Business Insight Zone

Last Thursday I drew the fun assignment of speaking to the monthly meeting of the Dallas Social Media Club. It was a fun group full of energy and questions, and my preso was followed by one of the best demos I’ve seen in a long time — for the social-media tool Nomee. (The Nomee folks also stood everyone a round of drinks afterwards, which was awfully nice of them.) Even better, the event was hosted in the lovely offices of Moroch Partners, and catered by Zoe’s Kitchen. (Yum!) Follow this link to get a recap of the event from the organizers.

Here’s a copy of the slide deck I presented to the group.

Time permitting, I’ll return to this post to add annotations to the slides.

One of the topics that consistently yields the most hits on this blog is “deliberate practice,” a form of expertise-building studied by psychologist Anders Ericsson and laid out in books like Geoff Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.

I’ve discussed deliberate practice here many times, and I’m always interested when new conversations arise in the comment threads of those posts. If you’d like to join one of these in progress, check out the lengthy exchanges between “tallison” and me in the comment thread of the post “Deliberate Practice in a Nutshell.”

How do YOU think we develop our abilities? And how much does talent (or “talent”?) matter?

Please chime in!

Continuing our recent string of product enhancements, we’re pleased to announce release 3.0 of the Hoover’s API, which allows custom integration of Hoover’s data for:

• enterprises with custom data needs (e.g. because they have hand-built CRM or ERP systems); and
• software makers whose apps benefit from having our top-notch company, industry, and people data integrated into them.

Some of the highlights of the 3.0 release:

• An expanded data set — You can now access 60 million company records, including many more non-U.S. records than before.
• New data points — including latitude/longitude information and the D&B Prescreen Score.
• New search parameters — including the ability to search by company URL.

For more information on this release, check out this post at the “New at Hoover’s” blog. And for MUCH more about the API and how your company can benefit from it, click on over to our dedicated Hoover’s API site and blog. (You can even register for a development API key while you’re there.)

The hits just keep on rolling . . .

We’re proud to announce that Hoover’s has partnered with Jigsaw to enhance our ConnectMail product, which is available as an add-on to Hoover’s subscriptions. ConnectMail gives Hoover’s subscribers access to an additional 7.5 million contacts generated from Jigsaw’s community, which grows by 25,000 active contacts per day.

ConnectMail helps you to:

• Keep track of valuable connections via a “My Contacts” list;
• Find the right business decision makers for your sales and marketing efforts;
• Manage a large number of contacts easily.

For more information, check out this entry from the “New at Hoover’s” blog, or call 877-303-3810.

Want to see me speak about social media and its impact on business? Will you be in Dallas on Thursday?

Follow this link to register for Social Media Club Dallas, coming up this week on the 19th. The meeting runs from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the offices of Moroch Partners on Hall Street in downtown Dallas.

My topic:

“Professor Drucker Would Like a Word with You
about Your Social Media Strategy”

After the event, join us at Bengal Coast for good food and more informal conversation.

Hope to meet you there!

You’re invited to the next installment in Hoover’s free webinar series:

Sales, Prospects, and Clients: Getting Back To Face-to-Face
Thursday, November 19, 2009 at noon Eastern

Our speaker for the one-hour session will be Nancy D. Solomon, a professional speaker, counselor, and coach who has spent many years helping others understand how human relationships impact business success.

Economic conditions have put a tremendous strain on both individuals and organizations; this session will help you understand how a personal approach to your prospects and customers can make you a better — and happier — seller or marketer, despite the economy.

Register for the event by following this link and you’ll also receive a complimentary white paper.

Please join us for a lively discussion on Thursday!

. . . and of the voices of my co-panelists Natanya Anderson (of Powered) and Jason Molin (of UT’s McCombs School of Business), please check out Jason’s blog post about the panel on social media that the three of us presented a few weeks ago at the annual meeting of the Association for University Business and Economic Research.

The post comes complete with Jason’s talking points and an MP3 recording of the whole session. Check it out.

(This is the first follow-up to “Insert blog topic here.”)

Here they are:

1. Be more dogged.

In “The sad lie of mediocrity,” Seth Godin pointed out a fundamental, devastating truth about success:

Doing 4% less does not get you 4% less.
Doing 4% less may very well get you 95% less.

Yes, I know you work hard. Yes, I know this particular obstacle is big and hairy and has fangs like chainsaws.

So what? Get a bazooka. Enlist friends. Stay up all night to work toward its demise, if need be.

But buckle down and get it done. It’s not over until you win.

2. Get creative.

Maybe this fanged monster is impervious to bazookas, but susceptible to poison. Maybe, like Al Capone, it’s susceptible to indictment for tax evasion.

Pull back the lens. Zoom way back so you can take in the landscape. Think again about the problem you’re trying to solve — the beastie you’re trying to kill — rather than focusing on what hasn’t worked so far. Look over my advice from “Killing off a vampire project” and see if any of it rings a bell for you.

Maybe all you need to overcome this obstacle is a skateboard and the right attitude.

“But it’s not that simple!” I can hear someone say.

Actually, yes, it is.

Go.

~

Image by Daniel Catt, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Are you like me? Do you have a hard time saying “No”?

Last month a friend invited me to take part in a blogging project. When I saw the list of people he was inviting, I was flattered even to be included. The guy making the offer is a friend of mine socially, but also a stone-cold professional. I wanted to jump at the chance to work with him.

But as much as I did, I had to admit it wasn’t the right opportunity. Before I told him “No,” I listed the two main reasons for myself:

• I like to think I know something about business, but I know I lack expertise in the topic at hand. My friend was giving me too much credit.
• I say “Yes” too much in general . . . which makes me overbooked . . . which means that each project I do suffers under the weight of all the projects I take on. (Sound familiar at all, O overworked legions?)

This one time, I talked myself down from saying “Yes,” and I was glad I did. It’s a habit I’m working hard to replicate. The takeaway I hope you’ll share with me:

It’s easy to say “No” to obvious losing propositions.
It’s hard when the opportunities are attractive.

So where does the rainbow-colored diagram come in?

It’s taken from Ted Williams‘ classic baseball manual, The Science of Hitting. Williams used it to show what batting average he guessed he’d earn if every pitch he faced were in that particular part of the strike zone. (Imagine you’re the pitcher facing Williams, and he’s standing on the left-hand side of the chart.) The colors are brighter for the areas where Williams knew he hit the best. They bear out his assertion — backed up by his own prodigious career — that “baseball history is made on the inner half of the plate.”

The fact that Williams gave this so much thought helps to explain why he was one of the greatest hitters of all time. But the book has an even simpler formulation for what goes into great hitting, regardless of the type of hitter we’re talking about:

“Get a good pitch to hit.”

I submit to you that it’s a great rule for business, too. Sure, you could reach the prospects at the fringe of your ideal target range — and it’s especially tempting to do that when the economy is as tight as it is now.

But is that where your best margins lie? Are those the kind of customers you’ll have in the brightest version of your company’s future? In other words, is that how you’ll make business history?

Ignore the pitches you can’t drive. Get a good pitch to hit.

Be selective.

~

Image source.

If you’ve been following the posts on the IPO market here, you’ll know that things got much better during the third quarter of this year. Well, the story has stayed happy during October and the early days of November, too.

You can get full details on the IPO Performance pages (October, November) of Hoover’s IPO Central.

Also worth a read: this short article from Matt Krantz of USA Today:

Hyatt, Ancestry.com successes show IPO market mending

The story quotes me as saying, “We’re seeing a healthy IPO market but not an overheated market.”

That’s what I think. Now, what about you? Where do you see the IPO market headed over the next several months?

~

Related posts:

• More of my IPO opinions, in long and short form.
• News from the IPO front, complete with gratuitous self-promotion.
• Increased volume and average value of IPO filings in Q3.

~

Photo by Infrogmation of New Orleans.