says the enterprise AI company is thinking more and more about including AI in how workers operate.
“A lot of people might be anxious about what AI means for them or for their job,” says Trzepacz, but AI is reducing administrative tasks to make room for more time for collaboration and innovation.
“AI is part of the future,” she says. “We need to be curious and learn about it.” To help employees learn more about AI uses, Trzepacz says the company has created an initiative called “AI Is For Everyone” to increase awareness of AI applications and technology among employees.
David Fontain’s insurance technology company Foresight uses AI in its products to generate safety compliance recommendations for its customers. “[AI] is not just a buzzword,” he says. Rather, it’s already useful at Foresight in practical applications and streamlining work processes, with machine learning and AI taking “the guessing game out of worker safety,” he says.
Leaders like Fontain say AI is just another tech evolution that workers need to level up on. And as the shift toward skills-based hiring increases, 82% of managers in Salesforce’s survey cited skills as the most important attribute when evaluating job applicants.
Now a hiring manager himself, Nguyen says he looks at job candidates’ Trailhead accounts to determine if they are staying up to date with technologies and if they have an appetite for gaining new skills. “You always have to upskill yourself,” he says.
Most tech entrepreneurs these days stay away from services because investors are looking for high-margin, repeatable revenue. Service revenues don’t command the same multiples that product revenues do.
When I decided to bootstrap my startup, I never expected to be selling professional services. I quickly learned, however, that offering services tied to your product can be incredibly useful when bootstrapping. When my company started offering design and development services utilizing our low-code development platform, these services led to high-margin recurring revenue and greatly improved unit economics. These services also drove a tremendous amount of customer success.
But, service offerings are not for everyone. Here are a few questions you should ask yourself in order to determine whether services should be part of your bootstrapping efforts.
For bootstrapping to work, you need a healthy margin. At one of the companies I founded, our professional services were a necessary element of customer onboarding since product implementation was incredibly complex and not self-service.
Our professional services margin was -20%, which eroded our cash significantly. In this instance, service was not a revenue center but a loss leader — something we had to offer to secure the more valuable recurring revenue. If you find yourself in the same boat, services will never be a viable bootstrapping strategy. They could, however, be a tool you utilize to drive the rapid growth of recurring revenues.
Does the market/customer want the services?
Many technology products simply can’t be used by most people without a services component. At my company, we found that even though our low-code development platform could be utilized by people with minimal coding expertise, certain segments of our user base simply didn’t have the inclination to build their solution on our platform. We also discovered that even with powerful tools, many people wanted to leverage the expertise of an experienced software design team.
This prompted us to spin up a services team that could charge for design and development as an initial project and even provide ongoing development services on a monthly basis. Going this route is driving a three-to-six month payback on sales and marketing investment for us. Do these types of opportunities exist for you?
Can your service offering eventually be outsourced to an ecosystem of providers?
Services can serve as a bridge to help fund platform losses up to a point where outsiders can take over. Building an ecosystem can create an awesome flywheel effect, whereby participants not only become service providers but a channel for bringing in new product sales — without the expense of having to add to your own sales team.
Salesforce and Workday both did a brilliant job of executing this strategy. Ideally your product will gain enough acceptance that you can sell off your services division for additional profit.
Do services provide you with more customer intimacy and enhance your retention metrics?
A customer’s switching costs go way up when there is both a human and technological connection to your product and services. This sort of intimacy can provide a significant boost to your retention metrics and ensure predictable revenue.
Having great people to support clients can make up for early product deficiencies and create a level of trust that a pure low-touch product cannot. This is especially important in the early days of any startup’s product lifecycle.
Can bootstrapping with services strengthen your product development?
Launching a services division also provides another benefit: the chance for you to “eat your own dogfood.” It’s a fact that when employees use their own product, it gets markedly better. At my company, we rotate core team members in and out of the professional services team to ensure every engineer feels what our customers feel. I believe this leads to product brilliance.
Now I’m not advocating you become a services company, but having a product company with a service business could stave off having to secure venture backing before your product is more mature. This can help you avoid things like dilution, a loss of control and the pressure to grow fast for a speedy exit.
As someone who’s previously founded two venture-backed startups, I like how bootstrapping with services is allowing my company to grow more thoughtfully. We have time to think about product/market fit before scaling up, we’re not pursuing growth rates that our platform can’t support, we’re making smart hires and we’re scrutinizing the ROI of all of our expenses because every dollar counts.
Additionally, we are vetting the utility of our own product with real-life customers and creating a virtuous circle of feedback to drive new features. I feel like it’s the smarter way to evolve a business like ours — building a company for the long haul versus hitting some arbitrary goal to secure additional venture capital.
There is one important consideration before bootstrapping with services: You’ll want to make sure you’re growing (albeit at a deliberate pace) and not just treading water. That’s why the above questions are something you’ll want to consider before following my lead. It’s critical you feel confident that you’ll create enough runway and customer success for your ultimate business model to take shape, while not letting services become a distraction.
In computer technology the term bootstrapping, refers to language compilers that are able to be coded in the same language. (For example, a C compiler is now written in the C language. Once the basic compiler is written, improvements can be iteratively made, thus pulling the language up by its bootstraps) Also, booting usually refers to the process of loading the basic software into the memory of a computer after power-on or general reset, the kernel will load the operating system which will then take care of loading other device drivers and software as needed.
Bootstrapping can also refer to the development of successively more complex, faster programming environments. The simplest environment will be, perhaps, a very basic text editor (e.g., ed) and an assembler program. Using these tools, one can write a more complex text editor, and a simple compiler for a higher-level language and so on, until one can have a graphicalIDE and an extremely high-level programming language.
Historically, bootstrapping also refers to an early technique for computer program development on new hardware. The technique described in this paragraph has been replaced by the use of a cross compiler executed by a pre-existing computer. Bootstrapping in program development began during the 1950s when each program was constructed on paper in decimal code or in binary code, bit by bit (1s and 0s), because there was no high-level computer language, no compiler, no assembler, and no linker.
A tiny assembler program was hand-coded for a new computer (for example the IBM 650) which converted a few instructions into binary or decimal code: A1. This simple assembler program was then rewritten in its just-defined assembly language but with extensions that would enable the use of some additional mnemonics for more complex operation codes.
The enhanced assembler’s source program was then assembled by its predecessor’s executable (A1) into binary or decimal code to give A2, and the cycle repeated (now with those enhancements available), until the entire instruction set was coded, branch addresses were automatically calculated, and other conveniences (such as conditional assembly, macros, optimisations, etc.) established. This was how the early assembly program SOAP (Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program) was developed. Compilers, linkers, loaders, and utilities were then coded in assembly language, further continuing the bootstrapping process of developing complex software systems by using simpler software.
See also
Causal loop, also known as Bootstrap paradox – Sequence of events which cause each other
Ecommerce juggernaut Amazon reported its best first-quarter sales ever Thursday after the market closed, beating out analyst expectations and tacking on to a slew of recent blockbuster reports from big-tech giants as stocks climb to new highs.
Key Facts
Seattle-based Amazon reported revenue of $108.5 billion in the first quarter, surging 44% year over year and beating out analyst expectations of $104.5 billion.
Boosted by stimulus checks and improving sales of Amazon Web Services (AWS), net income hit $15.79 per share, or roughly $8.1 billion—eclipsing expectations of $9.54 per share and more than tripling from $2.5 billion one year ago.
The release marks Amazon’s second-biggest quarter ever for sales, behind only the $125.6 billion nabbed in last year’s fourth quarter thanks to a later-than-usual Prime Day and the pandemic holiday season.
Amazon shares jumped 5% in after-hours trading immediately after the announcement; the stock ticked up 0.4% Thursday, lifting its year-to-date gain to about 9%—lower than the tech-heavy Nasdaq’s 11% increase.
Crucial Quote
“In just 15 years, AWS has become a $54 billion annual sales… business competing against the world’s largest technology companies, and its growth is accelerating—up 32% year over year,” Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said in the earnings release, touting the fast-growing segment that analysts expect will drive the bulk of Amazon’s future growth. “Companies from Airbnb to McDonald’s to Volkswagen come to AWS because we offer what is by far the broadest set of tools and services available, and we continue to invent relentlessly on their behalf.”
Key Background
Now worth an estimated $202 billion, Jeff Bezos started Amazon as an online bookseller operating out of his Seattle garage in 1994, and the company has since grown to become one of the world’s most valuable companies with businesses spanning cloud storage, video streaming, groceries and more.
Last year, about 56% of Amazon’s $386 billion in total sales came from products sold on the platform, while the rest came from services like AWS, Amazon Prime and advertising. In February, Amazon announced Bezos would step down as CEO in the third quarter after 27 years at the company’s helm, ceding the position to AWS CEO Andy Jassy—a sign the company could double-down on its quickly growing service offerings.
What To Watch For
Amazon’s first-quarter earnings call is at 5:30 p.m. EDT Thursday. Forte says he’ll be listening for details on “heir apparent” Jassy’s leadership transition, potential government regulation, the Alabama vote against unionization and costs incurred as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Big Number
$3,993. That’s how high analysts think Amazon shares can go over the next year, according to Bloomberg data, implying that the stock could soar about 14% from current prices of about $3,474.
Surprising Fact
A booming pandemic rally helped Amazon shares nearly double since the start of last year, creating the nation’s third-largest company with a market capitalization of nearly $1.8 trillion.
Tangent
“Last year, Amazon lost sales to competition—including Walmart, Target, eBay and others—because it couldn’t keep up with demand, and it made a strategic decision to emphasize essentials during the start of the pandemic,” Tom Forte, a senior research analyst at investment bank D.A. Davidson said in a pre-earnings note. “Since then, it has ramped up staffing and fulfillment-center square footage and, in our view, is better positioned to recapture those sales.”
I’m a reporter at Forbes focusing on markets and finance. I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I double-majored in business journalism and economics while working for UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School as a marketing and communications assistant. Before Forbes, I spent a summer reporting on the L.A. private sector for Los Angeles Business Journal and wrote about publicly traded North Carolina companies for NC Business News Wire. Reach out at jponciano@forbes.com.
The company spent slightly less than $2 billion on coronavirus-related operating costs in the quarter, Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, said on a call with investors and analysts. Its labor costs, meanwhile, are set to increase: The company announced this week it plans to boost pay for about 500,000 U.S. workers, who will receive hourly raises between 50 cents and $3. It already pays employees a $15 minimum starting wage.
Amazon has been on an unprecedented mass hiring spree, swelling its ranks by 430,000 workers in the past year to cope with pandemic-induced demand. It also faces growing worker activism. Amazon defeated its second union drive in the company’s 26-year history when employees at a warehouse complex in Bessemer, Alabama, declined to join the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union last month. The company faces another unionizing effort in four facilities around Staten Island, New York.
How did your leadership priorities change in 2020? If you started paying more attention to the sales enablement needs of your organization, you’re not alone.
According to recent HubSpot research, 65% of sales leaders who outperformed revenue targets in 2020 reported having a dedicated person or team working on sales enablement efforts instead of making it an initiative someone works on off the side of their desk.
For sales organizations that have been waiting to implement dedicated sales enablement measures — the time is now. With 2021 right around the corner, intentional sales enablement is a must-have for organizations that want to remain competitive in the future.
HubSpot recently sat down with Chris Pope, Director of Sales at Crayon, to discuss how companies can implement sales enablement strategies that can move the needle and drive revenue growth.
“Crayon defines sales enablement as providing our account executives with the resources and content they need to win more deals. Closing deals is more important than ever, especially in today’s competitive market where there are fewer deals to close,” he says.
In 2020, Crayon placed even greater emphasis on sales enablement to support their sales force. “We’ve put even more effort into making sure that our sales teams have the resources they need, simply because every deal matters more than ever,” says Pope.
How to Improve Sales Enablement for Your Team
1. Use data to inform your sales enablement content.
Crayon uses data to inform sales enablement decisions. According to Pope, his team relies on “velocity reports” to determine what areas of the sales process reps need the most support with.
“Velocity reports tell us what our reps conversion rates are at every stage of the sales funnel. How many opportunities are turning into discovery calls? How many discovery calls are turning into demos? How many demos are turning into proposals? And how many proposals do we send out that turn into closed business?” says Pope.
“We leverage that data to inform us where each individual rep needs to spend the most time, and where managers need to spend time training individual contributors.”
From an organizational level, this approach helps sales leaders know how to support sales managers and reps, and provides valuable insight into the type of training and content would be most effective.
Two examples of enablement content Crayon leadership has provided to their sales team include:
Call Recordings
“We love call recordings. We not only have call recordings of what the perfect call sounds like, we also have recordings of ideal discovery calls, effective demos, and successful closing calls. We share these recordings with reps who may need help in those areas, and we share them broadly across the organization so everyone is on the same page,” Pope says.
Battle Cards
Battle cards are a valuable tool for preparing reps to speak to features and objections related to your product. Crayon relies heavily on battle cards to ensure sales reps understand what they’re selling inside and out.
“We use our own product to make sure that our individual contributors have the most up to date messaging on how we position against our competition. This knowledge has been crucial not only for our organization, but for our customers as well,” says Pope.
2. Focus on sales team culture.
Chances are, you’re familiar with the term “company culture” — the idea that a company should have a shared set of beliefs, values, and practices. But when was the last time you assessed the culture of your sales team?
Sales teams are often dynamic organizations with motivated team members whose ability to sell is critical to the health of a company. Building strong rapport among members of the sales team and having a culture of open communication, especially in a remote environment, is an effective way to support sales enablement.
Feeling supported and included while selling remotely can be challenging for reps. For Crayon, sales team cohesion is a high priority.
“We’ve done our best to create a team atmosphere. We have daily calls where the entire sales team is on together, we have a peer program where our more experienced reps are paired with less experienced reps to offer coaching and mentorship, and we’re creating cross-functional opportunities for our pipeline generation team to work closer with our closing team,” says Pope.
These activities build trust across the team, and strengthen communication among sales managers and reps, creating a better environment to tackle sales enablement issues as they arise.
3. Prioritize sales enablement at each level of the organization.
At Crayon, sales enablement is an all-hands-on-deck initiative from the top down.
“Sales enablement is a team effort at Crayon. It starts at the top with our Senior Vice President of Sales, who delivers insight on broad topics and training related to overarching sales themes such as a demo workflow, or how to run a closing call,” says Pope.
“The managers and directors are responsible for individual training tailored to the needs of their reps. This can include listening in on at least a few calls for each individual contributor weekly, and providing regular feedback.”
In addition to the sales enablement work of leadership, Crayon focuses heavily on team selling to get everyone involved.
“If one of our reps is great at positioning our product against a competitor’s or they’re strong at demoing a certain aspect of our platform, we’ll invite their team members to tune into their sales calls so they can learn from them.”
Everybody within the organization plays a role in our sales enablement.
In 2020, sales managers at Crayon took a hands-on approach to coaching reps who had opportunities for improvement.
“We’ve really made it a focus to make sure managers are involved in more calls. Managers are putting time aside to give individual contributors and feedback that they need after calls, and benchmarking performance after every stage of the sales cycle,” says Pope.
According to Pope, if a rep is struggling with a specific part of the sales process, Crayon’s team will “focus our training on the specific aspect of the process they’re struggling with to help them improve and get their overall win rate up.”
4. Don’t wait to give feedback.
When sales managers and seasoned team members are coaching reps, the Crayon team makes it a point to provide feedback quickly.
For example, if Pope were to listen in to a rep’s sales call with a prospect, he would schedule 15 minutes with the rep right after the call to deliver feedback on how it went.
“When you let time pass, the call is not as fresh in the rep’s mind, and your feedback is not going to be as direct as it would be if you delivered it right away.”
5. Make sure sales managers feel supported.
Sales managers often have a lot on their plate. They are responsible for coaching and leading their reps to success, and are accountable for their team’s performance to leadership. For growing companies, relieving pressure from sales managers is crucial for a healthy organization.
“As you continue to scale your teams you don’t want your managers to feel overwhelmed. You want to make sure they have enough time in the day to give every individual contributor the attention that they need to to perform their best.” says Pope.
Pope says Crayon focuses on conscious staffing and resourcing to avoid sales manager burnout:
“If we know we’re going to hire a new group of sales reps, we make sure we already have enough managers in place who have the bandwidth to lead.
So when those people start we don’t have a new manager meeting new reps, we have experienced managers working with new reps, and we make sure that team members have the data they need to understand what their path to success will be as an individual contributor.”
Improving Team Morale in 2021
Per HubSpot’s 2021 Sales Enablement Report, 40% of sales leaders expected to miss their revenue targets this year. That means sales enablement efforts are not only necessary for growth — they are critical for survival.
In a competitive landscape where sales teams are working with volatile markets and buyer uncertainty, keeping morale high is more challenging than ever. Pope shares why communication is Crayon’s greatest tool for keeping employees engaged.
“Morale has been all over the map for different members of the team. At Crayon, we never go a day without checking in on our reps,” he says. “I try to at least have two times a day where I’m asking them how their days are going, what they’ve been working on, what calls have gone well, what calls haven’t gone well, and asking how can I continue to support them.”
This approach to communication happens at the organizational level as well.
“Crayon has done a really great job of communicating, being honest about when we might go back into the office, and making sure we’re meeting with folks who are concerned about not having an office atmosphere to make sure that they’re comfortable with their remote work setup,” says Pope.
If you’re looking for more advice on boosting sales rep productivity and morale, check out this post for advice from an Aircall sales leader on navigating employee fatigue.
Learn more about Sales Enablement: Why You Need Sales Enablement: https://clickhubspot.com/Sales-Enable… The Sales Enablement Certification will teach you how to develop a marketing-driven sales enablement strategy. This course was designed with marketing managers in mind, but other marketers, as well as sales leaders, can benefit from learning the principles involved in this approach to sales enablement.
We all know networking is important, but we don’t always prioritize it. Yet we should! The strongest personal brands have rich and diverse networks. I reached out to Michael Melcher, the author of the upcoming book Your Invisible Network: How to Create, Maintain, and Leverage the Relationships That Will Transform Your Career to inspire us to give networking the attention it deserves.
Melcher: The biggest mistake people make is that they over-qualify. They try to predict whether meeting any given person will be valuable, and they try to predict whether any given conversation will be useful. But actually, you can’t predict any of this. Some of your most valuable relationships will be unforeseen, and many people who you think will be useful won’t be. Therefore, you need a balance between being strategic and being open to serendipity, and between having an agenda in conversations and being curious about where the conversation will actually end up.
