Small Business Solutions - Mobile Technology Video

Get it off your chest – be the first to comment on this video!

Small Business Solutions - Mobile Technology

Small Business Solutions - Mobile Technology Jason: One more speaker today, his name is Mario Armstrong. He is a very smart guy and then he can do a little bios so you have to understand where he is coming from, so he translate so again a very guy translate his technology for non-technology audiences through his radio shows, TV appearances and public speaking. He is heard regularly on NPR’s Morning Edition News and News Program. He hosts technology talk shows on XM radio as well as several other radio broadcast. He also has appeared on CNBC TV One PBS and it seems fun. Please welcome Mario Armstrong. Mario: Thank you Jason for initiating. Thanks for the warm welcomes in Neo Plus. How you guys doing this morning, pretty good? All right, awesome. My name is Mario Armstrong. I’m glad to be here. We’re going to talk about a little about a couple of different things today specifically focus on small business and mobility. We’re going to go over to case studies, give you some examples of technology is actually being utilized and we’ll also show a little bit of some news updates that I think are interesting to you and to your business as well as some trends. We’re going to look at a little bit of in front of the future, start forecasting a little bit how you like when I use mobile devices for your business, and before I get started out I’d like to get a show of hands just really kind of get the gauge the audience. How many people here show your hands have about 20 or less than points zero to 20? Okay, great. And then how many say 20 and up? Okay, good so that’s a good mixture. So, I’ll make sure to keep that in focus for both of you I now consider at 20 now would like to maybe, maybe not, maybe grown as well in those that are at 20 to 99 maybe want to grow as well, but I wanted to make sure, understood that so we can focus on some of the case studies and how that relates to you. Do we have any lawyers here, any law firms? One, two okay just—you’re in the front just in case you got—on. No, our lawyers are—no, I say that because I actually have a case study specifically for that as well. So, a real quick background on me just you’re like, “Who is this guy? What does he do?” So, I run a technology media company. It is a small business. We have about five employees and we create content and we syndicate that content. We also have a youth park to our business as well when we focus on middle and high school kids getting them into Science and Technology and putting programs together that you’ll engage them to be the next future engineers. So, we own networks everything from CNN hosting radio shows on XM and NPR. Any public radio listeners here? Good, All right cool and if you’re members. I’m sorry I’m not fetching NPR. We’ve got one at the back. And also with online in SBTV.com, Small Business Television.com, so if you don’t know about that it’s a great resource. We do a lot of technology segments for this channel but they have a lot of other broadcast and material that relates to SBTV. In fact, what you’re seeing here today will launch also via SBTV.com, so if you missed anything or while reviewing just go to SBTV.com later. So, that’s about me I would like to get right into my feelings about cell phones and mobility, and right off the back you know, in business a cell phone is only as good, only as good as the applications that can run 20. I mean, cell phones had this you know this beautiful history of going from in fact, let’s do a quick test. Let’s see how many —I mean I can do so many things now, internet, email, text messaging, GPS. Who remembers this guy? Anybody who remembers this guy? Least we have one of these. You guys look terribly, but you know how this works right? You could just back in the day this was a big deal. This was I mean it was huge. It was big too but I mean it was a big deal to have one of these because they were expensive and not a lot of people have them and you were you know, cool. Some of them say elites but whatever. The point is you had one right? But you had to have it with an attitude because it was so new then, so you couldn’t just use this device in the old way. You had to really have like a star then so how this will work is you’ll be maybe at the restaurant or you’d be hanging outside of the business office and all of the sudden you see this briefcase go down the full rings and you see this guy kind of like position himself or a lady and flip back of course he have to you know flip back this piece out. It was real style how they did that. And then you pack the antenna you have to pack the antenna and then you just talk and you just feel you talk and you can’t miss that thing somebody with this phone and that was a big deal, so they go out to be able to be seen from 30 miles away that they were the only one in the vicinity that has a mobile phone. But then the whole drama didn’t end until the phone calling and that’s where I really mad because they resist instantaneous fact that you adhere. It’s a minute of phone calls is okay, “All right thanks yes, I’ll get there over to the office right away, All right bye.” You get this stop and you get this you know this flip. I’m serious you get this —and that was like the coolest thing to do and then you smack that down and put it in your pocket and you just keep to unroll it. That’s how you handle this mobile device backed in the day. Now, any of you didn’t do that that’s what I do but that’s what you did, so we’ve got a long way, these phones one line of text not text. I hope a numeric line in green all they do was place to calls so what they did is to place calls. Nowadays, we’re well beyond that, so we’re going to talk about some of how mobility has changed and how that can affect your business. How many people here would like to generate more skills in their company? Anybody here who is interested in growing a little bit of revenue, salary or more staff? Well, a lot of people are still getting confused about this metal piece. It’s like prospects are going in. You have great panel for the prospects but how many are actually coming out? And what’s happening in between? And so how this mobility impact that? Well, we’re going to take a look at the case study here of how you can use tools that can help you understand this pipeline to sales process a little bit more clear. So, first and foremost this company is Ripple—it’s about a 50-person company. They are into—they want to drive more sales. They are a software company and their problem was to expedite sales while being out of the office. That’s really what they wanted to focus on. They covered they were fine inside but outside of the office how do we take advantage of that time to still generate sales? So what they did is a three step process on a solution. Number one, they identified on a CRM application. Is anyone here used CRM Customer Relationship Management software? You do? All right, great. I love to know what some of those are afterwards, what you guys are using, but number one, they can choose CRM and there’s some here that actually work very well on the bone, if they have what it takes. Ensure that that solution though—before you make this investment, make sure it has real-time mobile connectivity. Many people made you may think you need a CRM and that’s going to roll the desktop that you have and maybe thought through how your sales agents on the field force could interface with that application while they’re on a move. So, make sure that that’s part of the investment plan and for their solution they use a third party extension that made that work for them. The only other thing about this particular case study that I really like is that they decided not to try to solve everything by going mobile. They really picked one thing and that was the sales lead process. So, they really went mobile with a purpose. They want to have better lead management follow-up, sales tracking and unconvertible sales. Convert those prospects to sales, so let me give you a little snaps out about the before and after. Before the solution, let me just pick one process we’re in the essence of time. Leave your comment from the web. Anyone rely to this. You get website leads, All right good. So, leads coming from the web, the manager received those leads then the manager would take his or her time review the leads, find out who the proper salesperson is to forward that lead too and get into that person. By the way, I haven’t said anything yet about the person contacting the initial prospect from the lead, and just remember if they’re coming to your website they’re also going to your competitor’s website presumably as well. So, you’re not the only one, so what I’m getting at is time of essence. Time of the essence to you, so now what happens with the solution, a lead comes in from the web by passes the manager, based officer and criterion goes down directly to the appropriate salesperson for that territory right to their handheld device. And when it appears on their handheld device it’s also placed in their CRM folder, so they have it back of the desktop but they have it with them while their mobile, and the minute they start replying from their mobile device it automatically starts to create a history. So, that’s key I mean for those of you that know how a CRM application works I mean this is business intelligence at its best. If you’re not using a CRM application you really ought to take a hard fast look at using one and going mobile with it because that really is the one of the application that will empower you and your sales teams to be or do more with license just be able to understand your clientele better. So, now when they make that reply it instantly creates this history so that people back at the office can see what the latest transaction is or as well as the salesperson without they can pull up this particular client, say what was the last thing we discussed because that will actually add you a few minutes here I like to call them a follow-up with where we are, but I need to know more about what’s the last thing we said we would do and make sure that I’m on the right page, so I don’t sound like I’m on the airport. So, a couple of results from their experience. They want a user a friendly access and they’ve got from their BlackBerry devices to make a little bit simpler but as I say here you know, CRM is useless unless people are updating the information. How many of you can relate I see some heads now. How many of you —yes, thank you for being honest about that because that I mean I used sales force in my business, Salesforce.com. And I’m telling you we thought we mat everything possible out. First of all there are so many different things you can do from a customization prospective but the most important thing you need to do is understand a process of how you’re to update that contact information. It takes time, and you have to account for that in the sales process and in the sales cycle. So, just make sure you’re thinking about that because otherwise it’s useless. They received increase for activity because they can work in non-office environments, some enhance business intelligence as I’m, mentioning and the mobile alerts were really big. They really like a mobile alerts especially for leads that were coming in. Now, I mentioned sales force. For those of you who have never seen it before. This is kind of what it looks like on a desktop here. In this particular site just gives you an idea of leads status that you’ll break down of different types of prospects that you can have. This one gives me my interest break down. This one gives me a little bit of my distribution but it’s a false solution to help your manager accounts, understand the sales cycle, figure out the clogs in your sales pipeline, understand quickly within the limbs. Who is a really good valued customer versus people that maybe taking a lot of your time and spending much of money, so it helps you understand what clients you may need to let go as well as which clients you may need to focus more on. This is what it actually looks like on a BlackBerry device. A really clean, really sharp and what I like about it you can see I grabbed this screen shot on purpose because as you can see if I want to call someone everyone is familiar with scroll on through your contacts but, how many of you can actually log the call, so when you place that call you can actually log it which means it’s also being updated into the CRM system which is great. You can look at the activity history all of the functionality that’s in the application on the desktop you can have right on your device, so you can look at opportunities you currently working on. You can look at the activity history of that open activities that you would like to close, a very powerful tool. So, the bottom line is productivity works going mobile and it works on the BlackBerry very, very well. The average amount of minutes that a study that was done on the ROI study by Reid on the BlackBerry says that 60 minutes a day on average were converted to productive time, so it’s a lot of time. It means five hours a week, 250 hours presumably yeah, I mean that’s a lot of time. What can you do with that time? The key is making sure that you’re being productive with the devices so you get to that 60 minutes. Now, another quick case study that’s one has a little bit of different angle. Anyone here who have offices in a different time zone? Okay, great, that’s good to see. This one kind of reflects that. How do you manage that that challenge? Anyone here who have issues now dealing with dead lines dealing with clients and being able to touch those on an international basis? Anyone who understand whose channels have organized it? All right, great. You sir with the glasses in the back, what are your challenges that you’re facing right now internationally? Yes. Male: Just on difference is the biggest challenge, trying to communicate to somebody who is working hours ahead that can be a challenge on the day to day basis. Mario: Yeah. Male: — Mario: Yeah, what’s your business? Male: We’re a marketing company. Mario: What's the name ofit? Male: AFGU. Mario: AFGU, All right thanks for sharing that. Well, this was the Pulse Group, they are a marketing intelligence firm so they do all the research for their clients to understand, to help their clients understand what’s happening in the industry, how they need to react to specific data, specific news and they analyze all of that, so their goal is very similar. How do you get key stat to operate in different time zones to get things done. It’s very challenging. You can’t change time right it is what it ism so they have offices across the globe and they’re really working on this problem of the friendly network force in this poor connectivity. So, you can’t change time but what you can do is make sure that you’re being most productive all the time as possible and that means thinking outside of the four walls. How can you be a value outside of the office space? So, they had some of the same challenges that we discussed type that lines employees are working longer hours because they just have too to get things done. So, one of the solutions that they did that I really like is they standardized on not just the BlackBerry service for all staff instead of saying, “Hey, let’s get blackberries.” They actually standardized on specific device within the suit of BlackBerry available devices which was smart because I don’t know how many of you, how many of you are dealing with an office now where different people have different types of phones? Yeah, I mean it’s too hard to manage. I mean and if you have an IT person they’re going nuts trying to manage all of these. So, to normally standardize all the service but to standardized on a device means everyone becomes an educated expert and everyone can help everyone and it’s simpler to get things done when it’s faster whenever it’s running the same software on the same device. The other thing that they did is they ran the BENSER. Anyone notice BlackBerry enterprise Server? Okay, so some of you have been there, done that that’s good, so for those that don’t know or didn’t raise their hands, this allows you to connect to different network environments most popular is probably Microsoft exchange that you can get your email, your calendar into contacts it synchronized your note and al the staff over the year while you’re out of the office. So, this gave them some increase response time and one of the things that they did one to have how to measure but it was important to them. Being a small firm in market research they wanted to have this visibility that they got it. They get it. We’re text savvy. We’re aggressive. We’re on the edge and yes we’re using this solution. We’re taking notes in biddings not with the pen and the pad with the actual device not on a laptop it’s going to take you know, three minutes to boot up let’s say on the Mac, move faster but still too heavy to carry everywhere. So, that works for them, so immediately you see when you're dealing with these time zones it’s difficult but that’s what you need and whether you’re dealing with offices out of the country or not you're still with that immunity. So, I say immunity is mobile’s best friend forever BFF. For those of you who don’t know you will get your text lingo to get it too because companies are texting each other, so make sure before you go off on somebody you go to a chat. There is a chat-text message translator, you guys know about that right? Like you can go online, yeah there’s—go to teenangels.org, teenangels.org, it’s a chat translator, an instant message translator so if you see some three-letter acronym coming in your instant message window or on your mobile device before you go over to say, what is that? Go to Teamengine.org and plug it in and it will translate it for you, so it’s a chat translator. So, 2500 is the average number of time to sent an emails that they studied. The Reid Blackberry IRO study said that we’re being handed time sensitive emails were being handled while being molded, that’s a lot. Last case study I’ve got to go back, last case study. Let me go back I’m sorry about that is the Law Firm. These are 20 lawyers and they have international clients. They want to be productive no matter where they are. How many hours a day? Where’s your law firm right? How much time do you think that you’re actually at the courthouse? What type of—are you in. Male: We do insurance defense work. Mario: Insurance defense work, so how much time do you think lawyers are spending at the courthouse for a given day whatever. Male: If it’s a small firm I say maybe on average—all together mainly eight to nine hours. Mario: Eight to nine hours, okay that’s fair that’s good enough, so I mean that’s a lot of time. So, some of the time could be utilized to—for more billable time if you could touch more clients, if you could do other things while you’re waiting. And how many of us can relate to just waiting in general whether in the law firm or not. So, their solution was to go with the BlackBerry Enterprise where they wanted to be able to multi-task and be able to do things when they worked busy on that one particular client they were working on, so that really translates into a craze available billable hours. Now, they’re taking into step further though that they’ve actually now look at it goes back to applications are important not just about email and calendaring your contacts in an address book. Now, they are actually looking at time in billing applications that they can place on the mobile device so when they’re out if they start a new discussion or they’re working on something for a client they can easily tracked that and record that time while they’re being mobile, that’s very key. And—for 20 lawyers is giving them a little bit more for competitive advantage, so another big area that I recognized out of this study was that work flow in team efficiency released has seen an increase since 2004. You know, little are the four years ago it’s in 29% while BlackBerry users are now saying it’s a 38% that they’ve seen in this increased of work flow. All right, some quick trends I want you guys to take a look at. Anybody here who have link then page? Linking profiles. All right, so that means you’re a good net workers. I would love to see how many business cards you actually have in your pockets for linking posts. What about Facebook users? Any Facebook users? A few, anybody who haven’t heard of Twitter, yes! We have a few people that know what that means, okay cool that’s great. So, when on the new side I’ll get to those social networking for business applications in a second, but on the new side, did you guys—Rim has made this announcement. Rim, you know this is a—this is—I don’t know who here made up—came up with this idea but I wish I could find out the right person to have an idea that I want to get funded. I’m just kidding, maybe not, I'm just kidding. They announced this 150,000,000,000.00 VC fund and that VC fund is specifically for developers to create applications. That’s important. It’s one thing to say you know what make a device and I don’t care who the company is. It’s one thing to say let’s make the device that we think people are going to use. It’s another thing to say we get it that applications matter and it’s the specific purpose of the application that needs to be enabled on a device is more important or as important because you need a solid network for the device to run away. You need fast speed. You need international connectivity and all those of things as well. But the point I’m making is this opens up an opportunity for a pipeline of applications to be created that will be more focus on your business solutions to business problems, that’s great news. Number two of the trends. Real briefly on this I want to touch on this but why any of these things matter? Well, because they can help forge new relationships. Who here has been using LinkedIn as a tool to find the right contact to make buying decisions? Anybody here used LinkedIn to that degree? Two hands, okay. If you haven't been, I really suggest almost you know all of the Fortune 500 companies are pretty much represented on LinkedIn. You can search and identify key decision makers. You can look up competitors. You can find out who in your—that you may know, know someone maybe a two or three-degree separation of way from a contact you’re trying to connect to. It’s all about making those six degrees of separations so much smaller, so I would really seriously consider playing around with understanding on some free time linked in and what that does means, but on the mobile device a mobility sense this is huge to be able to have that when you have sometimes and look up contacts to be able to you know what we have this new product that we want to pitch to XLIC vendor and I have a friend who I know works at this other company let me see if he knows somebody that’s and you start making his connections a lot faster. Now, Twitter on the other hand fairly knew some people will consider as a total tide ways and there’s some relevance to that and there are some cautionary things that you need to do. Now, from a mobile perspective I think you can value two things in Twitter, number one I think it gives you the opportunity. Twitter was a short messaging circus that 140 characters that’s all you can see, so it’s great you can say a lot. So, people get to the point but they also waste time. On my way to Dunkin Donuts I can’t wait to get the jelly field. It doesn’t do anything for you and some people do that. What that’s work though is I mean the social mini space I’m into social networking for business. One of the analysts that I follow is from Forester. He’s one of the most utilized persons on Twitter and he’s constantly giving updates, insights, news, things that he is looking at, things that he is seeing, that he can talk about publicly but the is updating us so I followed him and when I follow him I get those updates on my mobile device, so my news feeds are not coming just from CNN and traditional media outlets, my news feeds are actually coming from people that are inside of some of the businesses or industries that I’m trying to track or understand or be more up to date. Now, that can work in your—two perspectives. One, it makes you more informed as a individual in your industry, find the right people to follow just type in their names and see if they’re using Twitter. Two, used it yourself as a proactive device to position yourself to be a subject matter expert in your field and start making people aware that you’re doing just to make it easy you can use your address book to say, “Hey, I’m on Twitter now. I’m going to be doing updates specifically about marketing.” Do your point you know maybe it will work great in event marketing. So, expect to learn new trends, new ideas and things from us about event marketing and you become the subject matter expert. Well, now you have an instant—I’m talking about people that like 11,000 people are following some of this books. So, there’s instant activity that can happened. They can have daily—for their customers, Comcast uses it for—Comcast cares, so companies are using this I’m using be aware of these and it’s making it easier on mobile devices now at internet access 3G speeds and beautiful screens to look at this stuff. All right, my last line here. I am very bold on the ATT Bold and it’s because I’ve been a BlackBerry user from way back in the day. Anyone here relate to the BlackBerries before you can make a call? And when in a monochrome no color. I wish I could bring like I have maybe four or five BlackBerries from them it’s history timeline see I brought some of those with me. Yeah, I would and try to call over this new bold or I would smash it but those are the BlackBerries back in the day men it can take the bidding it still keep going. You can just drop those relentlessly and they still work. So, bold the definition I looked it up on a web real quick and it’s interesting you know I love the way that it says here. One of the definitions says, “A bold person is willing to bend the rules.” Excessively bold person could aggressively ask for money or impose a person to propel some requests. So, this is the answer so if you have some—people just get him a bold. Give him this definition and they're good. I mean, that’s inferior. It should ask more senses it just worked instant habit. But here are my four bold away experiences, number one I think this has overlooked, but being able to talk and work at the same time is a big deal. You can’t do that while in the carriers. You can’t do that. So, I don’t know how many of you have gone through oh yeah, let me call you back when I pull up this attachment and look at it or let me grab a different phone and see if I can call you from there. You don’t have time for that. You won’t be able to scroll the internet. You won’t be able to read email. You won’t be able to pull up attachments, put the phone on speaker if you need too and continue that conversation. Put it in conference mode very, very valuable you’d be able to talk and work at the same time. The attack of viewing, huge you heard Jason talked about it. You have to see attachments along these devices. The screen is so much cleared, the color is beautiful, the resolution the reason why it’s different not just the screen size but the actual resolution of the image. It’s expanded, so it makes web browsing so much more exciting, email attachments look so much better for and especially things that take a lot of scrolling like Excel and stuff. Streaming video, I love this. Video is the new range. Video is where it’s going and it continues to go. Streaming video on this service can get you everything from your news updates, but I’ll say take a new step further. How many of you have created video about your company’s products or services? And if you have that or you have a currently running commercial. If you have it do it. Take a little flip camera. This thing costs a $149.00 we’re not talking about broadcast quality. Take a little flip camera, figure out one thing you want to say in two minutes, do it well, record it, keep it organic. Don’t try to over script it. We’ll get the point out and then take this popped it in your PC, put it on your mobile and have that I mean you can shoot the video with the device itself. But have what I’m getting at this carry your video with you. Don’t think about getting away from the laptop. You don’t have to boot up the laptop to show stuff. You have a multi-media tool in your hand. Let it work for you. Show videos of your spots that are running on TV. Show videos of people that are working in your office, asks the client your favorite client he would probably more than happy to go on camera while you’re holding your phone and talk for a minute about the value that they see in your relationship with your business. Put that stuff on your—so you have it. You’ll be surprised if you do that how often you used that in networking events? How that also separates you as a tech savvy person that gets it very interesting why I used this video. And then the last thing is apps. One of the things I love about the Bold is that it comes with this program called Documents To Go. It’s actually by DataBiz and it allows you to edit—on the flop, everything except PDS. PDS is a bonus feature, but it documents, Excel spreadsheets. This is what an Excel spreadsheet looks like, actually on the device and this is like if you were getting ready to launch a file in Word, what that would look like as well. So, what did they learned? Just a quick review is that your Smart phones are only good as the application set on that, so you know be smart about the applications that you choose to run. Be purpose driven with those applications. Look at things like time billing. Look at things like sales management, sales data, access, navigation, flip management all of those things. And let’s try to stay in better and I actually say smarter contact with our clients are vendors and our staff using mobility on the go. The bottom line is mobility is here to stay. It’s not changing. Data is becoming more crucial. It makes no sense if you ask me I’ve done it with my business to go unlimited. Don’t even worry about trying to figure out the data in the bits and the bytes just go unlimited you’ll be so much more happier to do that because it will give you the opportunity to do things that you need while being mobile. So, that’s going to be a rough for my time. My name is Mario Armstrong. I want to thank you guys so much for your attention and for your participation and just tell you to empower your sales, take your business to the next level and if you need any help you know try to figure that out I’ll be around to discuss more technology and how these tools can help you guys expand your business zones. Thanks again for having me in Boston, I really appreciate it.

Small Business Television Network

For More Small Business Advice,visit sbtv website

http://www.sbtv.com/

Small Business Solutions - Mobile Technology

Jason: One more speaker today, his name is Mario Armstrong. He is a very smart guy and then he can do a little bios so you have to understand where he is coming from, so he translate so again a very guy translate his technology for non-technology audiences through his radio shows, TV appearances and public speaking.

He is heard regularly on NPR’s Morning Edition News and News Program. He hosts technology talk shows on XM radio as well as several other radio broadcast. He also has appeared on CNBC TV One PBS and it seems fun. Please welcome Mario Armstrong.

Mario: Thank you Jason for initiating. Thanks for the warm welcomes in Neo Plus. How you guys doing this morning, pretty good? All right, awesome.

My name is Mario Armstrong. I’m glad to be here. We’re going to talk about a little about a couple of different things today specifically focus on small business and mobility. We’re going to go over to case studies, give you some examples of technology is actually being utilized and we’ll also show a little bit of some news updates that I think are interesting to you and to your business as well as some trends.

We’re going to look at a little bit of in front of the future, start forecasting a little bit how you like when I use mobile devices for your business, and before I get started out I’d like to get a show of hands just really kind of get the gauge the audience. How many people here show your hands have about 20 or less than points zero to 20? Okay, great.

And then how many say 20 and up? Okay, good so that’s a good mixture. So, I’ll make sure to keep that in focus for both of you I now consider at 20 now would like to maybe, maybe not, maybe grown as well in those that are at 20 to 99 maybe want to grow as well, but I wanted to make sure, understood that so we can focus on some of the case studies and how that relates to you.

Do we have any lawyers here, any law firms? One, two okay just—you’re in the front just in case you got—on. No, our lawyers are—no, I say that because I actually have a case study specifically for that as well.

So, a real quick background on me just you’re like, “Who is this guy? What does he do?” So, I run a technology media company. It is a small business. We have about five employees and we create content and we syndicate that content. We also have a youth park to our business as well when we focus on middle and high school kids getting them into Science and Technology and putting programs together that you’ll engage them to be the next future engineers.

So, we own networks everything from CNN hosting radio shows on XM and NPR. Any public radio listeners here? Good, All right cool and if you’re members. I’m sorry I’m not fetching NPR. We’ve got one at the back.

And also with online in SBTV.com, Small Business Television.com, so if you don’t know about that it’s a great resource. We do a lot of technology segments for this channel but they have a lot of other broadcast and material that relates to SBTV. In fact, what you’re seeing here today will launch also via SBTV.com, so if you missed anything or while reviewing just go to SBTV.com later.

So, that’s about me I would like to get right into my feelings about cell phones and mobility, and right off the back you know, in business a cell phone is only as good, only as good as the applications that can run 20. I mean, cell phones had this you know this beautiful history of going from in fact, let’s do a quick test. Let’s see how many —I mean I can do so many things now, internet, email, text messaging, GPS.

Who remembers this guy? Anybody who remembers this guy? Least we have one of these. You guys look terribly, but you know how this works right? You could just back in the day this was a big deal. This was I mean it was huge. It was big too but I mean it was a big deal to have one of these because they were expensive and not a lot of people have them and you were you know, cool. Some of them say elites but whatever. The point is you had one right?

But you had to have it with an attitude because it was so new then, so you couldn’t just use this device in the old way. You had to really have like a star then so how this will work is you’ll be maybe at the restaurant or you’d be hanging outside of the business office and all of the sudden you see this briefcase go down the full rings and you see this guy kind of like position himself or a lady and flip back of course he have to you know flip back this piece out. It was real style how they did that.

And then you pack the antenna you have to pack the antenna and then you just talk and you just feel you talk and you can’t miss that thing somebody with this phone and that was a big deal, so they go out to be able to be seen from 30 miles away that they were the only one in the vicinity that has a mobile phone.

But then the whole drama didn’t end until the phone calling and that’s where I really mad because they resist instantaneous fact that you adhere. It’s a minute of phone calls is okay, “All right thanks yes, I’ll get there over to the office right away, All right bye.” You get this stop and you get this you know this flip. I’m serious you get this —and that was like the coolest thing to do and then you smack that down and put it in your pocket and you just keep to unroll it. That’s how you handle this mobile device backed in the day.

Now, any of you didn’t do that that’s what I do but that’s what you did, so we’ve got a long way, these phones one line of text not text. I hope a numeric line in green all they do was place to calls so what they did is to place calls.

Nowadays, we’re well beyond that, so we’re going to talk about some of how mobility has changed and how that can affect your business. How many people here would like to generate more skills in their company? Anybody here who is interested in growing a little bit of revenue, salary or more staff? Well, a lot of people are still getting confused about this metal piece. It’s like prospects are going in. You have great panel for the prospects but how many are actually coming out?

And what’s happening in between? And so how this mobility impact that? Well, we’re going to take a look at the case study here of how you can use tools that can help you understand this pipeline to sales process a little bit more clear.

So, first and foremost this company is Ripple—it’s about a 50-person company. They are into—they want to drive more sales. They are a software company and their problem was to expedite sales while being out of the office. That’s really what they wanted to focus on. They covered they were fine inside but outside of the office how do we take advantage of that time to still generate sales?

So what they did is a three step process on a solution. Number one, they identified on a CRM application. Is anyone here used CRM Customer Relationship Management software? You do? All right, great.

I love to know what some of those are afterwards, what you guys are using, but number one, they can choose CRM and there’s some here that actually work very well on the bone, if they have what it takes. Ensure that that solution though—before you make this investment, make sure it has real-time mobile connectivity.

Many people made you may think you need a CRM and that’s going to roll the desktop that you have and maybe thought through how your sales agents on the field force could interface with that application while they’re on a move.

So, make sure that that’s part of the investment plan and for their solution they use a third party extension that made that work for them. The only other thing about this particular case study that I really like is that they decided not to try to solve everything by going mobile. They really picked one thing and that was the sales lead process.

So, they really went mobile with a purpose. They want to have better lead management follow-up, sales tracking and unconvertible sales. Convert those prospects to sales, so let me give you a little snaps out about the before and after. Before the solution, let me just pick one process we’re in the essence of time.

Leave your comment from the web. Anyone rely to this. You get website leads, All right good. So, leads coming from the web, the manager received those leads then the manager would take his or her time review the leads, find out who the proper salesperson is to forward that lead too and get into that person.

By the way, I haven’t said anything yet about the person contacting the initial prospect from the lead, and just remember if they’re coming to your website they’re also going to your competitor’s website presumably as well.

So, you’re not the only one, so what I’m getting at is time of essence. Time of the essence to you, so now what happens with the solution, a lead comes in from the web by passes the manager, based officer and criterion goes down directly to the appropriate salesperson for that territory right to their handheld device.

And when it appears on their handheld device it’s also placed in their CRM folder, so they have it back of the desktop but they have it with them while their mobile, and the minute they start replying from their mobile device it automatically starts to create a history.

So, that’s key I mean for those of you that know how a CRM application works I mean this is business intelligence at its best. If you’re not using a CRM application you really ought to take a hard fast look at using one and going mobile with it because that really is the one of the application that will empower you and your sales teams to be or do more with license just be able to understand your clientele better.

So, now when they make that reply it instantly creates this history so that people back at the office can see what the latest transaction is or as well as the salesperson without they can pull up this particular client, say what was the last thing we discussed because that will actually add you a few minutes here I like to call them a follow-up with where we are, but I need to know more about what’s the last thing we said we would do and make sure that I’m on the right page, so I don’t sound like I’m on the airport.

So, a couple of results from their experience. They want a user a friendly access and they’ve got from their BlackBerry devices to make a little bit simpler but as I say here you know, CRM is useless unless people are updating the information. How many of you can relate I see some heads now. How many of you —yes, thank you for being honest about that because that I mean I used sales force in my business, Salesforce.com.

And I’m telling you we thought we mat everything possible out. First of all there are so many different things you can do from a customization prospective but the most important thing you need to do is understand a process of how you’re to update that contact information. It takes time, and you have to account for that in the sales process and in the sales cycle.

So, just make sure you’re thinking about that because otherwise it’s useless. They received increase for activity because they can work in non-office environments, some enhance business intelligence as I’m, mentioning and the mobile alerts were really big. They really like a mobile alerts especially for leads that were coming in.

Now, I mentioned sales force. For those of you who have never seen it before. This is kind of what it looks like on a desktop here. In this particular site just gives you an idea of leads status that you’ll break down of different types of prospects that you can have. This one gives me my interest break down. This one gives me a little bit of my distribution but it’s a false solution to help your manager accounts, understand the sales cycle, figure out the clogs in your sales pipeline, understand quickly within the limbs. Who is a really good valued customer versus people that maybe taking a lot of your time and spending much of money, so it helps you understand what clients you may need to let go as well as which clients you may need to focus more on.

This is what it actually looks like on a BlackBerry device. A really clean, really sharp and what I like about it you can see I grabbed this screen shot on purpose because as you can see if I want to call someone everyone is familiar with scroll on through your contacts but, how many of you can actually log the call, so when you place that call you can actually log it which means it’s also being updated into the CRM system which is great.

You can look at the activity history all of the functionality that’s in the application on the desktop you can have right on your device, so you can look at opportunities you currently working on. You can look at the activity history of that open activities that you would like to close, a very powerful tool.

So, the bottom line is productivity works going mobile and it works on the BlackBerry very, very well. The average amount of minutes that a study that was done on the ROI study by Reid on the BlackBerry says that 60 minutes a day on average were converted to productive time, so it’s a lot of time. It means five hours a week, 250 hours presumably yeah, I mean that’s a lot of time. What can you do with that time? The key is making sure that you’re being productive with the devices so you get to that 60 minutes.

Now, another quick case study that’s one has a little bit of different angle. Anyone here who have offices in a different time zone? Okay, great, that’s good to see. This one kind of reflects that. How do you manage that that challenge? Anyone here who have issues now dealing with dead lines dealing with clients and being able to touch those on an international basis? Anyone who understand whose channels have organized it? All right, great.

You sir with the glasses in the back, what are your challenges that you’re facing right now internationally? Yes.

Male: Just on difference is the biggest challenge, trying to communicate to somebody who is working hours ahead that can be a challenge on the day to day basis.

Mario: Yeah.

Male: —

Mario: Yeah, what’s your business?

Male: We’re a marketing company.

Mario: What's the name ofit?

Male: AFGU.

Mario: AFGU, All right thanks for sharing that. Well, this was the Pulse Group, they are a marketing intelligence firm so they do all the
research for their clients to understand, to help their clients understand what’s happening in the industry, how they need to react to specific data, specific news and they analyze all of that, so their goal is very similar.

How do you get key stat to operate in different time zones to get things done. It’s very challenging. You can’t change time right it is what it ism so they have offices across the globe and they’re really working on this problem of the friendly network force in this poor connectivity.

So, you can’t change time but what you can do is make sure that you’re being most productive all the time as possible and that means thinking outside of the four walls. How can you be a value outside of the office space? So, they had some of the same challenges that we discussed type that lines employees are working longer hours because they just have too to get things done.

So, one of the solutions that they did that I really like is they standardized on not just the BlackBerry service for all staff instead of saying, “Hey, let’s get blackberries.” They actually standardized on specific device within the suit of BlackBerry available devices which was smart because I don’t know how many of you, how many of you are dealing with an office now where different people have different types of phones? Yeah, I mean it’s too hard to manage. I mean and if you have an IT person they’re going nuts trying to manage all of these.

So, to normally standardize all the service but to standardized on a device means everyone becomes an educated expert and everyone can help everyone and it’s simpler to get things done when it’s faster whenever it’s running the same software on the same device.

The other thing that they did is they ran the BENSER. Anyone notice BlackBerry enterprise Server? Okay, so some of you have been there, done that that’s good, so for those that don’t know or didn’t raise their hands, this allows you to connect to different network environments most popular is probably Microsoft exchange that you can get your email, your calendar into contacts it synchronized your note and al the staff over the year while you’re out of the office.

So, this gave them some increase response time and one of the things that they did one to have how to measure but it was important to them. Being a small firm in market research they wanted to have this visibility that they got it. They get it. We’re text savvy. We’re aggressive. We’re on the edge and yes we’re using this solution. We’re taking notes in biddings not with the pen and the pad with the actual device not on a laptop it’s going to take you know, three minutes to boot up let’s say on the Mac, move faster but still too heavy to carry everywhere.

So, that works for them, so immediately you see when you're dealing with these time zones it’s difficult but that’s what you need and whether you’re dealing with offices out of the country or not you're still with that immunity.

So, I say immunity is mobile’s best friend forever BFF. For those of you who don’t know you will get your text lingo to get it too because companies are texting each other, so make sure before you go off on somebody you go to a chat. There is a chat-text message translator, you guys know about that right? Like you can go online, yeah there’s—go to teenangels.org, teenangels.org, it’s a chat translator, an instant message translator so if you see some three-letter acronym coming in your instant message window or on your mobile device before you go over to say, what is that? Go to Teamengine.org and plug it in and it will translate it for you, so it’s a chat translator.

So, 2500 is the average number of time to sent an emails that they studied. The Reid Blackberry IRO study said that we’re being handed time sensitive emails were being handled while being molded, that’s a lot.

Last case study I’ve got to go back, last case study. Let me go back I’m sorry about that is the Law Firm. These are 20 lawyers and they have international clients. They want to be productive no matter where they are. How many hours a day? Where’s your law firm right? How much time do you think that you’re actually at the courthouse? What type of—are you in.

Male: We do insurance defense work.

Mario: Insurance defense work, so how much time do you think lawyers are spending at the courthouse for a given day whatever.

Male: If it’s a small firm I say maybe on average—all together mainly eight to nine hours.

Mario: Eight to nine hours, okay that’s fair that’s good enough, so I mean that’s a lot of time. So, some of the time could be utilized to—for more billable time if you could touch more clients, if you could do other things while you’re waiting. And how many of us can relate to just waiting in general whether in the law firm or not.

So, their solution was to go with the BlackBerry Enterprise where they wanted to be able to multi-task and be able to do things when they worked busy on that one particular client they were working on, so that really translates into a craze available billable hours.

Now, they’re taking into step further though that they’ve actually now look at it goes back to applications are important not just about email and calendaring your contacts in an address book. Now, they are actually looking at time in billing applications that they can place on the mobile device so when they’re out if they start a new discussion or they’re working on something for a client they can easily tracked that and record that time while they’re being mobile, that’s very key.

And—for 20 lawyers is giving them a little bit more for competitive advantage, so another big area that I recognized out of this study was that work flow in team efficiency released has seen an increase since 2004. You know, little are the four years ago it’s in 29% while BlackBerry users are now saying it’s a 38% that they’ve seen in this increased of work flow.

All right, some quick trends I want you guys to take a look at. Anybody here who have link then page? Linking profiles. All right, so that means you’re a good net workers. I would love to see how many business cards you actually have in your pockets for linking posts. What about Facebook users? Any Facebook users? A few, anybody who haven’t heard of Twitter, yes! We have a few people that know what that means, okay cool that’s great.

So, when on the new side I’ll get to those social networking for business applications in a second, but on the new side, did you guys—Rim has made this announcement. Rim, you know this is a—this is—I don’t know who here made up—came up with this idea but I wish I could find out the right person to have an idea that I want to get funded.

I’m just kidding, maybe not, I'm just kidding. They announced this 150,000,000,000.00 VC fund and that VC fund is specifically for developers to create applications. That’s important. It’s one thing to say you know what make a device and I don’t care who the company is. It’s one thing to say let’s make the device that we think people are going to use. It’s another thing to say we get it that applications matter and it’s the specific purpose of the application that needs to be enabled on a device is more important or as important because you need a solid network for the device to run away. You need fast speed. You need international connectivity and all those of things as well.

But the point I’m making is this opens up an opportunity for a pipeline of applications to be created that will be more focus on your business solutions to business problems, that’s great news.

Number two of the trends. Real briefly on this I want to touch on this but why any of these things matter? Well, because they can help forge new relationships. Who here has been using LinkedIn as a tool to find the right contact to make buying decisions? Anybody here used LinkedIn to that degree? Two hands, okay.

If you haven't been, I really suggest almost you know all of the Fortune 500 companies are pretty much represented on LinkedIn. You can search and identify key decision makers. You can look up competitors. You can find out who in your—that you may know, know someone maybe a two or three-degree separation of way from a contact you’re trying to connect to.

It’s all about making those six degrees of separations so much smaller, so I would really seriously consider playing around with understanding on some free time linked in and what that does means, but on the mobile device a mobility sense this is huge to be able to have that when you have sometimes and look up contacts to be able to you know what we have this new product that we want to pitch to XLIC vendor and I have a friend who I know works at this other company let me see if he knows somebody that’s and you start making his connections a lot faster.

Now, Twitter on the other hand fairly knew some people will consider as a total tide ways and there’s some relevance to that and there are some cautionary things that you need to do. Now, from a mobile perspective I think you can value two things in Twitter, number one I think it gives you the opportunity. Twitter was a short messaging circus that 140 characters that’s all you can see, so it’s great you can say a lot.

So, people get to the point but they also waste time. On my way to Dunkin Donuts I can’t wait to get the jelly field. It doesn’t do anything for you and some people do that. What that’s work though is I mean the social mini space I’m into social networking for business.

One of the analysts that I follow is from Forester. He’s one of the most utilized persons on Twitter and he’s constantly giving updates, insights, news, things that he is looking at, things that he is seeing, that he can talk about publicly but the is updating us so I followed him and when I follow him I get those updates on my mobile device, so my news feeds are not coming just from CNN and traditional media outlets, my news feeds are actually coming from people that are inside of some of the businesses or industries that I’m trying to track or understand or be more up to date.

Now, that can work in your—two perspectives. One, it makes you more informed as a individual in your industry, find the right people to follow just type in their names and see if they’re using Twitter. Two, used it yourself as a proactive device to position yourself to be a subject matter expert in your field and start making people aware that you’re doing just to make it easy you can use your address book to say, “Hey, I’m on Twitter now. I’m going to be doing updates specifically about marketing.” Do your point you know maybe it will work great in event marketing.

So, expect to learn new trends, new ideas and things from us about event marketing and you become the subject matter expert. Well, now you have an instant—I’m talking about people that like 11,000 people are following some of this books.

So, there’s instant activity that can happened. They can have daily—for their customers, Comcast uses it for—Comcast cares, so companies are using this I’m using be aware of these and it’s making it easier on mobile devices now at internet access 3G speeds and beautiful screens to look at this stuff.

All right, my last line here. I am very bold on the ATT Bold and it’s because I’ve been a BlackBerry user from way back in the day. Anyone here relate to the BlackBerries before you can make a call? And when in a monochrome no color. I wish I could bring like I have maybe four or five BlackBerries from them it’s history timeline see I brought some of those with me.

Yeah, I would and try to call over this new bold or I would smash it but those are the BlackBerries back in the day men it can take the bidding it still keep going. You can just drop those relentlessly and they still work.

So, bold the definition I looked it up on a web real quick and it’s interesting you know I love the way that it says here. One of the definitions says, “A bold person is willing to bend the rules.” Excessively bold person could aggressively ask for money or impose a person to propel some requests.

So, this is the answer so if you have some—people just get him a bold. Give him this definition and they're good. I mean, that’s inferior. It should ask more senses it just worked instant habit. But here are my four bold away experiences, number one I think this has overlooked, but being able to talk and work at the same time is a big deal. You can’t do that while in the carriers. You can’t do that.

So, I don’t know how many of you have gone through oh yeah, let me call you back when I pull up this attachment and look at it or let me grab a different phone and see if I can call you from there. You don’t have time for that. You won’t be able to scroll the internet. You won’t be able to read email. You won’t be able to pull up attachments, put the phone on speaker if you need too and continue that conversation.

Put it in conference mode very, very valuable you’d be able to talk and work at the same time. The attack of viewing, huge you heard Jason talked about it. You have to see attachments along these devices. The screen is so much cleared, the color is beautiful, the resolution the reason why it’s different not just the screen size but the actual resolution of the image. It’s expanded, so it makes web browsing so much more exciting, email attachments look so much better for and especially things that take a lot of scrolling like Excel and stuff.

Streaming video, I love this. Video is the new range. Video is where it’s going and it continues to go. Streaming video on this service can get you everything from your news updates, but I’ll say take a new step further. How many of you have created video about your company’s products or services? And if you have that or you have a currently running commercial. If you have it do it. Take a little flip camera. This thing costs a $149.00 we’re not talking about broadcast quality. Take a little flip camera, figure out one thing you want to say in two minutes, do it well, record it, keep it organic. Don’t try to over script it. We’ll get the point out and then take this popped it in your PC, put it on your mobile and have that I mean you can shoot the video with the device itself.

But have what I’m getting at this carry your video with you. Don’t think about getting away from the laptop. You don’t have to boot up the laptop to show stuff. You have a multi-media tool in your hand. Let it work for you. Show videos of your spots that are running on TV. Show videos of people that are working in your office, asks the client your favorite client he would probably more than happy to go on camera while you’re holding your phone and talk for a minute about the value that they see in your relationship with your business.

Put that stuff on your—so you have it. You’ll be surprised if you do that how often you used that in networking events? How that also separates you as a tech savvy person that gets it very interesting why I used this video.

And then the last thing is apps. One of the things I love about the Bold is that it comes with this program called Documents To Go. It’s actually by DataBiz and it allows you to edit—on the flop, everything except PDS. PDS is a bonus feature, but it documents, Excel spreadsheets. This is what an Excel spreadsheet looks like, actually on the device and this is like if you were getting ready to launch a file in Word, what that would look like as well.

So, what did they learned? Just a quick review is that your Smart phones are only good as the application set on that, so you know be smart about the applications that you choose to run. Be purpose driven with those applications. Look at things like time billing. Look at things like sales management, sales data, access, navigation, flip management all of those things.

And let’s try to stay in better and I actually say smarter contact with our clients are vendors and our staff using mobility on the go. The bottom line is mobility is here to stay. It’s not changing. Data is becoming more crucial. It makes no sense if you ask me I’ve done it with my business to go unlimited. Don’t even worry about trying to figure out the data in the bits and the bytes just go unlimited you’ll be so much more happier to do that because it will give you the opportunity to do things that you need while being mobile.

So, that’s going to be a rough for my time. My name is Mario Armstrong. I want to thank you guys so much for your attention and for your participation and just tell you to empower your sales, take your business to the next level and if you need any help you know try to figure that out I’ll be around to discuss more technology and how these tools can help you guys expand your business zones.

Thanks again for having me in Boston, I really appreciate it.

Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services