The Fine Art of Gift Giving

It’s that time of year again and my inbox is bombarded with holiday marketing messages:

“VIP, Nothin’ Says Lovin’ Like a Gift from Nike!”, “FREE Shipping + Wrap Up Your Holiday Shopping,” “'Tis the Season to Sparkle,” “30% Coupon, Plus the Year's #1 Christmas CD.” And on, and on…certainly the Web has made it easy to find gifts and get them shipped anywhere. But has it really improved the art of gift giving?

I emailed my sister a link to a sweater I thought she’d like and she confirmed that she did. She told me the right size and is all set to return it if it’s not as good as she hoped. We also agreed I’d send a honey-baked ham for the big family gathering – online together we figured out the right size ham and the right store to order so she could pick it up. The big advantage of all this, obviously, is being able to do all this running around without actually having to, like, run around.

Meanwhile, ZOOM is working with a start up, RichRelevance, which was founded by the guru at Amazon who developed their innovative product recommendation engine. So, when I log on to Amazon and it says “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” I may just find the perfect scarf to go with my sister’s sweater. RichRelevance has developed dozens of algorithms to help retailers figure out the most relevant recommendation for a particular visitor on a particular day. Their goal is to delight customers with a perfect idea for an extra gift, not just make them feel like they’re being upsold by a web server.

For those of us whose lives don’t allow us endless time to browse through shops, these technologies are a Christmas gift unto themselves.

But on the other hand, there’s my mom. She told me the other day she baked ginger cookies for some friends because she knew they loved ginger cookies. The friend liked them so much, she asked my mom for the recipe. My mom wrote down the recipe and then drove to three stores to find the crystallized ginger (secret ingredient) to make sure she could make the cookies just right. Dad jokes that mom has a database in her mind of every person she knows and their favorite things (food, clothes, colors, sizes, hobbies, etc.). Every year, she buys Russian dolls for a girl adopted from Russia, she’s always on the lookout for a friend who collects frogs and every year, she buys Nick a wall calendar with a diving theme. My mom gives the gifts whenever she sees the person (doesn’t wait for birthdays or holidays), and those gifts are always personal and heartfelt.

Mom doesn’t email or surf the web. A fax machine is her sole concession to the tech revolution. I keep telling her the Internet was made for her; she will be able to do her gift giving so much faster, more efficiently. But her approach reminds me that even with all the technology in the world at your fingertips, the real heart and soul of gift giving is in the fine art of listening, caring, and looking out for what will make people feel special.

If I could get my mom online, I would have created the world’s greatest force for gift giving. In lieu of that, I’m glad I’ve got her, and glad I’ve got the Internet.

How to Position in a Recession

In the best of times, strategic positioning is a complicated game. In a recession, with budgets getting cut and people anxious about their jobs, it becomes way more challenging. How do you motivate customers to spend money when money is tight? What do you say or do?

The immediate reflex when money is tight is to build your Point That Matters around saving money. And certainly, for many consumer goods, the bottom line is always the bottom line. But in the rarified world of high technology (where we’ve been working for twelve years and two recessions), it ain’t necessarily so…it’s natural to think that in a down economy, economizing would be the winning message. Which is essentially the problem…it’s so ubiquitous that it gets tuned out.

Case in point, we recently ZOOMed VMware, the leader in Business Infrastructure Virtualization. That is a technology that’s built around saving money…the math is simple, you replace three servers with one and cut your cost by two-thirds, right? And the more you reduce, the more you save, right? Definitely.

Problem is, as customer and prospects told us again and again, no vendor ever calls up saying “I’m going to make you spend more money.” Cost savings is expected, it’s table stakes, but it’s not going to close the sale. What the market was excited to learn about VMware was that they added value on both sides of the coin – increasing IT flexibility and reducing costs.

In any economy but especially in a down one, customers want to hear a positive, inspiring message. And when you say save money, what they hear is spend money. So now VMware is talking about energizing business through IT. There are three pillars to VMware’s message: 1) optimize financial energy; 2) shift human energy and 3) save the earth’s energy. Check out the message on VMware’s web site (www.vmware.com) and on airport billboards in major cities. VMware’s message is energizing customers and prospects…and, of course, saving money in the process.

The same was true of another recent ZOOMee, DocuSign. DocuSign’s electronic signature service saves money in all sorts of ways, by taking the time- and resource-consuming process of pushing paper contracts around and digitizing it. That part is a no-brainer, and not a differentiator. Their breakthrough, the thing their prospects were excited to learn, was DocuSign’s ability to track and store signed documents. That’s the thing that made them stand out from the crowd of “money saving” solutions.

Challenging times call for challenging thinking. And we’ve found the first thing to challenge is the conventional wisdom that in a tough economy, saving money is the only thing that matters. It’s important to be sure…but with everyone focused on that, it’s the companies that go beyond conventional thinking and find innovative ways to differentiate that are going to win.

Entrepreneurs are dead, long live entrepreneurs!

Headlines in the business press have been dominated by stories of fraudster Bernie Madoff's multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, the Big Three CEOs riding private jets to plead for public funds and fat bonuses for executives whose recklessness almost brought their companies (and the U.S. economy) crashing down. The back pages continue to report sluggish earnings, and opinion pages continue to debate how bad the recession is and how long it will last.

This backdrop served as a sharp contrast to what I discovered as a judge for the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year contest.  This was my first year as a judge and I found the entire experience fascinating. It started with a FedEx’d binder of 117 Northern California companies ― ranging from bakeries to solar utilities ― applying for the prestigious award.  Each company made the case for why their CEO should earn this honor, based on six criteria:

• Entrepreneurial spirit
• Financial performance
• Strategic direction
• Community impact
• Innovation
• Personal integrity and influence

The full judging process probably took about 80 hours and obliged me to sacrifice two weekends…not good for my tennis game!

But the truth is these stories just drew me in.  I was so impressed to see how many CEOs and entrepreneurs are still making Silicon Valley great.  For every Bernie Madoff, there’s a Kimberly Kaselionis, the CEO of Circle Bank, who put her community bank on the map by giving back to the community in the bank’s services and outreach.  For every Big Three CEO, there are countless examples of CEOs who forego their own paychecks, or mortgage their homes, to invest in their companies and employees. Scott Lang from Silver Spring Networks was turned down by 100 VCs before he finally got funding. Another CEO risked deportation for himself and his family when he left a safe job to follow his dream.  

While it’s salacious to read about boondoggle executive vacations and retreats in Atlantis, many companies are seriously committed to giving back to their community and the world.  For example, Polycom’s Global Nomads Group uses its own video conferencing technology to foster communication between K-12 students in different countries.  Think of it as pen pals on steroids, connecting students in the U.S. and Israel with students in Iran and Iraq. This represents the highest level of philanthropy – dedication of time, money, product and people.

In the category of an entrepreneur who reinvented an old business model Osman Rashid impressed me the most. Rashid is founder and chairman of Chegg, which applies the Netflix model to textbooks. Students simply rent their books instead of buying them, and Chegg even provides the return mailer.  Can you believe no one else thought of that?

 

So for me, judging the Entrepreneur of the Year was more than a breath of fresh air in a stale  atmosphere of gloom and doom, it was totally invigorating and once again reminded me of how special and capable we all can be if we take that choice. I hope these few examples help motivate you and your company in these amazing times of opportunity.

 

 

ZOOM Survey Findings: Save Me Money if you Want My Green

Recently, we surveyed members of the ZOOM Advisory Council (IT decision makers within large companies) to find out what matters to them when it comes to green – and which technology companies are the greenest (to see the full survey results, click here).One of the key takeaways: ‘green’ is only good when it’s associated with saving the other kind of green, money. When asked how much they were willing to spend to purchase ‘green’ rather than the alternative, 43% said they would only be willing to pay the same price or cheaper for ‘green’; the most the majority was willing to pay was 10% or more. One surveyed member summed it up “in a down economy, decisions are being made based on cost as the number one factor”.

We also learned that the ‘green’ hill is still wide open, with no one company yet succeeding to set themselves apart as the ‘greenest’. For those high tech companies seeking to conquer the ‘green’ hill, there are a few key ways they begin the climb, including: how they run their own business, how they help their customers run their businesses, and how they use marketing to sell their ‘greenness’.

Our survey indicated that Google is leading in how companies can run their own businesses in a ‘green’ way. Survey participants believed that Google is currently the greenest internet services company. Google puts its money where its mouth is by going ‘green’ in almost every aspect of day to day operations, such as:
· Shared bicycles for employees to use for short trips around campus
· Organic and sustainable ingredients in their cafeteria
· Biodiesel shuttles to bring employees to work from around the Bay Area
· Installing 1.6MW of solar on their campus
· Discounts to employees who go solar at home

Another way to be seen as ‘green’ is to help customers run their own business more energy and cost efficiently. Dell was voted as the ‘greenest’ hardware company for its efforts in reducing customers’ costs and carbon footprint. The rationale for this honor is that Dell is “focused on reducing energy usage” and “continues to create products that are more environmentally friendly.” The Dell Energy Smart solutions are self-touted as giving the consumer the ability to “save energy and save money.” Dell claims that its Energy Smart desktops, notebooks and workstations can reduce power consumption by as much as 78%. Dell also makes it easier for customers to recycle outdated computers, even going as far as coming to your home or business and pick it up for you. As far as software companies, Microsoft was voted the greenest. Unlike Google, credited for running its own business in a ‘green’ manner, Microsoft is credited for helping its customers run a ‘greener’ business. One survey participant explained Microsoft gives you “tools for doing more with less.”

IBM’s name came up most as the leader in marketing ‘green.’ One participant felt that IBM is “working hard to educate customers and to be as green as possible themselves”, and another participant praised IBM’s recent ‘green’ related TV commercials, saying that this was “by far the most exposure I have seen a technology company have with respect to being green.” IBM’s latest ad campaigns feature “employees telling their bosses how much being ‘green’ can save them money”. IBM speaks to the business advantages of green. Now more than ever, a greener planet can mean more ‘green’ in your pocket.