Job opening – Partner Enablement Manager, Symantec

Found on monster.com via Twitter on November 5, 2009:

Job Title: Partner Enablement Manager
Company: Symantec
Location: Heathrow, FL, USA
Status: Full Time Employee
Regular/Temporary: Regular
Job Category: Sales/Retail/Business Development
Job ID / Reference Code: 586618

Company Overview

“Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help our customers – from consumers and small businesses to the largest global organizations – secure and manage their information-driven world against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently. Our software and services protect completely, in ways that can be easily managed and with controls that can be enforced automatically – enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored.

Department Overview

Enterprise Marketings role is to shorten the sales cycle – plain and simple. We make it easier for employees, partners and customers to understand what products and services we have. Were responsible for much of what the customer sees and hears about Symantec. Join Symantec’s Enterprise Marketing organization, and be a part of the world’s security market share leader for consumer and enterprise software and services, protecting hundreds of millions of customers worldwide.

Responsibilities

• Key objective is to nurture and grow Symantec partner sales and services capabilities, on a global basis, that will lead to increased SMB and enterprise partner sales of Symantec products and services.
• Conduct in-depth research from multiple sources regarding partner services and new opportunities.
• Develop written requirements leading to specific partner sales and services enablement programs, tools, training for Symantec channel partners that can be leveraged on a worldwide basis.
• Determine the deliverables required to address unique partner segments.
• Develop detailed plans regarding ultimate delivery of these partner enablement deliverables.
• Champion the efforts to develop required deliverables and garner support from other company groups.
• Lead and manage cross-functional team efforts, and produce deliverables on schedule and budget.
• Capable of developing solid plans to achieve objectives and then executing those plans independently.
• Ability to work with and lead multiple internal company groups simultaneously toward achieving objectives and completing deliverables on time.
• Ability to work well with and command respect from Symantec internal teams including services, sales, sales engineers, product management, product marketing, and channel marketing.
• Strong writing, project management and organizational skills.
• Strong interpersonal skills and proven presentation capability.
• Ability to multi-task in a fast-paced environment with a proven track record of delivering results.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in business, engineering, computer science, or related discipline.
• 10 years working in an enterprise security and/or storage software product environment in channel sales engineering, program management, product management and/or product marketing disciplines.
• Strong working knowledge of Symantec’s security and storage products, services and solutions and their value to the sales channel and end-customers in all segments.
• Solid working knowledge of the many direct and indirect software product sales channels and deep experience working with multi-tier channel partners.
• Strong knowledge of server products to include the OS and application platforms and their markets.
• Understanding of the Microsoft and Unix sales and marketing channel ecosystems and routes to market to reach customers in the SMB and enterprise segments.
• Working knowledge of products and technologies from industry server vendors, storage hardware vendors, software vendors, and the value they provide to the channel and end user, individually and as solutions.

How To Apply

To be considered for a position, please submit your resume/CV on the Symantec Careers site. http://www.symantec.com/about/careers/search.jsp

[...]“

Social Media Marketing for SMBs

This post is a must read for SMBs who don’t have a Social Media Marketing strategy yet:
10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips by Ross Kimbarovsky, from October 28th, 2009.

The following is only the introduction. Read the 10 tips and leave your comment here.

“[...] Capacity – especially to plan and execute effective marketing strategies – is a big challenge for every small business. In this post, I’ll offer 10 suggestions for how small businesses can supercharge their marketing efforts by leveraging social media. For each suggestion, I will discuss a basic strategy – for those who simply want to get their toes wet, as well as anadvanced strategy – for those who want to spend a bit more time and go a bit deeper in their social media marketing efforts. These tips are based on my experience leveraging social media marketing for my company, crowdSPRING.

I suggest you begin by outlining clear goals for your social media marketing efforts and figuring out how you’ll measure success. Once you’ve outlined your goals, let’s look at 10 great ways you can begin to leverage social media for your marketing efforts.

[...]“

Sales Team Effectiveness Assessments

Blog post ‘Sales Team Effectiveness Assessments’ by Greg from peaksalesperformance.wordpress.com from October 1, 2009.

Whenever Greg gets asked for his opinion on a firm’s sales organization overall and for a development plan, he always works from a copyrighted formula:

“Sales Results = (Sales Skill + Sales Will) X (Execution + Leadership)

Each of these variables has 8 drivers.

Sales Skills (primarily B2B)

1. Prospecting Skills
2. Presenting Skills
3. Probing Skills
4. Listening Skills
5. Closing Skills
6. Pipeline Management Skills
7. Product Knowledge
8. Industry Awareness

Sales Will

1. Recruitment Process
2. High Performance Focus
3. Target Compensation @ Plan
4. Peer Recognition
5. Family & Friend Recognition
6. Tactical Sales Plans Aligned with Strategy
7. Incentive Plan Clarity
8. Effective Field Coaching

Performance Management

1. Goal Clarity
2. Tactical Prescription
3. Performance Metrics
4. Defined Performance Management Process
5. Joint Call Activity Levels
6. Readiness Assessment
7. Coaching & Counseling
8. Culture

Leadership

1. Strategy Development
2. Strategy Communication
3. Tactical Definition & Measurement
4. Readiness Planning
5. Sales Participation
6. Performance Management Process Execution
7. Leadership Style
8. Recognition & Communication

These are the 32 drivers of sales results.  Based on your industry and sales channels they will vary somewhat.

You start the assessment process with the understanding that there is a limit to the organizations resources and ability to execute change.  With this in mind, the key is to find the largest gaps and then to formulate a “do-able” organizational development plan that will begin to close those gaps.

I begin my assessments by examining the drivers at a high level, identifying the major gaps and then drilling down.  This saves me time and saves my clients significant money.  Once the four to six gaps are identified I review and discuss them with the assessment sponsors to find those gaps where the solutions can be bundled into a singular development initiative.  Again, this approach is designed to save money, time and ensure execution.

Why bother with an assessment?  It saves time, money and ensures sales growth.  Why spend money on negotiation training if your issues stem from a lack of field coaching?  Why waste time perfecting a lead generation program when your individual contributors are handicapped in their search for client pain?  Why would you continue to give up margins just because your sales pipeline is anemic?  Why continue to throw good money into an incentive plan when your recruiting process keeps bringing in candidates with low skill and low sales will?

Great organizations have a common approach to problem solving.  Assess, plan and execute.

If you want to grow sales, you’re best approach is to start at the beginning.”

Economy and Internet Trends 2009

Presentation ‘Economy + Internet Trends’ from October 20, 2009.
Presented at the Web 2.0 Summit – San Francisco by Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley.

View this document on Scribd

Social Media Trends for 2010

HarvardBusiness.org blog post ‘Six Social Media Trends for 2010′ by David Armano (@armano) from November 2, 2009:

“In 2009 we saw exponential growth of social media. According to Nielsen Online, Twitter alone grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, [...] In 2010, social media will get even more popular, more mobile, and more exclusive — at least, that’s my guess. What are the near-term trends [...]:

1. Social media begins to look less social
With groups, lists and niche networks becoming more popular, networks could begin to feel more “exclusive.” Not everyone can fit on someone’s newly created Twitter list and as networks begin to fill with noise, it’s likely that user behavior such as “hiding” the hyperactive updaters that appear in your Facebook news feed may become more common. Perhaps it’s not actually less social, but it might seem that way as we all come to terms with getting value out of our networks — while filtering out the clutter.

2. Corporations look to scale
There are relatively few big companies that have scaled social initiatives beyond one-off marketing or communications initiatives. Best Buy’s Twelpforce leverages hundreds of employees who provide customer support on Twitter. The employees are managed through a custom built system that keeps track of who participates. This is a sign of things to come over the next year as more companies look to uncover cost savings or serve customers more effectively through leveraging social technology.

3. Social business becomes serious play
Relatively new networks such as Foursquare are touted for the focus on making networked activity local and mobile. However, it also has a game-like quality to it which brings out the competitor in the user. Participants are incentivized and rewarded through higher participation levels. And push technology is there to remind you that your friends are one step away from stealing your coveted “mayorship.” As businesses look to incentivize activity within their internal or external networks, they may include carrots that encourage a bit of friendly competition.

4. Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced)
If the company you work for doesn’t already have a social media policy in place with specific rules of engagement across multiple networks, it just might in the next year. From how to conduct yourself as an employee to what’s considered competition, it’s likely that you’ll see something formalized about how the company views social media and your participation in it.

5. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline
With approximately 70 percent of organizations banning social networks and, simultaneously, sales of smartphones on the rise, it’s likely that employees will seek to feed their social media addictions on their mobile devices. What used to be cigarette breaks could turn into “social media breaks” as long as there is a clear signal and IT isn’t looking. As a result, we may see more and/or better mobile versions of our favorite social drug of choice.

6. Sharing no longer means e-mail
The New York Times iPhone application recently added sharing functionality which allows a user to easily broadcast an article across networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Many websites already support this functionality, but it’s likely that we will see an increase in user behavior as it becomes more mainstream for people to share with networks what they used to do with e-mail lists. And content providers will be all too happy to help them distribute any way they choose.

[...]

David Armano [@armano] is part of the founding team at Dachis Group, an Austin based consultancy delivering social business design services. He is both an active practitioner and thinker in the worlds of digital marketing, experience design, and the social web. [...]“

Comment by Daniel:

“One thing you missed, David: People will use lifestreaming platforms to add more context to their content. For instance, you may post that you’re eating a hamburger via Twitter — alas, the dreaded “what I ate” tweet — but if you were to use a lifestream platform such as Brightkite or Foursquare, you can add dimension to your content so it actually helps others.

But this is one part of lifestreaming. The other, you see, is aggregation ['Don't waste time with visiting twitter.com or blogs - Aggregate everything via rss'].

Look for companies to develop storystreaming platforms that enable brands — and individuals — to stream in content from the social web. Since content curation is a key part of this, look for this year’s “killer app” to be a tool that enables power users (brand managers, agencies, community managers, etc.) to fine-tune the content that gets pulled in. [...]“

Comment by Jason:

“Social media will become more global in 2010.

With Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter all gear up on their language translation capabilities, we will see an interesting growth of international users on all these platforms.

Social media will become an increasingly important medium for global brands to market toward oversea consumers. It will be interesting to see how multi-national brand managers can tap into rich social data and engagement oversea without having to leave the corporate headquarter.”

David Armano’s response to comments:

“Seems that the most common, high value use of social media mechanisms is to bypass bad operating designs (service models).”

Yes. Yes. Yes. Social service design possibly? The signs are here, this will probably get traction in the next year in a more formalized way. Again, Twelpforce is an early indicator.

Jason, Global is a good point.

Other themes here that I think would emerge is the popularity of anything that can support the real time Web or as we call “dynamic signals” As Daniel eludes to , storytelling in a real time Web becomes storystreaming. Brands and content providers will have tremendous opportunities here if leadership can persuade the lawyers.

And most definitely social commerce. I already know of a few players planning these initiatives.”

Comment by Loraine Antrim:

“One trend in social media as we approach 2010 is that the “media” aspect will increase dramatically. Video is exploding on the web; more and more blogs include links to video content and as mobile devices expand the use of video, we will see even more video content in all aspects of social media. Also, the idea of “Social” will take second seat to corporations’ use of social media, but the real trend is the increase of SMBs who will start to use social media as a strategy for attraction and retention of customers. [...]“

Selling, as the Art of Persuasion, was killed by Information Overload

In the comments of ‘Facts vs Fiction – Social Media Tools in B2B Selling’ I found the following from Jacques Werth:

“[...] The reason that selling is dying is because the basic concept of how to sell is obsolete. Selling, as the Art of Persuasion, is dead. It was killed by Information Overload. The markets for every product and service are far more sophisticated than ten years ago.

• Cold-calling doesn’t work anymore.
• Lead acquisition methods are costly and inefficient.
• Finding needs has become counter-productive.
• Establishing Rapport has become counter-productive.
• Educating prospects has become counter-productive.
• Selling benefits turns off most prospects.
• Persuasion causes resistance.
• Selling points have become resistance points.
• Consultative selling has been show to be fraudulent.
• Closing techniques do not work.
• Overcoming objections kills sales.

Top sales producers do not do any of the above. Their sales processes are simple, yet highly effective.

• They know how to find prospects that are ready, willing, and able to buy.
• They know how to develop immediate relationships of mutual trust and respect.
• They know how to determine prospects’ exact buying intentions.
• They know the importance of assessing prospects’ conditions of satisfaction.
• They know how to quickly arrive at mutual agreements and mutual commitments.
• They know how to have prospects’ enthusiastically close the sale.”

Obviously this does not tell us how to become or create a top sales producer but it shows all that is broken and won’t work in a Sales 2.0 world anymore.

In one of his own blog posts Jacques Werth goes on to say…

“[...] There are no secret tips. There are no magic tricks. Effective selling is about finding a sales process that works, following that process carefully, and measuring the results. Pay attention to doing it right. You can’t learn how to sell just by reading articles or participating in sales discussion groups. Although it is possible to learn to sell by reading a lot of books, this doesn’t work for most people.

Books and CD’s can teach you a great deal about selling, but not much about the step-by-step details on how to actually do it. For that, we recommend training and practice. [...]“

Sales runs on information; access to it and use of it – The best sales people are those who learn how to access information

The post ‘The ‘Gist’ of a new Sales Tool’ by Jim Keenan (@heykeenan) from aSalesGuy.com emphasizes beautifully that “sales runs on information; access to it and use of it” and that the “best sales people are those who learn how to access information [...]“:

“I love finding good sales tools. Few things get me as excited as finding good tool to help me achieve my goals. One of the biggest areas for improvement is access to information. Sales runs on information; access to it and use of it. The best sales people are those who learn how to access information others can’t and know how to use it.

Finding information has usually meant research. Companies like Hoovers would compile all the info and we would go tearing through it looking for the tidbit to give us an edge. The problem was Hoovers controlled the info. If they couldn’t find it or chose not to add it, you didn’t get it. Google Alerts has upped the game a bit, but if you’re like me, you get a little tired of managing the tons of emails that come in everyday. I just couldn’t keep up with all the different alerts. This is why I’m excited about Gist.

Gist has the potential to be the next killer sales app. Gist is a new site that allows you to link your contact list to the web. After you sign up, you are prompted to upload your address book. Gist supports, Oulook, Vcard, Gmail, as well as LinkedIn and Facebook. Once your accounts have been set up, (you can set up more than one) Gist begins to pull all the information from the web it can and puts it into a clean dashboard by person, by company. What I like about how Gist works is I can see a client or companies entire web presence in a single click. Gist does a Google search and throws up all the relevant info on the people and companies in my contacts. It tracks the tweets, and blog posts, as well as any new web mentions. Getting information on clients has always been difficult. Gist is changing this and has taken a tremendous step into bringing sales people closer to their clients and what their clients are saying. Gist also provides the same rich information for the companies in your contacts, as it does for your contact list.

There are a few features I really enjoy. One is the ability to dial up or down the importance of a contact or company. The more important a contact, the higher on the dashboard you can make them show up. This gives you control on who gets more attention your watch list. Gist also syncs with your email account for better organization of all your account information. Gist gives you the ability to share contacts with other Gist users and merge contacts into a single view. (ex: multiple contacts at a single company.)

I have been using it for a few weeks and have just scratched the surface. I uploaded my entire contact list, not sure I’d do that again. There are too many people I just don’t care to watch. Gist does integrate with Salesforce.com. Which was a good move. I haven’t played with that feature yet. I am curious on how it’ll work.

Gist is headed in the right direction. As more and more people come online, via Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn etc, Gist will provide you immediate information that can be used in the sales process, relationship building and a myriad of other business needs.

Gist is easy to use and easy to set up. I don’t see any barrier to adoption. Go sign up and tell me what you think. Playing with it is the only true way to find out how something works. Come back and give us your two cents.”

Please leave your comments on the original post.

How Sales People Make Money

After having posted ‘Metrics to measure around a deal’ and ‘Sales people do not like to be tracked, measured or accounted for against anything other than quota’, the post ‘How Sales People Make Money’ by Jim Keenan (@heykeenan) from aSalesGuy.com is a great reminder for me what simple and straight forward a topic ‘motivation of sales people’ actually is:

“Sales people get paid by selling stuff. The more stuff they sell, the more money they make. The biggest impact on what a sales person makes, in some cases even more than their selling, is the comp plan. Sale people get paid on commission. Therefore, a sales persons compensation plan is the key to his or her earnings.

Management creates the comp plan. Comp plans need to be 3 things; simple, consistent and motivating.

Simple – Sales people have to be able to know what they’re getting paid for, how much and when. If they can’t understand how much they’ll make on a sale, your plan needs work. Sales people follow the money. If they can’t quickly understand, in their head, how much they make on a deal your plan is too complicated.

Consistent – It should be clear what you (management) is incenting. If you are looking to drive greater sales of a new product, the plan needs to support new product sales. If you want to increase services, then incent services. Far too often the comp plan does not support and align with managements message. This causes anxiety. Imagine being told to sell silly widgets, when you get paid more on dumb widgets. It’s stressful.

Motivating – Comp plans are in place to motivate sales. Good ones motivate sales people. They energize the teams and push sales people to excel. When plans aren’t simple or consistent they lose their value because they don’t motivate

Sales people get paid by selling. Sales people MAKE money because of the comp plan.

What does your comp plan look like. Is it simple? Is it consistent? Is it motivating? Creating the killer comp plan is the most impacting thing sales leadership can do to drive revenue. Don’t leave it to sales operations, don’t rush to get it out. Be creative, engage the team, connect with product, and align it with the corporate goals and make it the best damn comp plan you’ve ever created.

It’s how sales people make money and the companies revenues deserve it.”