Sleeping @ work place !?

An afternoon nap can improve your effectiveness on the job!
If you think naps are only for slackers, think again.

Companies such as Zappos, Google, and Nike have heeded the "productive nap", and now encourage team members to take a nap on the job and refresh when they need it.

Now, How to take a "productive nap"?A short afternoon nap of 20 minutes enhances alertness and concentration, elevates mood, and sharpens motor skills. To boost alertness on waking, you can drink a cup of coffee before you nap. Caffeine requires 20 or 30 minutes to take effect, so it will kick in just as you're waking.

Take a look at this infographic taken from http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/naps/

Cold call ! NO !

Instead of hundreds of random calls to people who don’t want to hear from you, and where your pitch is little more than “Got any job orders I can fill?”, do the research work to find a point of common ground which turns the call from ‘cold’ to ‘warm’.
There are many ways to do this...

• Approach ex-candidates, employees who are now in roles where they may become clients.
• Get a referral from your present and previous clients.
• Connect first in a neutral environment(like Exhibition, seminar) and follow up later.
• Engage on social media first. Start now!
• Follow up on a talk given by a prospect, or a blog written, or a piece of PR.

How today's VC's decide ??

Today’s VCs decide whether to invest based on a founder’s answers to two factors:

• Growth potential. In order to buy low and sell high, VCs want to invest in markets that are currently small but have the potential to grow big fast. Big markets and high profits attract swarms of competitors who bid up the valuations of startups with a big lead in those markets.
• Good leadership. You need to convince the VC that you are the person to capture the lion’s share of the opportunity. But what does it mean to be a great start-up CEO? I found that VCs apply five tests: Are you an industry thought leader? Have you demonstrated a will to win? Do you have high clock speed? Are you a good risk manager? And can you build an A-team?

VCs are very anxious to start turning a big profit for their limited partners because there is no way a pension fund or endowment will take the huge risk of start-up investing without high returns. By understanding the pressures facing VCs and the way they try to pick winners, you can boost your odds of getting them to invest. 

And today's Hungry Start-up Strategy is  "Creating New Ventures with Limited Resources and Unlimited Vision" 

Smart phones, Who is the leader ??

Nokia’s Symbian platform went from 47% share to 16% in three years
Microsoft’s phone platforms went from 12% to 1%
RIM’s Blackberry went from 17% to 12%
Other platforms went from 21% to zero.

Over a two year period,
Google’s Android OS went from zero to 48%
and Apple’s iOS went from 2% to 19%.

ADA India is into Android application development from Jan-2012
2 Apps coming up before 30-Apr-2012.

How to make sales training more effective?

• Focus on fundamental skills. Most sales failures take place because of a lack of ability or practice in very fundamental skills–questioning, presenting and closing.
• Include skills training. Set a goal to spend at least one-third of every team meeting on sales training. You'll increase everyone's numbers more by improving skills than with product training alone.
• Tie the fundamentals. If you understand how those skills help move an opportunity through the sales cycle, you can identify exactly where additional training is needed–either on a group or on an individual level.
• Include role-playing. While it's fun to bat around sales theory, it's only useful if tied to actual behavior. That means practicing, in a controlled way, so that the skills are really learned.
• Check and revise of what was taught before. Sometimes sales training involves eliminating bad habits and integrating new ones. That means you need to make sure that the training sticks and continues to be used.
• Make it fun. Sales training should ideally involve a contest, a competition, and/or prizes. People who sell pros are naturally motivated to win–so turning sales training into an opportunity to win guarantees participation.

Steps to remove "Procrastination"

Did you find yourself constantly pulled in multiple directions by new opportunities?

Here are some small steps by which you can have a more focussed frame of mind.

Set qualification benchmarks for new opportunities, ideas, and/or relationships. This will help keep you on track and help you assess what is worth your time.

Assess incoming requests against internal opportunities and ideas. What will make the biggest impact if you and your team complete it? What could have the biggest negative impact if it isn’t taken care of?

Choose one big idea or project at a time and focus on it. If you have a team, delegate vetting opportunities and initial tasks on other priorities to team members. This way, you stay focused.

Tackle the big things first, then fill in the rest of your time with the mid-sized and smaller jobs you need to take care of on a regular basis.   

Set the objectives and intended outcome first. Then break those down into smaller tasks with goal-oriented timelines, and start assigning responsibilities.