Since we participated in Jack Derby's Entreprenuer Launchpad program through the Providence RI Chamber,  I have been getting his monthly news letter and unlike most long winded blog type emails I get, I actually take time to read his because he always has a good story or insight for managing our business in a way that will enable us to deliver on our promis to our customers of better, faster and greater value. This is the part that stuck out for me this month.

Hunting, Farming & Tracking will never be more important.

Everyone in Sales knows about the concept of dividing your sales functions into two different camps-Hunters and Farmers. It's our experience, that while most everyone understands the concept, few actually practice it formally and consistently. To the managers who question the tactic of dividing your salesforce into different functional selling teams, it should not a surprise to anyone that 2009 will be a year when saying "no" will be the norm for all new prospects. All the more reason that you should think about focusing your sales management efforts to identify and reward trained hunters who actually enjoy the highly organized process and the excitement of the hunt.

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Ok I know it has been a while but my standard excuse is that I have been busy working... well is this not always the case? :-) Well things should be better now that we are on a roll with our new project management team and the fact we have resolved a few internal projects that are going to free up my time to get in here more often...

Our new SEO guru Freedom Flynn sent me this article

and I found it to be very interesting and worth you all taking a look: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4416/Inbound-Marketing-the-Next-Phase-of-Marketing-on-the-Web/?source=email_PM1208

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In the midst of all that has been going on here I have been meaning to post some links and info that I have found interesting. The first was an article about the trends in Social media and the growth in advertising dollars being spent. According to eMarketer, advertisers spent an estimated $920 million on social networking sites in the US in 2007, and are projected to spend $1.6 billion in 2008. Thisis encouraging news for folks getting in to growing their online communities and

it just shows the value of Social networking even if you do not push ads in the face of your visitors. http://www.mediapost.com/ommasocial/

This is just one example, Social networking is expected to grow to a 5 billion market by 2012 as per the graph I found in CRM magazine.

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This past week Sony and I had the great pleasure of participating in the Entrepreneur Launch Pad program sponsored by the Providence Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce. This educational series kicked off with a three day “boot camp” led by Jack Derby and George Simmons from the Derby Management Group and is part of a 6 month program designed to educate and introduce startup businesses to the Venture Capital and Angel investor funding community. This initiative is intended to stimulate economic growth for the RI business community. Perhaps I am bias as a participant but what an excellent idea on behalf of the chamber.

I have to say the program was excellent! We took away a lot of valuable information and met some wonderful folks. This was set up as a workshop where the lectures by George, Jack and others provided insider information on how to hone our pitch and fill in the voids of information required to improve our focus and solidify the vision and factual information in our business plan as it relates to the funding community. What helped make it powerful for me was the workshop setting with 16 other startup businesses that are going through some of the same strategic and growth challenges that we have been going through. I know there will be a lot of homework over the coming months since they unraveled so much great info to digest and apply but well worth the effort. This program has the potential to be just as it is intended by its very title, a “Launch Pad” for growth and success.

Quick overview:

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It has been a very eventful couple months. We are in the process of launching three NEW major portal projects based on our JoomlaCRM platform. Our JoomlaCRM platform features a large collection of built in social networking components and is integrated with a suite of robust

eCommerce and Customer Relationship Business Management tools (CRBM). Our demo is live finally at http://www.joomlacrm.com/.  Feel free to stop by and watch this presentation take shape over the coming months. We are excited about this new integrated bundle because it allows us to deliver feature rich systems, in shorted deployment times with a greater value and return on investment to the customer. Having a flexible framework pre bundled allows us to offer greater value in training, consulting and content configuration and development.

The first of our projects has come together in record time due to the great collaboration and synergy we were able to get between the customer the Client and our development team. Typically projecets of this magnitude can take up to a year to build out and configure content. However this project has been built in a fraction of the time. The new portal at http://www.bavc.org/ which will be live as of July 1st  leverages many of the deep features built into our Joomla + CRM social networking community platform. This portal offers a myspace meets youtube type of user community since BAVC interacts with a diverse constituency but has many event registration and eLearning tools as well. This JoomlaCRM portal framework is complimented with a beautiful design by Airbag industries and solid template coding by our expert Joomla! development team. We built over 30 custom modules and will have two unique template designs once the second phase of the project unfolds over the coming months.  In addition we integrated a unique class registration and event management system.

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