• Implement some enhancements – mainly involves updates to the UI flow – this would also involve updates to the model
• Ensure that security issues are taken care of
• Look at setup configuration (web-server, phusion passenger) and do the tweaks to handle higher concurrency loads

This would require understanding of our model, application flow and implementation. The technical knowhow needed is

• Good knowledge of Ruby, RoR
• ERB, Ajax.
• Also if the person has deployed small to medium scale SaaS products on the web it would be great.

We also have a backend implementation in Ruby that performs resource (CPU, memory, Bandwidth) intensive operations. We have identified some optimizations for this. These need to be reviewed, implemented and tested
This needs

• Good knowledge of Ruby
• Knowledge of Unix IPC would be useful

Contact rajag [at] zebugroup [dot] com

It’s not as though a fourteen year old doesn’t have enough pressure in her life between trying to fit in with peers, other parents expectation of their kids, and all the emotional upheavals that comes with high school. My own childhood must have been so terrible, I have no recollection of what it – or at the very least high school examinations – were like.

So you’d have found me this weekend sitting with my daughter, trying to help her prepare for the first exam – Social Studies. This includes history, geography, civics, economics and disaster management (the last three somehow seem to be related). We got the idea of doing a mock test or two, so that she feels comfortable with the whole exercise.

Editing out all episodes of parental gnashing of teeth or screaming, occasional storming away from the study table by the child in question, we finally devised a three step process for her to do well in her exams. As we reviewed it one last time, I realized these exact same 3 steps would likely help all of us as marketers and sales folks do better with our prospects and customers. So here they are!

LISTEN CAREFULLY
(in my daughter’s case it was Read the Question Carefully) Many of us – my daughter and myself included – have a tendency to jump to answer a question we’ve just read or heard. But all too often we hear what we want to, rather than what the customer or prospect is actually asking.  So when a customer says “What about support?” it’s better that we stop and pause, to actually understand his question before answering the question. This way you are less likely to develop a taste for leather – which otherwise might be necessary if we frequently keeping putting our foot in our mouths!

OUTLINE
When my daughter needs to figure out how short or long an answer she should give to a question, she’s learnt now to check for how many marks the question carries. In real life such clear indicators don’t always appear. So rather than stumble, repeat yourself or worse yet ramble endlessly, in response to a customer question, it is always useful to outline in your mind or even on a piece of paper – the two or four points that you want to touch upon in your answer.

When you observe experienced sales hands, you will notice them use phrases such as “That’s an excellent question” or “I am really glad you brought that up.” These aren’t meant merely to make the customer feel good (thought that never hurts) but a harmless stalling tactic, to get their outlines done (largely in their heads). Such outlining and the pause that precedes it allows them to present a coherent and to-the-point response to the customers question.

USE PLAIN ENGLISH
Even when you know the answer to a question and have it neatly outlined in your head, as my daughter found out, you can be misunderstood. Unlike my daughter, who’s still trying to master grammar, we don’t have any excuse for not making perfect sense. Yet all too often we flub this – because we tend to couch our answers in jargon rather than in plain English.

So rather than say “Our widget’s or sonar-powered hyper-performance will result in a 4X ROI” if you can phrase it as “For less than $2 a day, the machine will pay for itself in 3 months” or something equally simple in plain English you are more likely to be understood and therefore successful.

So lets practice listening, outlining and using plain English – while my daughter and I go get ready for the science exam that’s coming up next.

1. Plan your day the night before Mom was right – we should get ready the night before. Yep, it is tough to make this a habit but it is time tested and works. Now is as good a time to get started. Draw up your to-do list for the day the night before and you will be already ahead. The list will give you a clear idea of what the next day will look like and you can be prepared for it.
2. Attend to the most important task first As Brian Tracy, author and inspirational speaker puts it “Eat That Frog.” Starting off your day by tackling and completing the most important, and often hardest, task in your to-do list, can work wonders. You stay motivated for the rest of the day and what remains to be done seems so much easier.
3. Check your email late in the morning Attending to your email the first thing in the morning is probably the biggest time waster in the modern  era. The trick is to postpone this task to a later part in the morning so that the most important task in your to-do list gets its due attention. It is also well worth limiting the frequency at which you check your email, so that your day is not chopped up into short unproductive bits between email sessions.
4. Bookmark sites that you want to revisit Scheduling a time slot for every activity is one smart way to improve productivity. In the course of working your to-dos or on specific projects, when you come across an interesting site, bookmark it, rather than be distracted by exploring it. Set aside a fixed time slot to do your internet browsing without an agenda and explore these bookmarks. Such bookmarking can also save you a lot of time in finding the right content when you actually need it.
5. Reduce the time you spend on social media Technology that allows us to stay in touch with our friends easily also makes it addictive. We can find it difficult to get out of chat sessions and status updates that seem to run all day. This year, measure and schedule the time you spend on social media and try to restrict your time spent on it during the work day.

Hope these tips from blog posts by Stephani Davis and Productivity 501 and others such as Zen Habits will help you plan for higher productivity in 2010.

Image by photographerpandora via Flickr

One of the biggest lessons that I learnt as an entrepreneur and marketer is to appreciate sales folks. Before you even think of snickering, reflect for moment. Which of us likes being rejected day after day, having to not merely tolerate but cultivate customers with idiosyncrasies you’d never accept in any other person. Add to this being the first person in the line of fire for the products failings and picking up the pieces after an exec or that product marketing guy walks out after lobbing a grenade at a customer meeting – the lot of a sales person is not easy. And if you happen to selling in a brutal market like India, you are ready to be canonized – it is not for the faint of heart. With all that said, if you are a sales person, you might as well be successful, for the pleasure of winning as much for the money.

Dave Brock, in his blog Partners in Excellence, recently spoke of the need for a simple sales process, one that we’d actually follow. Many companies that we work with at Zebu, have a sales process in place, however informal or archaic – even in startups that say they don’t! Yet we find organizations and sales teams struggling – not enough qualified leads, selling cycles taking too long and always, always the pricing pressures. And all this even without the recession. In every one of these cases, we’ve found it useful to go back to the basics. Which in our experience is following three steps, consistently.

1. Weekly review – plan for the week & month ahead
2. Daily execution – relentlessly work  your A, C and B lists
3. Sales Pipeline & Process – written SMART and living pipeline

1. Weekly Review
Twice a week, preferably on Friday evenings and Tuesday mornings, sit down to review your sales pipeline. Ideally with the whole sales team, if there’s less than 8 folks, in person (at least on Fridays) and plan for the week ahead. Typically we find reviewing by deal size and by sales person, what orders you’re likely to book, a good place to start. The review of what you will

• book that week (List A),
• book that month (List B) and
• be adding to your hopper (List C)

On Friday (or Saturdays if you work six days) before you go for that beer or break, having a plan for the week ahead helps. It allows the team to celebrate any wins they’ve had and more importantly recover from a bad week or big loss and focus on the future.

Tuesday mornings, leaves all of Monday to execute, without meetings and provides a chance to make any tweaks to Friday’s plan if there’s been any unforeseen changes or to put out any fires that may have popped up. It helps the sales manager figure out who or which deal might need help and what he needs to focus on as well. The two things the weekly review helps you do are

1. create a focused plan for the week/month ahead
2. understand and adjust for things that didn’t play out the way you reckoned the previous week

2. Daily Execution
This is the most critical step – the relentless daily doing. Start your day early, and work it in the order A, C, B – namely chase the important deals you plan to close that week, your List A. Do whatever is necessary for the first one on our A list. Don’t take your eye of the one you are  working on till you close it or get it to a logical decision point. Then move on to the second one on your A list and so on. Once done with your A list, then work your way through the C list – leads – generating, qualifying and moving them forward rather than on the B list. Some folks prefer to even sneak a few of the C list items between completing their A list items.

Most of us have , taught to work things in an A, B and then C order. And starting with the A list makes sense for all the logical reasons. However, given sales is a numbers game, if you don’t work through your C’s first, they’d never get any time on your calendar. Sooner or later your pipeline is going to run dry – even if marketing is doing lead generation for you, if you don’t build up a strong C list than can feed your B list. Work your B list, after you have done your share of C list pursuit. Again we’ve seen successful sales folks put in one hour (or two) each day into their Cs before moving on to the B. Alternately folks have done, so many C calls each day, before handling their B list. Regardless of how you work your actual day, the take away is ensure that no day goes by without your working your C list, regardless of the number of As or Bs you have on your plate.

3. The Sales Pipeline
Just as a CFO or controller would know (good ones always do), what their cash situation is at any time and where & when the big inflows or outlays will happen, every sales person should have a written down sales pipeline. This could be the one you created on the fly, at that first weekly meeting on a white board or a sheet of paper or good ol’ Excel. Or one that your sales manager has assiduously pulled together in your company’s fancy CRM tool. Either way it is a start. However rough or accurate your first sales pipeline is, the weekly reviews and daily execution, will clean it up pretty quick.

The important thing in your sales pipeline is to capture a finite set of specifics, that will help you slice & dice the data you have. These specifics are essentially your “sales process.” The sales process has only one purpose – to empower each sales person to accomplish their goals, in the shortest possible time on the best possible terms. It it allows the management to plan, forecast and help the sales team achieve their objectives, all the better.

Regardless of which step you start with, when executed consistently, these three steps will act to create a virtuous cycle, that will help you start selling better today.

The news of an impending recovery has not done much to take the heat off of marketers. With the pressure to do more with ever fewer resource, marketers and even CEOs are feeling the heat. There’s another email campaign to be run, yet more leads to be generated and qualified and of course, landing that big deal that everyone’s been working on these last two quarters.

With the tyranny of what needs to be done each day as we go about our business, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture.  Even as the economy promises to pick up, one of the biggest challenges we see many customers facing is a plateauing of their business. In working with the number of clients, we’ve found it useful to step back and ask them “Which car are you?”

The first time we do this, we get a range of reactions – from the merely puzzled to the outright incredulous. What does selling hospital supplies, workforce management software or alternative medicinal supplements have to do with cars? Once we run them through an actual exercise of comparing three or four of the most common car brands and how our clients see each of them positioned against the other, the puzzlement dissolves.

Typically we put (depending on the nationality of the audience), four names out of list such as BMW, Lexus, Ford, Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota (which we’d usually qualify as Corolla). I never cease to be amazed at the rapidity with which, a group of squabbling marketers and execs can align on a single word against each of these brands as their primary positioning. We usually end up with a table like this

BMW	Performance
Mercedes	Luxury
Toyota	Value/Economy
Volvo	Safety

This is when we repeat the question to our customers, “Which car are you?” I am yet to be bored by a single one of these sessions. The same folks who converged rapidly on the cars’ positioning, can rarely agree on what a single word positioning is for their business. This is usually acute for companies that are relatively early in their lifecycles – but we’ve found it to be true even for companies that have been in business for decades. Asking them to position their competitors usually helps nudge the discussion forward. In this exercise once a word is taken up by another company, it is not available for our clients to use, much as they like it, want it or thought they owned it.

The exercise usually achieves three things

• moves the discussion away from the product and features to customer benefits
• acts as  dose of reality in acknowledging competitors’ positioning and dispels myths about their own position in the market place, and
• focuses the team, across C-execs, marketing and sales on the need for (and often absence of) a simple & singular positioning of the product and/or company

All in all not bad for an hour or two of work. So I’d urge you to stop and ask yourself at least twice a year, “Which car am I?”

It is somewhat surprising to me that after having Google Analytics for so long all of us are still struggling to measure correctly a specific channel of traffic to our site. As I have been working with several email marketing tools these last fews a simple solution struck me. I was quite struck by the simplicity of the solution and was wondered anyone has thought of it before? I’d urge readers (not you mom) including Danny and Fred try out this little experiment on their blog and see if they can quantify the exact amount of traffic coming in through Twitter (or bit.ly).

The Solution

Nearly all email marketing service providers and products such as AWeber, Campaign Monitor or MailChimp use a simple method to track how many people have opened their mails. Since JavaScript is not allowed inside the mail content, a Google Analytics kind of solution is definitely not possible. What they do is they embed a tiny (1×1 px) transparent image in the mail. When the mail is opened in an email client and the image is loaded, the server gets a GET request for that image and immediately knows that someone has opened the email.

On the same lines, for this blog post I have included an image in this blog post. But instead of directly storing the url of that image, I have first shortened it using bit.ly. When this blog is loaded on your browser, even if JavaScript is disabled, that image will be loaded, and hence bit.ly will register the count. Search bots, Twitter clients and browser plugins are not going to be interested in my image. So clearly the number of views reported by bit.ly for that image (and not for the blog’s permalink which I tweeted) will be a correct estimation of the number of humans who have clicked on the shortened link in Twitter. This will be smaller than what bit.ly would have recorded for the blog itself, and bigger than what Google Analytics will report if this blog is viewed in a phone which has JavaScript disabled.

Conclusion

This blog does not get a lot of traffic (yet), so the numbers may not make good sense. But if high traffic bloggers such as Danny or Fred Wilson use this little experiment on their blog, it would be worth seeing what the results are like.

This should also give Bit.ly some ideas on how to accurately measure link views and discard the requestes for only a link lookup. The solution may be involved as the user would have to embed a shortened link to a tracking image, but it should be ok if the user is really motivatedand wants to measure his traffic. Or better still, similar to Google Analytics, ask users to embed a small piece of code in the blog entry that they want to track. This code can be as generic as follows

<img src="http://bit.ly/mayanks/tracking/image">

When the browser makes a request for this image as part of loading the blog entry, the HTTP_REFERER should identify the permalink of the blog entry for which the request is being made. Just increment the counter for that permalink and you are done. I’d love to hear from others who have tried something along these lines and the results you see if you try this image embedding with a bit.ly link.

The last couple of months have shown a shift in Internet traffic – from being search engine (read Google) directed to social media driven. I believe, the main reason for this is what Fred Wilson calls the Power of Passed Links. That is, I click more often on the links that my friends tweet in Twitter or share on Facebook than on those I find by searching.  Fred has seen this dramatic shift on his own website. Earlier TechCrunch presented a similar observation and was quick to embrace a personalized short domain name (tcrn.ch).

In a recent article titled “How Twitter Might Send Far More Traffic Than You Think“, Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, compares the statistics provided by Bit.ly and Google Analytics and is awed by the difference. My own sense is that before all of us get rolling on this Social Media Optimization (SMO) effort, it would help to take a hard look at how link statistics are gathered and tracked by tools such as Bit.ly.

Simply put link tracking tools store the number of times a short link has been looked up. When such tools first emerged they captured imagination of a lot of people as potentially a simple replacement for Google Analytics.  However, the statistics provided by link tracker function in tools such as Bit.ly can be very misleading.

Since only the link look-up is counted by link trackers, all search engine and Twitter crawlers that de-reference a short link get counted erroneously as look-ups. Most of the newer Twitter clients de-reference a short url, and show the target domain name, complete url or the title in the tweet message. Which effectively means that the moment you publish a Bit.ly link on Twitter, it’s link count could potentially shoot up to as many followers as you have, even if none of them actually clicked through the link.

In my view, this is one of the biggest challenge that Bit.ly and others of its ilk will face to present an actual view’ed link as against merely looked-up link.

In the near future, I anticipate that more people will use their own short domain names and their own url shortening service to protect their brands.  Pure play URL shortening services are bound to get commoditized. For pioneers such as Bit.ly to retain their market share, it is critical that they evolve to provide vanity shortening services and emerge to be the analytics tool of choice for SMO by providing ever more accurate viewed statistics as against looked-up statistics.

The United States will work to implement the updated ICRG peer review process and work with partners in the FATF to address jurisdictions not complying with international AML/CFT standards.

Talk about failing to communicate simply and clearly. In Felix’s words,

“In a nutshell: If you thought this was going to make the current horribly-complicated system of financial regulation less complicated, think again.”

As someone who spends much of his day, when not watching others’ mind-numbing presentations, creating content myself (with Open Office Impress), I have come to worship the word of Edward Tufte and admire the work of the folks at CommonCraft and Presentation Zen. The President’s men and the rest of us could learn a lesson or two on how to make our words and numbers tell a gripping story. Prof Hans Rosling’s video below, is living proof that with a little effort we can all do it!

How often have we stared at a table of data or a graph unable to make head or tail of it? Professor Hans Rosling, global health expert, shows how our world view is distorted by pre-conceived notions. He transforms complex data into a riveting story on the social changes that are taking place in the world. Click here to see the video.

This article appeared in the June issue of ZEBU Crossing, our monthly newsletter. To subscribe to ZEBU Crossing, fill the form at the top right of this page.

One of the most attractive features is link analytics provided by bit.ly and several others. The link tracking is unobtrusive even as I am redirected to the target web page and the quality of reporting varies by service provider.

However, some services, most notably ow.ly and digg.com have taken a more extreme role. Instead of redirecting the URL, they keep the user on their domain and display the target website in a frame. One of the biggest problem with this approach is that, inserting the shortened link in my twitter message or other posts will not count to that website’s incoming link. Trackbacks, on your blog will not work with these links. Google’s crawler will not give credit to the target website, for this shortened URL as it technically does not point to that target web page. This is a serious limitation in a SEO conscious world. Secondly, they use up pricey real estate on your browser, for free, by placing a top bar with their own branding . Talk about being intrusive!? And finally do we want to be reminded yet again, against the usage of frames?

Digg succumbed to pressure from user complaints and removed the top bar for regular users. A Google search on “remove digg bar” shows that people just don’t want this feature, and in fact a lot of those motivated people have designed ways to disable it.

For applications on Twitter that analyse what links people mostly talking about, URL shortening introduces a whole lot of challenges. Typically to just know what a shortened URL is pointing at, You need to issue a HEAD request to the service provider (bit.ly/ow.ly). Since usually it’s a redirection, just taking the ‘location’ value from the response is adequate. The HEAD request just gets the header response as against the whole body with a GET request. This is optimal if you have to process say a half a million links a day.

Now, if you apply the same logic to digg.com or ow.ly, things get squirrely. You get a 200 response from digg.com and a 403 (unauthorized access) response from ow.ly. A 200 response is essentially the html document itself, whereas 403 error prohibits that http request (HEAD). In either of these cases do we get information about the target page? NO. For these services, you’d actually need to download the page (a GET request), parse the HTML, and extract the target address. Obviously this model is not only sub-optimal, it is highly nonscalable. You’d have to manually add parsing code for each such service. Moreover, if they change their layout tomorrow, your parser will fail. There are numerous other services which behave this way.

URL shortening services are here to stay and touches almost every web user. If you are providing such a service you are owning up a certain responsibility towards people using your service. You just cannot be insensitive to them.

Remember with great power, comes great responsibility

With the virulence of a jilted lover I ran back into the arms of that rule-lined temptress Microsoft Excel. I’ll admit I flirted with ACT, had a drunken evening with GoldMine and actually paid $29.95 for Iambic’s SalesWarrior on my Palm powered Kyocera phone (circa 2000). Yet I always returned to Excel. By the time Salesforce.com began its meteoric rise, I had become a bureaucrat. So I watched from the sidelines – a C-level executive who no longer used anything other than Excel.

Starting again on our own, and boot-strapping Zebu meant I was back to donning the sales hat, working the phone, pressing palms and mailing my heart out. So we were back to looking for CRM software! Of course with the world having moved on, we never bothered looking for a PC client, and decided to go Web 2.0 – the bulk of my evaluation time was spent with HighRise, ZohoCRM and BatchBook. While I briefly spent time playing with PipelineDeals and Oprius, I was already too far along, with the others, for these to ever be serious contenders.

For those of you looking for the Quick & Dirty summary version here it is:

BatchBook – we picked this finally because of

• its simplicity – unbelievable simplicity
• the fiendish power of superTags
• its incredible support 

and while we have become paying customers of BatchBook now, when we started its pricing (which began with a free offer for three users) tipped us over!

For those of you who want more, check out the presentation that was made internally to share why BatchBook.

HighRise We began with unabashed admiration for 37Signals. We found ourselves reading, watching and discussing DHH & JF.

• we started as (paying) BaseCamp users and struggled with use of separate tool for contacts
• we also stumbled initially because their free version did not support three users(our team size then)
• they’ve arguably led the simplicity (less is more) movement;  But we kept running into things, we wished were there in HighRise, and did not get the feeling of being listened to.
• pricing was a niggling more than BatchBook, but was not a deal killer

One of the mysteries I never figured out was, I got going using HighRise, but could not never get the other members of our team rolling – maybe ‘coz they were moonlighting then or for some other reason. But by the time we got to evaluating BatchBook, my partners got active and BB edged out HR! Once we got rolling with BatchBook, while we did find many things missing in BatchBook as well,  that we’d have liked to have, superTags almost always gave us workarounds.

ZohoCRM Personally, I have been a big advocate of Zoho (Projects, Writer & Sheet)

• ZohoCRM is almost the antithesis of BatchBook or HighRise – every feature imaginable is available
• Even a highly motivated user, as I think of myself, needs a one or more unit college course to use it
• alas – the near poetry of Zoho Writer or more recently Folders is totally lacking in the ZohoCRM UI design – the sheer complexity resulted in loss of ease of use and the UI left much to be desired. Seems like someone not yet steeped in the ways of early Zoho products designed it. Deal killer!

This might explain why, despite Zoho’s 3 user free license, I could not get any of my partners to use Zoho CRM.

Now that we have been ardent, paying customers of BatchBook, key areas we are hoping to influence include:

[a] more extensive reports (of anything v anything in the database, ala Quicken, my all time favorite)
[b] better sales deals/opportunity tracking without losing the ease of use, nor contorting too much with superTags
[c] even stronger API support, so that  can extend reports and synch with other apps.