Posts Tagged ‘http://activegarage.com’

What’s your ante?

by Himanshu Jhamb, Mar 1, 2010

Poker is about making wagers. You need to pay up to get in the game and which table you play depends upon how much you want to ante up. Life and business are no different. Evaluate what table you are sitting at. If the potential payout is not going to help you reach your goal, you need to quit that table you are at and move to a table where the payout is large enough. Quitting is easy to do, but make sure you have the required skills to play at a high stakes table. more…

Change Management #6 – Processes: Two tips for refereeing business rule changes

by Gary Monti, Mar 2, 2010

To say that bringing change to an organization will be challenging is a gross understatement. You may feel like Sisyphus rolling the huge rock uphill only to see it roll back down again. Your success at this is predicated on two components: What to do and How to do it. more…

Are you moving forward or drifting in your life?

by Vijay Peduru, Mar 3, 2010

If you examine your life, you may find areas which are not the way you want them to be. For instance, you may be stuck at the same position in your career. If you analyze why, you will find out that you are simply reacting to situations and not producing the situations you want to be in. You can rectify this if you learn how to be the “cause in the matter”. more…

Social Media and making a $1 Billion movie: Avatar

by Deepika Bajaj, Mar 4. 2010

Avatar is a phenomenal movie and it is setting a new standard for movie makers. Nevertheless, Social Media had a role to play in its box office success. Avatar, through its own Facebook and Twitter pages spread the word all over the web. The red carpet premier was broadcast live to web audience. These were capped by the interview the movie director, producer and the lead actors gave on MTV.com in which they took questions from internet fans. That is Social Media for you! more…

Do you have the tools you need to write a book?

by Roger Parker, Mar 5, 2010

Writing is a craft and yes, writers need the right tools too. Apart from a variety of low-tech tools you can get at office supply stores, writers need some high-tech tools like Mind mapping tools, Keystroke substitution software and speech recognition software. You also need to gain mastery of the word processing program you use. Read the article and take a free online evaluation to test your knowledge. more…

Magesh is an accomplished software professional focused on building enterprise value through creative use of technology. Magesh enjoys working with people and is passionate about bringing out the best in everybody to achieve results that are larger than the sum of individual accomplishments.

Tagged as: active garage, business, Business Management, Business Strategy, Change Management, deepika bajaj, gary monti, himanshu jhamb, http://activegarage.com, Magesh Tarala, roger parker, Social Media, vijay peduru, Writing for Business

There are many ways others can help you write your book. You don’t have to write every single word that appears in your brand-building, nonfiction book! Many of the leading author brands in business and publishing involve authors who have shared their writing responsibilities with others.

There are a lot of reasons for this, and the idea of involving others in writing you book shouldn’t be viewed as a “cop out” or lessening of your responsibility to produce the best possible book.

Advantages of involving others

Although there are many advantages to working with other, the two most important are perspective and efficiency:

• Perspective. When you involve others in writing your book, you can produce a richer, more fulfilling book. Others can bring new experiences, ideas, information, perspectives, and talents to your book. This is true whether you work with other experts in your field, or involve your market in writing your book.

• Efficiency. Working with others, you can bring your book to market faster, giving it a head start against the competition. Working with others also gives you more time to spend marketing your book, building market anticipation and creating marketing partnerships with others in your field. Effectively marketed good books will outsell poorly marketed great books!

As the lead author, you are not abdicating your responsibilities. This will still be “your” book. You are the visionary who had the idea for the book, you set the standard, and you’re still responsible for the quality of the book.

Consider yourself the captain of a ship. The captain doesn’t do everything needed to take an ocean liner from New York City to Athens. The captain sets the goals and performance standards while delegating nearly every other task to others; running the engines, keeping in touch with the home office, maintaining crew discipline, running the engines, navigating, cooking, and serving drinks.

Your book will be as strong, or as weak, as the leadership you provide and the mentoring you offer to others involved in your book.

With others involved, you’ll still get the majority of the credit, but your book may be a better one (in terms of perspective) or one that appears sooner backed-up with better pre-publication marketing and visibility.

Options and alternatives

There is no “one way” to write a book with others. Your job is to identify and fine-tune a process that works for you, one that can be replicated over and over again as you expand your book title into a series of successful follow-up titles. Here are the basic choices:

• Co-authors. Like marriages, co-author situations can be really great, or they can turn into a nightmare. The range of possible co-author relationships is great, ranging from full partnership to work for hire situations. When you research co-authored books, watch for clues in the way the authors’ names on the book cover: “and” implies a partnership, or near partnership. But, when you see “with,” the name that follows is typically a “follower” or a “work for hire” craftsman.

• Ghostwriters. The names of ghostwriters generally don’t appear on the book cover, although they often appears in the author’s Acknowledgments. Ghost writers perform their magic through a process that involves interviewing the lead author, independent research, and a back-and-forth review cycle.

• Assistants. Many authors involve freelancers to save the author time by researching details and summarizing results, providing the author with information to weave into the narrative of the book.

• Crowdsourcing. Many books are based on a strong premise, backed-up by anecdotes, case studies, and interviews with either other experts in the field, or by customers, clients, and end-users. An excellent example of this is Books like Mitchell Levy’s 42 Rules for Driving Success with Books, based on case studies and stories submitted by authors who have profited from writing a book.

Making the right choice

The right choice involves identifying your goals, choosing the right option, and then structuring the relationship in a way that reduces opportunities for problems down the road.

1. Identify your goals. Know what you’re looking for. Are you looking for a “hand off” situation where you will have little involvement with the writing of the book, beyond setting the goals and creating a table of contents, or are you looking for assistance on specific chapters? How visible do you want the relationship to be, i.e., are you looking for a “with” or an “and” situation?
2. Choose the right option. If you’re looking at possible co-authors, focus on compatibility and the long-term. Several interesting perspectives emerged in a Published & Profitable interview with Bob Bly and David Meerman Scott. One of the points Bob mentioned was that “marriages of equals” often didn’t work as well structuring a clear “who’s the leader and who’s the follower” hierarchy. Both recommended looking for co-authors with established author platforms and reader followings to jump start your book’s sales.
3. Structuring the relationship. Handshakes are not enough. Although it’s impossible to anticipate every eventuality, your co-authorship agreement must address rights and responsibilities. For example, if you’re considering working with a co-author, what happens after your book appears? Who has primary marketing responsibilities? Who pays for the website? Whom will the media interview? Who has first rights to speaking and consulting engagements? Who can prepare spin-off products, like e-courses, “train the trainer” programs, and videos? What rights do ghost-writers and researchers have to their research after your book appears?

The big takeaway

The big idea from this post is simply to explore all options. Find others who might be able to help you write your book. Explore your writing options. with an open mind and the recognition that the authors whom you respect the most and turn to for inspiration often were working in a group situation. There’s often a team behind a book, often a team in place well before editors and proofreaders get involved!

Roger C. Parker invites you to visit a special resource page for Author Journey readers. You’ll find growing list of special writing resources, including several mind mapping samples. You can also explore Published & Profitable’s Samle Content,  and sign-up for his Daily Writing Tips blog. His next book is Title Tweet! 140 Bite-Sized Ideas for Article, Book, and Event Titles

Roger C. Parker helps business professionals write brand-building, thought-leadership books. He’s written over 30 books, offers writing tools at Published&Profitable, and posts writing tips each weekday. His next book is Title Tweet! 140 Bite-Sized Ideas for Article, Book, and Event Titles.

Tagged as: active garage, author's journey, Communication, http://activegarage.com, roger parker, Write your Book, writing book, Writing for Business, www.activegarage.com

Every day our lives get more and more connected online which has made our lives easier, but at the same time, has put us more at risk as more of our sensitive information is stored online.  With IPv6 right around the corner, which will be able to support an almost infinite number of IP addresses, we will only be more connected, and therefore, more at risk.

On a personal basis, I’m the first to admit that online services such as banking, travel and email, to name a few, have made our lives easier.  On a professional basis, as businesses push more services online to expand their marketplace, conversely, they are also making themselves more susceptible to data breaches from hackers.  Hosting providers are pushing the envelope by trying to get their customers to accept cloud services: email, applications and storage to name a few.  Some of these providers such as Google and Amazon have been successful in selling their cloud based services to small business and have now started making headway in to the enterprise segment of the marketplace.  Their services also allow you to access your information anywhere you have web access.  Their services are great for non-core, non-critical applications that won’t impact your business in the event their service goes down and you are unable to access your applications or data. 

While every company is talking about cloud services, not many are acting on it.  According to a white paper published by Gartner called Hype Cycles of Emerging Technologies, 2009, the most hyped technology was cloud computing. 

Why is this technology “hyped” and not being accepted with open arms?  The hack against Googles intellectual property last month should give you a pretty good idea as to why cloud services are still vulnerable. 

If you decide to move in to cloud services, don’t push all of your applications online.  Start slow.  Test a non-critical application first, or store non-critical data in the cloud that will help off-load space on your storage platform.  If you lose the application or the data, you’ll probably be upset over this mishap, but your life and the business will move on.  From there, look at moving parts of your development environment online and start testing other applications to see how they perform online and how well you can secure the data.  When testing these applications in the cloud, always be skeptical of who will access your data and how.  Don’t move at the pace your providers want you to move at.  Move at the pace that you’re comfortable with and that will protect your intellectual property and your company’s (and customers) sensitive information.

In a Newsweek article recently published by Daniel Lyons called “Where Secrets Aren’t Safe”, he mentions, “Information is not at all like electricity.  Electricity is a cheap, dumb commodity.  Nobody wants to steal your electricity, and even if someone did, who cares?  Information, on the other hand, may be the most precious thing your company has.”

This article was contributed by Robert Driscoll, co-founder of Active Garage. You can follow Robert on Twitter at rsdriscoll.

Tagged as: active garage, business, Business Management, business planning, Business Strategy, http://activegarage.com, information, Intellectual Property, Robert Driscoll, Strategy, technology, www.activegarage.com

Securing your company or organizations network and/or data is more critical today than ever.  Unfortunately, too often we take it for granted and don’t even realize that our environment could be easily compromised.  The worst thing that any person in the IT department can do is ignore the potential risks to their environments.  When it comes to security, the three easiest remedies one could do is:

• Monitor your security logs regularly
• Constantly update and patch your software
• Train your staff and regularly remind them of the threats to your network and data

Instead of writing about security threats in a general manner, I’m going to focus on one area and how to possibly help mitigate it:  insider attacks.

A study conducted in 2008 by the Verizon Business Risk Team noted that of the 500 intrusions they investigated over a four year period, 18% of them occurred internally by employees.  Of that 18%, over half of the breaches were done by employees in the IT department.  While most breaches occur in larger companies where it can be harder to track employees, they can and will occur in smaller companies as well. 

There are pros and cons to the number of people who have access to your company’s critical data and network.  The pros to a larger group of people having access to your critical data and networks is continuity in the event someone should leave or something happens to someone.  The obvious con is that you have too many people who have access to your critical components.  The pros to having a smaller group of people who have access to this environment is that you minimize the risk for an impact.  The flip side is that if you minimize it so much that you entrust everything to one person with no one able to back them up, it’s just a matter of time before disaster strikes.  Take for instance when the City of San Francisco was unable to access their WAN because of a rogue network administrator who blocked entry to anyone.  The network administrator was the only one who fully understood the network and therefore they were the gatekeeper.

So how do we minimize or eliminate these risks?

• Have more than one administrator – but not too many.  Always have a continuity plan in place.  Not only for your data and your infrastructure, but also for those who have access to it.
• Have a stringent hiring process.  If it’s critical environments that the person will be in charge of protecting, do the appropriate background checks (criminal, credit, etc…) before hiring them.
• Constantly review and update your security policies as well as providing periodic training to your employees to remind them and keep them aware of the policies that are in place.

When guarding your organizations critical data and/or network, never put your guard down and never put too much trust in to just one person.  There must always be checks and balances.  What commonality exists in all security breaches?  Most of them could have been avoided through reasonable controls.

This article was contributed by Robert Driscoll, co-founder of Active Garage. You can follow Robert on Twitter at rsdriscoll.

Tagged as: active garage, Business Management, business planning, Business Strategy, execution, http://activegarage.com, management, Robert Driscoll, security, www.activegarage.com

The marketplace in 2008 and 2009 was unlike any other in the past 70 years.  Businesses saw their top line revenue drop overnight.  Access to capital dried up and continues to be difficult to get.  While organizations had to trim their workforce, they continued to “protect” their top talent.  I put the word protect in quotes because while businesses kept their top employees, they expected them to do more with less.  While the top employees cannot wait for the market to get back to “normal”, they are still hungry for opportunities, but still need a break from overwork and pressure.

Everyone is working hard to survive, but businesses need to be careful not to put too much pressure and strain on their top employees because when the economy recovers and companies start hiring again, if businesses aren’t careful, they will lose their top talent as they accept offers from competitors.  A company’s top talents are important assets and will help the company achieve its short-term goals during this recovery period, but just as important, during the growth period after this recession.

Most employees today are burned out as they’ve taken on more work, stress and responsibility.  Because of this, employees’ loyalties to their companies have diminished as they are looking, more now than ever, to take care of their concerns.

In a recent report by Gartner, senior executives identified retention of top talent as a key concern.  In a 4Q09 survey done by Gartner, they asked senior executives to identify their top 5 concerns for 2010, and attracting and retaining top talent as number four on their list.

In the report conducted by Gartner, they made the following recommendations for companies:

-          Clearly define your “top talent” – profiles, behaviors and skills

-          Assess the state of the top talent from (2) perspectives:

• Identify business areas where the top talent is sufficient to achieve short-term plans for recovery and return to growth.  At the same time, identify talent gaps or misalignment with business plans.
• Assess the attitudes, expectations and “climate” of your top employees.  Determine positive and negative attitudes, people and business functions at risk, and the nature of the risk.

-          Address your findings head-on and discuss these issues with your top talent.  Design incentive and reward programs to address any of these issues.

-          Conduct periodic assessments and adjustments to actions until your top employees and risk return to normal levels.

Whether you are a manager or senior executive in a large company or an owner of a small business, remember to take care of your top employees.  If you don’t, your employees will take care of their concerns which may not include you or your company.

—

This article was contributed by Robert Driscoll, co-founder of Active Garage. You can follow Robert on Twitter at rsdriscoll.

Tagged as: active garage, business, Business Management, business planning, Business Strategy, Communication, execution, http://activegarage.com, Leadership, management, Robert Driscoll, sales, Strategy, www.activegarage.com

As we enter this jobless recovery in 2010, it won’t be big business that will pick up the economy.  Once again, it will be the small business entrepreneurs.  News agencies and financial firms follow what the CEO’s of major firms foresee for 2010 to see when the light at the end of the tunnel will become visible.  What many people don’t realize is that small businesses employ over half of all private sector employees and generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years.  It is small businesses and entrepreneurs who will bring us out of this slump.

While the days of working for one employer during your professional career are long over, big business continues to squeeze more perks out of their employees to cut expenses. Almost a third of Fortune 1000 companies have now frozen their pension plans in an effort to control expenses. US wages and salaries rose at record lows according to the Labor Department in 2009.  Over the past 12 months, wages and salaries only rose 1.5 percent making it the lowest increase since the figures started to be collected in 1982.

Wages for non-managerial workers have fallen by 1.4 percent so far this year, according to an article in USA Today, and are on track for even further declines. The official unemployment rate has reached 9.8 percent, and when one takes into account discouraged workers and people who are underemployed, it is at 17 percent, possibly higher.  And for 2010, while more employers state that they will be hiring more employees, it’s nothing to write home about as it’s not much higher than 2009.

With the marketplace now changing faster than ever and forcing businesses to adapt more quickly, more employers will have to rethink their hiring efforts as they look to their employees to be more flexible as well.  This request from big business employers to employees for flexibility will be: increasing and decreasing work hours depending on demand; the continued request to do-more-for-less; continue to learn new skills.  How do you think employees are reacting to this?  According to a survey of 2900 companies done by Careerbuilder.com revealed that nearly a quarter of them rate their organization’s morale as low.  So what can you do during these tough economic times?  You can be thankful that you have a job and suck it up or you can make a change.

Recently a good friend of mine told me that he was considering quitting his corporate job in the northeast and moving to the mid-west to help a family member of his grow his small business and take it to the next level.  While he would initially be taking a pay cut, the opportunity for growth and exceeding his income today is enormous, but he worries about leaving his “comfortable” corporate job.  He called me to ask me for my opinion.  I told him that there are risks in working for a small business, or for that matter, helping to start one, but in today’s uncertain economy, there aren’t any more uncertainties working for big business as there are working for a small company.  The difference, I told him, is that there will be nothing more fulfilling than creating something that is his and being in control of his financial destiny.  I asked him what he’s waiting for and when he’s leaving to start his new journey.  I hope it’s soon.

So ask yourself, “Am I happy?” or, “Is my career/job fulfilling?” If not, then what are you waiting for to change it?

This article was contributed by Robert Driscoll, co-founder of Active Garage. You can follow Robert on Twitter at rsdriscoll.

Tagged as: Action, active garage, business, Business Strategy, Communication, destiny, entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, execution, http://activegarage.com, Leadership, management, possibilities, purpose, Robert Driscoll, Strategy, www.activegarage.com

How we use words in our day-to-day life, both in our personal and professional world, are very important.  Through language, we use words to convey our thoughts and feelings.  As we communicate with others, we need to be cognizant of how others are interpreting our words to ensure our message comes across the way we intended it to and get the reaction we want.  “Partner” and “opponent” are words that can used to describe the relationship between two individuals or companies in the marketplace, but their meanings are very different.

When most of us think of the word “opponent”, we think of our competitors or rivals in the marketplace.  We think about victory and defeat or winning and losing.  In the marketplace we are constantly trying to “beat up” our opponents.  “Aggressive” is the key word here.  Very few people can handle a tough marketplace and become successful.  The strong take advantage of the weak and the majority will quit never quite realizing what they could have made of themselves or their company.

For many in today’s marketplace, the attitude is, “Only the strong survive.”  Too often though we forget to ask ourselves if the goal is really to survive or is it to grow and use the knowledge you’ve gained to evolve?  With an adversarial attitude, the only thing that grows is yours and your competitor’s ego.  You could say that a person who has a “take no enemies” approach to business and has “accomplished” a lot, when in reality they might be over-stressed and are sadly unfulfilled as they are never satisfied and want to “conquer” the next task.  Succumbing to this opponent attitude is futile as your struggle is always with yourself.

Now, think of the difference in both your personal and professional life if you shifted from an opponent or adversarial role to a partner role.  When you do this, you stop looking at life as every man for themselves and instead you look at the skills you bring to the table along with those of your partners, whether they are your colleagues at work or other companies you work with.  The environment becomes one of increasing progress versus a mindset of kill or be killed.

A great partner learns to adapt to the environment they are in and recognizes the skill level of the other people they are working with and encourages everyone to work at their greatest potential.  Pushing and challenging your partners will be just as intense as when you were looking at the marketplace as full of opponents.  The difference though, is that instead of creating an offer by yourself, you learn to partner with others to create offers in the marketplace that have marginal value and that make you unique in the marketplace.

Changing your mindset from an opponent to a partner one can help in making you a trusted advisor to your clients as you seek to create solutions that are specific to their concerns and not developing solutions that differentiate you from the competitor who is bidding on the same contract.  A partner mindset will allow you create uncommon offers without having to think about what the competition is offering.  Addressing your clients specific concerns will make them feel like they are in a win/win situation and your clients will want to return to you again and again.

This article was contributed by Robert Driscoll, co-founder of Active Garage. You can follow Robert on Twitter at rsdriscoll.

Tagged as: active garage, business, Business Management, Business Strategy, execution, http://activegarage.com, Leadership, management, marketing, opponent, partner, possibilities, Robert Driscoll, sales, Sales and Marketing, Strategy, www.activegarage.com

You’ve developed your customer profiles and you’ve set up a meeting with your customer with an objective and an agenda.  So, how do you identify and qualify opportunities during the meeting?

The purpose of you meeting with your customer(s) is to indentify concerns they have, create an offer that takes care of these concerns and they accept, which in turn takes care of your concerns of meeting your sales goals for your company.  To help uncover current and future opportunities, start off with open-ended questions.  Use some of these questions to help you determine your customers willingness to work with you:

• Tell me about your vision for the organization.
• What are your plans to support that vision?
• What plans have you defined for each of these goals?
• What would you like to improve in the organization?
• What opportunities do you see in your marketplace?
• What process do you go through when you make decisions like this?
• Who besides yourself will be involved in the decision-making process?

As you ask these questions, be certain to understand how every issue impacts the organization.  As you ask each question and a concern is brought up, be sure to ask one of the following open-ended questions:

• What impact will this issue have on your organization?
• How do you measure/define the impact?

As you start having these conversations, you can start seeing gaps that exist between where your customer(s) organization is today and where they want to be.  Listening to your customer(s) and paying attention to their background of listening will allow you to create offers that are specific to your customer(s) needs that help fill these gaps.  These conversations in turn allow you to open your space of possibilities with your customer(s) for creating new offers.

This article was contributed by Robert Driscoll, co-founder of Active Garage. You can follow Robert on Twitter at rsdriscoll.

Tagged as: active garage, business, Business Management, business planning, Business Strategy, execution, http://activegarage.com, Leadership, management, opportunity, possibilities, Robert Driscoll, sales, Sales and Marketing, Strategy

You’ve been trying to get a meeting with a client for quite some time now and now you have one.  Now what?  In my previous post (Developing Opportunities), I discussed what you need to do when trying to identify and develop opportunities before you meet with your customers.

In this post, I’ll discuss how when you secure a meeting with your customer, it’s important that you set the objective and create an agenda so that both you and your customer clearly understand what you will be covering and to ensure that you have the right audience.  Setting the objective will allow you to seize and maintain control of the process as well as help ensure you set the tone to effectively gather the desired information.

As you state your objective in your meeting with your customer, it is important to let your customer know that you are looking for ways to measurably impact their business.  You can continue this conversation by stating that you are looking for opportunities to help them increase their revenues, control their expenses, increase their productivity and/or efficiencies.  To help you uncover this, the next step is to go over the agenda for the meeting.

In your agenda, the last thing you should talk about is your company.  In creating your agenda, follow these steps:

• It is important first to learn as much as possible about your customers’ organization.  This will help you not only understand their concerns, but help you create the best offer to meet their business needs.
• Next, discuss the criteria they will use to determine which provider is best for their company.  Do this to ensure that you provide them with all the information they need to evaluate your offer.
• Third, discuss the process the customer will be using to make a decision and their timeframes to ensure that you bring the desired information to your customer in a timely fashion.
• Finally, talk about your company and the products/services you can offer them and how it can help address their concern.  During this part of the meeting, it will help you determine whether or not your company has an offer that can address your customers concern(s) and whether or not your company could possibly be a good long-term partner for your customer.

Today, more than ever, employers are asking more from their employees.  Remember this when meeting with your customers and be respectful of their time.  Stating a clear objective and having a defined agenda will help you keep your customer(s) focused, ensure that they have the right audience for your meeting and in turn, further help you identify opportunities.

This article was contributed by Robert Driscoll, co-founder of Active Garage. You can follow Robert on Twitter at rsdriscoll.

Tagged as: active garage, Business Management, business planning, Business Strategy, execution, http://activegarage.com, Leadership, management, objectives, possibilities, Project Management, Robert Driscoll, sales, Sales and Marketing, Strategy

On October 29^th, the US Department of Commerce stated that the US economy grew in the third quarter for the first time in over a year, signaling the end of the worst recession in over 70 years.    Even though we are “out” of the recession, do you still feel like your customers are not buying and hesitant to move forward on projects?  Do you feel more and more pressure to bring in new opportunities for your company?  Unfortunately, regardless of the economic condition of the marketplace, as salespeople, we are required to perform as our company’s success is directly tied to our individual success.

In a previous post (What I Wish I Knew More About In Sales #2: Know What To Quit), I discussed how it’s important to learn when to quit opportunities so that you can focus more time on those that have a higher probability of closing.  Following this process in today’s difficult marketplace is more important than ever as it’s more difficult today to find qualified and real opportunities, but just as important to focus more on those opportunities that are realistic. 

In today’s post, I will discuss some basic steps that you can use to develop an ideal customer profile which are the business characteristics that your organization looks for in your customers to sell your products and services and to drive them to do so now. 

In developing the ideal customer profile, go through your list of accounts and try to answer the following questions for each one:

1. What does your product/service do?
2. What do your customers do in lieu of your product or service? 
3. If they are using a competitor’s product or service, what marginal value does your product/service offer that the competitor’s does not?
4. With your product/service, how would it improve your customers’ productivity, efficiency, security, etc…?
5. What characteristics would cause your customer to have/care about your product/service?
6. Without your product/service, who in the organization is likely to benefit if they were to have it (individual contributor through CEO)?

Going through your list of customers and being able to answer these questions results in:

1. A list of information to gather to determine where we have opportunities
2. Targeted contacts who will be interested in solving the problem

The next step is to gather information about your customers.  Decision makers are not necessarily the right contacts for gathering information.  In addition to looking at any sales history you might have and any research you can gather via the internet about your customer(s), you can also gather information from secretaries, receptionists, their sales people and their customers.

Once you have answered the questions above and gathered information about your customer(s), you are now ready to sell the appointment with a targeted executive and to truly start developing your opportunities.

This article was contributed by Robert Driscoll, co-founder of Active Garage. You can follow Robert on Twitter at rsdriscoll.

Tagged as: active garage, business, Business Management, business planning, Business Strategy, developing opportunities, execution, http://activegarage.com, Leadership, management, possibilities, Robert Driscoll, sales, Sales and Marketing, Strategy, www.activegarage.com