email us at amarts@artifact3.com

Name: Amin Marts. No worries if you mispronounce the first name, I’ll correct you.

What I’m interested in: Simply, finding solutions for problems, excuse me, challenges.

What I bring to the table: Big picture thinking. Ruthless execution. The ability to distill complex topics into bite-sized and easy to digest contextual stories.

Turn On’s: Smart design. Simple solutions to complex problems. Billboards that make me stop, think, and take a picture to share with you. Jargon. Most of all, flowy singletrack.

Turn Off’s: Jargon. Overly complex solutions that don’t scale. Ambiguous messages. Unintelligible handwriting. Skiers who wear Starter jackets.

My Favorite Tools: iPad, Keynote, Mindmeister, DropBox, old skool whiteboards, OmniFocus, Glenn Beck.

Things I (admit) I read: HBR, Economist, anything Seth Godin writes, WSJ, on occasion the International Herald, when feeling snarky The New Yorker.

January’s Wish: To lose the twang I’ve developed from watching too much CMT during Christmas.

Best way to contact me: Through my twitter or email. I’m easy to find.

Author Archive

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09.02.2010

Eliminate Yawns During Your Presentations

I’m a cyclist and as such I subscribe to publications such as Bicycling and Bike. I also ski and as such there’s also a copy of Skiing lying around the house as well. What I love about each are the ‘How To’ sections:

“How To Shred Bumps in 5 Easy Moves”
“12 Ways To Add More Ride Time To Your Schedule”
“How to Get Back In-Shape in 8 Weeks” (aka 8 Weeks to Super Human You)

These titles clearly articulate the steps it takes to get you from point A to point B, or from a place of unfamiliarity to mastery. The messages are clear and concise. For the most part, the opposite is the norm with training events, regardless if they are web seminars (live or recorded), multi-day training sessions or quick-hit technical overviews. Typically, a high level agenda is communicated by the instructor or organizer outlining the high-level goals of the communication and not much else.

Audiences deserve more. Moreover, your audience deserves more. Their time is precious and the more detailed map you give them the more engaged they will be. This being the case, upgrade the agenda by adding time stamps to it. For instance, rather than plainly pointing out the sections of the presentation, communicate that in (1) hour they’ll be able to hand-idly complete ‘X’ task. In (2) hours they’ll be able to complete ‘X’ and ‘Y’ task and so the story goes.

This method benefits the audience, the content deliverer and content developer. Addressing the audience first, this method breaks the task of learning into smaller, predictable chunks of data that aren’t overwhelming. If maintaining your audience’s attention is important to you, this is one of the simplest and easiest tactics to implement. As it relates to the content deliverer and developer (because they aren’t always the same person) it puts them on the hook to be mindful of communicating intelligible, cohesive thoughts in a timely fashion. Tangents are a natural and powerful part of conversation however they also have the power to derail an otherwise well organized presentation. Knowing that by a certain the time the audience needs to be able to do ‘X’, helps in reining in sidebars that often have a mind of their own.

Time stamps…use them liberally, your audience will love them.

Posted by on 09.02.2010 at 4:05pm   Tags: , , , ,
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08.12.2010

Branding: VARs and OEMs working together

An organization’s brand is its fingerprint. Fundamentally, a brand is the distinctive perception prospects and customers have of a product, service or organization, and as the saying goes, “perception is reality”. In competitive markets globally, differentiation of services coupled with effectively communicating expertise are essential components of winning new business and maintaining old. As such, the ‘brand’ is the flag bearer of these aspects. Surprisingly, many VARs underestimate the usefulness and impact of their brand, despite its tight association with revenue. This lack of foresight yields low brand equity, which in turn opens the door to competition and makes it harder to win with target customers in target markets.

At a high level, VARs aren’t marketers. Rather, they’re technically-minded and traditionally market-by-committee. Think of ‘marketing-by-committee’ as giving the role of the professional marketer to persons who simply have the most free time to execute brand strategy. What’s missing from this equation is an understanding or experience of managing a brand and its supporting accouterments. This lack of expertise and experience not only negatively impacts the VAR but the OEM as well. It impacts the VAR for the reasons mentioned earlier. OEMs depend on VARs to sell and implement their products and solutions. When VARs fail to build brand equity, the OEM is also adversely, if indirectly, affected.

As you might have guessed, this is a golden opportunity for the OEM to tighten its relationship with the VAR at a general business level. Most partner programs make available technical training and marketing assets to their partners, however these marketing assets are useless if the VAR doesn’t:

  • Understand the role branding and marketing plays in their business
  • Know how to use or when to apply the assets and selling tools
  • Have basic solution selling skills
  • Understand the foundational tenets of marketing and how to apply them (e.g. marketing plan development, campaign creation & management)

Posted by on 08.12.2010 at 12:50pm   Tags: , , , , ,
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07.07.2010

Ford: Demos and Case Studies

The target user of your product needs to see how your product fixes their problem before they’re going to buy it, plain and simple. Straight away, the easier you make it for them to kick the tires and look under the hood, the shorter the ensuing sale-cycle will be.

For example, take Ford and their new F-Series line of trucks. They’ve developed a campaign that showcases the truck’s capabilities and the capabilities’ alignment with the target audience’s typical issues. The associative content is delivered primarily via video @ fordvehicles.com/2011Superduty/. Here, the prospect can gather the obligatory head-to-head comparisons to the competition, but that’s just the beginning.

Ford has (apparently) invested a ton into making their trucks the most capable in their class. I know little to nothing about trucks, however after being walked through numerous real-world demonstrations, I’m convinced. Rather than appealing to the 5-year old in me by having the trucks jumping rings of fire (see Dodge) and racing around the desert, Ford educated me. Their message is about the alignment of their trucks’ capabilities and their practicality. Interwoven with the capability speak are reference-able case studies. Regardless if you’re selling software, trucks, or pharmaceuticals this is a winning approach.

This approach gives the audience the ability to relate their experiences and needs to a particular set of capabilities. In other words, it contextualizes the product’s capabilities. In the case of Ford, it’s these capabilities that sell F-Series trucks, but it’s Ford’s personalized and conversational presentation of them that make the difference.

Thinking about you and your products and services:

What capabilities sell or should sell you products?

How do you communicate the relevance of your product’s capabilities to the real-world challenges your end-users face?

How easy is it for your end-users to see your products solving these real-world issues without having to communicate with a sales person?

How can you leverage your website to make easy the dissemination of your message and relevance of your products?

Think about these questions when crafting your next pitch on why an end-user should buy your products or why a reseller should sell them. Jumping rings of fire is cool, but when was the last time you did so?

Posted by on 07.07.2010 at 5:56am   Tags: , , , ,
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06.28.2010

The Golden Rule of Partnering

Selling via a channel is a fundamental part of business. Some organizations get it, some don’t. Those that do can clearly articulate why the channel is integral to their success, who the target customer is, what skill-sets their partners must have to be successful and when it’s appropriate to disengage from an unproductive partner. This finite understanding doesn’t happen overnight; rather it’s an ongoing evolutionary process.

The question I’m most often asked by organizations who are in the process of developing a channel is, “Where should we start?”  Realistically, before you can intelligently address questions about factors like market vertical, target customers, and internal organizational structure, you need to clearly understand that in order to justify the existence of a channel…

“Business generated by the channel must exceed your current margins in order to justify the effort”

Posted by on 06.28.2010 at 7:52am   Tags: , , , , ,
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06.18.2010

Questions To Help Right-Size Your Channel

Evaluating the selling channel is a continuous process. Following suit, below is a subsection of questions sales managers, directors of sales enablement and operations people should be continually thinking about.

  • Are the right metrics being used to evaluate the health of the sales channel?
  • How many under performing partners are members of the channel?
  • What do partners need to be successful?
  • Are we providing this needs in an easily consumable fashion?
  • Are we listening on the same frequency that our partners are speaking to us on?
  • How effective are the programs associated with recruiting, onboarding and nurturing partners?
  • Is the process for removing under-performing partners elegant or do we stick our heads in the sand and hope they’ll just fade away?
  • If we differentiate our partners by way of verticals how does that help them help their customers?
  • How can we get partners working with each other to improve their effectiveness while subversively bolstering our brand?
  • Is our channel strategy sensitive to the changing needs of our customers, partners and the market overall?
  • How does our channel differentiate itself from our competitors’?
  • What does it mean to have ‘enabled’ a partner?
  • What are the costs associated with enabling a partner?
  • Is our channel sized appropriately to close the amount of business we need it to?
  • Is our internal structure a help or hindrance to our channel’s success?

Posted by on 06.18.2010 at 12:23pm   Tags: , , ,
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06.03.2010

3 Simple Ways To Improve Your Presentations

The intrinsic power of a crisp and clear presentation cannot be overstated.  Communities both personal and professional thrive on the sharing of ideas.

When your presentations are clean, clear and coherent, you will:

  • Make it easy for your audience to focus on the idea, opposed to the tool being used
  • Be able to more easily mobilize your audience
  • Make better use of the allotted time

I’d like to share a few practices I’ve found beneficial when creating and delivering presentations:

1. Keep the Presentation Lean

This has nothing to do with slide count or duration. Deleting slides is not the objective. When analyzing your presentation, reengineer or remove overly wordy slides. Case in point: if your audience is able to read your presentation and garner 90% of its meaning, there is no point showing up.

You are the voice. Your frame of reference and your anecdotal stories are the show. The actual slide show is a framework to work from.

Effective presenters use the presentation as way of introducing talking points and providing the audience with visual stimuli. By all means, use graphs and charts where appropriate but don’t let them take over. Where appropriate, think about using descriptive pictures or even video or audio.

In a previous life, I had the pleasure of working with John Dragoon, who is the CMO of Novell Inc. He is a master of the keynote. Granted, being a great orator is part of his job but he’s also adept at communicating complex stories using slides with minimal text.

His level of proficiency is high, but achievable. The first step is assessing, honestly, the quality of your presentation. Use these questions to start things off:

  • Is your presentation designed to be read or presented?
  • Does the audience ask questions about points you haven’t addressed yet?
  • Role-reversal: Would your presentation bore you to tears?

2. Leave something meaningful

All too often, the leave behind is the exact same presentation that was just delivered. Don’t do this; you’’ll be squandering the opportunity to leave the audience with supportive information . Post-presentation supportive information is essential to the communication of your idea. Reason being, the average audience will only retain 25% of your information on the first pass. The implication, then, is that 75% of the information you present will be lost on the audience without an additional effort on your part. It’s essential to bolster the initial learning experience with supportive information if your ideas are to take root. (This fact alone sells the reason why on-demand or self-paced video-casts and recorded webinars are so powerful.)

Provide a digital copy of the presentation. The format and feel can remain the same but pack it full of links to case studies, articles and videos. You might even want to consider offering it as a podcast or self-paced video.

3. PowerPoint is not the Holy Grail

Microsoft PowerPoint has become the standard for presentations far and wide. Rather than attempt to sell you on why you shouldn’t use it, I’d like to introduce you to some alternatives I’ve used effectively.

OpenOffice Presenter:

Think of it as an application with a similar look and feel to MS PowerPoint but at 10% of the cost. I enjoyed the ability to open PowerPoint presentations without jumping through hoops. I especially liked the ability to create a presentation in OpenOffice Presenter and save it as a PowerPoint presentation. Lastly, I was pleased to not have to re-learn shortcut keys as they all translated from MS PowerPoint to OpenOffice Presenter.

Prezi:

Prezi is not a MS PowerPoint wannabe. MS PowerPoint is designed for a linear conversation. Rarely does a conversational presentation happen linearly. Prezi was designed for the non-linear presentation. I’ve used it in environments where the audience is looking for a brain-dump of information but is unsure what they want to cover first or where they want to end up.

MindMeister:

Mindmeister is a brainstorming application otherwise known as a mind map. Using MindMeister as a presentation tool can be a stretch for the linear thinker or for less conversational presentations. There are no secrets when using it. The audience can see your intentions and thought process. I enjoy this style of presenting, however this platform is not for the meek. If your presentation is less about volleying ideas and more about communicating a precise path, don’t’ use MindMeister.

Posted by on 06.03.2010 at 8:33am   Tags: , , , ,
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05.27.2010

The Art of Failing

Failure is a dirty word. It’s the elephant in the room that everyone sees but no one wants to acknowledge. Sir James Dyson considers it a natural component of problem solving. Donna Fenn thinks of it as a vital aspect of American entrepreneurialism. Honda reveres it as the secret sauce of success. I see aspects of the art of failing in learning.

Understanding and success (for the persistent) are the yield of failure. Don’t believe me? Watch as a child learns to walk or ride a bike. Each misstep, each time they topple over, is another opportunity to figure out the wrong and right way of doing it. The sum of these experiences is success.

Learning how to deploy and maintain a software platform or application is no different. The basics are critical but understanding the how and why is what separates adequate administrators from rock-star administrators, who are cool under fire.

The fundamental difference between the two groups is, the rock-stars treat failure as an opportunity to learn. Each failure builds support for techniques that work and understanding around techniques that don’t. To no surprise, this makes them more knowledgeable about the systems they administer and ultimately more valuable to the organizations to which they belong.

Not all environments are forgiving enough to promote, allow or even believe in the art of failing. Likewise, if it’s unacceptable to fail in real life for the sake of learning where is failing ok? It’s ok in the classroom.

Technical courses have become the perfect sandbox environment for administrators to hone their skills. Tools made popular by VMware allow instructional designers to build courses and take snapshots of the classroom environment at various stages of the course. Snapshots enable students to attempt multiple fixes to a problem to ascertain which one works best, or if they know better than the instructor. If they completely break the environment or realize a proposed fix simply won’t work, they can open a snapshot from earlier part in the course. The benefit to the student is the ability to fail safely from multiple perspectives, multiple times without the pressure of a customer watching, a supervisor critiquing or missing a SLA.

Posted by on 05.27.2010 at 6:35am   Tags: , , , , , ,
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04.29.2010

Sales Enablement with Personal Context: A Winning Formula

Sales channel enablement is the process of training the members of the channel to sell and support a set of products and/or solutions. It’s an essential component of success for businesses, regardless of vertical, to cultivate and support a viable channel for the purposes of driving revenue.

The departments responsible for supporting the channel, spend a tremendous amount of time and energy assembling the right content and smartly organizing it. Too bad the neat and orderly organization of content is almost a complete waste of time.

The typical sales enablement experience progresses like this, a sales person, or customer, enters a portal and is presented a menu of all the available educational material. Often there’s an RSS capability that enables them to receive an alert when content is added or changed. Largely, this mechanism of consuming content is cumbersome, time consuming and most importantly it lacks personal context.

Personal context is the key to providing a rich learning experience. Succinctly, it’s the presentation of supplemental educational content to an audience member based on their previous actions. This includes, but is not limited to, the frequency with which they’ve consumed content, the recency of this consumption, and the basic clickstream data of website visits. Taken as a whole, their digital actions form their digital body language.

The ability to analyze behavior and deliver pertinent content that corresponds with the audience’s implicit or explicit interests moves content delivery away from a pull-action model to a push-action delivery model.

The pull-action delivery model of learning is highly ineffective. It forces the audience—in this case the sales person—to be self-aware of what they don’t know. This is analogous to a shopping experience where you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, but you’ll know it when you find it. In this mode, you could be browsing for hours and from store to store. If you have the time, I suppose this might not be an issue, but who has that kind of time? We have an economy to support and deadlines to meet. Conversely, if you’re pressed for time, this ‘browsing process’ can be a nerve-wracking, highly inefficient experience that will probably end fruitlessly.

To apply this example to the behavior of sales professionals: if they are spending time browsing through your mountain of educational content, regardless of whether the content is readily available in easy to consume formats, or if it is neatly organization, they aren’t selling. To minimize their time spent toiling away in your content library, present to them content that is most relevant to their immediate needs. Be their personal shopper.

An effective personal shopper knows their customer’s purchase history and preferences, and is able to translate the subtle cues of what catches their customer’s eye into what they are most likely looking for. Effective personal shoppers thin-slice.

To truly enable sales people and technical people alike, it’s imperative to minimize their time spent searching for the right content and maximize their time spent consuming and applying it.

Posted by on 04.29.2010 at 3:15pm   Tags: , , , , , ,
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04.05.2010

Training Aligned with Database Marketing

Metrics and analytics are the ties that tightly bind marketing to training. Being able to analyze and distill your customer database into its finer components yields marketing collateral that is more contextually relevant and high impact. In short, your customer database is the key to enabling focused, solution driven marketing when used effectively.

A large facet of solution driven marketing is its ability to enable contextual 1:1 (or what seem like 1:1) conversations with your prospects and customers. Their challenges are the focal point of these conversations. Likewise, the most effective conversations begin with an identification of what their business issues are. Often times, this means helping the audience to articulate a problem they didn’t know they had. This is referred to as, ‘the discovery of latent pain’. It’s good practice to leverage anecdotal stories to further align your capabilities to the discovered challenges. This process leads to the proof point that you can successfully address the challenges they are facing. If you’ve executed this process correctly they’ll be enthusiastically asking you for the solution.

Being able to conduct these investigative conversations face-to-face to a receptive audience is not always possible. This is precisely where your database of customer contacts, leads and prospects comes into play. The list below is a general guideline of the refinement I’m referring to.

  • Position in the buying cycle
  • Industry Vertical
  • Geography
  • Company Size
  • Revenue
  • Products of yours they currently own

The aforementioned segments help in determining how to position marketing resources and collateral. Case in point, the business issues faced by a manufacturer can be quite different than those experienced by pharmaceutical organizations. In some cases the businesses’ issues align closely. In either case the marketing and communications aligned with either situation need to be articulated using the correct industry specific vernacular. Using pharmaceutical language or case studies with manufacturers or vice versa, regardless of how close their issues are, is a sure fire recipe for failure.

The opportunity to communicate your subject matter expertise via this type of marketing is boundless, or at least more so than in traditional marketing.  Traditional marketing paints with broader strokes, whereas database, solution based marketing lives in the details. The latter of the two creates an opportunity for you to shine as a marketer, I mean educator (or do I mean marketer?). The education you’re instilling is 100% focused on the prospect and their needs. It culminates with you providing them with the tools to verify that your product and services do what you say they can do. Execution of this order requires you to build training disguised as marketing, which succinctly helps to insert your product in the prospect’s environment for the sole purpose of solving an issue they knew they had or you helped them uncover.

To keep the prospect focused and intrigued, the associated training must be delivered in bite-sized, easy to consume, multidimensional formats. In addition, topics need to be condensed into their core elements and delivered via videos, podcasts, and smart landing pages. Automated follow-up emails should be incorporated to renew interest as well as pass along contextual tips and tricks where appropriate.

Interweaving training with marketing handily aligns outbound communications with the needs of the prospect. Addressing their leads in a fashion that puts their challenges first makes you more relevant, your marketing more effective and positions you as a business consultant.

Posted by on 04.05.2010 at 8:44am   Tags: ,
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03.30.2010

Creating High Impact Assessment Questions

Training and assessment questions go together like peas and carrots. Their purpose is simple, it’s to evaluate a learner’s ability to apply newly acquired information and skills to solve a particular problem. It’s a measurement tool. More times than not, they demonstrate the learner’s ability to memorize data points and recall them on command. Missing from the experience is the practical application of the newly acquired skill.

This intrinsic problem with typical assessment questions is unveiled when the learner attempts to apply the newly acquired skill in the real world and fails handily. As learning developers, how do we prevent this from happening? One solution is role-playing however this presents a laundry list of issues too long for this post. The solution that resonates with me is the conceptualization and deployment of better assessment questions. Karl M. Kapp, addresses this as well as provides a recipe for creating high impact assessment questions in his recent blog post.

I invite you to take a peek. It’s a good read and worth your time.

Posted by on 03.30.2010 at 6:59am   Tags: , , , , , , ,
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