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The Struggle and Appreciation of Meditation as an Entrepreneur

I admit I was struggling to find a topic for this blog post. I sat at my computer with writer’s block which is uncommon for me. So, what did I do? I left. I left, read, and went to a meditation class. Ironic, then that my head wanted to race during meditation. After this, I realized that meditation is a great subject to share with entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs. 
I’ve been attending group meditation classes for a couple years now, and I admit that I don’t always get to that meditative state. I probably only get there 20% of the time. (Okay – 10%.) Like today, I struggle to be mindful, stay focused on my breath, and meditate.
What I’ve realized and was appreciative of was the effort to sit there for an hour and try. I also appreciated the effort to sit there and think. I didn’t meditate, but I did hop on that mind-train and rode that for a good bit. That, in itself, can be a wonderful thing because I don’t take enough time to sit in peace and think.
Meditation is supposed to provide all sorts of benefits to which I can summarize: lower stress/ cortisol levels, practice mindfulness, develop patience, etc. Many entrepreneurs have practiced meditation to help cope with the stress and go-go-go life including Jeff Weiner (CEO, LinkedIn), Marc Benioff (CEO, Salesforce.com), Oprah Winfrey (a media mogul), etc.
The gist is to make time and effort for the things that matter. The benefits can be realized with diligent practice. Realize, too, the use of the word “practice” because that’s important. “Anything worth having never comes easy,” as Bob Kelso from Scrubs once said. Meditation is a constant practice. Though one practice (or many) may not achieve the goal, there’s the next practice.
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Sales Team and Sales Reps Engagement to Drive Results: Take-Aways from TAG Panel

TAG Panel on “How Dynamic Sales Orgs Drive Results”. Pictured from left to right: Jon Birdsong, Mary Ford, Ryan Radding, Eric Mercado, and Kyle Tothill
I attended a Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) event for sales leadership a couple weeks ago about “How Dynamic Sales Orgs. Drive Results”. The panel included:

The majority of the discussion revolved around engaging sales teams either in mentoring and coaching or via direct incentives. Here are a few take-aways:

  • There’s a spectrum of engagement and performance that ranges from (low to high): Resistant, Reluctant, Existent, Compliant, Committed, and Compelled. Mitigate (or remove) reps in the first three groups while promoting and sharing practices of the high performance reps who exhibit innovation and leadership.
  • Drive engagement in these areas: Connection (connect individuals together to form the team), Support (mentoring and coaching), Reward (incentives), Progress (clear career progression model), and Structure (ensure alignment and understanding of roles and responsibilities).
  • Measuring success and engagement should go beyond metrics and activities. Include personal goals – set, met, exceeded? Understand that the “outside” lives of reps has a very real impact on work performance.
  • Beyond retention and promotion stats, evaluate the effectiveness and engagement of the team with referrals by reps and how quickly reps ramp up.
  • Gamification plays to the competitive nature of sales reps with a layer of transparency and accountability.
  • Pull ideas from reps on selling, don’t just push “best practices”. Sales reps can be innovative in how they sell and pushing “best practices” may not be conducive to the reps’ individual styles.
  • Coaching tends to have a “master-subordinate” structure set with boundaries while mentoring allows freer structure and less formality. Mentors tend to go beyond sales topics or even at the current job. Have/ establish both.

Good points raised by the team, and continues to illustrate that to drive sales, it’s all about driving engagement from the team. Companies are organizations of people. Engaging the people within, at the group and individual level, can produce a culture that drives sustainable practices for business growth and team motivation.

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3 Hours in Salesforce, and I’m (Finally) an Expert!

Just checking out what’s under the hood (image source: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/media/jpg/gedney/med/KY0344.jpg)
So I’ve mentioned powerful systems like Salesforce in the past many times, but truth be told, I had never actually stepped foot in the Salesforce platform. However, when it comes to a CRM, it’s the go-to system. Heck, many of the DC Companies (David Cummings’/ David Cummings-backed) are built with Salesforce in mind – Rivalry for leaderboards and sales coaching [of record], SalesLoft for prospecting, etc.
When I speak to startups these days about Biz Dev roles, curiously, many tout the need for Salesforce experience. This has always been a… well, “curious” thing to me, but I get it. I was once in the Management Consulting world, and I know someone with SAP experience can get up and running much faster than someone without. However, Salesforce isn’t as ridiculous as SAP. Or at least, so I thought. I mean, again, I had never experienced it. My logic was rooted more or less in the many articles, talks, and even YouTube videos I had seen of Salesforce. I always questioned why Salesforce was a “needed skill” rather than a “nice to have”.
Yesterday, I took the first half of my day and spent it at Atlanta Tech Village to “play” in one of my friend’s company’s instances to learn more about Salesforce. I can’t keep preaching about it without having some experience, right? Okay, here are some take-aways.
  • The foundation of Salesforce is built on Leads, Accounts, Opportunities, and Contacts. In fact, check out a quick intro via Rivalry’s blog—“Leads, Accounts, Opportunities, and Contacts in Salesforce: The Basics”.
  • Re-packaged and glorified spreadsheets and Outlook in one. That is to say, when you play with Salesforce, you can quickly see how Salesforce grew so fast because it really is Excel and Outlook repackaged. In the end, many sales people started with cruder products earlier and Salesforce’s structure, the reminders, etc. were familiar already.
  • It’s massive, but also not so. Salesforce reminds me a lot of web templates you can get off the internet (think: ThemeForest). That is, you buy a template, and you get a ton of great features, CSS files, JavaScript, etc. However, you will likely scrap most of it anyways, and focus on a few core pieces relevant to you.
  • You can see its earlier “Big Platform” cloud beginnings. Marc Benioff (Salesforce’s Founder) is a former Oracle Exec. When you click around Salesforce, you can see very similar UI/ UX as some of the other big platform players like Oracle and SAP. Not originally Oracle, but I see similarities with Oracle’s Agile PLM, SAP eSourcing, etc. (full disclosure: I played with these systems three years ago).
  • Salesforce’s power is its core + all the third-party apps. Salesforce is #winning and killing it by being simple, and also the system that holds the data. At the end of the day, it’s hugely simple in concept, and what makes it powerful is integration to other powerful apps through its App Exchange like Rivalry, SalesLoft, Tinder Box, ToutApp, etc.
  • Salesforce is still cumbersome. The opportunity is automating/ mechanizing it. I love tools like those mentioned above, but especially Voxa. Everything Salesforce does, I was doing already in my own setup with spreadsheets. I could make it more powerful with notifications and the like, but really, that’s all it was. As I did Biz Dev for Body Boss and others, the biggest pain in the rear, and ultimately what makes Salesforce powerful is the data that is inputted. From this standpoint, every CRM is still annoying… until you can automate logging events like contact history, adding leads/ contacts, etc. That’s where tools like Voxa which can automatically log your activities and even detect human language to schedule follow-ups that much more powerful. You get around the biggest pain!
  • There are better tools, but they integrate to Salesforce, too. You really don’t need much time in Salesforce to see where it could improve. However, like I said in the bullets before, there are tools that are better and can MAKE Salesforce better. For example, as a pipeline tool, I’m visual guy, and I don’t see Salesforce’s Opportunities list as a great tool. It really just looks like a list. PipeDrive, however, is a much better, visually-oriented tool to manage your pipeline. Luckily, it, too, can integrate to Salesforce.

Obviously the above didn’t just come out of three hours, and okay, maybe I’m not an expert. Some of these were notions I had coming into the learning sessions, but were reinforced. Can’t say anything was dispelled other than Salesforce is really, really easy. I know during my three hours I didn’t play with every module, and maybe one day, I’ll get that opportunity in MY OWN instance. Or, maybe I’ll be a part of simplifying Salesforce into another CRM startup. (Okay, that made me laugh because there are several others that do a decent job.)

At the end of the day (or morning, rather), Salesforce IS powerful. It’s powerful because it’s simplified the structure of customer relationship (seems very sales focused, but not necessarily account management focused, but maybe that’s just the instance I was using) and enabled others to pick up the slack via the App Exchange. They’re really the big platform that profits, but also gives others including startups a chance to build businesses, too, off them. It’s a great ecosystem.
Salesforce is one of those simple tools that doesn’t need to be a “MUST HAVE SKILL” for a sales role. It’s simple enough that anyone can get started very quickly in the matter of hours. At least for me, I’ve seen the beast, and it’s really just a tiny rabbit with a big shadow. It’s not daunting, and I’m glad I got to spend a few hours in a Salesforce user’s shoes. 
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At The End of My 2.5-Year Startup Roller Coaster: 21 Rough Lessons Learned from Failure

Yowza, starting a startup from nothing is wicked hard. After 2.5 years at Body Boss, my team and I have been riding the startup roller coaster with high highs and low lows. Our ride has been one of the most frustrating, stressful, challenging, and rewarding experiences of our lives. A ride that sadly stops here.
We aimed at curing time-consuming spreadsheet madness and bringing intelligence into a world where technology feared to go before – the gyms of high schools, colleges, and the like. We made pivots to our dream, but sadly, we won’t be continuing further. Our market is incredibly young, and though growing, does not provide a sustainable operation for the foreseeable future. So as it stands, we’ll be supporting Body Boss as it is today, but unless/ until the market matures, we won’t be building out new features or spending heavy resources on marketing at this time. 
As they say, you learn more from failure than success. And boy have we learned… If you’re looking to start your own venture, the below list of 21 lessons we’ve learned should help plot out your course and watch out for traps. Or in the least, these lessons can save you from punching helpless pillows or picking up all the papers you threw in the air from frustration:
  1. Have customer-PARTNERS at the beginning. Partners at the beginning give you momentum coming out of the gate to not only build the product, but also to sell the product. Social motivation is a powerful tool.
  2. Research should weigh heavily on building your product/ service WITH your customer-PARTNERS. Engaging your customer-partners early and often (in an effective way) will mitigate risks you’re building something that they don’t want, need, or it’s just too far outside the process. The first versions of your product/ service will need refining, and communicative partners will tell you how to improve.
  3. Dedication to the startup is clutch to iterate. I’ve said it in a post before that speed is one of the critical elements of a winning startup strategy. With speed, you can iterate through ideas and test them with your customers. The best way to do this is to work full-time on the startup and have high quality engineers/ developers. Quality builders can implement changes quickly and mitigate against the risks of glaring bugs.
  4. For a tech startup these days, design is the second part of the winning strategy.If it isn’t quick to understand and navigate, users will likely not give you the time of day to figure it out.
  5. Quick set-up is the catalyst for early success. Apps these days that sign up and login with Facebook, or have API implementation with big platforms like Salesforce.com can help customers get set up quick. It turns out to be a turn-key solution. Most people don’t want to take precious time to learn or set up a program, especially when they have an existing, albeit weaker, solution.
  6. Establish an effective method and rhythm to reach prospects. With social media, many people believe it’s the best way to reach new customers. But it’s not necessarily. You should know how your target market absorbs new ideas/ products. Do they read magazines? Do they read blogs? Are they social media users? Your marketing strategy may not make sense.
  7. Don’t believe you’ve made a sale till days after a check clears. Can’t tell you how many prospects said they’d buy only to go cold a day later. And even when someone gives you his/ her credit card information, wait for the amount to clear your bank account before you celebrate that new signing.
  8. Establish roles be it with titles or equity. It’s amazing what happens when everyone is equal and everyone has different ideas – wheels spin but you’re going nowhere. I applaud those avant-garde companies trying out flat orgs with “no titles”, but that’s not for me. In Body Boss, we had 4 Co-Founders — equal shares, no hierarchy… just friends. To have a single, clear vision to fall back on when consensus isn’t there is a beautiful thing.
  9. Treat your startup like a real company. Your startup is not a hobby. It can’t be a “project” if you want it to be something greater. It’s a company. Take it seriously. Everyday you aren’t improving your company, everyday you’re not making your product or service better, you’re wasting your company’s talent and resources. Sadly and ironically, that happens to be your own.
  10. Market like a king with a blacksmith’s earnings. If you’re going to spend any money on marketing like attending trade shows, make sure you standout. We once sponsored a dinner for an event thinking it’d be a great way for us to reach prospects, except it didn’t. Everyone just ate and barely heard our message. That’s a good bit of money down the drain. If your hard-earned dollar isn’t going to WOW and prompt your prospect to the call to action (CTA), don’t bother.
  11. Be ready to pitch anytime and everytime you walk outside. It’s an amazingly small world, and you will run into potential customers, investors, or just everyday people who can connect you. Be ready to pitch.
  12. All about the team. To have diversity in a team is incredibly frustrating. However, it’s beautiful. It’s needed. For success, you need people to debate productively. If you don’t debate new, fresh ideas from your team (not just customers), you may be potentially paddling down a waterfall in unison. Diversity forces you to sometimes build only what’s necessary, and cut out the fat unless there’s true value. That, or you may never get those new, fresh ideas at all.
  13. New sales are good, but recurring sales are better. One issue that we found at Body Boss was many customers subscribed and bought in, but then, didn’t re-subscribe. After talking to many, there were various reasons why it didn’t work out including glaring product-related issues that we weren’t aware of. If they don’t sign back up, find out why because marketing a product that loses customers later can crush your business. Existing customers can be powerful advocates, and word-of-mouth marketing is the best type of marketing.
  14. Solve a real problem. Definitely don’t introduce a new one. So much of the above can also be addressed if you solve a real problem. With a real problem, you’ll get the buy-in from prospects to buy what you’re selling, or work with you because in the end, IT’S A PROBLEM!
  15. Pick an industry where you have LOADS of experience can go a really long way. Not only to give yourself and your startup credibility, but it’s a great way to network and find your initial customer-partners. I think one of our struggles at Body Boss has been because we approached professional strength and conditioning within an institutional setting – a setting none of us have had much experience. Thus, we didn’t understand our customers as well as we should’ve to build and sell our product.
  16. Know your limitations, and when to break them. Not all of your customers will buy into what you’re selling. Not all of your team members can work full-time. You might not have the skills to pick up the keyboard and start coding. However, all of these challenges end up being opportunities to build a greater startup, a better product, and a better service. If you pay attention to those limitations, you may be able to find creative solutions around (or through) them.
  17. Know when to stay rigid, when to flex, and when to break on your ideals. We start companies with the confidence that we can do things better. By that very nature, we enter with ideals. Know when your ideals should stick or when they should take a back seat for the growth of your company.
  18. Don’t make excuses. Just sell. My main role in Body Boss is to sell. I catch myself sometimes saying, “oh, it’s hard because of timing” or “they’re not answering their phones, so… yeah”. It’s admittedly poor. If you feel an inkling like you didn’t bust your @$$, then you probably didn’t. Find the value. Convert.
  19. Measure everything you can within reason. Use Google Analytics to track your website traffic. Analyze user engagement data (effectively, not analysis paralysis). Track by device, by user, what is your customer doing? With data comes the ability to draw patterns and make actionable changes. “What gets measured gets improved.” (That’s actually a Trademark we have.)
  20. It’s your company so choose who to hear and who to listen to. Everyone has ideas. Everyone will give you advice whether you want it or not. Know which ones make sense. It’s your company. You have to make the calls.
  21. SALES IS HARD! At the end of the day, companies, teams, etc. are made of people. And because you’re selling to people, it only makes sense that not everyone will be seeking the same values out of your product. It’s best to learn quickly about your prospect when selling, and catering your value prop accordingly. A couple tips: (1) the international language and what everyone wants more of: money. Help them pull and push the lever to add revenue and/ or cut costs. (2) You have two ears and one mouth. Let your prospects do the talking so you can assess what he/ she needs, and they’ll be bought in. (3) In-person goes farther than phone or email. Also, emails suck. Too easy for customers to delete/ not read.

Are you ready for the ride? Have you perhaps fallen victim to any of these hard lessons? What advice would you give to entrepreneurs?

(Also, how fitting is it that I’m petrified of roller coasters? They freak me out.)
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Who’s poised to profit in this fragmented, online dating world of startups?

If you’re single and ready to mingle, chances are good you have a number of “online dating” apps on your phone. They’re everywhere — the usual suspects of Match.com, eHarmony, OkCupid (a Match company now actually), Plenty of Fish, etc. are joined by the swipe-addicting Tinder, Hinge, Twine, and so many more. Most of those apps and companies didn’t exist three years ago. However, this post isn’t about dating apps.

Looking across different industries, you see the same explosive growth in companies. From travel, you’ve got Travelocity, Expedia, Hotwire, Kayak, and Booking.com with more recent newcomers including Airbnb, Hipmunk, SafelyStay, etc. Even in the CRM space you had SAP, Oracle, etc. with their own solutions and then Salesforce has pretty much taken over, but you have to add in the SugarCRM, Zoho, and so many more. Now, let’s also add in the explosion of wearable technologies to be spearheaded by Google’s announcement of a designated OS called Android Wear. Yowza.
A couple posts ago, I shared some recent trends I had been seeing and perhaps not explicitly said, it’s apparent the suppliers of markets are growing — refer to “Trends for Startups and Ideas to Build the Future“. Each company with its own take on how to do “it” better. So what does this all mean? Where are we headed with all this fragmentation?
  • APIs are a great way for especially software and hardware players to integrate into existing platforms, and enable customers to get set up quickly.
  • The big players are establishing themselves as the common integration point creating another sustainability point with added revenue-stream implications — you can definitely see this in Apple’s App Store, SalesForce’s App Exchange, Facebook‘s ubiquitous login option, and even NCR’s Cloud Services.
  • Smaller startup players will have a frantic fight over the next years to stay in the game and relevant. Switching costs for customers are becoming much lower meaning the power is virtually all in the customers’ hands.
  • Hardware manufacturers are getting in on the exact with APIs such as Thalmic Labs’ Myo Band, Atlas Wearables, Jawbone Up, Logitech peripherals, etc.
  • There will likely be much consolidation in the markets over the next few years as the smaller players get gobbled up by other startups or by the big platform companies themselves. And of course, there will be the natural attrition of startups who just peter out.
  • There’s still significant opportunity for markets where there isn’t an established platform whereby large swaths of companies plug into. Or, you can be an integrator/ middleware connector by which startups connector through you to platforms
In the end, the the power lays largely with the buyers/ customers in many of these markets as suppliers are so vast. However, it also creates some stumbling blocks for customers to pick the right cloud platform. In the B2C market, for example, fragmentation creates an annoyance for many users where there may be, especially, a social aspect and communities are split. But in the end, customers do win with more innovative solutions in a competitive market. This time of market frenzy will last a few years, I believe, before the consolidations really take place. And at that time, the cycle will restart where startups will sprout up again creating opportunity.
What are your thoughts on today’s growth of companies and solutions? How do you think the markets will play out? 
And perhaps more for fun, what dating app are you on? 😉
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