CNN reported earlier that newspaper sales are generally down by 2% in the US, while online news viewing has increased by 8%. I definitely contribute to that increase. Living an ex-pat existence for most of the year, I appreciate, more than most, the ability to get news from my favorite dailies over the Internet. While the morning coffee is brewing, my T3 is syncing with AvantGo, and instead of six sections of the New York Times competing at the breakfast table for space with my cereal bowl, spoon in one hand and T3 in the other, I skim through their digital counterparts without the bother of advertising or clutter.

Following the Times, I skim through my collection of ten other news and technology sources, including the international edition of Time Magazine, where I can get a look at the week’s cover photo and a taste of the articles inside. I sate my information hunger with Quick News business and technical feeds, carry the dishes to the sink, and start my work day fully refreshed.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich confirmed, during his interview by Steven Colbert on May 9th, the seriousness of this trend when he said that PDAs spelled doom for the newsprint industry. I downloaded that episode of Comedy Central in Moscow, from iTunes to my PC (while I patiently wait for Apple to buy Palm and take the video iPod to its ultimate incarnation). I think PDAs (including “smart” phones) spell the same doom for book publishers, broadcast TV, music and video discs.

Before I became a voracious eBook reader, I ordered my bestsellers from Amazon, waited an average of three weeks for them to wind their way through the postal maze that stretches between California and Moscow, and paid a premium of 40% for the “pleasure.” Now, they are minutes away via eReader, Mobipocket and Fictionwise, at an average of 30% less than hardcover prices.

Most of you have broad consumer choices, as you are from cities full of shopping malls. For those of us living in the thousands of diasporas scattered around the planet, digital is our only choice. No matter what our native language or culture (or what language or culture we are studying), there are digital newspapers, libraries, music and video collections just a few keystrokes away. The Russians call it “mir tesen”—it’s a small world!

Personally, I don’t think that Sony will be any more successful with their new eBook reader than earlier failed platforms. I do think that the mobile device users of the world will increasingly read and watch on them simply because they can, but that those activities will always remain secondary. Primary will be real-time life management including phone calls, emails and instant messaging. Whatever will be, I’m smiling smugly now because I’m already there!

Jeffrey Barrie, Moscow, Russian Federation

This posting is from John Darrin, an old friend who has been involved with sales and marketing for most of his career, with a few interludes – starting and running his own businesses. John worked with me during much of the time that the ideas in Sales Automation Done Right came to being, and was a valuable observer and commentator in those discussions. I hope John will be a frequent contributor to the SalesWays site.

- Keith Thompson

First, the disclaimer. I have been selling for over thirty years. Selling a broad variety of products and services from multi-million dollar projects to $200 electronics to the luncheon special. I have read the Sales Automation Done Right book, and I use similar processes and methodologies and techniques.

In the book, sales automation is defined (Page 7), and I paraphrase that definition to read “efficient and effective, technology-assisted selling.” The precision of that definition, the importance of both effectiveness and efficiency, and the ability of modern technology to support them, is critical to success in selling today.

Now I want to get something relevant to this definition off my chest. Something that continues to nag at me whenever my sales staff, or peers, or even bosses or clients, postulate one particularly absurd assumption. Here is my rant:

IT ISN’T ALL UP THERE.

One of the silliest things I ever heard came from a young, very aggressive, very ambitious, and otherwise very intelligent salesman, while he tapped his head with his index finger. “It’s all up here,” he said.

He meant that he didn’t need technology to record and save and use his sales opportunity information to help him sell, because he kept it all in his head. Technology was good for keeping his contact information and his calendar, but that’s all. Presumably, recording these bits of information on his computer left room for everything else to fit in his head.

Sales people are often smug, pretty confident, sure of themselves. We have to be able to get up every day and go out there and try to convince people to do something. Usually something they should do anyway but are dragging their feet for some reason, and usually with someone else trying to convince them otherwise. Often, we succeed, and this success can blind us to some realities. And when we fail, many times we don’t know why.

I don’t care who you are, or what you sell, it is critical to understand that it isn’t all up there. Some of it is. Maybe even enough to enjoy some success. But never all. If it was all up there, then you would be solving the big bang theory, or playing with super strings, or something equally esoteric. Or, you would be closing 100% of your opportunities.

But you’re not.

Look at it this way – if you had just one opportunity to work, and you could devote 100% of your time, your resources, and your talent to it, and as long as it wasn’t selling a fleet of 747’s or something equally complex, you would have virtually a 100% closing rate. It’s as simple as that.

As more opportunities are added, or as opportunities become more complex and require more activity, focus gets blurred, information remains undiscovered, chances are missed. And sales are lost.

So, whatever you can do as a salesman to focus all of your might on one opportunity before you move on to the next, do it. Even if you have a hundred open opportunities and you have to switch gears fifty times a day, technology can make the transition smooth.

When you do switch those gears, focus on the one opportunity. Treat it like it was your only one. And let technology keep track of the other ninety-nine until it’s their turn.

Do that, and it never will be the only one.

I have been in the high tech industry for all of my life, and have always had the luxury to choose my own computer. As I always worked from both home and the office so I gravitated to portable computers.

I must have worked with all the so called portable computers since the early eighties, although I confess I never had an Osborne, which most computer historians claim to be the first truly portable device (1981), with a five inch monitor and a weight of 24 pounds. Although I did not have one, I bumped into them a lot in my career of a high tech lab instrument salesman. Seems to me that they were light years ahead of their time.

I went through a number of machines of all weights and sizes, but one of my favorites was “the Brick.” The idea of the brick was to put the computer into a very small package (3″ x 8″ x 11″), which could then be transported. When you got to the office you plugged in your keyboard, monitor, and printer and started work. This was in 1990. I loved it, although you had to hold your breath when you plugged it into the docking station, which had a gazillion connectors, anyone of which, if bent, could bring the system down. I must have been through a dozen different portable, laptop, or notebook variants over the years, but my favorite is the one I have now – the Sony Vaio TR3A. I like tiny computers—before the Sony I had a Fujitsu B-Series Lifebook, which is actually smaller than the Sony, but doesn’t have the same features.

My Sony weighs just three pounds, has a 10 inch high resolution display and a built-in optical drive. My requirements are simple—give me the smallest computer that will allow me to touch type and read the screen. Battery life is important too, but I settle for three hours and the ability to replace the battery. It seems to me that the overwhelming factor in of this size thing is the keyboard. I am a new touch typer as I picked the talent up late in life; touch typing is liberating. I’m glad I gave it the three months of effort needed to pick it up. But, if you can type at the rate that you can think quality thoughts, the world opens up. It definitely makes writing a book a bit quicker.

I’ve always liked the idea of having a notebook; the kind made of paper (I like the electronic versions that you tap into too, but more about those later). I like the look and the feel of notebooks, and the idea of having get acres and acres of blank pages, just urging me to spill my thoughts.

Then there’s the feeling when you look back on your work (provided you don’t have trouble deciphering your own chicken scratch). Of course, not everything you scrawl will see the light of day, but there is always that gem of an idea waiting to be shared. And it will be locked safely on organic two-dimensional space.

I picked up the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago and found a fascinating article on the Moleskine Notebook. Even though I must have purchased every exotic book of blank paper under the sun over the past thirty years, I had never got a Moleskine; until now.

The Moleskine story seems to be a wonderful example of good marketing (with the likes of Van Gogh and Hemingway rumored to have been Moleskine users), and has even spawned a blog dedicated to the ways people use their Moleskines (The moleskinerie). Well now I’ve got a Moleskine and I’m giving a try; I’ll let you know how it works out.

Why do I ask that question? Well, SalesWays is about sales and technology. In my book Sales Automation Done Right I am downright discriminatory against paper. There are many instances where I infer that a paper-based office will ensure the demise of the business. I’m not backing away from that, because I’m referring to paper-based processes.

Paper is not conducive to dynamic workflow within the company; it can’t move itself so it needs people to pick it up and move it from one desk to another. It accumulates in heaps, and people, inevitably intimidated, procrastinate when they have to stare down a leaning tower of paper. It is much better to make the process electronic and move it using electrons down a wire or through the air. With paper-based information, you have to store it in big metal boxes, and then spend a lifetime trying to make some practical use of it. It’s a much better idea to store it on a 200GB hard drive and take advantage of some friendly software to extract the stuff you need.

But here’s the paradox; paper is great when it comes to capturing information when you are sitting in front of the customer. You can usually write as fast as you think, but you certainly couldn’t touch type into your notebook computer at 40 wpm in front of the customer (if you can, you should be commended; you have a marvelous ability to multitask). Somehow, customers seem to appreciate you carefully writing notes about your conversation, whereas they may have a problem with you when you’re dealing with the odd Windows quirk at the same time as they are telling you about their budget, product needs, or difficulties dealing with their purchasing department.

Paper is great for capturing information quickly. Paper works with the human mind in splendid unison. If you don’t like what you just jotted down, you can scratch it out. If you love what you wrote, highlight it with a star. If there is no room left to write, put it in the margin or curve it around the perimeter—paper will let you do anything. And I don’t care how much of a computer junky they are, the typical salesperson will have their favorite notebook with no LCD or keyboard—just paper.

I was looking at a recent article by Denis Pombriant. I’ve known Denis as a perceptive analyst for a number of years, and fortunately he and I have mostly seen eye to eye about CRM fundamentals (although not always). Denis has the ability to look at all the stuff about the CRM space and to locate something lurking in there that most other people have missed.

The latest example of this that struck me was his observation regarding the spreadsheet. Denis wrote:

“I have always believed that, to figure out what new applications would be appearing in the near future, all you have to do is understand what people are tracking on spreadsheets.”

I see this observation come to life in my other world, as the head of a company specializing in delivering CRM solutions If I had to pick just one technology that was supporting the endeavors of most companies implementing their CRM, it would be Microsoft Excel. This is because the spreadsheet is the best list making tool in the world.

Recently (2002) I was an interim CEO for the Canadian division of a global bioscience company where their future sales projections depended on the spreadsheet. The giant spreadsheet would arrive from head office, and you typed into the part you for which you were responsible. You e-mailed it back, and it got rolled up with scores of other region’s results. Then you got it back again to see how you were performing. At that time there was no company-wide CRM tool—each region did its own thing. But head office wanted to know what was going on, so they used Excel to figure it out. A dozen business analysts were needed at head office just to keep the spreadsheet routine working.

Don’t get me wrong, of course, spreadsheets are powerful analytical and reporting tools, but, to use spreadsheets throughout an organization without any kind of connecting glue underpinning it is a recipe for waste of effort and inefficiencies. They don’t link very well, they don’t share common data very well—they are cumbersome and need lots of tender loving care to make them work. You manually dig the information out from somewhere else and type it into the spreadsheet.

The CRM system has to be the central repository that contains all the information (accurate and up to date) ready for the spreadsheet to use. Press a button and the CRM information automatically flows into the spreadsheet, which then automatically digests the data and spits it out into predefined formats. No one types data into the spreadsheet.

It is the reliance on the spreadsheet that slows a company down in evolving to a proper CRM solution. The attitude is, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and the pressure of continuing business prevents people from sitting back, taking a breath, and recognizing just how wasteful and time consuming the spreadsheet process really is. From my experience the best thing to do is to implement a solid CRM product in parallel, and to slowly wean the business off the spreadsheet, and relegate it to a pure reporting and analysis tool.

This agreement gets full marks from me, and is a step forward in providing an optimized mobile platform for salespeople to conduct business. RIM gave us universal, easy access to information in the form of e-mail. Palm gave us the ability to run complex business applications from a very small footprint. The ideas in sales automation done right have already been running on the Palm platform for three years, and they work well. When they run on the Treo with RIM software, they show the promise of working even better.

Palm is also bringing out a Treo that will run on the Microsoft operating system. If you were to ask Steve Jobs today if his highly protective stance on licensing out the Apple operating system decades ago was the best thing to do – he would say NO.

Palm has got it right.