Part of the process of writing blogs, is reading a lot of other blogs, posts and articles. Over time I have found some interesting phrases/thoughts that I think need more discussion. Some are brand new while others are older having just resurfaced recently.

So here they are:

“The Best Time to Call Me is Email”

- Joe Chernov, VP Content, Hubspot

source: @jchernov twitter

Joe Chernov Tweeted this great phrase in October 15, 2013 and garnered him over 1,400 Retweets which I think speaks volumes of the appeal of this statement.

I think we are kidding ourselves to think that email is dead - email is alive and kicking. It still is the preferred business communication channel, and how I interpret what Joe said, is that we (humans) favor asynchronous communication more than ever. Think of the recent rise of social, messaging, and even chat apps with asynchronous half-lives (e.g. Snapchat).

Why asynchronous? We are so inundated with communication and messages, we just cannot keep up, process and respond in real-time. Unfortunately today, you have to earn the right for synchronous communication.

And you can quote me on that

“Every Organization Needs Intrapreneurs”

- Julio Viskovich, VP Marketing rFactr, Top 30 Social Sales Influencer

source: intrapreneurshipconference.com

Intrapreneur was a concept that that first established in a paper in 1978 by Gifford Pinchott III. In a more recent blog post (April 2014) by Julio Viskovich, he defined an intrapreneur as:

“…a person within a company that is given the freedom and resources to to initiate projects, business ventures etc.” (read: act as an entrepreneur)

This post got over 16,000 views and almost 1,000 likes on LinkedIn alone. I think it is a powerful concept, because large businesses need to keep up with the pace of change, and “reinvent” themselves without blowing up their current business. I feel intrapreneurship is a great way to experiment and speed up growth in the enterprise.

However there is a downside for startups. These intrapreneurs start acting like mini-Enterprise VCs - trying many new solutions in pilots and across multiple business processes. In the past you didn’t get to the enterprise until you were a more mature business, but now with this “slush fund for experimentation”, you can give startups a false sense of product market fit. Maybe this is one reason why the series A has become the new seed, and the series B the new A. 10 enterprise “customers”, may just be 10 short term pilots in today’s intrapreneur-lead-enterprise-world.

“The Mechatronics of Sales and Marketing”

- Steve Woods, CTO, Nudge, Bestselling Author

source: chiefmartech.com

“Mechatronics is a multidisciplinary field of engineering that includes a combination of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, telecommunications engineering, control engineering and computer engineering. As technology advances the subfields of engineering multiply and adapt. Mechatronics’ aim is a design process that unifies these subfields” (Wikipedia).

Steve Woods sees a direct parallel to what is happening in the multidisciplinary field of sales and marketing.

Everyone is trying so hard to develop the holy grail of automated buying processes, we have forgotten that customers sometimes just want to talk to someone. And with all due respect to the recent “rise of the inside sales rep” (a role I do really believe in), what I am seeing is still just better, cheaper, volume-based activity.

SiriusDecisions recently came out with a report (a study of 1,005 B2B buyers) that indicated 85% of buyers had positive interactions with a sales person throughout every stage of the buying process.

Mechatronics works for engineering, but it can only go so far for sales and marketing. Because the ultimate goal is to develop a trusted relationship with your customers. How does trust get subdivided and then unified? It doesn’t. Trust can only be earned if the relationship comes first, and the transaction is second.