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Keynote Speakers

01 May What I Learned From Doing 15 Virtual Keynotes In 21 Days

Posted at 22:50h in Rohit Bhargava

Six weeks ago nearly every event got cancelled, postponed or moved to virtual. Like many professional speakers, I started delivering my talks virtually. But taking a 45 minute talk and doing it over Zoom doesn’t work. It’s too long, tech gets in the way and it just feels boring.

I knew I had to get better at this.

So I started researching. At first it was YouTube videos. I watched a 34 minute overview on selecting the right cardioid microphone. I took notes from a masterclass from a Hollywood lighting pro on techniques like loop and butterfly lighting. I consumed hours of videos on acting techniques, professional studio setups, and product demos. I also asked for advice from some professionals in the entertainment business from my network and read what my friends and fellow speakers were sharing on social media.

And I started writing a book all about everything I was learning when it came to presenting virtually, working more effectively while remote and building trust with people without being in the same room (or perhaps without ever having met in real life. This week, I’m launching that book as a FREE download (get it here) and throughout the process of writing and researching it, I kept presenting and experimenting.

Over the last three weeks I have learned a lot and gotten better. Though I’m continuing to do presentations and getting better at virtual storytelling, I thought I’d share some of the biggest things that I have learned which will help you get better faster, and perhaps skip watching hours of YouTube videos in order to do it.

1. Don’t fear the tech.

I realized over the past month that I have been completely spoiled at events by working with a professional AV crew. At home, it’s just me. And when faced with complex technology, my tendency has too often been to claim ignorance. I was, after all, an English major. But in a professional setting, when you are on your own without an IT department, technical problems just end up making YOU look bad. There’s no one else to blame. So skip the excuses, watch some YouTube videos yourself and conquer your fear of getting technical. This isn’t like programming the Mars rover. You can do this.

2. Get dressed.

It’s a beautiful thing that we can now present in our pajamas. But I don’t. In fact, I usually dress the same way I would if I were presenting from the stage. For me, it helps me to bring more energy in an artificial environment where I don’t get the benefit of audience feedback. So I don’t look the same in every video, I also try to wear something different for each talk.

3. Embrace the unperfection.

Most of us don’t have a professional studio at home. It’s ok. In fact, it might be better. When we see each other’s homes in the background, or some of our personality – we feel more connected. So let it be a little bit unperfect and focus on being authentic instead of perfect.

4. Face the window.

All of the light tutorials I watched on YouTube were great, but complicated. You can buy ring lights or hook up web-enabled dimmers to your phone – but the real secret to how I’m getting pretty good light on all my calls comes down to three words: face a window. When your face is to the window, you avoid backlighting (the biggest lighting problem most people have) and odd shadows too. The picture below is me in my home office with NO additional lighting. I literally just turned around to face the window instead of putting it behind me. Of course, this won’t work if you’re in a room with no windows (or at night) – so if that’s the case, get good lighting from the front (a ring light works for this) and start with that.

5. Invest in sound.

If you are going to spend money on anything to improve your virtual presentation, make it a high quality microphone. Headsets generally are a great way to get good sound and avoid background noise. The problem is you end up looking like a call center operator. The alternative is a good cardioid microphone (a microphone that mainly picks up sound from the front). The microphones to avoid are omnidirectional (they pick up ambient sound from around the room).

6. Play with the tech.

Whenever my boys encounter something new, they want to press all the buttons. As they get older, they still do that. We can use some of that same mentality when it comes to using videoconferencing platforms. Do you know what all the buttons do? Try them out. On a Zoom call, using the space bar is a shortcut to go off mute. Skype has similar keyboard shortcuts. The best way to get better at using the tools is by playing with it … and pressing all the buttons.

7. Skip the apology.

We all know that virtual meetings aren’t seamless. Sometimes people are hard to hear. And your WiFi may be slow. It’s tempting to always be apologizing for this, or even worse, apologizing before anything even goes wrong! Instead, go with the flow and adapt to the difficulties. If they persist, be decisive in what to do about it – whether it’s asking everyone to log out and then back in, or the worst case scenario of rescheduling the meeting. People may not like it, but they will definitely appreciate it more if you didn’t waste 30 minutes trying to get everything working before finally canceling.

8. Speak to the camera.

When you are on a video call where multiple people are sharing screens, you will want to look at them. The problem is, doing this appears as if you’re looking sideways. The only way to offer the appearance of eye contact is to speak to your webcam instead of to the images of the people. This is logical, but very hard to consistently do because it feels unnatural. To be honest, I haven’t found an easy way to do this, apart from asking everyone else to turn off their video screens. So I’ve just been practicing ignoring their videos and speaking to the camera instead.

9. Use props.

One of the nicest things about presenting from my home office is that I can have all the tools I usually use right next to me. So while I used to share a picture of a stack of books that I read from the stage, now I can actually SHOW people the stack. Props are a great way to break up the monotony of a talk and bring your personality too.

10. Update your website/profile.

Everything is changing, but a lot of what we see online seems to have been created before Covid-19. As a speaker, I wanted to be sure to let event planners and potential clients know that I’ve adjusted what I do, so I changed my homepage and my speaking page to focus on virtual events. If you want to show potential customers or even your colleagues that you’re adjusting too, consider updating your site (if you have one) or your professional profiles too.

Rohit Bhargava is an innovation, trends, marketing expert and Wall Street Journal Best Selling Author. Invite him to keynote your next virtual or live event.

27 Apr Cybersecurity And Compliance In The New Decade

Posted at 17:26h in Uncategorized

Dave Knox sat down to talk about the rise of cybersecurity and why today – particularly in our new work from home environment – it is becoming a topic of board room discussion. In 2002, Scott Price was 26 years old when his employer, Arthur Andersen, went out of business following Enron. With his focus on auditing security around technology controls, Scott started his first company, growing it to $11 million in revenue seven years later. Sensing a broader opportunity, Scott left to start A-LIGN in 2009. As CEO and Founder of A-LIGN, they help companies comply with different regulatory and information security standards globally.

Dave Knox: When you started your career, audits and compliance were mostly financial. Early in your career, you saw that a change was coming and that need would broaden. How has cybersecurity changed compliance over the last decade?

Scott Price: I think compliance really allows businesses to trust each other. I talk about the fact of what we do allows businesses to trust and respect each other. They want to be able to trust businesses back and forth of sharing data and us as consumers, we want to make sure our companies respect the data that we give to them. A-LIGN’s focus on having a very broad framework of how we attack those from a security controls perspective, I think really adds value to our clients because they see the fact that they can either raise funds, do business with a new company, move upstream or really just improve their business because of that trust. Having great cybersecurity controls in place is going to mitigate risk and make your company more successful.

Knox: Is the conversation around cybersecurity changing at the executive level?

Price: I think people are starting to talk about it moving from behind the scenes to the board room and I really do believe it’s become a board room discussion. But security is still not the place where we say okay, if we have a dollar to spend on sales and marketing or we have a dollar to spend on security, we’re going to choose security. Companies are going to consistently choose growth metrics and growth dollars over the fact that these are things that could happen. Let’s face it, with cybersecurity we know it’s going to happen, it’s not the if but the when it will happen. You do see it continuously getting more exposure at the board level though. And the focus will continue to increase as greater fines are incurred, companies lose major customers, and relationships are strained when you’ve influenced their cybersecurity environment.

We’re clearly biased as a company that helps organizations of all sizes reduce cybersecurity risks, but we feel that the ability to spend dollars to demonstrate compliance with cybersecurity regulations really will allow sales and marketing to drive further. We found that 66% of our client base takes on Series A funding or greater within 160 days of hiring us. We’ve seen the fact that they will get the funding and then want to move up market, so they’ll need to build these security controls in place. Or they’ll be looking for the funding and they’ll want to make sure that they have the best security controls as they go through due diligence. Investors and Strategic Buyers are starting to look at the compliance framework during the diligence process so it’s becoming a bigger, bigger issue.

Knox: Is there a way to measure an ROI when you think about security?

Price: I think the ROI is more if you don’t do something. You have to do it. People continuously underestimate the risk of bad things happening. I go back to the movie the Big Short. They found great investments because people don’t think that bad things are going to happen. They always undervalue it. I think it’s hard to put a dollar exactly on what the ROI is. I think it’s more along the lines of how it drives the sales and marketing aspect which you can put a dollar on that. It’s easier to measure the growth than to measure the penalty.

Knox: We mostly think of compliance and security as an IT responsibility but what you’re saying is it’s moving closer to being something the entire c-suite needs to care about. How do you think about that role of cybersecurity becoming more horizontal?

Price: There’s an often used phrase that they say cybersecurity is a team sport. It really is. We see the fact that sales and marketing are looking at their competition and seeing the types of certifications and assessments that those competitors can promote. They realize they need the same thing to be able to compete in the marketplace. We see it more and more driven by sales and marketing and then it becomes a responsibility of implementation by IT or operations. That in itself allows compliance and cybersecurity to have more visibility and not just sit in the back closet.

Knox: As a founder yourself, how do you coach and think about entrepreneurs engaging with security early on and planning ahead versus reacting?

Price: When you’re in a startup mode you don’t have time to go back and redo code, redo processes and procedures. You want to build those controls that are required for these cybersecurity regulations into the code, into your processes because you’re moving so fast. We really get excited when a CEO calls us of a startup and he or she is engaged with us before they’ve even been asked for the audit or the assessment, before they’ve even building their application and they just have this idea. That’s where we can have the most impact because it’s not going back and retooling a process. That allows us to understand what works for you at this stage and you can grow into that process. For us, the value that we get derived of interacting with what we call “Startup Steve” and that buyer persona is really fascinating for us.

What we find is that this founder is typically someone that came from a large company and they had first hand experience of going through that process, retooling things, and seeing their teams bogged down. They recall that pain and don’t want to have it happen with their startup. They want to align their strategy and their compliance objectives. We love to partner with them early on and be able to not have to experience that pain.

Not some people haven’t had to experience that pain before. For them, the biggest thing is to try to relate to them of where their objectives are and how we can fit into that and get them there sooner. They want to be able to get to market and they want to be able to acquire new customers. We tell them that if we partner now, we’ll be able to do that with you in a much easier format, take you to market quicker and be able to achieve whatever they want to do faster. We are able to talk about our experience with 2,400 clients, many of which we started working with when they were in the startup and small business phase. We can make those connections and help them understand why it’s so important to do this work at the startup phase rather than building processes and having to retreat later on.

Knox: In your own journey as an entrepreneur and as you have worked with over 2,400 companies, what lessons do you wish you had when you were starting that first company at 26 years old?

Price: I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned is I wish I would have focused more on how to be a good leader and CEO and to invest in our people early on. I constantly hear “you’ve built this great company in A-LIGN” but the thing is, we don’t sell a widget, we don’t sell a car. We sell our people being experts in their industry and being able to go out and interact with our clients. As we received our investment from FTV Capital, we’ve invested tremendously in our people with training and also in our technology. Those are the things that I wish I had done earlier and raised capital in order to be able to do that because we’ve seen the dividends of that pay off. If we had done that work in 2014, we might be 10 times where we’re at now.

We have four values and one of our four values is innovate constantly. We firmly believe that our clients want us to innovate and be on top of what we’re doing because they’ve chosen us as their trusted provider to be able to do just that. For someone that wants to grow and be pushed to the limit, this is the best feeling. This is what I love to do because we are constantly learning about new attack techniques that hackers are trying to do. The great thing is the hackers get worse every day and we have to get better to be able to support our clients. Standards change every day because cybersecurity threats change every day. This is one of the most interesting industries that allows us to have these constant changes, to keep it interesting. The standard is constantly evolving. Our client’s risk is constantly evolving. The technology behind what they’re doing is evolving. This makes this very interesting. We don’t sell black and white TV’s at A-LIGN. We’re in cybersecurity and it’s constantly evolving.

Knox: COVID-19 has created a new cybersecurity threat landscape for C-suite executives – especially CEOs, CIOs and CISOs. What kind of threats are organizations facing and what should you consider when choosing a compliance partner?

Price: The new threat landscape created by COVID-19 is our new reality – and even the most prepared business continuity plans likely did not plan for a worldwide pandemic that would disrupt business and IT operations. Organizations are facing new risks regarding a remote workforce and compliance initiatives as cyber criminals attempt to exploit the fear of the unknown. Continuing to maintain compliance, even during uncertain times, remains vital – and finding an experienced partner you trust that has the right people, process and platform will transform any security and compliance experience.

Dave Knox is a leading consultant, speaker, and coach in the areas of innovation, marketing, and digital transformation. Invite him to keynote your virtual or LIVE meeting/event.

(This article first appeared in Forbes on April 20, 2020)

08 Apr How Will We Know When It’s Time to Reopen the Nation?

Posted at 17:05h in Uncategorized

Everyone wants to know when we are going to be able to leave our homes and reopen the United States. That’s the wrong way to frame it.

The better question is: “How will we know when to reopen the country?”

Any date that is currently being thrown around is just a guess. It’s pulled out of the air.

To this point, Americans have been reacting, often too late, and rarely with data. Most of us are engaging in social distancing because leaders have seen what’s happening in Europe or in New York; they want to avoid getting there; and we don’t have the testing available to know where coronavirus hot spots really are.

Since the virus appears to be everywhere, we have to shut everything down. That’s unlikely to be the way we’ll exit, though.

Some cities or states will recover sooner than others. It’s helpful to have criteria by which cities or states could determine they’re ready. A recent report by Scott Gottlieb, Caitlin Rivers, Mark B. McClellan, Lauren Silvis and Crystal Watson staked out some goal posts.

Hospitals in the state must be able to safely treat all patients requiring hospitalization, without resorting to crisis standards of care.

Other cities and states fear that they will approach New York City’s state of crisis. They’re trying to increase the number of available beds and ventilators — as well as doctors, nurses and other health care providers — to make sure they aren’t overwhelmed in their capacity to provide care to all those who need it.

This is the most immediate bar, and the focus of most public health officials’ attention. At the moment, there’s no reason to believe any area is over a surge of cases, and analysts’ models predict many places won’t peak for weeks to come.

A state needs to be able to test at least everyone who has symptoms.

Dr. Gottlieb and colleagues estimate that the nation would need to have the capacity to run 750,000 tests a week — this is after things have calmed down greatly. There are times we might need even more.

“The 750,000 number should be viewed as a reasonable expectation for when we haven’t been having any major pockets or regional outbreaks to manage,” said Mark McClellan, an author of the report and a professor of business, medicine and policy at Duke. “If more testing to help contain outbreaks and potential outbreaks is needed, which seems very plausible, especially early on, the number would need to be significantly larger. We’ll also have to do some surveillance of people without symptoms, especially in higher-risk settings.”

A national estimate means less in deciding whether a state can reopen than its local capabilities. A state would need to be sure it could test every single person who might be infected, and have the results in a timely manner. That would be the only way to achieve the next requirement.

The state is able to conduct monitoring of confirmed cases and contacts.

A robust system of contact tracing and isolation is the only thing that can prevent an outbreak and a resulting lockdown from recurring. Every time an individual tests positive, the public health infrastructure needs to be able to determine whom that person has been in close contact with, find those people, and have them go into isolation or quarantine until it’s established they aren’t infected, too.

This will be a big challenge for most areas. Other countries have relied on cellphone tracking technology to determine whom people have been near. We don’t have anything like that ready, nor is it even clear we’d allow it. The United States also doesn’t have enough people working in public health in many areas to carry out this task.

Building that capacity will take significant time and money, and the country hasn’t even started.

There must be a sustained reduction in cases for at least 14 days.

Because it can take up to two weeks for symptoms to emerge, any infections that have already happened can take that long to appear. If the number of cases in an area is dropping steadily for that much time, however, public health officials can be reasonably comfortable that suppression has been achieved, defined by every infected person infecting fewer than one other.

In suppression, cases will dwindle at an exponential fashion, just as they rose. It’s not possible to set a benchmark number for every state because the number of infections that will be manageable in any area depends on the local population and the public health system’s ability to handle sporadic cases.

“We wanted to suggest criteria that would allow locations to safely and thoughtfully begin to reopen, but what that looks like exactly will vary from state to state,” said Caitlin Rivers, another author of the report and an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “We therefore included some flexibility for jurisdictions to tailor these criteria to their local context.”

These four criteria are a baseline. Other experts think we will need to add serological testing, which is different from the viral detection going on now. This type of testing looks for antibodies in the blood that our bodies created to fight the infection, not the infection itself. These tests can be much cheaper and faster than the ones we’re currently using to detect the virus in sick people.

Testing for antibodies will tell us how many people in a community have already been infected, as opposed to currently infected, and may also provide information about future immunity.

Gregg Gonsalves, a professor of epidemiology and law at Yale, said: “I’d feel better if we had serological testing, and could preferentially allow those who are antibody positive and no longer infectious to return to work first. The point is, though, that we are nowhere even near accomplishing any of these criteria. Opening up before then will be met with a resurgence of the virus.”

He added, “That’s the thing that keeps me up every night.”

Until we get a vaccine or effective drug treatments, focusing on these major criteria, and directing efforts toward them, should help us determine how we are progressing locally, and how we might achieve each goal.

It would also prevent us from offering false hope about when America can start reopening. Instead of guesses, people could have clear answers about when they might be able to go back to a closer-to-normal way of life.

Aaron Carroll, MD, MS is a professor, speaker and author who keynotes events on the future of healthcare. Invite him to your next meeting.

07 Apr The World of Viruses

Posted at 23:56h in Uncategorized

In January, virologists in China isolated a new virus. In March the Coronaviridae Study Group of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses named the virus SARS-CoV-2. Most people call it the coronavirus. The virus causes a disease called Covid-19. The vocabulary can be very confusing. The goal of this article is to shed some light on the various terms.

Let’s start with taxonomy, a scheme of classification of things, especially living things. A Swedish naturalist named Carolus Linnaeus is considered the “Father of Taxonomy”. In the 1700s, Linnaeus developed a method we still use today to name and organize species. The table below shows one version of the Linnaean Classification of Humans.

Kingdom	Animalia
Phylum	Chordata
Subphylum	Vertebrata
Class	Mammalia
Subclass	Theria
Infraclass	Eutheria
Order	Primates
Suborder	Anthropoidea
Superfamily	Hominoidea
Family	Hominidae
Genus	Homo
Species	Sapiens

The level of detail can make your head hurt. We humans are often referred to simply as Homo Sapiens. There is much more detail beyond the table if you want to drill down. When it comes to viruses, the taxonomy makes the human taxonomy look really simple. See the following table from Nature.com to get a glimpse of it. The complete 8,000-word article is here.

To put the complexity in perspective, consider SARS-CoV-2, the cause of the pandemic, is one of 6,828 virus species which have been named. Researchers say they know of hundreds of thousands more species. Some believe there may be trillions waiting to be found. This is the virosphere.

The good news is there are a number of profound research projects underway to deal with the world of viruses. This is incredibly important because viruses are not going away. Some experts are saying a new and different virus will appear next year or even later this year. Hopefully, we will be ready. The wake up call this time was so loud and clear, I believe we will be prepared.

One new approach under development is the use of synbio, as described in last week’s e-brief. A vaccine made from synthetic ingredients can potentially offer some significant advantages. The big one is scalability. Synbio vaccines could be produced efficiently for millions or even billions of doses. Synbio vaccines are developed using computer models, not flasks and test tubes. With billions of calculations, a nanoparticle can be designed which has the exact properties desired. The really big breakthrough with synbio is the attachment of multiple different viral molecules to the nanoparticle and thereby create a universal coronavirus vaccine. One vaccine for all corona viruses. That will be the breakthrough.

Another positive development in the silver lining of the coronavirus cloud is tech companies large and small are jumping in the boat to help. For example, IBM is collaborating with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Department of Energy to launch the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. The Consortium will provide supercomputing power to researchers developing predictive models to analyze the coronavirus progression and identify potential treatments. Researchers from around the world can submit proposals, and the Consortium will select the projects which could have the most immediate impact. Other partners in the consortium include NASA, MIT, and the Argonne National Laboratory.

Another significant Covid-19 effort is taking place at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. As of November 2019, Oak Ridge had the fastest supercomputer in the world. It is capable of performing one thousand million million (10¹⁵) operations per second.

Scientists at Oak Ridge have deployed the massive supercomputer to look for compounds which can bind to the “spike protein” of the virus. It is the spike protein which the virus uses to infect host cells. The right compound could render the spike protein ineffective, and the virus would be stopped from spreading. Using digital models, the supercomputer can simulate how particles in the viral protein would react to different drug compounds. The researchers started with a list of 77 compounds and narrowed it down to the top seven most promising candidates which could become effective treatments for covid-19. The research is at the early stage but I believe we can be hopeful.

John Patrick is available for virtual and in-person keynotes. The post The World of Viruses appeared first on johnpatrick.com.

07 Apr Dr. Carroll Answers Viewers’ Questions About COVID-19

Posted at 23:55h in Uncategorized

Dr. Aaron Carroll answers viewers’ questions about COVID-19 on his popular podcast Healthcare Triage. Questions pertaining to social distancing, and how to stay safe. You can ask questions for future Q&As at http://www.healthcaretriage.info.

30 Mar 5 Reasons Virtual Meetings Suck (And 5 Ways To Fix Them)

Posted at 18:27h in Rohit Bhargava

With the concerns about a global health pandemic, the necessity of shifting more events and meetings to be virtual is on everyone’s mind. There’s only one problem: most of us have spent too much time in virtual meetings that are a waste of time.

I should know, I’ve probably spoken or participated in well over a hundred over the past years – both as a virtual keynote speaker and a remote workshop leader.

Some of them have sucked.

But I don’t believe that virtual meetings or presentations need to be bad. The real problem is that no one seems to know how to run them well.

Thanks to concerns about the coronavirus, we seem to be headed into a season where more events will happen virtually. So we should all have an interest in making them better. To start, let’s consider five of the most common reasons that virtual meetings go awry …

Problem #1 – Increased distractions.

Presenting the same thing you might have done in person in the same way doesn’t work in a virtual session. There are too many distractions and other things people may be doing at the same time.

Problem #2 – Lack of audience.

The entire idea of a laugh track for television sitcoms was created because the lack of an audience made creators worry that people wouldn’t know when to laugh. In a live meeting, we can look to the people around us for a cue as to how we might react. A virtual setting lacks this and so we feel isolated in our reactions and it’s harder to engage.

Problem #3 – Intrusive malfunctioning tech.

If you have ever started a conference call with ten minutes of participants asking if you can hear them, you’ve already experienced this. The fact is, much of the technology used for virtual sessions creates a lot of friction. People have to download something, microphones don’t work and Internet connections fail.

Problem #4 – No accountability.

When you are sitting in a live meeting or you show up late, there is a reputational and social cost to being tardy or being on your phone or checking out. Everyone else can see what you’re doing. In a virtual session, there isn’t any social pressure to keep you engaged or to prevent you from multitasking.

Problem #5 – One-way interaction.

Too often in virtual meetings one side has a camera on and is delivering content while the other is silently and invisibly listening. This creates an unbalanced meeting because one side has no insight into how the other side is reacting.

So, how do we fix these issues?

It’s easy to think that these are all thing that will always be the case with virtual meetings. After all, it’s not reasonable to “lock the doors” of a virtual session or force everyone to be on video to hold them accountable, right? And you certainly can’t wish away technical issues just by hoping they don’t happen.

Yet despite the difficulties these problems create, there are some techniques I have seen and used myself to help make virtual meetings and presentations a LOT better than they might otherwise be. Here are a few suggestions:

Solution #1 – Make virtual tech an advantage.

If you know everyone who is participating in your meeting will be on their computer during the session, a lot of possibilities open up. You can have them all visit a landing page directly to enter information. You can host and integrate a live poll. You can even tailor your content based on immediate responses you get. Virtual meetings can enable faster real time engagement if you can bake the interaction into the session.

Solution #2 – Use multiple mediums/styles.

While people may be able to sit through an hour long meeting or a 45 minute keynote, the rules are different for virtual sessions. In a world where people are used to 90 second YouTube videos, keeping their attention is more demanding. Sometimes, I will integrate videos more frequently into virtual sessions, or use interactive exercises asking participants to draw a picture or answer a question. These allow for a mental break and help audiences stay engaged for longer because you are mixing up the content.

Solution #3 – Reduce the friction.

Often the technology platform for a session is selected based on what is the approved platform for a particular organization or what presenters are most comfortable using. Both are not great ways to choose technology. Instead, consider what tech would be easiest and fastest for your audience to get working. Who has the best live support to help people with issues? What tool doesn’t require downloading? Considering the friction of the tech tools for your audience first can help prevent tech issues later.

Solution #4 – Expect distractions and reiterate often.

In a virtual environment, repetition becomes much more important in order for ideas to stick. When you are presenting virtually with slides, for example, you may need to insert more summary slides or add more “bottom line” style reminders to reiterate your main points. Just because your audience may have been distracted or multitasking doesn’t mean they are bad people or didn’t really want to hear your message. Being more patient and proactive by changing your presentation style slightly can make a big difference in what your audience retains afterwards.

Solution #5 – Focus on the follow up.

Perhaps even more than in-person meetings, the follow up from a virtual session becomes much more important. If you have recorded the session and promised to share it, make that happen quickly. If there are downloadable materials make them easy to find and get. The moment right after a virtual session is a critical one for engagement and a time when your audience may be most receptive to anything you can share. So plan the follow up and do it quickly.

Is the future about virtual events?

I have never been someone who believed that virtual events could replace in person events. There is something magical about getting the right people in the room to make connections and a serendipity that happens face to face which is impossible to recreate virtually (yet!). I hope that live events never get replaced.

I do, however, believe that a virtual presentation can be highly effective and in many cases preferable – for example if you have a widely distributed group that can’t be in the same place at once, or a global health scare that makes travel riskier. Hopefully this list helps you transform your next virtual meeting or presentation into one that doesn’t suck and really does engage your audience.

We all need to find more ways to make our virtual meetings better. For the near future, it’s at least pretty clear we can expect to have more of them.

03 Dec 5 KEYS TO SELLING A DIGITAL SERVICE PRODUCT

Posted at 20:07h in Timothy Chou

There are no shortage of research development teams (R&D) that built great — yet ultimately unsuccessful — products. And while any manufacturer — no matter the industry — is capable of doubling its revenues and quadrupling its margins by building digital service products, it’s a task that’s more easily said than done.

Why? Because the digital service product still has to be sold. And successfully doing so requires not only investment of time, effort and resources. It also requires a concerted effort to focus on five key components:

Pricing the product
Top-level marketing stories
Developing a sales team and determining how they will be compensated
Successfully managing business operations
Determining how to pay for everything

PRICING THE PRODUCT

Let’s start with pricing the product. While it can generate significant amount of debate within an organization, I propose you start with something simple. Price the digital service product as a monthly percentage of the purchase price of the machine. In the world of software, this often ranges from 2-6% of the purchase price of the product. Consider starting with 0.5-1% per month. So if your microplate reader is priced at $75,000, you should price the digital service product at $375-$750 per month. Of course, you’ll have a volume discount matrix, which will offer customers who spend more money a bigger discount.

TOP-LEVEL MARKETING STORIES

Next, you’ll need to define the marketing message. Since your No. 1 competition is the status quo, you should start with “selling the not.” Plenty of people both internal and external to your company think service is break-fix. A few months ago, I had breakfast with the CEO of a company that builds machines for the semiconductor industry. I asked him how many machines he had in the field. He responded by saying around 10,000 to 20,0000. The precision of his answer caught my attention immediately. I went on to ask him how much service revenue he generates, to which he responded with the universal sign of a goose egg.

I then asked “Why zero?” He replied “No one wants to pay for service.” Of course the reason no one pays for service is he defined it as break-fix support. Anyone who has just bought a $250,000 machine would assume it would work, so why pay anything more?

Well, service is not break-fix. Service is information, personal and relevant; information on how to maintain or optimize the performance, availability, security and changes of a machine.

Then there’s the importance of top-level marketing stories. In the modern era, it’s critical for you to find a way to tell your story as a story. Every night when you watch your favorite television show, you’ll see some essential aspects of storytelling. Stories have characters. Stories are set in a particular place and time. And all stories fall into three categories: man vs. man; man vs. nature; man vs. himself. Now check out your marketing collateral. How many stories do you see?

DEVELOPING A SALES TEAM

Once you’ve clearly articulated your digital service product story, your next major step should be to hire and organize your sales team. Make sure it’s a dedicated team. Selling service is not the same as selling new product features. Think of it this way… You may have noticed the Mercedes sales person and the Mercedes service manager isn’t the same person. Your digital service salespeople will be more farmer than hunter, since the goal is to monetize your installed base. Given these are all customers you should know, this is not the same as trying to prospect for new names.

No sales team works without a compensation package. Given you’re moving from selling one time to selling a recurring service, you’ll need to establish a compensation plan which both incentivizes the initial sale of the service, but also more importantly the renewal of this valuable recurring revenue stream. In software companies, it’s not uncommon to have customer success managers whose sole focus is continually satisfying the customer.

MANAGING BUSINESS OPERATIONS

Next you’ll need to have business operations create new contracts and ordering documents. You could borrow some of the terms and conditions from the software-as-a-service industry, but my most important recommendation is you avoid the creation of service level agreements with associated point-by-point penalties depending on how you did or did not perform the service. Instead, create a digital service product guarantee, which is all encompassing. In this guarantee, you should stipulate that, no matter the reason, the customer is entitled to a rebate of 20% in the month the claim is made. This will simplify revenue recognition, which will make your CFO happy, reduce legal expenses and expedite the contract signing (which should, in turn, make your sales teams happy).

FUNDING

Finally, building and selling a new product line will not happen without investment. You’ll be challenged to re-allocate resources from your traditional business. If you’re looking for a tool to help think about how to fund this transformation check out Geoffrey Moore’s last book, Zone to Win. He talks about putting your annual budget into four major categories:

Performance
Productivity
Incubation
Transformation zones

The performance zone is money you spend to deliver material bookings, revenues, and contribution margins in this fiscal year. The productivity zone is money you spend to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your R&D or sales organization. The money spent to deploy a new CRM application would fall into this category. Again, the time horizon is the current fiscal year. Most companies will have 100% of their budgets allocated to these two categories, which brings us to the last two categories. The incubation zone allocates funds to developing new business models or new products. The time horizon for these investments is 36-72 months. If you have not started a digital service product, then you’d allocate financial resources from the incubation bucket. Finally, the transformation zone is where you put the wood behind the arrow and fund not only the development of the digital service product, but all of the sales and marketing that’s required for it to be successful. Moore says pick only one project from the incubation zone. The CEO must sponsor it. Furthermore you’d expect to deliver 10% of the current company revenue in a 36-month horizon. Given the market opportunity is at least two times your current product revenues, this is certainly possible for any digital service product.

While not easy, the next major step for any company that makes combine harvesters, front loaders, industrial printers, water purification equipment, agitators or ultrasound machines is to build and sell digital service products. Digital service products deliver information on how to maintain or optimize the performance, availability and security of the machine. These are the fundamental components of the last major step, which is to deliver the product-as-a-service.

We’re already seeing the digital service product revolution occurring in certain industries. When will it start in yours?

27 Sep Why Trend Predictions Suck (And How To Fix Them)

Posted at 21:41h in Rohit Bhargava

The first time I wrote about trends, I was inspired by bullshit.

I remember reading an article with a headline that promised “5 Trends That Will Change The Future.” The first trend on the list was “Mobile Usage Will Continue To Rise.” That was the moment when I understood deeply why so many people mistrust trend predictions.

As I dug deeper, I started to discover that there are actually three reasons why most trend predictions are so bad:

They are self serving. The only people declaring 2020 to be “the year of [your product here]” are the content marketers from the companies that sell that product.
They are obvious. It is undeniably true that mobile usage will indeed continue to rise. So what? Many trend predictions take pains to point out the perfectly obvious.
They aren’t actionable. Even trend predictions that seem good lack the next level of insights to make them useful in real life.

Back in 2011 I wrote my first “Non-Obvious Trend Report,” spotlighting 15 trends that year which I thought were changing the world of marketing and social media. Over the following several years, I expanded the report to include trends about culture, technology, media and education. In the process, I discovered the answer to my own question about how to make trend predictions better.

The secret to predicting the future is getting better at paying attention to and understanding the accelerating present.

It’s hard to believe, but that was ten years ago and over the last several months I’ve been working on the research for the tenth annual edition of my trend predictions — called Non-Obvious Megatrends. Unlike previous years, this year’s book will be a bit different. For the first time, I’m taking a look back over the past ten years of research and it all started with a sorting exercise using my signature “Haystack Method” to group similar trends together. Here’s a time lapse video of that:

Over the next several months, I’ll be sharing more about the process leading up to publication of the book in January, 2020. In the meantime, if you want to get an early look at the book and get new non-obvious ideas in your inbox every Thursday, make sure to join my email newsletter list here: www.rohitbhargava.com/subscribe.

PS – If you want to take a deeper look inside my Haystack Method approach and how it works, check out this feature article about my process.

27 Sep WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Posted at 21:38h in Mark Mayfield

Delaney May was my first grandchild. That’s her first and middle name and the reason I’m not broadcasting her last name is because I’m sure some international modeling and/or talent agency is gonna want her, and she just doesn’t need that kind of pressure right now. She’s too busy learning how to blow slobber bubbles for heaven’s sake. But I’m just so thankful that my daughter and son-in-law chose such a great name. It’s beautiful, even poetic, but most of all NORMAL!!!

In this “what can I do to call attention to myself” society, they avoided the trend of giving their child some goofy yet noticeable name. Why do parents do that? A name is somewhat permanent. Gwyneth Paltrow named her daughter “Apple”. If she would ever have another girl she could name her “Peach”, then she’d have a “Pear”. HA! And this is the woman that moved to England because she said Americans were too stupid. Look in the mirror honey. Rob Morrow named his daughter “Tu”. His little girl’s name is pronounced Tomorrow. Are you kidding me? But the “Big Bonehead” award has to go to Dave Duchovny and Tea Leoni who named their child “Kyd”. They named their kid, Kyd. You can’t make this stuff up. I’m thinking “Kyd” is a kid destined for wedgies. There’s “Billy the Kid” and “Kid Rock”, but those are nicknames. There is a difference, you attention seeking dimwits. At least now we will have a real life sequel for Abbot & Costello’s “Who’s on First” routine.

What’s your name kid?
Yep.
No, your name kid.
That’s it.
That’s what?
My name.
That’s what I’m asking, what’s your name kid?
You got it.
I got what?
My name.
That’s what I’m asking, your name kid?
That’s it.
Your name is “It”?
Nope, he’s my brother.

I thought the parents were supposed to be the smart, responsible ones. But then those examples I gave you did come from Hollywood, didn’t they?

I’m just sayin’.

Mark Mayfield

A Funny Speaker with a Serious Message

05 Sep 5 Awesome (And Slightly Scary) Technology Stories You Should Now

Posted at 19:44h in Rohit Bhargava

Most weeks I tend to focus on stories about our culture, but this week my curation led more consistently toward technology with a wide range of articles about innovations, discoveries and new research. In the stories below you’ll find everything from human-animal embryo research to the cure for baldness. They may awaken your imagination or perhaps disturb you with their ambition, but they are all stories you should know about. If there is a theme among them, it is probably the reminder that technology continues to simultaneously be a great and scary thing.

Contact Lenses That Change Focus and Zoom When You Blink
Though its only a prototype, a new soft contact lens from researchers at the University of California San Diego may allow the wearer to use the electrical field found in the tissues around the eye to control features like zooming in simply by blinking. It’s not exactly x-ray vision, but pretty amazing nonetheless.

Japan Approves First Human-Animal Embryo Tests
Hiromitsu Nakauchi has a plan to grow human cells in mouse and rat embryos and then transplant those embryos into surrogate animals. This week Japan became the first government to allow such research and if it works, the door may be open to scientists producing animals with organs made of human cells that can eventually be transplanted into real people.

Pampers Invents Smart Diapers To Track Baby’s Pee
Teaming up with health software platform Verily, Pampers is finally launching the product that countless parents have dreamed about – smart diapers. The diapers detects whether a diaper is wet from pee, as well as how wet it is. It also records how long a baby has been sleeping for. Now all we need is a diaper that can change itself.

Saudi Prince Announces Plans For City of the Future
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has an ambitious vision to create the city of the future, complete with glow in the dark beaches, AI maids and robot dinosaurs. The project is called Neom, may require close to $500 billion to make and will cover 10,000 squares miles of coastline and desert. More importantly, the effort to build it will awaken human imagination and offer some ideas the rest of the world can use as well.

A Cure For Baldness (As Long As You’re Rich)
Every potential cure for baldness has had at least one fatal flaw. Hair regrowth medications don’t typically regrow much hair. Transplants look unnatural and hair cloning has never been viable. Now researchers believe the secret may lie in using stem cells to create a “hair farm” where new hair could be regrown with stronger hair follicles and then reinserted into the scalp. It’s a promising, expensive, and might actually work.

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