David | December 22, 2012
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Five Ways to Improve 2013 Sales Kickoff Meetings

It is that time of year again where companies pull together their sales teams for the highly anticipated [i.e. dreaded] annual kickoff meeting.  During the typical training session the sales leader or the marketing guy will try to stuff 100lbs of information into 10lb brains all compressed into 50 minutes. That’s an awful lot to absorb and retain especially when the selling teams are already battling a splitting headache from the team bonding events of the night before.

Here are 5 ways you can turn this one time sales training and enablement event into a year long selling advantage.

Be kind to your selling teams

For product marketing mangers, sales trainers and sales operations managers the annual kickoff is the single most compressed way to get information to the field. Unfortunately this is like drinking from a fire hose or actually several fire hoses all at the same time for the field organization.  Be hyper-aware that learners have a capacity limit.  During individual sessions, focus on the most important aspects of the topics and don’t overwhelm the audience with details.  Use this time to tell exciting stories of how others have been successful and how customers have succeeded. Stories stick much stronger than features, functions, speeds and feeds.

Add context to your sales materials & training content

Sales teams, especially those geographically distributed, don’t have the luxury of informal conversations that reveal the bigger picture behind a sales tool.  Extend the value of selling content by including “insider” information with every resource to help the sales teams better understand when, where and why to use different pieces.  A simple paragraph or set of instructions can dramatically improve the utilization of the sales resources and product content.

Take your training handouts digital

Nobody wants to carry around a binder with printed copies of Powerpoint presentations and sales collateral.  So this year take training handouts digital and aggregate all of those great resources into one place.  Training materials should go beyond the presentation, they should include real world examples, links to supporting web content, access to training videos and webinars.  Don’t sell yourself short on the value of a well rounded training companion that has all of those details you just won’t have time to get across in  face-to-face sessions.

Make every session actionable

Don’t fall into the rut of preaching to the sales teams like they are an audience of cabbages.  Take the opportunity to collaborate with the group.  Ask questions during your session and make it interactive to turn it into a learning experience for you too.  At the end of each session give the audience at least one action to complete after the kickoff meeting is over.  This will help to keep the selling teams engaged and help remind them of the valuable points you made during the training session.  Examples of take away actions could be “3 things to go and tell each of your customers” or “Share a customer success story with every prospect.”

Turn one time training into a recurring program

Sales Performance International (SPI), world renown experts in Solution Selling, says that retention dramatically drops off when there isn’t a continual learning program in place.  According to SPI’s own research it takes just 5 weeks for the average learner to forgot 50% of the materials.  That number climbs to 84% in just 16 weeks. There is a tremendous opportunity to increase sales team productivity by changing the way training is done.  Implementing a continual learning program where information is distributed to the team in an ongoing fashion is just one of the steps you can take.

David Abramowski is a career product marketing leader and co-founder of Zoomstra, a Seattle based software company that helps organizations take their sales training content to the Cloud.

 

Category: partner enablement, sales guides, sales kits, sales training, training, Uncategorized | Tags: ,
David | December 19, 2012
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Zoomstra’s Look Back at 2012

December is a great time to look back at the year and spend some time thinking about the great new friends we have made, the transformations along the way and the progress we have enjoyed as a business.  The team at Zoomstra wanted to share our year in review to give you a glimpse inside of our start-up….

March 2012 – Welcome Zoomstra! 

On March 1st we launched the first production version of Zoomstra along side with our first commercial customer Parallels.

April & May 2012 – Customer learning front and center

Our first commercial customer launched a program using Zoomstra to provided partner enablement worldwide. An embedded SurveyMonkey survey captured partner feedback with a resounding 100% recommendation rating. We were delighted to say the least.

After our initial release, we focused on learning as much as we could from our initial customers and hundreds of trial users. We heard the good, the bad and the ugly about our baby and we loved every minute of it (okay, maybe not every minute of it, but we heard what our customers were saying).  When people have strong opinions about what your software needs, you know they are using it and want to keep using it!  So we listened to the customers and put together a plan to significantly re-design of several pieces of the product.

July 2012 – Beta2 introduces the new Workbook builder

In July we introduced a much improved Zoomstra Workbook builder. This lets you aggregate a wider variety of content from the web, from your computers and from your head.

August 2012 – Giving back with the PR guide for Start-ups

During the second round of beta we learned a lot about our messaging and about getting exposure for Zoomstra.  We focused our efforts on getting listed across as many beta sites and start-up sites as we could find.  We captured the sites, the processes and curated some of the best content into a Zoomstra Workbook that we make available to anyone for FREE! Get access by clicking here.

September 2012 – The importance of good plumbing & the Zoomstra API

The more that our customers and partners used Zoomstra, the more we heard of the needs for a published API. Customers wanted to integrate with Zoomstra for automated provisioning, subscription management and more.  We felt that this was an important aspect of our future growth so we quietly focused on making sure that the inner workings of Zoomstra were rock solid and efficient.  We then began creating our API that we released to our partners in September.

October 2012 – Founder’s Workbook companion to The Startup Owners Manual goes live

The well known authors Steve Blank and Bob Dorf teamed up with Zoomstra to add an online companion to their hot selling book and new age guide for entrepreneurs - The Startup Owner’s Manual. This created a model for other content authors to follow while offering their how-to guides and training companions for a fee. And just like that, zWorkbooks.com was born!

November 2012 – Keeping it simple for participants

In November we focused on making it easier for participants to get into workbooks and ways to keep them coming back. Participants told us that they wanted the delivery of new workbook content directly to their inbox with a simple click to automatically grant access to the available information. We gave them what they asked for! As of November, Zoomstra workbooks have weekly reminder notifications and one-click access to make it incredibly simple to get access to workbook content.

December 2012 – Salesforce Integration V1 complete-ish

Customers kept asking us for the same thing: Salesforce.com integration. It was like listening to a broken record. We knew it had to happen, but kept putting it off because we lacked  experience on the Salesforce platform.  Luckily we found a great developer that was able to help us out and get the first version of  our Salesforce.com connector completed in short order. This connector will allow companies to add Zoomstra Workbooks and Zoomstra Collections directly to the detail record of a Lead or a Contact without ever leaving Salesforce.com. We’re wrapping up beta now so stay tuned for the launch.  We have a few more steps to complete in conjunction with Salesforce to offer this connector on the AppExchange.  If you would like to be notified when the Salesforce connector is available please drop us a note.

Thank you for a successful 2012 and giving us a great outlook on 2013! 

Starting a B2B software company isn’t the sexiest of all ventures.  It doesn’t land you on the front page of Tech Crunch, it doesn’t get you into the hottest Tech Incubators with all that free press.  But what it does get you is access to a market that is willing to try new solutions and pay for those solutions that prove they solve real problems.  As a bootstrapped company, finding the early acceptance has been key to our ongoing progress.  We thank the thousands of people who have been using Zoomstra, providing feedback and helping us shape the next generation of our solution.

Category: channel enablement, cloud, enablement, marketing, partner enablement, sales guides, sales kits, startups | Tags: , , ,
Zoomstra | October 28, 2012
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Remind me! One click access and more…

As we turn towards the end of October we have a few interesting updates to let you know about.  Based upon customer feedback we are introducing weekly email reminders for workbook participants, simplified one click access capability and we are making really good progress on the salesforce.com application.  Let’s take a look at these in a bit more detail….

Automated Weekly Reminders are here! 

Today we rolled out an automated reminder system for Zoomstra workbooks.  By default the system will now generate a weekly reminder email for each distributed workbook.  The reminder email will include the table of contents for the workbook as well as current progress information.

Zoomstra will automatically send out a weekly reminder as long as the participant is accessing the workbook and making progress.   If no activity is detected after 4 reminders have been sent, the system will automatically stop itself.

Reminder emails are an easy way to keep your information in-front of your audience and keep them engaged in your workbooks.

Although we set the default to weekly, Participant users can adjust their reminder settings from within the Zoomstra Cloud Reader+ by clicking on the profile link.  The default of “weekly” can be changed to monthly or reminders can be turned off completely.

Check out the One click access via email

You know how you hate having to remember a user id and password every time you want to access some information.  We feel the same way so we have stripped away the burden of setting a user id and password for a participant user.  The participant can simply click on any link in the invitation email (or reminder emails) and they will be taken directly to their workbook in the Zoomstra Cloud Reader+. Under the covers we have embedded special login tokens that allow for the tracking of the user and access to personalized workbooks.

For those of you with sensitive data or company policies that don’t allow token based access, don’t fret. As a site administrator you can decide to turn off this feature and require a user id and password.

What’s going on with Salesforce Integration? 

In our last blog post we teased you about a Salesforce.com integration that was about to get underway.  I’m happy to report that the Zoomstra APIs have been completed and the salesforce.com application is nearly finished. We are getting really close to submitting the application for security clearance from Salesforce.  So with any luck we will be able to post a demonstration of the app in the next week or two!

Category: marketing, partner enablement, Uncategorized, Zoomstra |
David | October 23, 2012
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Building a startup is hard work. The Startup Owner’s Manual — Founder’s Workbook can help

Zoomstra partners with Steve Blank to launch The Founder’s Workbook, online companion to The Startup Owner’s Manual

Interactive guide leads founders through the startup process outlined
in The Startup Owner’s Manual, helping track progress while building a great company.

Today Zoomstra, in partnership with authors Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, announces the availability of The Startup Owner’s Manual – Founder’s Workbook online subscription, an interactive tool that guides founders through each of the hundreds of steps in the four-step Customer Development process, so they can track and monitor their progress.

The Founder’s Workbook ($9.95 at www.zoomstra.com/foundersworkbook) is a companion guide to the print and ebook editions of The Startup Owner’s Manual — the encyclopedic how-to bible that entrepreneurs of all stripes are using to build a successful company.

“We’re pleased to welcome the Founder’s Workbook and the Zoomstra platform as a handy tool to help entrepreneurs monitor their progress through the customer development process. We believe it’s a powerful tool and an excellent value,” says Steve Blank, the Silicon Valley startup expert and educator who developed the Customer Development methodology that launched the lean startup movement.

The Internet guide highlights on the checklists contained in The Startup Owner’s Manual, helping founders:

  • organize the work needed to search for a successful, scalable business model
  • walk through each key facet of the Customer Development process
  • visualize their progress
  • compare notes with the other members of their team
  • determine whether they need to pivot or if they can proceed to the next step

“We are excited to release the Startup Owner’s Manual Founder’s Workbook for entrepreneurs everywhere“ says Aaron Kassover, co-founder of Zoomstra. “Working with Steve Blank and Bob Dorf has helped us improve Zoomstra for authors and to make companion guides even easier to assemble and distribute.”

The Startup Owner’s Manual Founders Workbook is now available as an annual subscription for $9.95 at www.zoomstra.com/foundersworkbook.  The subscription gives the user access to the online guide for a full year through the Zoomstra Cloud Reader.

About Steve Blank

Steve Blank is a driving force in innovation, helping to radically reshape how startups are built and how entrepreneurship is taught. His first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, details the Customer Development process he created and which spawned the Lean Startup movement. His new Startup Owner’s Manual is his latest addition for entrepreneurial practitioners. Steve teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley, Columbia, and the National Science Foundation, among others, and blogs at www.steveblank.com

About Bob Dorf

Bob Dorf is a serial entrepreneur, founding his first success at age 22. Dorf is often called the “midwife of Customer Development,” having critiqued early drafts of The Four Steps to the Epiphany; he and Steve have been friends and colleagues ever since. When he’s not running K&S Ranch Consulting with Steve, Dorf teaches “Introduction to Venturing,” on Customer Development and getting startups right, as an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School.

About Zoomstra.com

Zoomstra.com is a unique online training & enablement platform that moves learning from a one-time classroom event into an ongoing, repeatable process. With the Zoomstra platform, organizations and instructors quickly create, distribute, and monitor interactive workbooks to guide their audience, employees, and partners.

Category: cloud, How-to, partner enablement, sales training, startups, Zoomstra |
Zoomstra | October 3, 2012
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Thanks beta2, we’ll never forget you…

We have officially exited our beta period for the latest version of Zoomstra and learned a lot of great lessons that we won’t soon forget.  Here are a few of our learnings and improvements you’ll find inside of Zoomstra…

Speed & scale improvements

Our top learning during the beta was all about speed and ability to scale the distribution of workbooks to large audiences.  During the beta the Zoomstra application launched thousands of workbooks, sometimes creating long queues behind the scenes resulting in slow response to users.  We returned to the drawing board and re-worked the fundamental architecture and processes used to create and distribute workbooks.  We are now confident that we can scale to tens of thousands of workbooks and keep response times within acceptable limits for a web application (i.e. – immediate!)

Improving interactivity in the Zoomstra Cloud Reader+ with user created notes

Zoomstra workbooks are finding their way into several different niches like ebook companions and how-to guides.  As we worked with several authors the need for additional interactivity within the workbook itself was needed.  We have added a new feature that allows participants to add notes to individual checklist items so that they can not only track their progress, but they can keep track of their thoughts and ideas at the same time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Customization of icons in the Workbook table of contents improves adoption

If you are a channel manager you’ll like this one.  We learned that creating visually appealing workbook invitations that are delivered via email is key to adoption when it comes to partner enablement.  You can now use your own icons to represent each lesson in a workbook.  Here is an example…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Salesforce.com integration is coming

One last piece of information we want to share is that we heard you loud and clear that integration with Salesforce.com is a requirement for partner enablement programs.  We are actively building the integration and plan to have a preview of this connector application before the end of October.  Stay tuned for more updates!

Thanks to everyone who participated in our beta and providing feedback.  If you have a Zoomstra account from the beta we’ll be contacting you shortly with an offer that will let you continue to use the application as one of our early adopters.

Category: channel enablement, enablement, How-to, marketing, onboarding, partner enablement, sales guides, sales kits, sales training, training |
Zoomstra | September 7, 2012
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Beta Update – Easy distribution added

Today we have a few changes to announce based upon our beta tester feedback.

Workbook is auto-distributed to author upon “publishing”.

We heard that you didn’t want to take the extra steps needed to assign yourself the workbook that you just built. We added an automated feature that will place a copy of the newly minted workbook in your “Reader” tab the first time that the workbook is “Published”.  So go ahead and create a workbook then click the publish button.  You should see it appear in your Reader the same way that your users will see it.

Distribute action added to workbook listing. 

To streamline your workflow we have added the “distribute” action to each of the workbooks in your library.  You’ll notice the new menu item on the bottom of the Workbook action panel.  Click on this to reveal the drop down menu.  From the menu you can select to distribute the workbook to one user or multiple users.  Make sure that your workbook is “Active” before you try to distribute it.  (only Active workbooks can be distributed)

Editable HTML Block added to the left side bar

We have had several requests to allow you to add links or other information to the sidebar of your Zoomstra Cloud Reader.   This is now available to the administrator.  As a site wide setting, you can go into the “Administration” link at the top of the page and then edit the section “Color and Branding”.  You will see the option to activate the HTML block as well as the corresponding input field.

Keep on using Zoomstra and keep on sending us feedback.  We love to hear how you are using Zoomstra.

Category: How-to, Zoomstra |
David | September 4, 2012
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STARTUPS: Getting your first 100 beta signups in 24hrs

Does this sound familiar?  You have completed months of hard core customer development work and you are finally ready to get your product out there in the world.  You want beta testers to help you understand how your system is performing and if your interpretation of customer conversations is correct. You want those same testers to become proponents for your solution. You would love to see reviews, articles and the same level of excitement you have for your solution.

So you open your doors and slap that big red BETA label on the front of your site.  You do some SEO work.  You send out a few tweets with a #beta hash tag and you write a blog post or two.  You are so excited. You shipped your first version. You go to bed and expect to wake up to big things like news of your startup splashed on the front page of Techcrunch and Mashable with hundreds of new signups giving you valuable feedback.

Unfortunately, when the alarm goes off the next morning you take a look at your site and see that nothing has really happened.

As entrepreneurs we have all been here and seen this time and time again and you’d think we would learn our lesson.  But since most of us only launch a product once or twice, we don’t have a deep pool of past experience to rely on.

Therefore the Zoomstra crew wanted to share our most recent experience with you and create a baseline you can use to get your own startup some attention.  When we launched beta2 of zoomstra.com we documented our process and created a step-by-step guide that can help you get those every so important initial beta testers.

Following this process worked for us and hopefully can work for you.  We aggregated great advice from smart people all over the startup community. We then used that information and put together a step-by-step program which we turned into a Zoomstra workbook.  We then followed this plan ourselves to launch beta2 and we gained a level of awareness for Zoomstra that we had not achieved previously.  Not only did we reach 100 beta signups in record time we have also opened to doors to more than a dozen sales cycles and some really interesting use cases for Zoomstra that we’ll be announcing shortly.

You can find the FREE workbook called PR Guide for Startups and Growth Hackers – Getting your first 100 users in 24hrs on our website.  Share this knowledge with your friends, startup groups and anyone else you think can benefit from the knowledge.  We’d also like your feedback so the we can continually improve this guide.

Best of luck and may the odds always be in your favor! :)

….The Zoomstra Crew

Category: How-to, startups |
David | August 23, 2012
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The beauty of beta – learning where the gaps are!

What do I do after I hit publish? I don’t see anything in “My Workbooks”

The latest release (Beta2) of Zoomstra has been available for about 10 days now and boy are we learning fast.  We are finding out not only about our product but also about the ways that people want to use it – it’s very exciting indeed. Now all is not perfect, but that’s why you do betas.  In the short amount of time that has elapsed it has become clear to us that we didn’t quite get the workflow right between the creation of a workbook and it’s distribution. In the past week our number 1 question is simply “What do I do after I hit publish”. On our whiteboards and in our heads it was all very logical (to us). Yet, in reality with hundreds of people interacting with the system and asking us questions, we can see that the path from creating a workbook to making that workbook available for an audience isn’t so clear.

So as we work on a way to improve Zoomstra to make it a simple flow from creation through distribution, we offer a few pieces of advice.

Distribute a workbook to one user or multiple users

Once your workbook has been created and you have published it, you can now share it with users.  To do this you go to the “User” tab and click on “Add New User” or “Add Multiple Users”.  You can also click on any user in the list and add a copy of a published workbook at any time.

 

Go ahead and click on your name in the list.  At the top of the modal window that just opened you’ll see “Add Workbook/Collection”. Click that link and then go ahead, pick a workbook from the list and then click save.  Now you can visit the “My Workbooks” tab and see your work the same way a user will see it.

Enable Self Service Registration

Just like an email opt-in form, Zoomstra also has a built in way to let people gain access to your workbooks.  Found in the “Library” tab you’ll see a button for “Collections”.

A collection is simply a grouping of one or more workbooks that you want to distribute to a user at once.  The grouping is fluid which means you can add or subtract from it at anytime.  The “collection” also has a feature that allows you to turn on self registration and provides you with a URL and HTML link.  You can even limit self registration to specific email domains if you want to make a special collection only available to a special partner.

Don’t worry we will continue to work on the process flow to make it more intuitive for everyone to use Zoomstra.  Thanks for you feedback so far and if you have suggestions for us or just can’t figure something out, please don’t hesitate to call us or contact us at the email address we sent you in the welcome letter.

Category: How-to |
David | August 19, 2012
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Create a sales kit in about 3 minutes with Zoomstra

Let’s take a look at how quickly you can put together a sales kit to nurture leads from webinars, tradeshows and online marketing campaigns.  The video below walks you through the steps to pull together a marketing presentation, a video overview and a next step for the audience.  The video is just under 3 minutes.

I even turned on self-registration for this workbook so you can interact with it yourself. It’s not smoke and mirrors. This is truly how easy it is to use Zoomstra. Click here to self register to access this Introduction to Zoomstra workbook.

Category: marketing, sales guides, sales kits, sales training, Zoomstra |
David | August 16, 2012
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Zoomstra beta2 pivots towards marketing automation & lead nurturing

Earlier this week we launched the second beta for Zoomstra.com.  This release makes significant strides as an automated system to help sales and marketing people nurture leads coming in from a variety of marketing efforts.  You may be thinking “Say what Zoomstra, I thought you were all about workbooks and partner enablement”….so let’s take a deeper dive…

During our first six months in the market we spotted a common problem that our prospects wanted to address using Zoomstra.  We started our sales discussions around partner enablement challenges and these meetings easily turned into demos. It was during those demos that time and time again our prospects turned the tables on us and started asking how to use Zoomstra to nurture leads.

In one meeting we created a custom demo using random content and marketing tools from the company’s website.  We created an introduction to their platform  in the form of a Zoomstra workbook including an introductory PPT presentation, a video testimonial, a product data sheet and a few next steps – all wrapped into an easy to follow along Zoomstra Workbook.  After the demo, the VP of Marketing  looked at us and said “this is pretty much the best interactive sales kit I could imagine for new leads, lets get started.”

So after hearing about this problem about a half dozen times in a row, we started to really pay attention and began working to disprove a theory that Zoomstra workbooks could effectively automate lead nurturing for those great unwashed masses.

Our research helped us learn that that companies spend a lot of money on awareness and lead generation yet they have a hard time engaging with each and every one of those people after the fact.  Companies feel that they they have a great story and a good collection of marketing materials. Where they fall short is on the resources needed to individually coach each and every possible lead on their product or service.

This was lean startup customer development at its finest.  Our own prospects identified for us a use for Zoomstra workbooks that has tremendous value. By talking to our buyers we learned that workbooks can be used early in the sales cycle to provide step by step guidance needed to build the initial trust with the potential lead.

We ran a few pilots hand in hand with customers using the first edition of Zoomstra. We learned first hand about the types of content companies already have and the way that marketing managers want to organize and distribute these sales kits. And that’s how we re-factored Zoomstra for this new beta2 release, and we couldn’t be happier.

We went on to look at the real dilemma behind this problem.  We found out that companies of all sizes spend tens of thousands of dollars attending trade shows, hosting webinars, and buying ads on Google, Facebook and LinkedIn with hardly any plan on how to nurture and convert those leads into prospects beyond a followup email or two.

And this is where Zoomstra Workbooks really shine.  With the new workbook builder the marketing or sales person can pull together a collection of existing materials into a step-by-step guide in a matter of a few minutes.  The marketing person can add context to existing materials, integrate content from the web and even make up their own checklists that basically tell the marketing contact exactly what to do next.  It’s pretty brilliant!

We’d like to invite you to try out Zoomstra during our beta2 as we shake out the rest of the bugs and complete a few additional development sprints.  Access to the beta is free during this time and you’ll be able to see how the system works. To gain access you’ll need an invitation code – so let me give you one right here.  After you visit www.zoomstra.com and enter your email address you’ll be prompted for an invite code – use the code zoomstrabeta123 to gain instant access.

We look forward to your feedback and seeing how you can use Zoomstra Workbooks to nurture leads and convert more contacts into prospects.

 

 

 

Category: marketing, online marketing, sales guides, sales kits, Uncategorized |
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