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I spent the weekend helping my daughter move into her first apartment and get ready for this year at university.  We visited IKEA to furnish the place.  From the parking lot to the playground inside the store, the entire place was packed.

I’ve only been to IKEA a few times, but I’ve always been fascinated about the concept and how IKEA connects with their customers, anywhere in the world.  I was in the IKEA in Montreal this weekend; however, I’ve seen IKEA not only across Canada and the US, but in Europe as well.  Why do I see IKEA in all the places I seem to go?  Because you can’t help but see an IKEA - they are connected to the high traffic areas of their markets.  They are always ready  for customers (this weekend with back to school you could see students and boxes all around the student areas of Montreal), so it’s no wonder IKEA’s owners are some of the most wealthy in the world.

How does every IKEA work – and why is it such an “off-line” great example of The Connected Market Space?

First, each and every IKEA is connected by location.   Always off of a busy highway, you can’t help but see the place.  From Montreal to Malaysia, it’s always the same connection to traffic.  The volume of eyes from the highway racing by knows exactly what IKEA looks like and where they are located.

Inside, they're always bustling.  Directly in front of me were stairs up to the showroom.  We found the beds and bathrooms and all manners of home furnishings in between.  Cool, cheap, and organized so we could easily grab our slip and jot down what we needed.  The “shopping” experience was good (I’m not a shopper by nature) because IKEA tracked us right where we needed to go and we set about discovering whatever was on our minds, “bookmarking” it along the way (rack and bin number noted).

Down the stairs, into the back end warehouse – we became our own warehouse staff.    All IKEA warehouses are the same. Searching for the inventory I wanted was easy and IKEA had just saved a ton by having us act on our own to pick and pack products onto our cart.

Finally checkout: self serve tills lined the isle, but we weren’t on our own. For the few items that were too large, there was help to move those larger boxes after we had scanned and paid for the items.

How IKEA has connected with their market is by having the right prices, great looking stuff and a flow that allows their customers to self serve and save money.  IKEA is a perfect example of a connected market space.  It’s easy to see how IKEA connected their warehouse, with a brilliant visibility and showroom strategy, with the internal track of how customers flow through the store to find what they need.

It’s not so easy to do this on the internet though. Your warehouse is the back end data of your website, and your showroom is your web presence. The track your customers follow through involves virtual images and communications rather than a colourful line.

That said… what if you could build a presence on the web that allowed your market to connect?  Imagine that customers that pass by on a highway notice your presence, so they can stop by when they need what you have to offer.  They're served automatically – by just visiting your store.  They can do whatever they want to themselves and they can even check out on their own, or ask for help.   What if you gave your market exactly what they needed to find from your inventory in the back end: access to your data that represents your “warehouse floor”?

What the web is striving to be a connected market space.  All you have to do is look at IKEA.  If you can replicate that experience, your customers will be happily carting away your products or services – happily building them for exactly what they needed in their lives.

My daughter’s apartment is all set up, and I’ve said good bye.  I won’t see her for months.  I’ll miss her as she sits in her new kitchen on the new bar stools I put together.

Building IKEA.   Somehow it makes me still feel closer – feel connected.

It’s great to get back to blogging after being “disconnected” for 10 days.  I want to thank Kathleen for keeping information flowing on the blog and the 1to1REAL and PedBot Team for their work at staying connected while I was unwinding.

There are times to be connected and times to be disconnected. We should all know this (a great thing to teach our kids too. I am teaching my daughters moderation in technology).  I thought a lot about that as I had turned off my email, iPhone, iPad & laptop – I was “off the grid”.  I played checkers with the kids and was amazed as my 9 year old started challenging me in chess – the real kind on a board with wooden pieces (not the iPad version)!

But what happens with your company when you’re turned off ?

That’s the challenge of staying connected…  Just because you’re off (which I highly recommend to rejuvenate and stay creative and energized – BTW), does not mean the rest of the world is – in fact they most likely aren’t.  Who is minding your store when you’re away?  How do you deal with a global economy or time zone economics?  I’m an early riser: 5am most days.  But, even at that I like to have time away from the phone and email, but by 6 the East Coast is buzzing and fully perked up on Starbucks.  The REAL world always connected, and you can’t be connected all the time … or can you be?

This has been a dilemma I have faced throughout my career.  I’m the key spokesperson, entrepreneur and visionary; I’m the guy that drives our Connected Market Space and 1to1REAL, who connected to industries and customer and sells products at CMAEON.  This is why I decided to build 1to1REAL in the first place.

I realized a decade ago that the world was going to be more informed and more on than ever before.  In order to speak to my customers and our market, I would need a system to keep up.  Unfortunately, in order to assemble those systems:  email marketing and responses, CRM, web sites, social networking, AdWord advertising, data and list building, new lead acquisition… and then filter through all of that information to our customers, I became overwhelmed.  I was already working 15 hour plus days – how could I keep up?

That was when I first started thinking about this Technology Tangle we weave for ourselves.  Where does productivity start and where does it fail?  That was the beginning of 1to1REAL. New staff was not the answer.  Then, not only did I have a training issue, I had added overhead, which can kill any business.  Spending money to chase new revenues with additional staff, while taking the hit on time for training and money – that is every small business’ dilemma.

I reviewed CRM and contact management software. They were a piece of the puzzle, but unfortunately beyond the big learning curve of all of the features, they just didn’t do any real work for me.  I still had to have fingers on the keyboards constantly to make these tools work (a fact that most sales people, CEOs and Entrepreneurs despise).  I found once I learned a system, I had to keep it up to date for it to be useful – taking up even more time.

The promise of technology was not a promise at all. It had become a difficult path.  And so, 1to1REAL was born with a “robot” to take some of the tasks off of my hands and stay connected while I was either completely disconnected, or focused on exactly what I do best to make my business successful.  That is why, after nearly eleven years in business I still don’t have, or need, a huge sales force to run a substantial company and business.  1to1REAL, through all of its versions, was really about how to extend the vision and talent I had personally and help leverage those into my business so it could sell itself.

Today every company of any size is trying to do more with less.   With small companies that has always been the case – it’s just tougher in a tight market.  I felt that if technology were a solution, it had to be affordable, effective and actually DO work automatically once I set it up.  Today we talk to over a million people regularly.  We serve thousands of users.  We bring new installs and users in daily.  Yet, I’ve been able to keep the staff count and overhead low – and still answer my own phone and do the work I love to do – working with entrepreneurs and businesses to improve their connections and build their connected markets.  It works for me every day – and I’ve seen it grow every other business that has adopted this use of technology and market connections.

I had to create an automated marketing, sales and customer relationship team – so 1to1REAL was designed to do just that.  Because today, whether I’m on holiday, or on the phone, with an important key customer, or thinking about how to build a better business – the world is always on – with 1to1REAL we are always open for business.  Answering what our PedBot Auto Drive can answer – and jumping in when it is the perfect time for a personal conversation to sell and close a new account.

Great to be connected agian – thanks to everyone for staying connected and for the comments and questions ….

Tim

Every blogger and writer has had days when even writing a sentence was fraught with distractions. The mind wanders, emails demand attention, you get another text message… all of a sudden it’s been 2 hours and you’re still staring at a blank screen.

Why is it so hard to write one small blog post?  You’re procrastinating – for one reason or another – putting off work that you know you should be doing, but just can’t quite bring yourself to start. Whether it’s sleep deprivation too much information coming at you all at once, you know you need to focus, but how?

• Quit Outlook or whatever mail client you’re using. If you really need to work, then you can’t answer emails. Nothing sent in an email is so urgent it has to be dealt with right away. If it was that important, they’d phone you. Speaking of which…
• Screen your calls. Use caller ID to determine if you really need to talk to that person. Realistically, you can call your partner to get the grocery list after you’re done. Tell yourself that your boss can wait to talk to you – after all, you are working.
• Unconnect yourself. No twitter, feeds or news until you’re done. Quit your browser entirely, or only leave open tabs with information you actually need.

• Everyone has their own way of focusing their mind: listen to music (my pick is Scottish electronic band Boards of Canada), zone out to talk radio, or just use a pair of noise cancelling headphones to reduce the noise around you.

• Get yourself a glass of water, a mug of tea, a granola bar… whatever you need to keep you at your desk before you start. The only excuse you’ll have to leave it would be to go to the bathroom, and of course you’d do that before you start, right?

• Sure you have a million things to do and to worry about, but you can’t obsess over them and get something requiring concentration done at the same time. Tell yourself you’ll deal with them later. If you can’t put them out of your head, create a list of everything else you need to do, then put it away and tell yourself you’ll come back to the list as soon as you’re finished.

• If you’re trying to focus to start working on a huge presentation, you won’t get it done in one sitting, but you can decide that you won’t stop until you’ve gotten your outline done. Breaking big projects that you’re putting off into a list of manageable tasks can make the project seem much less intimidating.

• Ever hear of a second wind? Runners get them after they refuse to stop when they begin to get tired. Writers can get them too. Instead of running out of steam and then getting distracted again, force yourself to carry on. Keep writing, even if you know you’ll have to revise it later.
• Rewards are a great motivator – tell yourself once you’re done whatever you need to do, you can have a coffee break, go for a walk with the dog, watch some videos on Youtube… whatever makes you want to work towards your goal.

• Concentrating is hard work. Take a break every time you’ve finished a task, or every 30 minutes. Use a timer to make sure your breaks don’t start to become longer than your work periods. Don’t do other work on your breaks. You’re taking them to stay fresh and sharp, not to worry about other things.
• Keep on working – if the creative juices have you and you’re on a roll, keep going! Don’t let taking breaks become another distraction.

One of the most popular CRM solutions in the world will tell you to automate your sales force, ditch the software and get your reps selling instead of administrating.  Sounds good, right? Except for one small hitch… what if you’re the sales force? What if you don’t have reps, managers and executives to automate?

A small business with only a few sales people (or only a single sales person) probably isn’t so bogged down that adapting a traditional CRM solution that reduces paperwork and greases the information wheels will really do anything for them.   Most small businesses run lean – the sales department isn’t usually so disconnected from the logistics department that CRM solutions will make them more efficient – sales and logistics are probably sitting next to each other. They might even be the same person.

What a small business needs to do isn’t automate their non-existent sales force; they need to create something that functions as an automated sales force!  There are many things that someone in sales has to do every day:  nurture leads, send information, follow up on sales calls, and remind people of sales, promotions, deals… the list goes on. If a small business could automate those tasks, sending information, follow ups, and incentives automatically, the time consuming grunt work of selling would give them more of their time back. Time they could spend making deals.  A small business doesn’t need software or solutions, it needs a robot.

That’s where CRM and small businesses disconnect – traditional CRM can make those processes more efficient, but it doesn’t do them for you.

Bike Ride Fever

Our CEO Tim is getting some time off this week – the CMAEON staff have taken over!

ost people know about Ride Your Bike to Work week. Typically it falls in May, and it’s a great way to get some exercise and to commute to work without building up an unhealthy amount of road rage.  CMAEON has a lot of avid bike riders on staff, and we’re looking to commute.  Many people never make the switch from driving to riding, so we’d like to give you a little encouragement.

Here are 4 reasons we think you should try riding your bike to work:

Exercise – riding a bike isn’t strenuous, but it’s certainly better for you than driving. If you live 10 km away, you can probably ride to work in around 30 minutes, and when you add up your commute, that’s an extra hour a day of exercise. Your doctor would be thrilled.

Money – barring running out to buy a brand new commuter bike, you probably only need to have your own bicycle tuned up before hitting the road. The cost of a tune up and a flat tire repair kit are far less than gas and maintenance on a car.

The Environment – riding a bike is the most environmentally friendly way to commute – if you’re looking to reduce your footprint a bit, cutting out your 5 day a week commute would be a huge start.

Speed – as a bit of a test, the CMAEON tweeter drove to work one day, and rode her bike the next. By the time red lights, parking and general road delays were factored in; driving the 10km to work took exactly the same amount of time as riding it. The bonus was that riding a bike along a tree lined urban trail is a LOT more relaxing than getting stuck behind three red lights in a row.

Don’t believe it? British motoring show Top Gear did a challenge – what was the fastest way to get across the busiest parts of London – bike, public transit, car or boat (up the Thames)?  The Bike was fastest by a good margin over the boat (yes, the boat), with public transit third and car a distant fourth.

So, now that we’ve pitched the benefits, we’d like to offer you a challenge. Try biking to work for the next couple of days. See how you like it. Victoria is one of the nicest places in Canada to ride a bike –so take advantage of it. Let us know how your commute went in the comments.

Just before you start, remember to wear a helmet, take a water bottle, have your bike tuned up, plan your route and most importantly, enjoy the scenery.

Our CEO Tim is getting some time off this week – the CMAEON staff have taken over!

Most people know about Ride Your Bike to Work week. Typically it falls in May, and it’s a great way to get some exercise and to commute to work without building up an unhealthy amount of road rage.  CMAEON has a lot of avid bike riders on staff, and we’re looking to commute.  Many people never make the switch from driving to riding, so we’d like to give you a little encouragement.

Here are 4 reasons we think you should try riding your bike to work:

Exercise – riding a bike isn’t strenuous, but it’s certainly better for you than driving. If you live 10 km away, you can probably ride to work in around 30 minutes, and when you add up your commute, that’s an extra hour a day of exercise. Your doctor would be thrilled.

Money – barring running out to buy a brand new commuter bike, you probably only need to have your own bicycle tuned up before hitting the road. The cost of a tune up and a flat tire repair kit are far less than gas and maintenance on a car.

The Environment – riding a bike is the most environmentally friendly way to commute – if you’re looking to reduce your footprint a bit, cutting out your 5 day a week commute would be a huge start.

Speed – as a bit of a test, the CMAEON tweeter drove to work one day, and rode her bike the next. By the time red lights, parking and general road delays were factored in; driving the 10km to work took exactly the same amount of time as riding it. The bonus was that riding a bike along a tree lined urban trail is a LOT more relaxing than getting stuck behind three red lights in a row.

Don’t believe it? British motoring show Top Gear did a challenge – what was the fastest way to get across the busiest parts of London – bike, public transit, car or boat (up the Thames)?  The Bike was fastest by a good margin over the boat (yes, the boat), with public transit third and car a distant fourth.

So, now that we’ve pitched the benefits, we’d like to offer you a challenge. Try biking to work for the next couple of days. See how you like it. Victoria is one of the nicest places in Canada to ride a bike –so take advantage of it. Let us know how your commute went in the comments.

Just before you start, remember to wear a helmet, take a water bottle, have your bike tuned up, plan your route and most importantly, enjoy the scenery.

Google makes a big show of their informal motto, “don’t be evil” and we believe them. Google after all, makes a lot of money on search but then uses it to give away fabulous services like Gmail, Wave, Google Docs, Youtube, etc, etc.

Google makes a big show of their informal motto, “don’t be evil” and we believe them. Google after all, makes a lot of money on search but then uses it to give away fabulous services like Gmail, Wave, Google Docs, Youtube, etc, etc.

However, there is a little more than altruism involved. Each time you use a service like Gmail, and every time you visit a website with Google Analytics or Adwords on it, you’re giving information to Google. Why? They need your information for their algorithms - the same ones they use to drive their search and Pay-Per-Click Adwords. Is this evil? Maybe not, but you are paying for these services – one way or another.

Keep in mind what Google actually sells is clicks and awareness of options, that their machines (both algorithm and paid for click money machines) decide we should know about. Google connects people to the filtered information and then sends them away. This process is the big money maker for Google - tens of thousands of "optimizers" make sure Google sends the top front page searches to the businesses that pay a lot for that placement.

So, you can buy into the “Google Game” – an expensive game that's more like a fishing game at a carnival, and you might get clicks and you might not – it’s not really a game you can win. You want those people who search to connect to you, but Google doesn’t care if they do or not. Think about how many bounces, un-followed up leads and would-be conversations are just dropped… Yet businesses pay for this all day, every day, 24/7 – and Google makes a lot of money from this.

So how can you actually catch fish instead of just paying to cast your hook in Google’s pond? The first step in winning the “Google Game” is to start a conversation. Don’t let those leads bounce. Engage, talk and make a dialogue with potential leads. Why? Because that is how social networks, followers, and conversation marketing work – nurturing those leads into clients, one person at a time.

Sure Google is a tool, but it’s not a solution – a solution needs to do more for you. It needs to want you to succeed. Google doesn’t care if you win their game or not – the longer you play, the more money they make.

If a business considers its entire market (i.e., the unique values it business brings to a transaction that earns and keeps customers) – it quickly become apparent they have to go beyond CRM and the sales force, and start thinking long term.

By definition, the sales force sells and then leaves - until there is something else to sell. For example, they sell razors and leave the production of the razor blades, the customer service, and razor blade user support to the rest of the team. Every business knows that the repeated value of the razor blade is what creates long term prosperity for the firm - the lifetime value of the customer and the firm – they want people to keep buying your razor blades. This means creating a connection with customers that isn't just a sales based relationship. Creating a connection with a market deeper than selling, is going beyond managing leads – it actually creates qualified sales leads. How? Slowly, surely, and over time as companies and customers connect and build a relationship.

People actually want to connect. People search, use social networks, save and sort information, speak, select and stick only if they go through the entire cycle themselves – we call this the "self discovery" market. Google is a very helpful tool for people to connect – it helps people sort information through search and PPC ads, and save information with bookmarks, social spaces, email, and other information management systems.

However, not everyone is searching and saving at the exact time they want to purchase something. This is where a typical sales cycle starts to fall apart. Sales people and the companies they work for don’t want, or more likely can’t afford to wait for a year to get a sale or commission.  The problem (especially in a “buyers market”) then becomes, if a business can’t get a buyer at the exact time the leads are searching the lead is worthless, contact is lost, and the company moves on. Not a good strategy for building a business or a solid set of connections.  A potential customer might want to buy a house next year, after they get married, but it doesn’t mean they’re not going to start looking for information on loans, mortgages and markets now.

Therefore, a business has a need for a consistent process of market participation and conversation marketing.  A successful business will want to provide information for as long as it takes for the leads to mature. When a business does this, it's building a deeper connection and creating that qualified group of connections in a market space. However, would it be too time consuming to provide that level of service to every customer that comes in the door with a vague request for information? Not necessarily.

What businesses need for is a marketing robot. Robots are not pushy and they are not emotional, they are informative and repetitive.  They can handle high volumes of people, can watch and learn and understand new things and create the right "space" for buyers and sellers without leaving the connection behind because the timing is wrong.  Robots can help create a conversation that can be revisited at any time. No sales force, marketing team or single person can do that - no matter how good they are - nor will they if they are compensated like most sales people - in commission. Effectively, this is how search engines started and still exist; however, a search engine is a one way cycle and is manipulated through "optimization" and a code set that decides what is relevant.

For a successful connection, humans should decide what is relevant to them, and then find that information.  Nobody ever feels like Google helps them make an informed decision – it just gives them information they specifically requested and leaves them to make the decisions themselves.

This is why conversation marketing and social networking is taking off so rapidly.  People trust and talk to other people.  People start by searching, but then they start narrowing down what they were thinking about and begin asking real people.  In short, they make a connection and follow it through.   In reality there is nothing about Google that makes anyone stick, other than sheer size of the search market. Once a lead comes through Google, a business still has to start that conversation!

That is where a robot can help for a clever business.  When people search and don’t get information or a meaningful connection, they will search again. So if a business can catch those searchers the first time, providing information to real people and in answering questions, it will be associated with the most valuable information about its market, and it will start to have engaged conversations with searchers.
That is unbeatable - if a business can get in the conversation, and staring helping to drive the conversation, it becomes a focal point, and more and more people will join in. Real people.   Interested people.  People that are buyers.  A robot helps because it grows and is patiently waiting and capturing and responding.  It doesn't lose interest or "move on" like a salesperson will.  It will cultivate and till the fields of prospects and create conversations and referrals and a community of people interested in a product or service.  

There are hundreds of millions of people on the internet.  A business only needs a few hundred or a few thousand of those people to decide that it is the expert, and the destination for solid, real useful information to be wildly successful, highly ranked on Google, and drive more success from natural brand advocates and community members than it ever could from PPC advertising or paid search.

So how can a business create its robot? How can it start generating real conversations and connections?
Contact us. We can help.

Are you inclined to take blind leaps of faith when making important business decisions? You would think most companies wouldn’t do that in a million years, but the answers are surprising.

When choosing CRM solutions, many companies do make leaps of faith.  Every day a business decides on a CRM system without identifying their key products and services, analyzing their market, or thinking about how to best reach their customers.

Businesses like this think automating their sales force will automatically create qualified sales leads.  Making blind leaps like this aren’t the mark of a successful business, but most businesses aren’t successful when they implement CRM.

Over 55% of CRM installs fail to achieve results or even go live (HBR 2001), because most businesses get caught in the technology tangle; implementing solutions that don’t solve problems but instead create new ones. If the new technology doesn’t talk to the all the old technology, and doesn’t connect to what it should be connecting to, this “automated marketing solution” is probably failing to deliver growth.

That’s why CMAEON has created the BIPED® process –good business solutions are not just about lead generation. BIPED® is about analyzing connections, gathering the content that makes a business unique, creating a single place to keep that information, connecting existing business processes and bringing everything together to create a tool that and speaks to customers in the way the customers want to hear.

The result is beyond CRM – BIPED® is a system that automates lead management and automatically creates qualified sales leads because it adapts itself to your system and how you work, not the other way around.

So take charge of your business and stop making leaps of faith. Run your business the way that’s best for you, not according to a CRM system.

Imagine a business where a lead comes in, is entered into the CRM system and then… just sits there.

This lead, let’s call her Ms. Smith, didn’t come in through traditional channels, so she was routed through an employee who didn’t really know how to use the CRM system;  the wrong ranking was assigned to Ms. Smith, so nobody knew she was a hot lead, ready to buy, and worst yet, no salesperson was assigned. Long story short, Ms. Smith sat there, unattended until she phoned back again. Is this an unlikely nightmare situation? You may be thinking to yourself unattended leads… in my system? It’s more likely than you think.

For a successful marketing or sales enterprise the focus shouldn’t just be on getting leads and entering into the CRM system. If that’s all a company focuses on, it will end up with a lot of cases like Ms. Smith. Proper lead management should be iQ3:

Quantity: exposure, volume of leads, and then;

Quality: making sure you know what they want, so you can talk about a product or program that is of interest to them, and then;

Qualified: leads that can and want to write a check for the product, service, solution, etc, etc that they are looking for.

However, once a company gets iQ3 leads, they can’t just sit there like Ms. Smith. They need to be managed, and there must be a process in place. CMAEON developed the patented Biped® Process to help our clients not only acquire leads, but connect to them, engage with them in a targeted conversation, covert them, and then measure how effective the whole process was.

Marketing and sales can be hard, time consuming and confusing. Adding more layers of data entry and systems that only do half the job won’t help any company become successful. What does help  a business bring in revenue is the ability to streamline the process  - a checklist that automatically helps them complete the steps required to turn a great lead into an even better sale. The Biped® Process is that checklist and process.
Interested? Let’s talk.

Photo: Alan Cleaver, Flickr

We have learned that getting people to "know about each other" is a difficult and full time job, and this is most likely the most difficult product to deliver for any business, no matter what size.  "Knowing" about each other involves many stakeholders - marketers, business people, sales people, and financial people and, of course, interested and qualified searchers that become buyers.

We have learned that not all businesses will make good business decisions, or are willing to follow a process, to stay in business.  These have been the toughest lessons, because these businesses are looking for an EZ process, and have nearly always failed.

We have learned that many people in the business world, inside many giant companies, have given up.  . We have seen firms that have provided their staff Just Ordinary Boring Stuff to do …those people have been dissatisfied and so have lost all enthusiasm for their contribution.  They are, needless to say, dis-connected in their work - perhaps only connected to a paycheck.  

We have learned that companies can grow their business - and outgrow their capital and capability to fund new opportunities.  This is not a sustainable model.  The challenge remains, how, when we are committed to innovation and change - and improving our revenue and business models to reach broader markets, can we evolve as entrepreneurs, rather than crush our dream under the weight of reality?   The key is being Connected to the measures of success.

We have learned in the toughest of times, when the world compromised the core mission of providing open information, innovation and connections with the best, most innovative business information technology in the world, our world failed.  We saw relationships with businesses crumble; consumers stop consuming, jobs lost, banking systems broken, homes lost, countries bankrupt.  When the world lost its connection its corporate soul, our culture, our way of doing business simply stopped.  We are now learning how to pick up our tools and start again.

As humans, in general, we are not afraid of change, in fact we embrace it.  Today is our time more than ever.  And that is sustainable - because change is always a renewable resource that can be relied upon - change is a mandate in the world.