John Ryan

The importance of automating the sales processes and capturing buyer data has perhaps never been more important.  Many organizations are finally waking up to the fact that having thousands of leads isn't as important as doing better with the leads you have.  From Gartner... What You Need to Know Despite slow sales due to the economy, organizations continue to invest in sales force automation (SFA). Gartner has not seen a drop-off in customer requests for help with vendor evaluations related to SFA. We have seen slightly more emphasis on software as a service (SaaS) due to tight capital budgets and the use of smartphones to drive salesperson adoption. Most vendors have come up with service and/or integration capabilities with fast-growing social networks, but sales organizations have been relatively cautious in embracing social-networking integration with SFA. All ven... (more)

Business Martial Arts Lesson – There Are No Short Cuts

This is Lesson No. 3 of a Continuing Series on How Martial Arts Skills can be Applied to Business There are no short cuts – a Hapkido master told me this and thank goodness there are people in the world who still believe this. Stop trying to be clever and instead focus on earning real capabilities. In Hapkido, you either know it or you don’t and it shows in the practice of the art. The business lesson – There are business people in prison because they forgot this. Building a strong business that has great capabilities requires study and hard work. When people take short cuts, bad t... (more)

How Do We Respond to Change? (Buyers Are People, Too.)

In the 21st century, the U.S. Labor Dept. predicts that today's learner will have over 10 jobs by the time they are 38. Being able to adapt to changing conditions in your job status and the status of your buyers is an important strength in 2009. I used to have to go to Europe quite a bit and I remember seeing this sculpture in the Louvre. This piece of art is quite beautiful and it really does make you think about how these captives must have felt. It's universal because we have all been there. The four reactions of their captivity depicted in the sculpture are revolt, hope, resi... (more)

Prepare Yourself for More Email Coming to Your Inbox

From Forrester's Press Release Spending on email marketing in the US will balloon to $2 billion by 2014 — a nearly 11 percent compound annual growth rate — according to a new forecast by Forrester Research Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR). Falling CPMs (cost per thousands), a high return on investment, and growing consumer use of social email accounts will fuel the use of email by Direct Marketing professionals. In five years, consumers will be deluged with more than 9,000 email marketing messages annually. “By 2014 direct marketers will waste $144 million on emails that never reach their pr... (more)

Opera Unite Democratizes the Cloud

From Opera's Press Release “Today, we are opening the full potential of the Web for everyone,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. “Technology moves in distinct cycles. PCs decentralized computing away from large mainframes. Opera Unite now decentralizes and democratizes the cloud. With server capability in the browser, Web developers can create Web applications with profound ease. Consumers have the flexibility to choose private and efficient ways of sharing information. We believe Opera Unite is one of our most significant innovations yet, because it changes forever the fundam... (more)