You turn on your iPad tablet and want to do some viewing. You’re in close proximity to others and you are uncomfortable with them gazing onto your screen. Have you experienced this? Then micro louver could be important to you.

When the plane lands, your competitor conveys the newly harvested info to his boss, sending your key relationship into the garbage bin.

Think it can’t happen you? It happens a lot, and with bad results. Occasionally, Spying in the business world makes the news headlines. These famous Corporate Espionage cases produced expensive and embarrassing consequences. According to SANS Reading Room report writer and course instructor, Shane W. Robinson, corporations spend billions every year spying on their competitors, and tens of billions more is lost with corporate intelligence swindlers.

This week in San Francisco may be the greatest time in history that IT professionals from the SharePoint and Security worlds can unleash the potential to support their fellow employees in Mobile Sharepoint solutions. For those readers less optimistic, it may be as volatile as a propane gas tanker going through the Strait of Hormuz under terrorists fire guns. The reason being, there are two big conferences in town this week: RSA Conference at Moscone Center, and SPTechCon at the SF Hilton.

At the RSA Conference, we have 18,000 security CISO CSO CISSP credentialed persons attending. At the SPTechCon, there are over 1,000 SharePoint professionals.

Providing security assurance for mobile infrastructures, crafting acceptable risk-reward security plans, and implementing policy compliance with workable solutions for the users is a hot topic at RSA. A new mobile working group is being launched from the CSA, Cloud Security Alliance, and Eva Chen CEO of Trend Micro, received the inaugural recognition award for the Alliance.

AT SPTechCon, there are many opportunities to embrace the security value proposition, as depicted in Michael Noel’s Best Practices article.

For either of these IT groups to succeed, they need to work closely with the other. You know what I mean; coordination, collaboration, egos aside, leadership. You need each other. In all my successful client engagements of strategic SharePoint mobility deployments, they came together and shared the project goals. The security pros’ engagement and support of mobile SharePoint content management and collaboration initiatives is vital, especially for line of business executives and knowledge workers that want to empower mobile enthusiasts connecting to the SharePoint platform.

Security pros, please meet your SharePoint associates, when you hit the town this week. SharePoint Admins Developers Architects and IT pros, when you get back to work after this week’s conference, please bring your Security colleagues to the early stage planning efforts.

We’re closing 2011 with pictures of some of the places, events.

Great Barry Manilow show at Paris Hotel in Las Vegas

2011 is the Chinese year of the rabbit

Shep at the Dog Park

Cactus League MLB SF Giants and AZ Diamond Backs Play Baseball in Scottsdale

The mighty Wurlitzer in Mesa AZ. This instrument is gigantic.

Getting a taste of Iowa home style cooking 2000 miles away in Mesa AZ.

Seeing son Alex as Tom Joad in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath at Chabot College

Watching the Oakland A’s baseball game from my favorite seats, behind home plate. Wait a minute, that guy is wearing a jersey with my name on it. Turns out he’s one of the coaches and we have no relationship.

Planting a garden, love those fresh vegetables.

Summer Camping with fresh Corn, shipped overnight from Iowa home.

In Mendocino, at incredible Point Arena Lighthouse beach.

Walking amongst Giant Redwoods, this one 1400 years old.

Taking a Pit Stop Meetup with Dario Franchitti, one of IndyCar racer’s most intense personalities.

It’s great being around fast cars.

Absorbing some wordpress security education from Mark Jaquith, Jon Cave, Brad Williams

Harvesting the garden.

Picture this! Kodak at gdgt conference in San Francisco. It’s amazing what those handheld mobile devices do.

Are you curious about your collaboration style? There are three stages everyone faces during their projects and collaborations. You’re looking to get into a project, you’re in a project; and, you’re finishing a project. Yes there are other sub-type project stages, like you can’t stand one and want out. Or, you’re trying to tactfully sidestep getting into one. No matter which stage primarily describes your current situation, you may have noticed some patterns. You’ll want to address the question ‘What is the best way for me to handle the collaborative opportunity?

What insights can you glean from the short quiz will give you a head start on your direction and approach in the next collaboration project. Smarter Collaboration ideas come courtesy of Central Desktop.

For a complete infographic that can lead you to smarter collaboration approaches, I guarantee you will find some insights.

My test results pretty much confirmed what I knew from my past work roles. I’m a ringleader, sometimes a rabblerouser, but mostly empowering others on my team, getting and keeping them involved. And I appreciate the suggestions from the folks at Central Desktop for the fun way to expose actionable tactics.

The test took a few minutes. Central Desktop posted an on-demand webcast, in case you want a deeper dive. Why don’t you give it a ride and let me know what type you are?

I’m intrigued with the notion of a ‘mobile first’ strategy to support enterprise applications, specifically SharePoint. One that I found is SharePlus, which brings the Microsoft SharePoint Mobile Office Client into the handheld device. These include iPads, iPhones, Androids, Playbook and Windows Phone. Demand for this solution has increased with the skyrocketing adoption of iPads in enterprise businesses. SharePlus is a local device client coupled with SharePoint 2007 or 2010 to deliver rich functions.

After hearing many prospective customers ask, “What is the difference between SharePlus Pro and the Enterprise versions?” I’m spotlighting a few major items here. Check the slides for a quick overview.

I crossed the finish line in August, and it feels good. I reaped rewards from establishing new habits, reflected in a job offer to represent a mobile device and SharePoint software firm, SouthLabs. A combination of factors led to this result, starting with a pledge to have a job offer within 60 days, when I couldn’t imagine it happening back in June. But then, I was nudged into making the promise.

Next, I made a commitment to write a long term vision and strategy statement, coupled with a 30 day plan to receive an offer. I received guidance from a coach, Donna Fedor; and I worked with some inspiring and generous accountability partners going on a similar journey. We held weekly conference and personal one on one calls. These activities are handy when short term pitfalls get at you. Incidentally, Donna Fedor’s Results Thinking and Re-Think services work on a powerful and transformative level. I highly recommend them.

Our call agendas were to celebrate weekly wins, address challenges of our intentions, and our new promises. I tracked these in a sprint weekly challenge report and kept a daily log of items labeled ‘My TNT’ list. TNT means ‘today not tomorrow’.

The biggest impact resulted from recording a handful of Gratitudes at the end of each day and also listing my Intentions daily as well. I’m quite sure when you start doing these same types of things that you will accomplish seemingly impossible goals in a short while. Why not give it a try? It feels good crossing the finish line.

Your challenge is to bust down the barriers of the online world.

Your emails and letters are going out. You’re making phone calls. You’re setting up informational and networking meetings. It’s taking a lot of your effort, but somehow the best prospects elude you. It’s taking too much time. You are prepared to offer a compelling value proposition, but realize that it needs to happen face to face. You’re not frustrated by this challenge. You’re fascinated. You need to cut through the clutter. You’re through spinning your wheels, waiting for a response. You are on a quest to garner better results. You know face to face kicks off new relationships, rekindles familiar ones really well. This article is part one of a two part series. Part two prescribes an approach.

Your Transformational Opportunities

• Develop specific domain expertise based on one or more factors: functional role, geographical area, vertical market focus
• Identify the best leads, contacts: Companies that are growing fast, willing to make investments, and decision makers that recognize the value of your contribution.
• Make timing be in your favor just like the black smith striking while the iron is hot, you are addressing their concerns when their awareness of needed changes is piqued, their interest is focused, and their commitment to do something is highest.
• Improve your effectiveness, make it manifest: Shortening the time to the meeting or interview, speeding up the time to an offer or acceptance of your proposal, raising visibility to a bigger set of opportunities, obtaining a larger more lucrative contract, or better salary and benefits package, meeting firms qualified with needs for your offering and resources at their disposal.

Your Homework First

It’s important to be prepared before you are face to face with the influential person. What kind of conversations do you want to lead? In my next article, I’ll focus on the method and give you some ideas for implementing the face to face strategy. You don’t want to limit yourself only to meeting the hiring manager or the decision maker. In fact, it is likely better not to in the beginning. This homework you do will help you distinguish yourself, and you will accelerate the results of the sales call, informational or networking interview, or the hiring interview. The process focuses on a professional event.

You Are The Change Agent

The mentality behind the strategy I’m about to spotlight for you comes from an excellent book, Selling Change by Brett Clay. Check it out if you like the questions he presents and you will ask your targeted influential person. What you learn and teach in pursuit of these questions is the price of admission. When you study these, you have definitely earned a place in the corner office. With these answers, you can make a compelling proposition for your newest customer or employer.

1. What are the forces your client is feeling?
2. What is the client’s best response to those forces?
3. What will it take to respond to a change? What is the effort, the cost, the risk?
4. What value will be created by the change?
5. How will the client initiate the change?

I welcome your experience from using the questions with your targeted key influential persons.

Why is it that knowing an exceptional sales professional is such a rarity?

I wonder about it sometimes, and realize many people may not even recognize one. To illustrate, let me ask you if you have seen the movie or read the book “The King’s Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy” by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi. In it, you may have noticed a marvelous relationship between a commoner, Lionel Logue and King Albert Frederick Arthur George. It makes for a fascinating story, and would be a helpful guide to recognize a great salesperson.

At first glance, you might see the story as a King with a speech problem, and Lionel is a speech coach, but he’s much more than that. He demonstrates what a great salesperson does. He cuts through the baloney.

In it, Lionel serves the stammering monarch as his speech counselor. You will notice the hallmarks of a great salesperson, reflected in the following examples.

Be A Trusted Advisor

Lionel proves himself the trusted advisor. In a poignant scene, his wife is dumbfounded, meeting the king and queen in her dining room. King Albert had been a speech coaching client of his for some time and he did not reveal even to his wife that the monarch was a client.

Be An Expert In Something

Lionel establishes himself as an expert with practical knowledge in the field of speech therapy, valuable to the King and Country. He easily could have been an actor, but chose to give up that profession, positioning himself for great impact on friends, family, and clients who rely on him.

Apply Experience

Lionel learns from personal experience. He commits to never ending self improvement, shown when you hear his fiery response in Westminster Abby to King Albert about his credentials and experience. His personal relationship trumps an officially credentialed referral from the Arch Bishop.

Ask For The Business

Lionel closed the sale, setting up terms of engagement from the very first meeting. We see evidence of the closed sale, when the King drops a schilling with him for an earlier promise made.

Have A Backbone

Lionel remains steadfast in his belief in the face of challenges. During all the times the King quits, he stands ready and even comes back to try and revive the faltered progress.

Be A Friend First

Lionel makes a friend first, demonstrates respect, positions himself as a peer in the relationship, shown with his requests to use first names. And when the King accomplishes a major speech milestone, he recognizes the King’s royal status.

Be Systematic

Lionel uses a systematic and tested approach. Even when challenged on the location to hold the therapy training sessions, he maintains a resolve to host the meetings in his studio.

Build Partnerships

Lionel forms strong partnerships, based on a referral in his well-connected network. The queen finds him after other royal family sanctioned speech therapists failed. He nurtures the success of his client, the King with full support and teamwork from the queen.

Provide Value

Lionel provides value, preparing the King to publicly lead England against the forces of Nazi Germany. His client and friend the King successfully and confidently addresses the public at a crucial time in England’s history, stemming doubts among the population about his leadership, winning the favor of the royal family, getting hugs from his children. His client’s self esteem soars, resulting from the success of their preparations.

Be Authentic

Lionel is authentic, never insincere in all his communications with others. You see him brimming full of humble pride and confidence at the film’s climax, but he’s not boastful at the conclusion of the speech.

I became engrossed in the characters of “The King’s Speech”, and made it a subject in a mini-study of professional sales and coaching. It serves as a model to me to strive to internalize these characteristics. I’m curious, do you have figures in your life who impact you in a similar manner as Lionel Logue does for me? How do you see this story? Did you have a similar or different experience?

This is the fifth post in a series of six articles

Increasing  Your Value Is Your Way to Resist the Squeeze

What do I mean by business conditions? We’re in a global era, one where the internet became the commoditizer. If you’re a sales professional in the technology space, you have some idea of what I mean. You’ll find this worth studying because you want more sales, faster and easier.

As a technology professional, I know you are feeling the pinch. The signs are everywhere this month of April. John Chambers, CEO of Cisco vows Bold Changes as investors worry. Newsweek captured some aspects of the challenge in a feature article this month called Dead Suit Walking about two men who can’t find jobs. After reading the article, it took me some time to figure out how come it bothered me so much. Then it hit me. The world has changed.

Why don’t you harness the motivations of your clients and partners to achieve their goals, as author Brett Clay suggests and start Selling Change for Growing Sales and Leading Change? Let’s roll up our sleeves and start to push back on the squeeze.

Meeting these challenges requires different approaches today than before. Adapting and responding is not enough today. It’s time to be a change leader. Here’s my list of challenges: The economic environment, increased competition, finding and qualifying sales opportunities, managing priorities and time constraints, creating visibility, differentiating your offering, using technology, tracking trends, contacting decision makers, attracting and retaining the best sales and marketing team, justifying sales and marketing investments.

Economic Environment

What are the forces the client is feeling? You want to understand these. Not all individuals, companies, and vertical markets are dealing with the same forces today. Businesses are cyclical in different economies. Lately, it’s been good for me in energy, materials, and government. Are you aligning your resources properly with the right partners, in the right geographies and markets?

Increased Competition

Its encroaching from all sides. It’s just a mouse click away. Are you letting it get you down, or letting it spur you onward to improve your strategy. Time to get some research done. Starting here: If you haven’t done so in a while, why not talk to existing customers and ask them why they signed up? Listen carefully. Thank them for their business and their time, get inspired with their perspective. It matters the most. Next, study your competitors and their key customers. Compare your value offering to theirs, using a matrix of elements.

Finding and Qualifying Sales Opportunities

Not optional for a true sales professional, especially as a discipline to drive change. Do you know what your client’s best response is to the forces affecting them? You need to as a change agent. You will also need to know what it will take for your customer to respond to a change. What is the effort, the costs, the risks that they carry? In fact, mastering this phase will give you sales. Selling is not telling. My manager beat this into my head when I began my sales career. I never forgot it, and it paid off. Today, with the information and training opportunities available, you have no excuse.

Managing Priorities and Time Constraints

How is it that some professionals generate ten times the sales production, when all pros have the same amount of time. Are you using your time effectively. Do you get the right things done? Do you move fast? Have you delegated tasks which you’re not excellent at doing them? How about ones not absolutely critical to your success?

Creating Visibility, Differentiating Your Offering

The commodity trap pulls us off our path. It’s easy to repeat the processes and approaches that worked yesterday. It’s harder to determine “What is the value you will be creating by helping them make the change?” We’re not content with merely selling solutions here, but becoming agents of change and helping customers achieve goals.

Using Technology, Tracking Trends

It’s easy to get sidetracked here, because the promises from innovators and creators are compelling and abundant. At a minimum, you’re using Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Google alerts, CRM, a Smartphone. How about playbooks? Do you have those?

Contacting Decision Makers

There are many times that sales seems too complicated. Who is better than the decision maker to answer the question, “What value will be created by the change you’re acquiring? One of my esteemed sales associates from Transworld Systems, Rick Wright who consistently came out on top in contests and had a heart as big as his drive and competitive spirit said it simply when asked, “Why are you number one?” His answer, “He who sees the most decision makers, wins.”

Attracting and Retaining the Best Sales, Product Management, and Marketing Team

If you’re an individual contributor, your impact is as a performer, a model and leader that the management team greatly values. But as a business owner or manager you know it’s vital to attract talent all the time, even when it’s not urgent.

Making Sales and Marketing Investments

You need a plan. Successful business executives and sales professionals know what success looks like, they pursue it through some strategies, make adjustments. I received a healthy dose of reinforcement reading San Francisco Business Times Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business.

Thanks for Reading

Please add your comments below and remember to get updates by email now or get the RSS Feed, if you haven’t already, so you don’t miss out.  As always, good luck with your sales transformation.

Please Tell People About Honest Intentions

If you like this article, please ReTweet it with the little green button, or tell a friend. My blog group has introduced me to a little tool called Share and Enjoy to make it easier for you to email it to a friend or add it to your favorite social media website.  I hear that if you bookmark it on Delicious or Stumbleupon, that will get more readers here. Many of my thanks in advance for your help. I appreciate it.

It is essential for you to focus on people to derive value from technology. The technology in this case is SharePoint. We went on a SharePoint field trip today. It’s springtime. Springtime for me is the most optimistic season. It passes quickly, so you have got to plant the seeds before time fleets away. I’m talking about making your business contacts count. SharePoint is a great platform for springtime.

As we drove from San Francisco to Sacramento to be with partners and customers today, I viewed expansive green hillsides, happy waterfowl in the bay and delta waters, trees with tight green buds everywhere, getting ready to burst. American River surging at full capacity. Anticipation. Our business development efforts to support Microsoft customers using our Brava and Redact-It technology within the SharePoint platform in many ways reflects our optimism of springtime.

Sharing Is For Winners
SharePoint Community Development remains a key marketing and sales strategy for my firm, Informative Graphics. Our sponsorship of events like SharePoint Fest, partner road shows, SharePoint Solution Expos, and SharePoint Saturdays bring us face to face with serious personal and business challenges and glorious opportunities to improve the lives of many people.

Here are three engagement examples that spur me on a quest to deliver our SharePoint solutions.

1. Child abuse or neglect, however you define it, has devastating impacts on vulnerable persons. When we received an invitation to curb the threat of child abuse by helping a social services staff with a SharePoint design and deployment and our Brava viewer and Redact-IT technologies, we jumped at the chance to give aid to the IT administrators responsible to support the case workers for the children. A chance to let the green buds meet the sunshine.

2. Engineers brought us in to help them build a gas pipeline that links remote production fields to energy customers like hospitals and home owners. These engineers need to view and collaborate on a software system that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Our Brava viewer in SharePoint is the answer. We offered them a way to view and collaborate with non-Microsoft CAD DWG file types inside a Microsoft platform, SharePoint. How cool is that? That is springtime.

3. We supply financial services advisors who assist as many upside down homeowners as possible to renegotiate payment terms of their mortgage loans and credit card debt. We provide them a tool for masking sensitive private information as they view, collaborate, and make notes in mountains of digital and paper documents. We enable them to efficiently process these documents in a secure environment, and to manage sensitive private information effectively through redaction services.

SharePoint Saturday Events Like the one in Santa Monica Are Vital Growth Opportunities

Reasons For You To Go   Enjoy the value of peer to peer interactions Make contacts you can call on the phone or meet afterwords Find others going through the same challenges as you at the same time Explore common issues Get into interactive opportunities in round table and small group discussions Continue conversations with peers Meet people who you wouldn’t ordinarily get a chance to meet Learn more about SharePoint

In the great tradition that is SharePoint Saturday, we’ll be sponsoring and attending the Los Angeles event on April 2nd. Come join us to experience the impact of springtime.