Author Archives: Dan Gershenson

Bold Prediction Time: When Will This Huge Technological Shift Happen?

I don’t just mean mainstream adoption. I’m talking about the point there’s a total switch-over. It’s a Shift when…

There are no more search engines to search for anything.
We have mobile apps and Siri-like functionality that pinpoints exactly what we want, when we want it.

There are no more desktops or laptops.
We have tablets for that.

Everybody stores their important documents, photos, video in the Cloud.

Nobody has separation of devices from “computer” to TV.
The TV is our computer and the computer is our TV. We do work and enjoy ourselves from the same screen.

We don’t have e-mail.
We text, we chat, we Skype/Hangout, we post publicly and privately on social media channels (oh yes, those are still very much around).

Speaking of which…
1 out of every 2 people in the world is on at least one social media channel.

Content is still important because we want to be entertained and educated. But here’s the kicker – the content is personalized on a 1-to-1 level while still allowing the company to scale upward. This is freakin’ tricky, I know. I didn’t say it was easy. I’m giving this major thought on the implications of this, time and resource-wise as we speak. I mean a step beyond people selecting or companies delivering whole eNewsletters but types of articles, videos based on what the reader wants and needs.

Our subscriptions aren’t just e-newsletters but material things.
We get new kinds of things mailed to us that we used to go shopping for in a traditional brick-and-mortar store. And if we don’t like it, we can send back. Like razor blades and gadgets and books and underwear. Because we trust that the brand “gets us” that much. It’s a new level of loyalty and gaining entry to it is awesome for marketers.

Trade shows become greater virtual experiences.
That way, we can attend a lot more of them vs. the traditional option.

Sure, I know many of us are doing these things. But of course, there are still search engines, traditional computers, separation of devices and folks scared of throwing their stuff in a Cloud. So even though there’s definitely a shift, obviously it’s not a complete and total one. And that’s what I’m talking about. I’d be curious on your take/bold prediction. As well as anything else you see happening during this great transition.

But make no mistake. The Shift will happen. All of it. It’s just a matter of when.

So what year does all this happen?

And as a bonus question, what are you doing about it now?

Hey Groupon, Can You Spare Some Culture Change?

While there’s been a lot written about the aftermath of Groupon’s IPO, falling share price and certain investors now leaving, the part of the story that’s getting lost a bit in the shuffle is how important a culture shift can be to a company’s trajectory. It’s no coincidence at all to me that Groupon’s struggles happened around the same time that its culture appeared to go through a fundamental change.

Up until about late last year, every other article about Groupon seemed to be about its loose dress code and vacation policy, its management’s quirky sense of humor, the transparent vibe, the customer service people who spent time at Second City, the actor who was hired to walk through the offices in a ballerina tutu.

So what happened?

In two words: Wild success. And ironically, believe it or not, those uncharted waters beyond the first big milestone can sometimes be a bad thing.

“It seems like the high echelons of upper management have forgotten their fellow employees. People are secretive. Shadow-like. Nobody talks to anyone. It’s like a high school.”

                                                – Glassdoor.com Company Review

We see this all the time in the Advertising world: Small agency with talented people and a cool culture gets outrageously successful, wins lots of new business, wins awards and earns great press. Then they get purchased by a bigger entity, which, of course, says, “We’re not going to change anything. We recognize why the agency we bought was successful and we don’t want to tamper with that success.”

It sounds promising when everyone is all smiles, handshakes and photo opps. Until some time passes and some elements slowly begin to change – not necessarily for the better. The culture that made the small agency great gradually melts away. Key players leave. You start to hear remaining veterans wandering the halls talking about the “good ol’ days” when so-and-so was running things.

 “Some employees who were bumped up to manager status in the hiring blitz have no idea what they’re doing. One is known to have admitted she ‘doesn’t like people’ and avoids most of our her staff, except her favorites.”

– Glassdoor.com Company Review

From an outsider’s point of view, it seems the very same pattern may have emerged here with Groupon.

 

Integrate Sales More into the Brand

Groupon is not unique in this circumstance – sometimes when I speak to companies, they refer to the Sales team as “those guys” off in some territory doing things that management hopes is the right message. But they’re never quite totally sure that Sales understands the “big picture” of what brand is aiming to achieve. This is where a lack of consistency can be hugely detrimental.

Think about how important this is. In many events, your people in Sales are at the front lines of telling your brand story. How many of them are all about making commission and how many get the bigger picture of what you’re trying to accomplish from a brand standpoint? Do your prospects/customers feel those salespeople are acting on their best interests?

In Groupon’s case, the directive from management seems to have been, “Close, close, close” without trying to customize very much for what their prospective merchants needed. It may be convenient for some to say that these merchants knew what they were getting into but did they?

If we’re to believe the comments of several current and former employees posted on employer rating site GlassDoor.com, it appears much from a Sales perspective at Groupon in the last year has been a mandate from management about the almighty “Bottom Line”: Making as many calls as possible, closing as many deals as possible and caring little about the merchant’s goals or well-being. Think that makes earning repeat business just a little difficult?

Some may make excuses in a “Hey, that’s a salesperson’s mentality for you” way, but I don’t buy it. It takes a special kind of salesperson to be able to speak to what your brand stands for, weaving it into their sales message eloquently. They can still close while delivering a message on point that leaves the prospective customer with a great impression of the brand for the long-term. Not just meeting the month’s quota.

Still, in that salesperson’s defense, it takes strong upper management with clear and constant communication to bring home this larger vision. If the only directive is “Always Be Closing,” a brand can get wrecked in no time.

Hey, where’s that foosball table we used to play with?

We have to give more credit to the role of fun and teamwork in a brand’s success. It starts from within, not from outside perception. I can’t help but wonder if that’s where Groupon has lost its way. If a company preaches the virtue of having a bold, irreverent environment, shouldn’t it see the merchants it sells to as part of a larger community where everyone wins, not just the employees? What about the customers who purchase a Groupon – shouldn’t those coupons be increasingly more personalized so we’re not being bombarded by random stuff that doesn’t apply to our life every day?

It’s not too late for Groupon to turn things around. But it’s going to take a clarified mission from the top, more consistent and attainable goals, transparency on career paths, an openness to employee feedback at all levels as well as working in the long-term interests of the merchant, not just pressuring them into the first deal.

At the end of the day, it’s about getting back to being the fun company that isn’t afraid to let its hair down in the name of team camaraderie – not just the one that’s trying to meet its numbers at all costs. Happy employees can be amazingly productive employees and great advocates. Nurture them. Now.

Deal?

5 ways you aren’t using LinkedIn (but should)

Create a profile. Ask people to connect with you. Update your account with new info.

Technically speaking, it may mean you’re on LinkedIn. But it isn’t really making LinkedIn work for you.

These three steps represent the basic, passive approach that the majority of businesspeople take once they join LinkedIn. In fact, some people don’t even get that far, merely entering the basics into a profile and leaving it as is for months at a time.

Which is a lost opportunity, considering the vast potential and promise it holds, particularly for entrepreneurs

“LinkedIn is the most effective business development tool since the advent of the cellular phone,” says Steve Fretzin, president of Sales Results, a national sales training firm. “In a time when gatekeepers and voicemail have all but eradicated the sales professional, inside connections are sometimes the only way through the door.”

That means entrepreneurs willing to dial it up a notch or two to switch their passive LinkedIn presence into a much more active one can be found more often, prospect for business more productively, leverage their network better and engage in true relationship building.

How? By using these five lesser-used but far more active tactics to power up your presence on LinkedIn:

#1: Rev up your recommendation acquisitions

By themselves, adding recommendations may seem passive, but I’m speaking more of the way in which you view and pursue them. Sure, you probably ask for a recommendation now and then. But every client/strategic partner/employer you have or have ever had a positive outcome with should represent a recommendation on LinkedIn. That’s right. Every single one. After all, shouldn’t someone who has benefited from your services want to say good things about you? Of course they should. This is perhaps the most underutilized feature of LinkedIn.

What’s more, recommendations may be more effective than anything else on your profile, according to Mr. Fretzin.

“A good analogy is how people choose a restaurant these days. We’re living in a time when people are more likely to trust the opinions of someone on Yelp or Urbanspoon than a critic’s review,” he said. “Similarly, on LinkedIn, we’d rather read the recommendations of others than only hearing what the person we are researching has to say. Why? Because we’d rather listen to people who are like us.”

#2: Are they looking at you? Then seize the moment.

When you upgrade to a LinkedIn Premium account, you can see all the people who have looked at your profile as opposed to only the most recent, which you see in the free version. What’s the advantage here? Without being creepy about it (“I saw you were looking at me!”), this represents an opportunity for potential follow-up as chances are good that person has some intent in looking for someone in your field or as a strategic partner.

#3: Optimize your profile for your target

Another advantage of LinkedIn Premium? You can see the search terms people are using to find your profile, which enables you to tailor your profile to incorporate the most popular terms. This goes beyond just tweaking your profile for the sake of appearing in search. It’s taking an active role in seeing how a specific set of search terms resonate with a specific set of people you want to attract more of.

#4: Search smarter and faster

Besides optimizing your profile to be found more easily, the other side of the search equation is in searching for your ideal prospect faster without restrictions. The Premium level enables you to save serious time by quickly zeroing in on prospects based on criteria such as seniority, company size, function, groups and more.

#5: Maximize activity with a warmer introduction

How often are you asked for an introduction to someone in your network?

How often do you ask a connection to introduce you to someone in their network.

Not much? You’re not alone. By themselves, cocktail hour networking and morning coffee chats may seem productive, but one of the biggest mistakes Mr. Fretzin sees people make is when they equate increased networking activity with progress – and becoming frustrated when relationships stall. A third-party introduction via LinkedIn can change that dynamic.

“The typical networker is only 10 percent effective at obtaining a quality introduction from someone they meet through networking,” Mr. Fretzin said. “Ninety percent of the time, people are just meeting people for meeting people’s sake. LinkedIn can take networking to another level when you leverage past or existing clients to get introduced to that person’s network at a high level.”

I’ll contend there are certain areas with LinkedIn that could allow for far more of a true business dashboard that incorporates a CRM, complete social networking, video conferencing and more. If and when it ever gets to that point, look out.

But let’s not wait for that evolution before evolving ourselves – because by turning the typically passive presence on LinkedIn into a more active one, we won’t just be standing out from the majority. We’ll be more likely to transform mere “Connections” into real relationships.

And isn’t that what we’re there to do?

The Dumbest Thing You Can Do On LinkedIn

LinkedIn isn’t for racking up as many connections as possible and turning people into a pack of baseball trading cards. At its best, it’s a way for taking the next step in a business relationship, forging a strategic partnership, getting educated from a trustworthy resource and/or introducing two parties that could be a fit.

It can also be a great way to share blog posts, presentations, groups, associations and bolster your personal profile. Nothing wrong with that at all.

That should be at least enough to start with, right?

Good. So Don’t Do This:

A) Make a connection with someone
B) Spam them via private message with your self-promotional garbage as the first or only method of communicating.

It’s called relationship building. Getting to know someone. Even if I have a need for your product or service, you do not deserve to be called back by anyone if you send a blanket email as a first form of introduction that does not appear to address their needs. They just gave you permission to connect with them and you decide that that gives you license to push ad messages to them?

Just one question for anyone who makes practice of such a tactic: Are you kidding me with this?

We are entering a time that will only demand greater personalization.
One-on-one communication will rule the day even more.
Consequently, identifying the best targets in the interest of time will be in ever-greater demand.
And the companies that can leverage these tools to get to that more likely target to have a customized conversation will find themselves ahead of the game.

Meanwhile, their competitors will send one message to all of their LinkedIn followers all the time, pat themselves on the back for their supreme knowledge of social media and brag in networking settings about how they’re really utilizing LinkedIn to work their network.

Bullcrap.

You’re advertising your own stuff and not getting to know your audience. It’s easy. It’s also lazy and, for many, largely ineffective.

To be clear, I’m not saying to stop sending out e-newsletters or e-mails or other pieces of communication that go to many people at once. I’m saying if I never met you before in my life, that would not be an ideal way to first meet you. Agreed?

I’m working on an article with the help of Steve Fretzin from Sales Results on the best uses of LinkedIn, including methods that aren’t merely of the passive variety. I look forward to sharing it with you very shortly.

In the interim, when you make a connection with someone on LinkedIn, see if the possibility exists for you to have coffee, breakfast, lunch or a drink after work. If they’re remote, could it be a Skype call or phone call? I admittedly haven’t done this every time with every one of my connections, but I’m aiming to up the ratio to be far more personal. That way, when I do have something to invite them to, hopefully they’ll have had at least one touch where we understood more about one another.

Having 5000 connections means nothing if you don’t get to know them.

Panera Cares baking up an evolved business model

“Being an entrepreneur is about seeing opportunity. It’s easy to write a check. But the real challenge for corporations like us is…what if we could solve some of these core problems too?”

– Ron Shaich, Founder, Chairman and Co-CEO, Panera Bread Co.

Sometimes when entrepreneurs talk about giving back to the community, it can feel as though it’s a convenient extra that’s good for PR or a team bonding day. Is it a nice gesture from that company? Absolutely. But it’s not exactly baked into the fabric of what the brand is all about either.

Which is what makes Panera Cares Café, the pay-by-donation restaurant concept from Panera Bread Company, so intriguing to me as a template for other businesses to potentially follow.

I had the opportunity last week to sit down with Panera’s Founder, Chairman and co-CEO, Ron Shaich, to learn more about the idea when he came to Chicago to open a Panera Cares in Lakeview (formerly a regular Panera Bread Co. restaurant), the 4th of its kind within the Panera restaurant system.

What I really wanted to find out was: Can a company find success and profit from a business model that expects people to do the right thing?

At first, I wasn’t certain. Sure, when you first learn about a restaurant that lets people pay what they want so that someone who has only small amount of money can buy anything on the menu, your first thought is, “Wow, that’s so nice of them to donate food to the community like that.” But as Shaich explains, there’s something deeper at work here.

“(Panera Cares) comes out of a view of the world in which the way in which businesses most succeed is when they make a difference for lots of different people. That’s the guts of Panera’s success since I founded it 25 years ago.”

Corporations give money and Panera is no different – franchisees included, the company has given near $100 million in donations to its surrounding communities. Still, Shaich says this method of donation felt a bit disconnected from Panera’s everyday work.

“One of the things that became clear to me is that a food shelter can be a dehumanizing experience. What we want to bring is a whole lot of positive energy out there.”

Are there lessons from Panera Cares that other businesses might apply to their brands if they’re trying to evolve their model for greater community tie-in and profitability? Start with these ideas:

 

See yours as more than an office/retail location.

Normally we refer to places like Panera as restaurants, but Shaich used the term, “Community centers.” With thousands of locations around the country, Panera supports the places where people gather and build community. And having witnessed it firsthand myself as a member of the neighborhood Panera Cares belongs to, you can see it’s a statement that’s entirely credible. These are places where everyone is meeting from networking businesspeople to running associations to seniors getting together for their regularly scheduled breakfast.

There certainly are other coffee shops that could offer this type of environment, but those tend to be people zoned in on the laptop in front of them. The difference I see at Panera (and now Panera Cares) is that community conversations are more likely and often to occur here.

Is there a vision you see for your place of business that transcends the traditional setting people expect of it in a unique way?

How is this baked into your brand?

Again, Panera Cares doesn’t feel like a special case outside of the Panera brand but more of something natural to do for the community. Part of that to me is due to the fact that nothing here is sacrificed or stripped down from what people have come to appreciate about Panera.

“We said if we were going to do this and put the Panera name on it, we were going to keep all the good stuff and leave nothing out,” Shaich says. “The whole menu would have to stay as is. There’s no abbreviated version.”

There’s also no altered version of the environment. For all intents and purposes, the soul of the Panera brand looks and feels the same but with an even more amplified mission behind it.

Without sacrificing anything that your customers have come to know and love about you, how can your business model flow into a natural community benefit?

 

Do customers clearly understand your mission?

Since Panera Cares is different from the traditional restaurant concept, Shaich recognized that people would need to understand how the payment system works and the overall “big picture” of what Panera Cares is aiming to accomplish. That’s why every Panera Cares also features an employee “ambassador” stationed at the front of the customer line who explains the pay-by-donation method and other customer questions. Had Panera Cares not had this, you can imagine how it might create a bottleneck of questions once each person arrived to pay and make for a frustrating experience. With one simple addition, that challenge is largely solved.

Don’t just expect a creative business model to tell your story for you. How can you help customers down the tracks with greater clarity so they get where you’re trying to go?

Where is your “ambassador” stationed within your brand to explain your model’s purpose? Is it a physical presence like this one or an online one? Consider how essential that might be, especially as you’re trying to turn customers into advocates.

 

What discussion are you elevating?

The distinction here is elevating a discussion, not trying to deliver a solution to the world’s problems. “(Panera Cares) isn’t about solving the hunger issue or solving poverty,” Shaich says. “It’s about food insecurity. Food insecurity happens when people who don’t know where their next meal is coming from or how to pay for it.

Shaich says that 1 in 6 Americans have experienced food insecurity in the last year. But while the assumption by some may be that these people are largely homeless, it’s actually a small percentage of the overall amount. In fact, of the people who do experience food insecurity, 1 in 3 are college educated.

What is the issue that you’re trying to elevate for greater awareness in the community? And rather than trying to singlehandedly eradicate a problem on your own, how is your brand involving that community – offline and online – so you can work on it together?

Get everyone involved from the top down

When he opened the first Panera Cares, Shaich didn’t just tell someone to report back to him how the business was going. He worked there for the first few weeks just like other employees. In the process, he got to not only see how well the system was working firsthand but also how customers were responding to the new concept.

A great idea on paper can have hiccups in reality. So for internal and external customers, it’s vital for management to get out from behind the desk, out of the office and into the “trenches” with employees so you can see what’s working and what needs to be tweaked. Not to mention it provides a greater perspective on the impact of the brand.

 

Be transparent

As Shaich explains, “If people feel like they’re being gamed, they’ll reject it. So it’s about transparency, not taking advantage of people in some way. It’s about showing people how to pay it forward.”

Don’t present something as a gift for the community and have motives that community isn’t aware about. Put it all out there and be clear about what you’re taking in from the effort financially. Lack of transparency clouds the message of your true purpose and becomes a competing factor you don’t need.

 

Don’t just give a handout. 

Panera Cares may appear like a gift to the community but the community also has to sustain it. There’s still a business to be run with real costs. But anything Panera Cares generates in excess of covering its operating expenses is given back to the community in training at-risk kids. “We work with social services to give kids the life and work skills they need, promising them a job when they get done,” Shaich says. Panera Cares has put dozens of young people through this program.

Plus, while you don’t have to leave any money if you can’t afford a Panera Cares item, they do ask that if you do that regularly that you volunteer your time with them. So there’s real training for someone’s benefit, not mere goodwill gestures.

Remember, you’re not running a charity. You’re running a community-based business model. So while you’re giving, don’t be afraid to express the expectations you have of your customers in return.

Maybe if this economy of ours is going to continue to recover with the help of healthier corporations, the answer won’t just come from increased hiring but also from a whole new business model that benefits the community and brand alike in a way that’s also quite profitable. It’s not a big departure but as a natural evolution of what the brand stands for. I like what Panera’s doing with Panera Cares toward that end. I’d love to know others who have bright ideas like this too.