Moving on to your next piece of content — regardless of how your last one performed — is the mark...
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Neen James is the author of Folding Time™ and her most recent book, Attention Pays™. She is frequently named one of the top 30 Leadership Speakers by Global Guru because of her work with companies like Viacom, Comcast, Cisco, Virgin, Pfizer, BMW, and the FBI, among others. Neen is a leadership expert who delivers high-energy keynotes that challenge audiences to leverage their focus and pay attention to what matters most at work and in life. She’s also originally from Australia but now lives in Florida. Neen and I are both members of a secret or not so secret society of speakers and although we have never met until today, the energy she shares through her digital communications makes me feel like we’ve known each other for years. On Wednesday October 16th, Neen will be giving an opening keynote, Attention Pays™: How to Drive Profitability, Productivity, and Accountability at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Washington D.C.. Neen was generous to spend some time with me to talk about the importance of attention in business, for marketing and marketing leaders. Enjoy the full video interview below: Neen James on the Value of Personal Branding in B2B Marketing: I think it's vital because when you think about this whole idea, if you really want to get attention, you have to give attention. And as marketers we have to give attention to the brand that people are buying from. We are the product. I grew up in corporate business, Lee. I worked in retail banking, telecommunications, and the oil industry. And what I realized, Lee, is I had to be able to stand out.
Just like you would do a SWOT analysis on a potential product for a client in a strategic plan, we're going to do the same thing with ourselves because the people that we are working with, Lee, they want to know that they can trust us. They want to know that we're going to get them the results that they need. So a personal brand in B2B is vital and it's also about making sure that the brand has longevity and consistency. Neen James on Systems of Attention: Systems create freedom, right? We all have systems in place, whether we are marketers within organizations or an entrepreneur that is running your own marketing for your company. I believe that we need systems of attention. There are systems of attention to be able to get and give the kind of attention that you want, whether it is in the work place or outside. We all know that with the projects that we're all juggling, the clientele that we're all managing, and the team that we're leading, that we need some systems in place. Neen James on the Cost of Distractions from Multitasking: The costs are insane. Whether they're personal or professional. There was some research done by the Information Overload Group, which is a hilarious name for a company, that found in the US $588 billion dollars is lost every year because there's loss of productivity through distraction and multitasking.The people that we are working with want to know that they can trust us. They want to know that we're going to get them the results that they need. @neenjames
From a professional point of view, there's obviously results like reduced productivity and reduced internal customer satisfaction. Are distracted employees really delivering on the results you said you would provide to the clientele that you serve inside or outside your organization? There are many costs including team engagement, productivity, customer satisfaction. There are professional costs, but personally the most disturbing thing I found when I was researching my book, Attention Pays, was that on average nine people die every day because of distracted driving. I mean, we've made it more important to update our Facebook status than to actually pay attention to the road. Neen James on Prioritizing your Priorities: A strategic appointment with yourself is just 15 minutes. Here's what's so fascinating. People tell me all the time, "Oh, there's never enough time." Or, "I've run out of time, we're going to kill time." Well, poor time. Time never did anything to you.In the US $588 billion dollars is lost every year because there's loss of productivity through distraction and multitasking. @neenjames
See, I don't believe in time management, right? You can't manage time because you and I get the same 1440 minutes in a day. Time doesn't care. It's going to happen anyway. You can't manage time, but you can manage your attention. By simply investing in a strategic appointment with yourself for 15 minutes every day you're going to identify what strategic nonnegotiable goals will get you closer to the bigger picture, to the things you're responsible for. Thanks Neen! BONUS: You can download a FREE copy of Neen's book, Folding Time, here (pdf)You can't manage time because you and I get the same 1440 minutes in a day. Time doesn't care. It's going to happen anyway. You can't manage time, but you can manage your attention. @neenjames
Bound for B2B Forum: For more information about imagining what’s possible in B2B including Neen James' keynote, check out the MarketingProfs B2B Forum conference including agenda, list of speakers (including Ashley Zeckman and myself) and many other fun facts on the B2B Form website here. Also, get $100 off by using this mpb2b discount code: B2BFriends You can find more information about Neen on her website and follow her on Twitter here: @neenjames Be sure to watch the other videos in the MPB2B series featuring: Ann Handley - Are You a B2B Marketing Badaxe? Jay Baer - Are You Down with EGC? Tyrona Heath - Can ABM & Social Selling Unite?
The post B2B Marketing Spotlight: Neen James on How to Make Attention Pay #mpb2b appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.
Do you remember the excitement you had when you were young and finally had a piggy bank full of coins? It was time to exchange the coins for paper money so you happily hummed a tune as you began separating the coins out to their denominations, counting them and stacking in piles across the floor, then finally stuffing the coins into the paper rolls. You admired your work and knew it was all worth it because now you could buy that first gift. But as time went on, the process of separating, counting, stacking and rolling became too repetitive and tedious. It took too much time to get to the real prize.
Today, businesses are still “counting, stacking, and rolling” their processes and it takes far too long for customers and employees to get what they need, the real prize of insights that help the business move forward. On that point of taking far too long, Bain & Co. and the Economist Intelligence Unit collaborated on research and they “found that the average company loses 21% of its productive power to time-wasting interactions.” For companies, every interaction people have with their work should feel efficient yet human. No one should feel like they need to roll coins and stack rolls in order to get the answer they need or to work with you. The experience should be rewarding, like having a piggy bank full of money, without the hassle. That aforementioned research also concluded that the best companies are typically able to reduce that 21% loss by nearly 50% compared to their peers.
We were intrigued then by a recent article published in SiliconAngle. It coincided with announcements Oracle made at its annual Oracle OpenWorld user conference and it provides insights into how productivity can be vastly improved through the use of AI and digital assistants. The trend of forward-leaning businesses now is to find and implement tools that will create more time for strategic analysis and execution and reduce the amount of time spent on repetitive, low value tasks. Think about that for a second. Creating time. If you want more of the world’s most valuable resource, an important metric to track is the ratio of time your organization spends gathering and cleansing the data versus analyzing the data. Companies should pour more energy into finding ways to have their high-priced talent working on things that add real measurable dollar-generating value. Value like the kind that’s produced by giving your marketing team the tools they can use to infuse their campaigns with the ability to engage with more relevance and precision micro-target audiences in order to accelerate sales. Or tools that allow them to connect in a more conversational manner with those target audiences.
In this new frontier where AI and machine learning streamline the interaction between businesses and customers, neither party should have to waste time getting lost or experiencing delays to access what they need. The adaptable technology of AI changes with its environment and responds quickly to any requests, improving itself over time. Equivalent to a GPS turn-by-turn navigation, AI guides the customer smoothly throughout their journey with the company.
The use of chatbots for ERP and EPM Cloud has quickly become an important channel for businesses. They enable companies to interact with everyone in their world, from employees to customers to prospects, quickly enabling those people to get answers as soon as they type the question. And with the use of Oracle’s new “predictive planning” feature, companies now have the ability to help people identify and leverage trends and patterns in financial and operational data. Such automatic predictions improve the quality and timeliness of planning decisions by enabling customers to access predictions at data load time, see prediction and forecast variances, identify variance patterns and make revisions seamlessly with a touch.
Generally speaking, with the deployment of digital assistants across Oracle Cloud Applications, organizations now have the opportunity to more directly engage with their customers and their employees in a proactive and personalized way, across all web, mobile, and messaging platforms. Customers no longer have to waste time searching for bread crumbs of important data, in getting lost in a company’s catacomb of information sites, no matter the method they choose when interacting with the company and its offerings.
Finally, and perhaps the aspect of this technology advancement that promises the most significant long-term business impact, these new technologies offer real productivity boosts that help connect employees to their best self. By reducing the frustration of delays experienced while gathering information and resources that they need in order to excel at their job, AI opens up the possibility for more fulfilling engagement of an individual with their work and a stronger connection and understanding of its relevance to the larger corporate mission and associated goals. Employee success, anyone?
To learn more about how modern technologies can help drive measurable improvement in the way your business operates and how it engages with customers and employees, see how Oracle’s Customer Success – Business Advisory Services can help.
Interested in finding out what tools make marketers’ live easier? Find out more about working what better targeting, segmentation, digital analytics, and automation with Oracle Marketing Cloud.
The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur Reading: October 2 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch on The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur – October 2
It’s time for another episode of The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur. Once a week, I’m coming to you with a reading from my new book, due out in October 2019. The book is structured around 366 daily readings from some of the great works of the mid-19th Century, and then I share my thoughts on how that quote relates to the modern entrepreneurial journey.
“Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing…Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! it’s a long stage, and no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold.”
Herman Melville Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne – published in Memories of Hawthorne by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1897)
Here’s another question to ponder, when shall we start growing? Melville admitted in an earlier letter to Hawthorne, “Until I was twenty-five I had no growth at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.”
Growth requires change, change is hard, so growth is hard.
Stop growing and life stagnates, but as Melville seems to express, it’s exhausting at times. Mainly because growth doesn’t happen by hoping or even setting audacious goals. It happens when you admit where you are now and accept all the chapters in your past without regret.
From this lucid place you can chart your growth.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if we got a cake and celebrated each step in our personal growth, you know instead of simply acknowledging we lived another year.
Admit we don’t know it all—cake, realize we don’t have to react—cake, decide to leave a toxic job—cake, hug more, forgive sooner—cake, learn how to listen to and support team members—cake, admit, without blame, that our parent’s shortcomings don’t define us—cake.
Maybe those are our real “birth” days?
There’s a lot to unpack there! One of the things that became clear to me as I was doing research for this is how much the writers of that time knew each other and spent time with each other. A lot of the writings that I came across were letters back and forth amongst these famous authors, and it’s interesting to get that private perspective on these very public people.
But now to focus on the content of the reading itself. Wouldn’t it be amazing if, instead of getting a birthday cake just because we’d aged another year, we instead celebrated moments of growth? Maybe some years we’d get seven or eight cakes on our birthday, if we had a particularly growth-filled year. It’s worth paying attention to the fact that we are never going to be done growing. While change and growth can be scary, they become less scary when you consider the alternative.
And now for today’s challenge question: Do you tend to focus on the positive or negative traits of others? Why?
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