Eliot Burdett, co-managing partner of Peak Sales Recruiting, shares his thoughts on last week’s launch of a new initiative in Ottawa to help build stronger sales-based companies.

The Sales Leadership Initiative hosted its first event last Friday morning, with bestselling author Jeffrey Gitomer speaking about the importance of sales culture and what it means to build dominating sales organizations.

More than 200 execs and sales leaders packed the event, which was sponsored by Peak Sales Recruiting, RIM, Bell, Telus, Corel, the Ottawa Business Journal, CFRA and Sherwin Kaldeway. The OBJ also reported on the event.

The Sales Leadership Initiative (SLI) is a not-for-profit, community-based organization that launched earlier in the year to help Ottawa technology businesses grow larger and faster. The organization will increase and develop the pool of sales talent and leaders and raise the profile of Ottawa as a center of sales excellence.

As SLI co-founder Brent Thomson put it at the opening of the event, “we are very strong at creating technology in Ottawa, but we have struggled to build companies that can outsell their competitors worldwide. For many of our companies, sales is an afterthought, when it should be the only thought. We are here to help make that happen.”

Peak supported this event because we believe that local companies need powerful sales functions in order for the city’s economy to thrive. We have clusters for technology, marketing, finance and even operations, but until now, there has not been an initiative focused on making sales paramount. The irony of this is that with the current limited availability of investment capital, there can be no marketing, engineering or operations unless there are strong sales. In effect, sales have become the fuel for the engine of innovation (if it wasn’t always). This is a critical issue for Ottawa.

Without sales (and revenue), the part of this town that is not funded by an external source - government or VC - will wither or die and that is hard for us to watch. The executives who formed the Sales Leadership Initiative have an immense amount of sales experience and want to leverage their success to help the community be stronger…and the Sales Leadership Initiative seems a perfect venue.

Technorati Tags: sales, business development, Gitomer, Sales Leadership Initiative, Peak Sales, Ottawa, entrepreneurship 

In its 2008 budget released last week, Canada’s Conservative government proposed beneficial changes for entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists seeking to create wealth by building businesses from the foundations upward.

When laying the foundations of a business, Canada’s Scientific Research and Experimental Development Program (SR&ED) tax refunds earned by early-stage technology firms are a vital source of cash. By allowing for 10% of all wages and salaries paid to Canadian residents for work performed outside Canada to be claimed, Budget 2008 will help improve cash flow. This change eliminates the ludicrous anti-marketing result of not allowing those expenses when experimental development work is conducted on export customer premises.

Budget 2008 also raised the limit of qualified expenditures for Canadian-controlled private corporations from $2 million to $3 million. However, the budget continued the anti-growth-rate policy of reducing the qualified expenditures amount for companies with taxable income of $400,000 or more, and phasing it out for those with taxable income of $700,000 or more.

Another addition to Budget 2008 was the introduction of tax-free savings accounts (TFSA). In brief, starting next calendar year, individuals can contribute up to $5,000 annually from after-tax income to a TFSA. Funds can be withdrawn, tax-free, at any time, positioning this new savings vehicle at the opposite end of the spectrum from registered retirement savings plans. The latter lets money to be put aside to invest before taxes are paid but requires taxes to be paid upon withdrawing funds.

This new initiative has potentially eliminated the capital gains tax for entrepreneurs and angel investors. Was introduction of the TFSA brilliantly accidental, or a sound implementation in support of the role assigned to entrepreneurs in the government’s science and technology strategy? Used in this way amongst other possible purposes, it would put the returns from investing in early-stage ventures on the same footing as winning the lottery. As a U.S. ambassador once observed, a country that valued entrepreneurship would not tax capital gains while leaving lottery winnings tax-free. Introduction of the TFSA meets the National Angel Organization’s request for support, albeit in a way akin to the relationship between the RRSP and the TFSA.

Finally, Budget 2008 appeared to remove a long-standing barrier to investment in Canada by U.S. venture capitalists, the infamous Sec 116 requirement that each investor provide Canada Revenue Agency a certificate that taxes are not due. This effectively prevented them from being rewarded for success and beating the odds against creating significant wealth.

What could Budget 2008 have done to really reinforce its hidden subtext of rewarding entrepreneurial success? You be the judge. Go to http://www.fin.gc.ca/activty/consult/sred_e.html where submissions provided to the consultation on the SR&ED Program before November 30, 2007 are being posted. When the government meets its commitment to posting all public submissions, review them and decide for yourself whether or not the SR & ED changes are a big “Eh” or a D. Given the Tory promises in respect of the capital gains tax, would an accountability review grade the budget as an Eh!+, a gentlemen’s C, or a D from the perspective of supporting implementation of the commercialization goals of the S&T policy?

Of course all of this would not be necessary if we were to enact the Tax Lawyers, Accountants and Economists Unemployment Act. Its key provisions would be a 15% tax rate on income, coupled with a capital gains exemption on a continuously declining daily basis, reaching zero at the end of a decade. Then the only questions for debate would be the amount of the basic exemption and the GST percentage. This won’t work, of course, except it is already available in competing countries.

Peter Kemball is CEO and founder at Acorn Partners, an innovative firm that helps B2B SMEs finance their success.

Technorati Tags: Budget 2008, SR&ED, RRSP, TFSA, CCPC, entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists

News releases present multiple opportunities to improve your company’s visibility. Their wide distribution across many wire services and online news sites makes optimization critically important.

News release optimization, in this context, is not just optimization of content for search engines. Equally important is the optimization of reader experience.

Let me explain what I mean:

The principles of search engine optimization apply to news releases just like any other online content. Search engines index a news release, follow its links and assess the overall relevance of the content for a given subject. When writing a news release, consider the following search engine optimization tips:

• Keyword mapping: Which two or three keyword phrases are most relevant for each individual news release? Ideally, these keywords can be worked into the page title and into a descriptive headline. Needless to say, the phrases will also occur naturally in the body of the news release itself. Otherwise, they are not the right choice of keywords.

• Keyword-rich links: Links play an important part in search engines’ ability to determine relevance for any given web page. Make sure that your news release doesn’t just link to your home page, but rather contains keyword-rich links to focused landing pages. Don’t expect too much from these links, however. The primary reason for a given link in your release should not be to attract search engine page-rank juice, but to get the reader to click through to a landing page for conversion.
• Use analytics: Where possible, use unique tracking parameters to identify which of your news release vehicles is resulting in traffic to your landing pages. Incorporate this knowledge into future efforts.
• Create a concise meta description: While meta descriptions are not being used for ranking of content, they are sometimes used in the search engine results. A compelling meta description can be the difference between an arbitrary text snippet and a compelling message that entices the searcher to click through.
• Online distribution: Where will the release be distributed? Make sure that you take full advantage of online distribution vehicles, and don’t forget vertical niche directories, which sometimes offer this as a free service. Keep in mind that search engines will identify duplicate content. Distribution of identical releases across multiple wire services is therefore a futile exercise for SEO purposes.
• Multiple angles: Does the news release warrant several different angles of coverage? If so, distribute different versions of the release to different wire services and distribution outlets.

Viewer optimization, on the other hand, concerns itself primarily with the usability of content. Online, everyone has ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). Here are a few tips to cope with that:

• Make content easily digestible: Using bullets and short headlines lets viewers quickly grasp the main points of your content.
• Plan a call to action: What do you expect the reader to do next? Make sure that this is blatantly obvious. Do not overload your text with competing links. Less is more.

These are just some of the suggestions to help you maximize the impact of your next news release. Needless to say, the story is still critical, and no amount of optimization will turn a dull and boring release into a lead generation machine. So don’t be boring.

Chris Biber is President & CEO of SearchingWorks.

Technorati Tags: public relations, PR, news releases, press releases, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, SEO-PR, press release optimization, news release optimization

If you think your business requires tough decisions, you would agree that they are trivial compared to the late President John Kennedy’s during the 13 days of the Cuban missile crises. The world teetered on the balance of massive nuclear explosions and a wrong decision would have killed millions of people in Canada, the USSR and the United States. Nor was this the only time. On at least two occasions, military officers faced the apparent prospect of incoming missiles. For them the decision to retaliate or not had to be made in minutes. In one case, the officer wondered why there were only five US missiles on his radar screen. The answer was that he was looking at five birds!

Recently Ted Sorenson, a key advisor to Kennedy during the missile crises, set out his view on how a leader makes tough decisions in the face of conflicting advice. Speaking in Ottawa and Toronto a week or so ago, Sorensen advised executives to picture their options creatively. For example, Kennedy didn’t call it a “blockade,” which would have meant that any ship sailing towards Cuba would have been turned back. He labelled it a “weapons embargo,” thus allowing key non-military supplies to reach Cuba and make it clear to the world that Cuba was not the enemy. A nice byproduct was avoiding the alienation of people elsewhere in the Caribbean whose lives would have been disrupted by a blockade’s automatic triggering of wartime marine insurance rates. Reach out for support, Sorenson advises. Kennedy sought cooperation from all nations. And communicate directly with your opponent rather than through agents.

Above all, Kennedy was a realist. When the crisis had passed, an aide urged him to use his status to intervene in the Sino-Indian War. “But you are 10 feet tall,” the aide said. “Oh, that will last a couple of weeks,” Kennedy replied.

Technology executives may face just as much uncertainty as Kennedy did, and need to apply the same creativity to their problem solving.

Peter Kemball is CEO and founder at Acorn Partners, an innovative firm that helps B2B SMEs finance their success.

Re: Francis’s Ottawa inferiority complex theorem

There is no question Ottawa has its own culture – the prevalence of government, where success is measured differently, probably has a lot to do with it. There are no free rides in a world of entrepreneurship and being mediocre usually means you are fighting to stay alive. Perhaps there hasn’t been a consistent stream of great successes here to regularly inspire everyone? No question this city doesn’t have a wild west, “shoot ‘em or die” spirit.

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Every day for the past week or so I have been receiving emails – via the company’s general delivery box – promising me “Leads! Leads! Leads!” and that I will “get so many leads my sales will go up!” Though faintly reminiscent of Viagra-type communications, I’ve been reading these messages from a “marketing publicity” agency. As a marketer, I pay a lot more attention to the brochures, magazines, direct mail pieces and emails that are sent my way than most people would. As a person who also buys marketing services, I get a lot of this stuff.

OK, so the emails are promising me leads and huge increases in sales if I use them for my media relations program. Do I want more leads? Yes. Oh yes. That definitely plays into what most B2B tech companies are looking for. Do I want to work with a company that sends me multiple unsolicited emails, with hyperbolic claims, no Web site link and a call to action that involves clicking to have someone other than the signatory get in touch with me? No. And if this is how you are trying to engage prospective clients, how are you approaching editors? Because, surprise surprise, I actually know something about PR. (An aside: why do so many vendors assume we marketing communications professionals are a clueless bunch and need every single thing explained to us in detail?)

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