Seeing as how most of this week was spent getting Randy, my new "rock star" call center agent, ready for battle, I thought it would be informative to share with you the tools he uses to do what he does. I've tried to break this out between hard things, soft things that have to be installed and soft things that are accessed through a browser. My personal bias and preference, and one I hope to develop in the book, is to do all soft things through a browser.

Over the years, I have hired call center agents in Canada, India and the Philippines.  Some of them have worked out really well, others less well.  As a relatively small business, I cant afford to screw up often...and I did recently.

Yesterday I interviewed 5 people in the Philippines.  The person I hired was not the person who fit the profile of the person I thought I would hire, yet I feel good about the decision.

The Challenge

Without the benefit of being able to look a candidate in the eye or read their body language, how do you know who to trust with the role? 

I have several really nice dictionaries in my bookshelf.  'Must have paid a small fortune for them.  However, they collect dust because I now go to to the web for most of my research these days.

It's good for people like you who read this online book-in-the-making because I can hyperlink right to the definition or to various definitions.  The other good thing is that the definition can be refined or otherwise updated and you get the latest information.

Not so with my Oxford dictionary.  Things like wikis and blogs didn't exist when I bought the reference books and goodness knows what new sales tools will be invented this year or next.

What will I do when it comes time to take this book to print?

I met with an acquaintance from the real estate industry yesterday. We'd not seen each other for over a year, so I was curious about what he'd been up to.

Background

This person is just over 40 years old. He has an MBA. He has bounced around from one career to another, but always had a passion for real estate that he had developed outside of his career. Since we'd last spoken, he decided to become a real estate professional and had only recently taken a full-time job selling lots in new residential developments at 100% commission. I was naturally curious about the challenge of making a decent living with this opportunity. (No, I was not trying to sell him a Sales Jumpstart, but I should have! Read on...)

The most important lesson I learned about sales methodologies, I learned baking a cake.

How to bake a great cake

1. Buy a good cake mix
2. Assemble all of the ingredients listed on the box
3. Mix according to the recipe
4. Bake at the temperature and for the time indicated on the box

If you do what you are supposed to, it is almost impossible to bake a bad cake!

How to make sales

1. Start with a decent product or service and a good list of prospects
2. Apply a procedure for changing prospects to customers
3. Work hard and with enthusiasm

If you do what you are supposed to, it is almost impossible to not make sales!

I went to a seminar on Lean manufacturing this morning. I learned that in all manufacturing businesses there is a value chain and that 95% of the steps in a typical value chain don't deliver any value at all. 95%... that's a staggering number!

This made me think about how the sales process is a lot like the manufacturing process and about how inefficient it generally is. Looking at ways to make the sales process more simple, more "lean" is certainly something to investigate in the book.

AWOL.  Absent Without Official Leave. 

Last Thursday, my call center agent in the Philippines, didn't show up for work.  She didn't call, email or otherwise inform me, her supervisor or anyone else in her place of work where she was or what was the matter.  Did she get into an accident?  Was she mugged?  Did she get sick and end up in the hospital? 

Friday came and went.  No news.  We tried calling her home and cell phone.  No answer.  We tried tracking her down through friends in the office.  Tasha was fairly new, so not that many people knew her.  No luck finding out more.

Manila has its violent side.   If something terrible happened to her, surely we'd hear over the weekend?  Nada.

Monday was another cliffhanger.  Someone apparently saw her crying on Wednesday afternoon.  Was it a family crisis?  A guy problem?  Still no word from Tasha.

I've been wondering about this for almost 4 years.  Every time I think I've got it figured out, something changes. 

There definitely are changes underway on the web that impact how we will interact with it, and how we will interact with each other using it. From the business book perspective, I feel what's being called Web 2.0 is worth investigating.

I believe that there will be significant business rewards for those who figure out how to apply Web 2.0 tools and techniques.  I'll certainly explore that in the book. 

In the meantime, I've decided to migrate my business from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.  I'm not sure yet what that means in terms of cost or workload.  Learn at my expense!

I've been teaching a course in eBusiness in the MBA program at the University of Phoenix for several years.  The course isn't being offered right now, so the website is gathering dust, so to speak.  I'd like to use this website to share resources that might benefit business developers everywhere. 

I'll start with "Cool Tools".  My aim for the course was to compile a list of free, or close to free, eBusiness tools that were relevant to the course and that I believed would benefit my students both during the class and in their professional lives.  I'm going to broaden that mission to say this "Cool Tools" section is to benefit the readers of this blog and the readers of my book-to-be.

I was very eager to go to the Northern Voice blogging conference this year.  I went in 2005, its first year, because my friends at Bryght were on the organizing team.  Last year, my wife scooped me by registering first and I got to stay at home with the kids.  Same this year, but one of my kids was sick with the flu and only mama could provide the required TLC, so I got to go to 1/2 the conference.  It was a good investment of time!
Several people I have a lot of time for would consider themselves bloggers in the same way that I would consider myself a salesperson or a runner.  To them, being a blogger is one of the key attributes of who they are.

My first impressions 3 years ago were who really cares about your blog?  You see, these folks were so passionate about their blogs and blogging that I figured the options were: