Jeremy Black

My colleague Mike Stern (@mike_stern) fired this deck my way today. It’s a pretty good representation of the right way to think about scaling a sales team.

This is a cross-post from the Xtreme Labs Blog (xtremelabs.com/blog).

Last week we posted a report from mobile analytics firm Flurry about The Appification of the Internet. Not surprisingly, the report shows that mobile content is increasingly being consumed via native applications as opposed to the browser. Now, as operating systems like Android, iOS, Windows, and webOS mature, we are starting to see some of their focus shift towards the needs of enterprise users. It makes sense given that enterprise users are the same people using an increasing number of native applications to consume news, interact with friends, and watch sports.

In short, the use of mobile applications in the enterprise is about to explode.

Mobile device management (MDM) systems in most organizations are now able to successfully deploy devices running any of the major mobile operating systems. The last remaining hurdles in the appification of the enterprise are content and distribution.

The App Store Volume Purchase Program

Last Tuesday, Apple quietly announced a significant improvement to the way IT departments will purchase and distribute publicly available iOS applications. The App Store Volume Purchase Program for Business is a solution that allows businesses to purchase public applications in volume for distribution to their teams. Once purchased, the applications can be distributed through manual installation, a private enterprise app store, iTunes, or wirelessly via a secure web server. So why is this change important? Because prior to this program, the sale and deployment of paid applications to address specific enterprise markets was inefficient. Software developers had little incentive to develop solutions for broad enterprise markets because they could not distribute them for volume purchase through the App Store. In other words, there was no sales channel.

A Practical Example

Imagine your organization was running customer relationship management (CRM) software that had a companion mobile application available for sale through the iTunes store. How would you purchase that application for each of your 100/1,000/10,000 sales reps and ensure that it was installed on each of their devices? You probably wouldn’t. The more likely case would be that some of your employees would purchase the app and expense it (or not) while the rest wouldn’t bother.

A Signal of Things to Come

The volume purchase program described above is just one example from one app store. RIM has always been a leader in the distribution of mobile software in the enterprise; and Microsoft and HP are certainly thinking deeply about how enterprise-grade applications are sold and distributed. Each of the mobile platform developers knows that the enterprise is the next frontier in mobile content.

Content Is King… Even in the Enterprise

Users have certain expectations about the quality and breadth of available mobile content. The key to driving application revenue via the enterprise is the same as it is for personal use; content availability.

The easier it is for mobile software developers to distribute their products, the more products they will create.

We look forward to creating some of those products with you.

Jeremy Black is a Business Development Manager at Xtreme Labs and can be reached at Jeremy.black@xtremelabs.com

I’ve been working in the entertainment ticketing business for the past year. I understand the structure of the ticketing and entertainment businesses so what follows is not written out of naivety.

Service charges on tickets are now a structural necessity in the entertainment business. Venue owners and event producers have been shifting these costs onto ticket purchasers since the 70′s and in most cases are in no position to absorb the costs today.

But what if the event producer is also the ticketing company? Oh, you’re board of hearing this debate about TM/Live Nation’s monopolistic practices? Yeah, me too.

Instead, here’s a video to demonstrate my plight. I really like The Get Up Kids. They bring me back to a simpler time (too cliché?). I’m not willing to pay $9.75 in service fees to see their $24.50 show though. Admittedly, only $8.75 goes to Ticketmaster. The other dollar goes to The Phoenix Concert Theatre, although I’m sure there’s a lot of other ass slapping going on between these two parties.

Point is, I don’t feel like TM/Live Nation/The Phoenix deserves a 39.8% tip (and that’s what it is when you’re both the one collecting the ticket price AND the service fees) on this ticket. Once again if I want to see a show my money will find it’s way into the hands of a smaller band at a smaller venue with $20 left to buy some beer.

I guess maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.

Music credit on this video goes to The Sadies and their Introduction from the New Seasons album. You can probably see them for $15 at the Horseshoe and still have $20 left for beers

Update
I meant to more accurately disclose that I do in fact work for TicketBreak and we are one of many Ticketmaster alternatives

Also, I got some interesting feedback from a friend via Facebook this morning. Part of the reason I wrote this post is because the Rogers Wireless Box office option on the Ticketmaster page says those tickets aren’t available, but they’re happy to sell you ones with full service fees. Erik says you can access the Rogers tickets here and that it is where Ticketmaster sends you when you choose the Rogers Wireless Box Office option on their site. They must’ve released more tickets because you can see from the video that something wasn’t working last night. Erik also informs me that tickets for Live Nation shows are available at Rotate and Soundscapes where it makes sense. That makes sense too. Thanks Erik!

I do stand by the post but it’s great to have more information and understanding of LN/TM’s business and purchase processes.

This is the summary of our lead management discussion.

Here’s what we’ve covered:

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Basics
- Get a CRM Solution
- Decide what data you need
- Keep tweaking it

Lead Marketing / Nurturing
- What to do with leads once you’ve found them
- Developing a marketing funnel
- Continue to segment your leads

Tracking and Analytics
- What are your leads looking for? How do you know?
- How do you give them what they’re looking for?

The biggest difficulty you will find when implementing a lead management process is keeping on top of the data. As you collect more and more leads your data is going to get messier and more complicated. You will need to continue to add content to your marketing funnel (website, email lists, print collateral etc.) to better reflect the information your prospective clients are looking for. That also means you’ll need to continue to find ways to segment your leads based on the information they share with you.

If you’re staying on top of your marketing funnel you’ll quickly find more effective ways to push leads through that funnel and on to sales. In a small organization the better you are at identifying exactly when a lead is sales-ready the more efficient your job of selling will become.

This all sort of goes without saying but in a lot of smaller organizations it usually goes without practice as well

I get the BDC eProfits newsletter every month as well as their free magazine; Profit. It’s a nice break from my Google Reader, which serves up 95% of what I read online.

BDC is an important player in Canada’s SME community and from the outside they seem to be doing a good job to keep pace with the needs of entrepreneurs.

Yeseterday’s newsletter had an article that provides a great overview of what I’ve been talking about over the past couple weeks. It talks about a few of the ways a sales rep can spend their time in lieu of cold calling. Have a look here.