Johnny Bunko is translated in French !

"The last career guide you will ever need" is now available in french and it is a great news ! beside reading it in the french version I must admit I grasped some details I haven't got in the original english version.
But do you know what this book is about ?
In this book the author Daniel H. Pink give us 6 lessons for a successful career and I am going to list them here in order to make you curious and interested in :

1. 
   
   There is no plan
2. 
   
   Think strenghs, not weaknesses
3. 
   
   It is not about you
4. 
   
   Persistence trumps talent
5. 
   
   Make excellent mistakes
6. 
   
   Leave an imprint

I will let you buy this book (in french for french people) that again I highly recommend and let you discover what contents are behind theses lessons. Watch the trailer of Dan Pink's latest book below :

Johnny Bunko trailer from DHP on Vimeo.Moreover, the first time I read something about this book was on the blog of Garr Raynolds and in his post Garr released a very inspiring powerpoint presentation dedicated to johnny Bunko called career's advice. It is a presentation that dramatically influenced ( and still do as well) me in my powerpoint building ability :

Career Advice '08

View more presentations from garr.

What Is Value ?

In our software daily job environment we used to speak about value and how we have to buy value to our customer instead of speaking about features and functionalities ! And that's good... But what is value ? can you explain us what is behind this word ?
Fortunately I got the answer (as usual) in seth's god and it is very simple :
VALUE = BENEFITS / PRICE

Which that means incidentally that at the demo level point of view, both Value and benefits are more or less equivalent so stop patronizing us about these concepts

let's quote seth's blog : "In a down economy, marketers fret a lot about price. We think that since times are tough, people care about price and nothing but price. Of course, people actually care more about value. They care about value more than they used to because they can’t afford to overpay, they don’t want to make a mistake with their money. Value = benefit/price. That means that one way to make value go up is to lower price, right? The thing is, there’s another way to make the value go up. Increase what you give. Increase quality and quantity and the unmeasurable pieces that bring confidence and joy to an interaction. When all of your competitors are busy increasing value by cutting prices, you can actually increase market share by increasing value and raising benefits. In a down economy, marketers fret a lot about price. We think that since times are tough, people care about price and nothing but price. Of course, people actually care more about value. They care about value more than they used to because they can’t afford to overpay, they don’t want to make a mistake with their money. Value = benefit/price. That means that one way to make value go up is to lower price, right? The thing is, there’s another way to make the value go up. Increase what you give. Increase quality and quantity and the unmeasurable pieces that bring confidence and joy to an interaction. When all of your competitors are busy increasing value by cutting prices, you can actually increase market share by increasing value and raising benefits. "

Moreover I can add a new math equation concept to my collection :

Too Long, Too Soon...

Sometimes we can't do in a different way but too many times ( and may be specially in France where everybody is focusing on a hard and well done home work, thinking that the number of hours does matter in order to prove his self value or to justify that he does exist ! ) we deliver 3 or 4 hour morning or afternoon session to get our message across. I remember a sale cycle 2 years ago in which we have made a rather successful one day presentation whereas our competitor did a 2 days presentation and then our sales rep recommended us to add a one day presentation to the sales cycle in order to counterbalance with the competition !

Have you ever attended a long demo cession or a long afternoon kick-off sale presentation training ? Do you really want to impose that kind of scourge to your customer ?

Are you aware that after 45 minutes our attention starts decreasing ? do you know that the audience will only remember 20 % of the demo in case the presentation lasts 45 minutes and 5 % of the demo if it lasts 4 hours ( and by the bargain this 5% won't be the essence of your message but some irrelevant facts that will attract by chance your audience's brains like the way you move your pen or your remote device )
And by the way did you remember a software presentation that afterwards was told to be too short by the prospect ? if yes (I don't think it could happen) it is probably the best demo you have ever attended...

Moreover, our demo are not only too long but most of the time our demos happen too soon in the sales cycles. We say everything at the beginning believing that the unique and complete demo will do all the sales work and will destroy all the purchase barriers... Don't forget that the demo is only one step of the sales cycle and not the pivotal step.

If you want to learn more, I recommend you to download this excellent document from MasteringTechnicalSales :
http://www.masteringtechnicalsales.com/files/Shorten_That_Demo.pdf

And don't forget the next time you organise a demo (and maybe something else) make it the shorter and the later as possible !!!

What Would Google Do ?

Whatever your job is, whatever your position is whether you perform or not outstanding demo you have to look into the mirror and ask to yourself "What Would Google Do"... If Google was running my business or my job !
That's the lesson I learnt from this Jeff Jarvis' book : Whatever the business I am involved in, I will try to follow the 4 next rules :

1. Do what you do best and link to the rest : The link changes every business and in every industry the link forces specialization, quality and collaboration, the link changes old role and creates new roles
2. Join a network : the internet adds networks of link over society, connecting people with information. The more connection they are, the greater the value ! join or create a network as soon as possible, "put yourself in a cloud of connection that lights up each time a link is made, so the entire cloud keeps getting bigger, denser and brighter".
3. Be a platform : How can you act as a platform where anybody will collaborate and get value, how can you create open standard so everybody will use and contribute so that you get a share of their value too ?
4. Think Distributed : Stop thinking centralised, don't think yourself as an end but as a mean, you can't no longer expect people to come to you, instead try to be found as many as possible on many other sites and platforms as possible.

I really recommend this book, how can you apply these keys of success in your daily job and in your software demo ? From my side I did a demo with the theme " how my software can help your publishing company to be a platfom in which your customer could subscribe, collaborate with the others, and create ad orders in the same time ?

Experiencing the power of the unexpected (with "Rachel Getting Married")

Last week , I decided to go to the cinema but I had no idea about the movie I was going to see and moreover I had no idea of what kind of movie I was in the mood to watch. I didn't know wet her I wanted to see a nice comedy, a tearjerkers, a thriller or a road movie but I knew one thing : I didn't want to be bore by a think tank or intellectual movie ? Arriving at the cinema building , my eyes were grabbed by the poster and the title of the film "Rachel Getting Married" and I assumed that it was likely a nice and naive comedy about romance like "Notting Hill" or "Pretty Woman" with Julia Robert and it was actually perfect for my state of mind at this time. So I paid the ticket, went into the movie theater and during all the movie session I experienced the power of the "unexpected" as "Rachel Getting Married" was absolutely not what I was expecting for, but in a VERY good way so that I felt more excited about this movie than if I had been told ( or if i had read some critics before) that it was the best Jonathan Demme's masterpiece since "The Silence of the Lambs" !!!

I though that it is a good information about our daily work and software demo : It is always worth it to exceed the expectation of the others. By the way in many companies it is one of the most important career criteria valuation : he is a great potential employee because he is always exceeding our expectations !!!
During the discovery process and the customer interviews we had better not talk about the demo and the features we will show them, we had better not promise a lot so that the surprise gap beetween their expectation or what they think of your solution and the real meeting will be as high as possible so that they feel as excited as I was after watching the Demme's movie. In each demo we need to take into account the unexpected effect (in a good way)

For instance, the last ever great demo I attended is a demo for which our customer was only expecting some presentation slides : instead we provided them in a live system how their own business processes could be enhanced by our solution !
How would you introduce the unexpected in our outstanding demo ? Make comments giving me ideas !