The Rogue Cartel

One of the advantages of starting from ground-zero with an enterprise software start-up is to do a ‘clean-slate’ and attempt to fix all the common problems and headaches one sees in traditional enterprise software companies from mid-sized to the BigCo’s.

One of them has been their CRM system. I started out using Oracle and Siebel and hated both of them. Even while at Oracle, I tracked my real activity using salesforce.com and then put whatever management needed into Oracle’s CRM. In fact, I did the same thing at IBM – it just wasn’t worth using for my day-to-day.

But now—salesforce.com has become the behemoth that’s slow and cumbersome, and so I begin anew with some key functionality.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t been easy to do. My requirements so far:

• Efficient template/group outbound email prospecting
• Ability to see full social context for contacts prospecting to
• Email handling the right way (e.g. no need to do that bcc’ b.s. – just get it from my IMAP AND associate it with the appropriate contact)
• Clear and flexible reporting
• Integrations with my tools (if all these can’t be done in a single tool)

I am trying to keep my requirements lean and focused on our primary goals: building repeatable pipeline that, once I’ve figured it out, can be easily scalable by hiring junior reps to repeat the process.

Well, I ended up looking at a number of candidates:

• Yesware
• Toutapp
• Nimble
• Close.IO
• BaseCRM
• CapsuleCRM

And I’m still scanning the horizon for others.

For Email prospecting, the specifics are:

• Templates
• Template (metrics) – how well did this template do, how often was it sent, who sent it
• Templates organized by target slices (I build lots of test segmentations)
• Integrations (I don’t want to input data twice…EVER!)

The candidates for this were:

• ToutApp
• YesWare

• CloseIO

• ToutApp had the best metrics and, seemingly, with groups by segments

• YesWare didn’t have such easily to access metrics or dynamic fields (sort of a given for Templates)
• CloseIO – I was hopeful because they did have templates, but even with their powerful search, I wasn’t clear if I could get the same metrics (I am still investigating this)

Challenges: getting ToutApp to pull data from my CRM’s OR to input data (either manually or an upload). For example: I had a contact already in ToutApp but needed to add the email address (or change one) – but guess what – I couldn’t find a place to edit the contact with the email address! Grrr….

This is the most important “front-end” of the pipeline so I have been sort of starting there, but I needed to go back and figure out my options for CRM systems. Surprisingly, the Zapier connections don’t solve this problem. In this day and age, I was surprised that I still have to limit which CRM systems I can work with. In Tout’s case, it was Capsule, Highrise, and salesforce.

So, for now, I am ranking ToutApp highest – but since there are dependencies on what are do in terms of very basic deal tracking and contact gathering….things could potentially change. The lack of integration with BaseCRM, for example, notched it down a point and put CapsuleCRM back in the running,

But the evaluation continues….till the next post.

One of the questions that isn’t asked that often is, “Who benefits from the rise of analytics?”

It’s accepted as a given and as important.

But to whom and why?

I want to propose that 1) Despite the rhetoric, there are a key set of constituents who have not fully embraced analytics; b) describe a clear benefit to them based on the real users of analytics.

Who are not fully embracing analytics?

There’s a subset of IT vendors, typically those providing appliance-based solutions for network and security, who don’t have advanced analytics. It’s understandable. Like all companies, they have a resource constraint, and they’d rather focus on making their product itself the best it can. These solutions are often competing on performance and feature-sets, so resources go towards improving core functionality.

Reporting is not typically perceived as a core functionality and is a different skillset from those building the primary product.

As a result, the analytics into the company’s own data and making it rich and flexible, is under-resourced. Either nothing is done at all, or the implementation is poor.

A common justification is that the reporting or analytics isn’t what is asked for – there’s no demand – and here’s where I think there’s an error.

Who typically uses analytics?

Managers and sometimes executives are the ones who commonly need acces to analytics. These may be high-level business analytics for most executives. But certainly could be relevant IT analytics, particularly if meaningful and customizable to meet the needs.

For example, a firewall or security appliance, to those in charge of security, must do its primary job. But a manager would want analytics to understand what types of behavior or trends are occurring. This shifts the value of the actual device to a higher level.

This is important: if demand is only measured by that generated by the typical purchaser and a lower level, one could find the evidence supporting no demand for analytics.

However, if selling one click higher in the chain and rolling a “trend and historical analysis” component into whatever you are providing, now you are improving your sales posture.

The real benefit of adding analytics comes from the shift in audience

The real benefit for those group that is overlooking the benefits of adding powerful analytics into their systems is in the way the solution gets position to higher-level decision-makers. These real-time dashboards are the “eye-candy” which can allow your sales teams to have a discussion around trends, patterns, forecasts, historical analysis – rather than just speeds and feeds. When done at an incremental investment of engineering (the hard part is already done – performing the tasks and generating the data), this could potentially yield huge upside for the sales organization by selling higher and selling with greater value.

So what gets in the way?

Suppose they make the calculation that it is important, what gets in the way? Why are so many reporting components so terrible (meaning inflexible, not incorporating different modules, etc?).

The reason is because more reporting is done wrong for these systems. They use a relational database with fixed schemas. This often results in reports that are too high-level (summarization), too slow (poor design and queries), and too slow to build (back to the fixed schemas). For these IT solutions with high volumes of data with complex configurations, a normal relational database won’t cut it, and it ends up becoming something that isn’t agile, dynamic, or cost-effective.

The solution: come-up with the right underlying infrastructure to makes those blockers go away and to then sell higher in the organization more quickly.

Summary

Because analytics is important to higher-level decision-makers, if you are an IT appliance that doesn’t have awesome “eye-candy,” the people who should care is your sales management.

I began researching other ways to make liver more palatable.

I felt I had some decent success using sous vide, but in the last few batches where I let it sit for a good long while, maybe 1-2 days, I ended up with a very soft piece of liver. I would magic bullet so that it would be easier to baby to chew, and I ended up with liver slurry.

It wasn’t that great for me, or for that matter, the baby.

Unfortunately, most of the other recipes involved putting the liver in a pan with a bunch of onions, and the risk that I seemed to face was the liver getting tough. Not good.

So, I started to research how to make pate. I liked the idea because I knew liver pate would not have the shoe-leather effect, and it was something I could potentially feed the baby and not worry about her swallowing a big tough slab of organ.

The other thing I liked about the possibilities from pate was that there could be lots of variations for me to experiment with till I came across my own, personal, killer version.

So: I began by researching several different types of liver pate recipes:

http://farmlet.co.nz/?p=199

http://paleodietlifestyle.com/simple-and-delicious-liver-pate-recipes/

I basically combined what I learned from these two:

1. Bought 1 pound of grass-fed beef liver at the farmer’s market (from Marin Sun).

2. Chopped a whole onion (originally I was concerned because the pieces weren’t that small for some of them, but now that I know that the whole thing gets blended anyway, it doesn’t really matter).

3. I decided to use Trader Joe’s chopped garlic and through in a big spoonful. I originally wanted to go all professional and do it with a fresh clove, but this was so much faster and I think just as good.

4. I added half a cup or so of red wine (the cheapest I could get, a $3.99 bottle of Shiraz from Whole Foods).

5. Chopped thyme and rosemary: these do need to be chopped pretty finely. If I believed my Magic Bullet could chop them, I probably would have done that, but I have a feeling that these fresh herbs wouldn’t have been chopped that well, so I did it by hand.

6. Half a cup of Kerry Gold grass-fed butter — this is why I believe this is a bulletproof super-food!

7. I put the onions in first into a pan with a few pads of butter to get them softened and then added the liver. One of the recipes said that this should brown the liver, but I didn’t see it get brown and didn’t expect it to. I just wanted it to get relatively cooked. I actually have experimented with raw liver to maintain as much of the nutrients in the past, but this time just followed the directions and kept the heat really low.

8. I then added all the herbs, red wine, garlic and let it simmer without a top till most of the liquid was gone.

9. Then I put it into a separate bowl, through in the rest of the butter and then put it covered in the refrigerator till it cooled off. After about 2 hours, I put the whole mixture into a food processor and blended it all up. Then I put the whole mixture in to cool for half a day before eating it.

10. I added salt and cracked pepper and then folded it into the mixture with a spoon. I realized later that adding more of both to taste will make it better (I use Pink himilayan and I know that pepper is not considered bulletproof because of the mold, but I can’t think of an alternative – the pepper really makes a difference in the pate).

The first morning, baby actually did lick the spoon; but she didn’t for dinner, so maybe it was a one-shot thing. I like it because I don’t have to keep it warm or cook it; I can just keep a container of the stuff and use a spoon and take it in when I need ‘nature’s vitamin.’

Overall, it was a good beginning. I will start to experiment with different flavors and possibly start taking photographs.

This morning was a minor victory on the breakfast front: I have taken to eaten raw eggs, taking care not to eat raw egg whites.

http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/Egg_Yolk.html

[http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/Egg_Yolk.html]

After reading the above article, I decided that maybe I should reduce the raw eggs and, instead, use whole eggs for baby.

But the “win” for today was that I did use the existing egg-whites, turned them into a scramble, and then Magic Bulleted them with the almond milk along with the Bulletproof Collagen…and she nearly finished the whole thing.

I had to add some Rice Crispies, but at least she’s getting a higher-protein start in the morning.

I have been researching how to replace sugar for the few times I do need something sweet with Xylitol, an alcohol-based sugar.

There were a couple of things that I had learned while doing research (the most important of which was, as far as I can tell, Xylitol tastes much more like sugar than, say, Stevia).

1. Some Xylitol is made in China; some in the US – I go for the US
2. Some Xylitol is made from corn; some from birch – I go for birch

And that is all. This is a short post.

If you’re interested, the kind that I ended up buying is here:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003CNOUWQ/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i02?ie=UTF8&psc=1][http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003CNOUWQ/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i02?ie=UTF8&psc=1]

I am reading “Top Dog” the latest book by Po Bronson, about competition.

An interesting take-away was his description of two effects on competition, one called the Matthew Effect and the other called the Mark Effect, both named after their respective books in the Gospel.

The Matthew Effect refers to Matthew 13:12:

“Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.”

This has to do with the notion that winners have a cumulative advantage. Early childhood students who do well get better schools and better teachers, which gives them an advantage when competing with later students.

The Mark Effect refers to Mark 10:31:

“But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”

This has to do with the idea that resources should be re-allocated – that those who have more should be given fewer so that those without can catch up (to counter the Matthew Effect).

What would be interesting is to understand how pervasive the Matthew Effect is and, can someone who has not had the advantages of it, be able to catch up.

I have been thinking about this in the context of education for Rachel. The book talks about the importance of certain types of healthy competition. In reflecting on my own experience, I realize that there was unhealthy competition from Mike. He exhibits all of the unhealthy aspects of competing in things that don’t matter, needing to verbally or physically hinder the comeptitor (me) rather than improving the game, and basically not thriving in it. He also illustrated that he could not operate in teams: the only sport he was interested in was tennis and cross-country running, neither of which really involve any kind of real team sportsmanship.

My goal is to enable the kids on how to properly deal with people like that. Part of it is providing education and tools: my mom did the opposite by, at best, ignoring the situation and worst, by blessing it as acceptable.

The book “Top Dog” also highlighted the importance of healthy peer competition to increase performance: when people are with peers (versus with those who are more successful or less successful at the competition at hand), performance can increase. This effect also depends upon closeness which is both physical and psychological. Closeness comes when the number of competing peers is not large (as shown by the higher SAT scores for those living in small cities).

The takeaways for me are that a good classroom setting should have:

• small numbers of students with similar capabilities and skills
• healthy self-concepts of competition (there is no place for those without a healthy concept, the barriers to change, as we saw with Mike, are much too high – there are deeper problems at work)
• in doing so, start the flywheel of the Matthew Effect

Naturally, this depends on one’s personality: apparently, some personalities will wither in the face of competition, and I want to understand how to both identify this and, hopefully, how to shape that person for healthy competition because the reality is, there will be competition in the world.

It’s with great anticipation that I await the re-opening of Lafayette Park.

Everytime I walk by, I peer through the wired gates to see how progress is going.

I check on the outside for any newly posted signs, just in case the deadline is pushed back.

It’s now early June and I have been waiting for the parks’ re-opening for over a year. I was incredibly bummed out when it did close because it is just two blocks from where I live, and Rachel was hitting her crawling stages.

But now that she’s full on walking, and occasionally running, we need the space, the outdoors, and the exposure to other kids playing.

This past weekend, I explored two new parks with Rachel: Rossi and Mountain Lake.

Both had cute, small playgrounds with swings. Mountain Lake had, as you would expect, a full-on lake with ample trees. Both had a wide expanse of green.

I began to think of some anecdotes that support the notion that a location’s quality of life can be measured by the density and quality of parks. Typically this would mean suburbs get the upper hand (I would imagine), but, regardless, it seems worth noting.

The first was a story I had heard about Governor Jerry Brown (not the current Governor Jerry Brown, but Brown 1.0 — and not his father, but him). Apparently he read a study which suggested that urban centers, like Los Angeles, would benefit its youths much more if there were more greenery. I don’t remember what the specific correlation was, but the conclusion was more is better.

As a result, he created a jobs program where unemployed youths would help build more parks. A stroke of genius: traditional government stimulus spending, tempered with small scale investments (a small urban park versus, say, a money-sucking tunnel or train or dam), with forward thinking environmentalism (both the green, save the trees, kind, and social fabric kind).

I wish I knew more about it.

The second comes from the book (which I started but didn’t finish) “The Power Broker” which is about Robert Moses who by paying attention to small, bureaucratic details, ultimately changed the face of New York by creating a huge public parks system. In his case, he really needed to stand up for an unpopular position which could be seen as anti-business and anti-growth.

But the result has made the state and New York City a memorable place and more livable place.

I have been feeding the baby grass fed collagen when I can, usually for breakfast.

In particular, I have been buying Dr. Friedlander’s collagen [[http://www.amazon.com/Collagen-Premium-Grass-fed-Processed-Pound/dp/B003Q9BDI0]].

My preference would be to feed her daily bone-broth from grass fed cows. Many of the same benefits can be found there, [[http://www.westonaprice.org/food-features/broth-is-beautiful]]

However, the stench of making bones seeping in hot water day and night bugs my wife, so I opted for the collagen approach. It’s not cheap, but given that sometimes Rachel doesn’t eat as much as I know she can, I want to make sure that, at minimum, she is eating something nutrient dense. The collagen isn’t a complete protein, but is essential for hair and gut health. Without the bone broth, though, it isn’t providing the calcium that I’d like her to get.

So here’s what I do:

• I put a scoop of collagen into a small bowl
• I add either whole fat milk or almond milk into it
• stir it up – this is hard since I usually have cold milk

Baby loves it, and I like knowing that at least she has high-density of proteins.

What would make it better, but would take alot more time would be:

• to have her have some coconut oil
• to have some grass-fed butter

This way she would get some fats. Ideally, we would have whole fat milk from grass-fed cows, but even that I’m unsure of because of the possibility of hormones as well as allergies. This could still happen with butter, but it’s a higher density of healthy fats. And I don’t currently see much downside to coconut oil.

So I ordered 5 pounds of tendon from Marin Sun Farms and was so excited to take the stuff home and start making it.

One of the things I really wanted to make in quantity was something I had discovered when making bone brother: some of the bone bones, particularly when I would order gelatinous bones, would have tendon attached to it. After letting it simmer for a while, it would be really soft, and I’d add it to my Magic Bullet along with the bone broth itself.

The additional piece of tendon seemed to make a thicker, richer broth.

So I was looking forward to doing more with tendon.

Yesterday and part of today I listened to the interview with HelpScout, which is an email-based help-desk.

One of the things they focused on to grow their business was “content marketing.” I wanted to jot down some notes and ideas so that I could reference them later and incorporate them into my own business.

Content marketing was their alternative to “writing a check” to acquire customers. It ultimately became so effective that they hired someone to do it full time. I don’t remember the name of the guy’s blog whom they hired…something like StrappingMind or something like that.

The way they built their content was to come up with a theme, which in this case was something like “data-driven customer support.” The core of the content came from a book, which was about 5,000 words.

It sounded like the way they based their posts was to find other companies that they could include in the article, perhaps as a case-study. That sounds like a good way to get good content.

But how did they get their content out there? They used guest posts. I think I read a guest post from him about guest posts on Think Traffic.

They used guest posts to get in front of potential customers. This seems to be a fairly common idea. At a high level, Noah Kagan in his interview (write down notes), did the same thing by saying that marketers should find ways to be where their potential customers are.

They also used SlideShare as a way to get their content out there. It sounded from the interview that he still used guest posts as the way to get traffic and then drive them to SlideShare.

For my project, what I will need to do is:

• Come up with a list of existing blogs where I can put content
• Come up with a landing page that I can link to
• Write content

It’s interesting that it was a software company that used this approach. I am still working through how it would work with my business models.