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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!

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.

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.