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Building Winning Technology Teams

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I created this book based on my experience in technology over the last 30 years. In that time, I built profitable startups driving millions of dollars in revenue. I have managed application development projects for CRM, SFA and enterprise applications. I have turned around struggling teams dramatically increasing performance, job satisfaction and retention. I took everything I have learned over that time and encapsulated them into this book. I have examples of good leadership as well as bad ones. I believe you can learn just as much from bad examples as good ones. I would recommend this book to anyone starting out as a leader or an experienced person that wants to pick up some new ideas. Below is a short list of what you will learn. 1. Hiring tips to build a winning team 2. Techniques to attract the best employees 3. Ideas for how to create an engaged and innovative working environment 4. Practices to manage distributed teams 5. How to monitor individ...
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Better Data, Better ROI

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Aren’t you always under pressure to improve sales and reduce costs? I think the answer is yes. I have consulted with many organizations in several different verticals. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen the positive impact of excellent data. I have been able to dramatically improve the close rates of sales campaigns just with proper data cleansing and deduplication. If you are doing direct mail with invalid addresses, sales campaigns filled with duplicates or email campaigns without proper suppressions, you are killing your ROI. These are all things and more I have seen. Marketers need help to reach their marketing goals. This requires strong reporting, excellent quality control and good process and procedure. Excellent data quality is the key. The following are some ideas that may help you. You can also reach out to me for help at www.CRM-Whiz.com. Duplicates Duplicates come in multiple forms like emails, mailing addresses or phone numbers. Deduplic...
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Value of a Marketing Database for Sales and Marketing

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The world is confusing today. We have DMP’s, CDP’s, CRM’s, SFA’s, etc. All these handles similar but different information. In this article I will refer to a consolidated single view of suspects, prospects, and customers as a Marketing Database. I am occasionally asked what are the benefits of a Marketing Database. It’s an important question and everyone should have some idea of the value it can provide to a sales and marketing team. In my experience excellent marketing data can unleash tremendous profits for an organization. So, I came up with the following summary outlining what a quality database can and should do for you. Single Source of Marketing Data: I don’t even have to ask, I already know in many organizations the data required for sales and marketing is spread all over the place in multiple silos. I have seen this in several companies, it’s a common problem. A marketing database will consolidate this data into...
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How to Turn Around a Failing Technology Team

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Have you ever been in this situation? You are a senior manager, and you aren’t getting what you want out of your technology group. Either you are seeing long production cycles, poor quality, significant down time, or the product is not what you expected. Well, you aren’t alone. Many senior leaders feel this way. I have led multiple successful teams and have consulted with several companies that had failing teams that came to us for help. I created the list below of some of the situations I ran into. One or more of these issues may apply to you. It is amazing how much productivity can be gained by fixing even one of these problems. Toxic Employees: They can be a big problem and can destroy the productivity of the entire team. If you have one, you need to resolve that issue as soon as possible. I have seen many examples of toxic people and dealt with the examples shown below. Misinformation – Individuals deliberately causing confusion by ...
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Managing Teams in a Remote Environment

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In my career I have had to deal with teams spread all over the country and around the world. Now COVID has forced everyone into this new reality. Even though many companies are returning to commuting and cubicles, some are remaining remote. Below I have shared some techniques I have used to manage remote teams. Team Meetings: The challenge is to build engagement, a sense of belonging and teamwork. Remote teams don’t have the ability to talk over the cubes or to head to Starbucks to have a brief discussion. I handle this problem in a couple different ways. The first is in the scrum. I take a few minutes for casual discussions in the scrum and talk about sports, the weekend, pets, kids, etc. This adds a human element to the discussion and builds trust and closer relationships as you learn more about each other. I also conduct cross training meetings. If someone on the team has a particular skill where everyone will benefit. I ask them to prese...
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Building A Winning Technology Team

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Building a Strong Technology Team As a manager you have many responsibilities like building relationships, removing barriers to production, reporting on progress, following up on problems and the like. You are tasked with bringing together a group of people with their own culture, problems, and self-interest. You are expected to pull this group together to work in harmony to achieve a goal assigned to you by your organization. Here are a few ideas to help you pull those individuals together into a strong unified team. Hiring: When building a team I must add a few comments about hiring. You have a very short time in an interview to learn something about an individual. I cannot cover all the nuances about an interview, but I will tell you the key is in your questions . I craft my questions in a way to answer the following. 1. Do they love what they do? 2. Are they interested in advancing their career or improving their skills? 3. Do ...
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Hiring Great People

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Finding and hiring the right people is the most important thing you can do. If you hire the right people, your job will be easy, and your team will achieve great things. If you don't, you will spend your days dealing with the consequences. Bad employees cause a huge time suck and affect the leader the most. Job Ads When creating an ad for an open position, keep it short and to the point. Don’t list every single item you think you will need to do the job. List only the most critical items. I have seen some ridiculous ads asking for twenty or more skills they want the applicant to be highly proficient in. I send these around to my friends, and we laugh at them because no one can be highly proficient in all these areas. It just turns off qualified candidates adept at the four to five skills you really need. Interview The trick in an interview is to get people to open up. You want to learn about them. How smart they are, can they answer questions...
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