Inspiration comes in many shapes and forms

As a business owner of a start-up, I am more motivated than ever to ramp, scale and grow my business.  I strive to be successful through my customers.

I have more than one vision for my company, and I think that is what motivates and drives me.

Throughout my career I have often had people ask me a few common questions so I thought I would take a little time to share my responses here so that others may use this information for their own growth.

What inspires me and where does my passion come from?  This is a question that I get asked a lot from colleagues, peers, and even business owners and executives.

Well, while there isn’t a simple answer I do have some things that I can share that may help others continue to maintain their motivation as they move forward.

1 – Inspiration – Recently I watched a series on TV called “The Men who Built America.”  It is an insightful look at the  industrial revolution and the trust companies (monopolies) that grew and thrived in the presence of incredible opportunities.  While the story has an underbelly of “breaking the backs of Americans” (not what I condone) – it also tells a story about how a few men built the infrastructure of what still touches a lot of our lives today.

So how did I frame my inspiration into words by watching this series – and why was it inspirational?

A – Carpe Diem – if you see an opportunity – GO. Don’t wait.  I learned the 5 troop leading procedures as an officer in the military and I still apply them today (look them up) but I do a mental risk assessment: what if, what if not, who is in the market, what do they do, what is missing, how can I be “DIFFERENT?”  Think, Act, Do.  I love Rockefeller’s approach to kerosene.  Everyone made it – his product was the same – but he “marketed” it differently and created an empire.  He didn’t wait for someone else to do it first.

B – Flexibility –  Be flexible and adaptable – and change with or before the market.  I love being in front of customers…why?  You see their needs (macro) before the market does.  When the analysts are talking about something, the problem has already been solved. Rockefeller created the first oil pipelines and nearly bankrupted Commodore Vanderbilt by being FLEXIBLE – and changed the face of both the oil and rail industries forever.  Ford later created a whole new market that leveraged one and competed with the other.  CHANGE.

C – Differentiation – I talked about this above in Rockefeller’s example – but it is so imperative that you drive / derive value through your customers differently than everyone else.  ME TOO – is me too little or me too late.  Many times in my career I was asked to help quote a solution that was put together by someone else…and my immediate answer was always “NO!!!”  Why would I stoop to “ME TOO?” (me too late).  I stood a better chance of winning by engaging – ripping apart (where possible) the other solution – and using my business experience to change (and solve) to better align with the LONG term goals of the organization AND win the deal.  Rockefeller was a chemist at heart and refined kerosene out of crude oil.  While everyone fought for drilling oil out of the ground, he focused on delivering “Standard Oil” kerosene to every household – and he became one of the richest men in America by doing this “different” thing.

2 – Passion – Where does my passion come from?

A – Childhood – I think where we come from and what we’ve experienced in life fuels the fire.  I know what it is to have absolutely nothing – and when I think about it, I never ever want to go back there – so a real fire burns inside. Contrast this with Dale Carnegie.  He started in the mail room and as an impoverished errand boy for Vanderbilt and he grew into one of the richest men in America.  Embrace who you are – and whatever fuels your passion.

B – The desire to succeed – Fear of failure (people ask)? I say – “no”  Fail to what?  No matter what, I won’t fail to a level of where I came from – so it isn’t a fear of failure – or I wouldn’t try anything.  Too many people get stuck in a position because of a fear of failure – to the contrary – I would say it is an overwhelming desire for “SUCCESS.”  J.P. Morgan risked it all on Thomas Edison – who was so transfixed on his blind passion around DC power – that he dismissed the young brilliant Tesla who worked for him – and was willing to GIVE HIM AC Power.  In the end, Tesla gave away all of his patents to Westinghouse to see his vision through.  JP Morgan’s ability to seize the day created a new company called “General Electric” that we all still know to this day.

C –  The overwhelming desire to learn – I truly enjoy learning new things.  If you look at my life and you will see “Frank the fiddling fireman.”  Someone once called me that at a young age because I seemed to have so many interests – that they said I would never accomplish anything if I didn’t focus.  WOW – if you let people hold you back, I promise they will.  What have I accomplished? Hmm…

– US Army Paratrooper – with many accomplishments
– US Army Aviator – Instructor Pilot – Standardization Instructor Pilot
– US Army officer (and scholarship recipient)
– Race car driver
– Motocross racer
– Musician/songwriter (closet 🙂
– Scuba diver
– Military ski instructor
– Multi-lingual
– Successful technologist
– Successful salesperson
– Marathon runner
– Father of three wonderful children
– and a LOT more…

I don’t mean these as a narcissistic brag – I post them so that you can see the diversity of the accomplishments.  Some people would take any one of these their lifelong dream or accomplishment.  I just looked at them all as a “bucket list”  and learning experiences.

In my professional career today – I still have that overwhelming desire to learn and grow…
– What are the needs of the market (customers?)
– Who are the competitors – how many?
– What do they do and why?
– Where are the gaps?
– How can I be different?
– What is the payoff versus the investment?

VISION – Self-vision to be more exact.  I have a “vision” that is the core of who I am.  I have my belief system and my values that drive me – and when I waver from them is when I fail myself and other people.  That’s just some personal insight…

But at the core of my “self-vision” I always come back to one word…. “DIFFERENT”

I don’t “dare to be different” for the sake of being different.  I have always looked at the ways I was taught to do something – the way other people did stuff – the way things “have always been done” and I looked for ways to do them differently for me and the people around me.

We are ALL unique – but at what level?  Create your own uniqueness – and make it your own – that is some of the best advice I can give anyone looking to grow.

As I continue forward on this journey of building out “Call To Action” – know that I won’t settle for being a  “me too…”

If you are an entrepreneur, a salesperson, or someone just starting your career and you read this – and it gives you a little direction or insight – then I did my job in writing this.

I spend a lot of my time talking to IT Reseller business owners and I am starting to hear a common theme – “there is a major disconnect between our sales and marketing departments.”  As I dig deeper into the root of the problem, I hear them say “marketing creates leads, but our sales team does a poor job of converting leads into opportunities, and we aren’t sure why.”

With a little probing, It does not take a “rocket surgeon” to figure out that there is a fundamental alignment issue between sales and marketing departments, and at the root of the problem is the fact that they are usually run autonomously.

To date, Marketing has performed three roles for most Technology resellers:  Content Development, Brand Awareness, and providing cool trinkets that we can give to our customers (and occasionally our kids).  Is it time for a paradigm shift?

2013 has been dubbed “The year of the CMO.” We see more an more companies putting together big budgets for “Big Data” solutions that will align their market strategies with their sales performance metrics.  Can you say “business analytics and intelligence?” IT resellers are chomping at the bit to get engaged in the “Big Data” conversations with their customers because it gives them an opportunity to sell more infrastructure.  But are they taking advantage of these new “business trends” within their own business? Do they drink their own energy drinks?

One of the most common questions I ask business owners is “how many active buying accounts did you have last year?”  The common answer is shocking.  Most don’t know and cannot produce the answer.  Hummmm

Probing further, I typically ask for the segmentation of technologies they sold (by vendor) and where the greatest demand is coming from within their customer base and market.  Ironically enough, we can get closer to that answer, but only because the Manufacturers provide this data back to the reseller. Again – hummmm

So where should marketing fit into this equation to provide greater value?

I believe this is a two part answer:

1 – Data – I won’t call it “Big Data,” but marketing has to start collecting and “USING” data about their customers to be effective.  Who is buying what?  What have you quoted? What have you sold?  What does the customer have in their environment? What can we learn from this and what should we be talking to them about?

2 – Sales AND Marketing – Marketing has to get “closer” to sales – and should have a “process” for moving customers through the “chasms” of engagement.  Simply stated – build awareness and implement ways to measure their interest or “consideration” and build a framework for engagement with your sales teams.

What tools should we implement?

CRM – When I was a sales manager, I used to say to my sales reps – “if you don’t have a coach in your customer’s environment, get one!” when discussing customer opportunities.  My newest saying to business owners is “if you don’t have a CRM system, get one!”  And be sure to integrate all aspects of your business, including marketing and all available customer data.  CRM is not the magic bullet for a business, but it is the first step in building visibility into the business.

Data – Every week your business is, or should be, producing quotes, doing registrations, conducting discoveries, and hopefully selling stuff to your customers.  HOW useable and available is this data to the business?  If you are letting this data drip through the cracks, well, you are missing out on a lot of opportunities – both current and future.

Most marketing departments are measured at a 10:1 investment level.  Every $1 put in, should produce $10 in return.  If we cannot answer the question of “how many buying accounts we had last year,” do we think we are effectively going to hit that 10:1 return?

The only plug I will put into this post for our company is…We have a Methodology and tool-set to solve these, and many other challenges that IT resellers are facing today.  You can find out more by e-mailing us at results@call-to-action.com

I do hope the article is useful insight above and beyond our plug, and that you find insight that you can use to scale your business.

Why is Desktop Virtualization such a hot topic for CIO’s today and how do I take it to market?  How you take it to market can have a major impact on you and your vendors.   See the forest from the trees?

Many resellers are struggling with selling Cloud Architectures, specifically Private Cloud architectures.  Gartner moved Cloud down to #10 on the CIO top 10 priority list for 2012, and atop the chart was BYOD and mobile devices, what I like to term – Desktop Virtualization, phase 1.

Many of the vendors have very robust and unique solutions to support these two technology focus areas, but we see a mash-up between the two. Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Converged Infrastructure, scalable, elastic, dynamic, robust, time-aware, remote, and even billed back.  These are the attributes we should be thinking about as we ponder Desktop Virtualization…. WHAT??? Frank – that sounds like Cloud – not desktop virtualization…. Ok – you’re right – but only partially.

Desktop Virtualization and Cloud Computing should go hand and hand and should be a part of the same conversation, and here is why…

If you fully embrace desktop virtualization, then you will eventually look to build out an infrastructure to support 100% of your users 24x7x365.  But your users don’t work 24x7x365…so why should you burden the organization with the cost of an infrastructure that is only going to be used essentially 35% of the time?

Here is your wake up call – it’s technology — think Jet Liner – not your personal car.  When airplanes sit idle, airlines loose billions.  The same should be true when you think about your compute environment.

MOVE your customer’s application usage cycles to the appropriate time of day and take advantage of that “utility compute” time.  Use OUR method – yes – if you say this – please give us credit- TIME OF DAY COMPUTING!!!  Move your Back-ups into a time slot and retire those legacy systems.  Dedicated servers for Batch-processing, WHY?  ANY type of historical report generation – move it…move it, move it move it.  Use Automation and Orchestration tools to take out the human intervention and leverage ITSM processes to manage the environment.

And most of all – pick the right architecture that provides FlexAbility and scalability for the years to come.  Don’t look at a converged infrastructure, look to a unified architecture that is built to suite all of your needs.  And find the right business partner that can deliver the results you desire.

Are you a reseller looking to take cloud to market?  Call us – we know how to REALLY make it happen and accelerate your business through a solid – CALL TO ACTION.

See results in 7 weeks that will impress your business AND your Vendors.

This week, I finished up a series of road-shows and it was reminiscent of “engagements” that I did years ago…

Customer Event 14Nov12 Atlanta

As I sat down and started building my message and the presentation, I remembered how important Data Center Optimization really was, and how often it was left behind.  The framework that I created years ago still lives on as a guidepost to the areas that must be addressed if you are going to build a true cloud strategy and achieve the results that so many desire.  Ironically enough, I can’t stop myself from thinking, what’s old is new again!

Let’s start this conversation with what is relevant with every IT manager, at any level (C,V,D,M), and that is always top of mind…COSTS.  Cost constraints in IT are always top of mind, unless you are in the business of technology/technology is your business.  “Do more with less, do more with what we have…just do more, but with no additional budget…” these are the conversations that we commonly hear through-out the year, especially during budget planning seasons.

The inverse to these conversations, which I am still glad to hear happen, are “IT – keep us competitive, give us speed to market, allow our users the ability and freedom to roam and work on their time to support our customers…”  All while maintaining security, reliability, and up-time.  These are the conversations we should all love to have, because they support the health and growth of the customer, beyond the day to day cost and operational conversations.

Conversations like this bring cloud, specifically PRIVATE CLOUD, to the front table as companies look at ways to provide the business with the flexibility they so badly desire.  Confused on Private Cloud (I find sales reps are…)  Private Cloud is the “intersection of virtualization and cloud technologies…” Tom Bittman, VP Gartner – has a great video to frame this…

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“It’s a Private Cloud we desire, but it’s a legacy infrastructure that holds us back…” Frank Ball

With the advent of High-Availability and Fault Tolerance in Virtualization tools, more and more organizations are migrating physical work-loads to virtual.  As they “cross this chasm,” they are looking forward into the future for Automation, Orchestration, and self-service models to support the business (aka – Private Cloud).

But herein lies the problem.  Most companies jumped feet first into this pool called “virtualization,” and they forgot a lot of things along the way.  Left behind were critical areas of savings that could have benefited the organization and potentially funded the acceleration of the “Journey to the Cloud…”  Combine that with aged infrastructure that is not “Cloud Ready,” and IT services, processes and even people that aren’t aligned appropriately.  Well, we seem to have one foot stuck in the past as we try to look forward to the future.  Not only is it costing us a LOT of money to support all of this “stuff,” but we aren’t really giving the business what they asked us for to begin with.

The 7 areas of Optimization?

1 – Applications
2 – Operating Systems
3 – HyperVisor Selection
4 – Platform Selection
5 – Networking and Security (virtualization and consolidation)
6 – Storage (virtualization and consolidation)
7 – Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning

These areas need to be addressed when we first set out on the path to virtualization.  Not just for cost saving, but to gives us the foundation to be able to provide true self-service models through Automation and Orchestration.

But most of us grabbed a hyper-visor and starting “playing” with workloads to solve a specific problem…Data Centers/Infrastructure was growing at an alarming rate, and we were running out of space… So we looked to virtualization to solve our “platform consolidation” problems.  Although servers were a big part of the equation, they weren’t the only piece to consider.  We still needed to address the “pipes, plumbing, and hot water heater.”

Network Consolidation and virtualization can contribute a 25% cost savings by migrating from “old to new.”

Storage Consolidation and virtualization can contribute a 50% cost by migrating from “old to new.”

Whether you are a VAR or a Manufacturer reading this posting, you understand the fundamental challenge…I need to get me more market-share for my products and services while customers grapple with this confusion in the market place.

I agree – and I also think that it makes “Call To Action” incredibly relevant to your business.

If you are a business partner and your reps aren’t having these types of conversations with your customers…well, chances are your competition is…  Put 50 target customers in a room and let us have this conversation “with” you.  Let us take you on a journey with your business partners to build quantifiable opportunities that are ready to engage and buy from you.  Let us expand your opportunities and investments.

Consider this…

Are your sales reps able to understand these items in a way that they can have a framing conversations with your customers, and create net new opportunities?  Let us make them a part of this process so they can “learn, see, do.”

The two events we just completed yielded a 50% hit rate on our “Call To Action” for our customer.  That is 50% of the participating customers opting in for a “Journey to the Cloud,” being delivered by our customer (a reseller partner).  Our service just generated net new opportunities for our customer’s vested manufacturers that they will be able to develop into “registered” deals, providing more margin while blocking their competition.  Additionally, they have tighter processes in place to pursue these opportunities with a higher-rate of success then they did just 7 short weeks ago.

We captured what the customers “want to hear about next” – solidifying investments and opening up new pathways for future investments.

Let this be your “Call To Action.”  Opportunities are there, ready and waiting for you.  Are you ready for them?

http://www.adcapnet.com/blog/adcap-journey-to-the-cloud-event-held-in-ft-lauderdale-nov-13/

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Today I embark on a journey.  I start my first round of customer speaking engagements this week and I am incredibly excited.  This message may seem a bit cryptic – well – it is a bit.  If I just gave you all of my knowledge then you wouldn’t need me, right?  Well, partially.  I think I bring a tremendous amount of experience to any table, but the ability to drive and action the knowledge is the real value.  The truth is, I want to paint a small picture here, and keep this interesting.  If you want to know more, call us, engage us, and build a Call To Action for your business!  In the mean time….

To start with, we are already over 110 registrations for the 2 events, a brilliant accomplishment within itself.  Putting together a video invite that sets the stage and gives enough of the story to build excitement is a wonderful tool to leverage.  It also helps when the speaker provides expert commentary for the audience to absorb.  We have aligned our vendors, built awareness around our messaging, and created some real excitement up and down the channel relationship.  It’s the magic of having a process built methodology.  These things don’t happen by accident!

110 registrants over 2 markets, driven in just 3.5 weeks.  That is amazing.  Now comes the next big task.  Maintain the attendance and reduce the drop off rates.  It’s all about the touch.  Today the sales teams are pounding the phones with teasers on the messaging and promoting the speaker and their new “differentiated” processes.  Yes, maintain the level of touch and continue to build the awareness with your customers.  Fill the room – and then let the hunting begin!!!

Call To Action.  Yes, it’s all in the name.  Tomorrow will be all about the Call To Action.  How do you enhance your value chain – a solid, easy to understand, actionable, Call To Action.

Leverage.  Yes, you have to extend yourself.  You need leverage.  It’s what I have learned after all of these years…how to leverage.  Opportunities come in many shapes and sizes.  We will be leveraging many opportunities for my customer to continue to grow.

On an amazing journey…

So much more to follow