Wouldn’t it be nice if every time you logged on to your computer you had a button pop up with any and all content that is relevant to you?

Information comes online faster than ever before.  Is it relevant to you?  Is it information you need?  How do you know it’s even out there if you aren’t listening?

Relevance describes how pertinent, connected, or applicable something is to a given matter. A thing is relevant if it serves as a means to a given purpose. – Wikipedia

Filtering IN relevant content is going to be the only way to stay on top of your game.  Here’s a few things I’m using to ensure I don’t miss out on anything I need or want to know -

• Google Reader – it’s easy, its free and its how I’m keeping up with thought leaders
• Tweetdeck – LOVE being able to filter on keywords and company names.
• iGoogle – I use it for news widgets and other personal stuff like – Spanish word a the day (I want to be bilingual so bad!), ESPN updates, Digg top news, and cool recipes.
• Workstreamer – (of course!) we’re using our own product to keep up with prospects, partners and competitors.  The Linkedin updates, Twitter tone cloud and multiple news stories on a given announcement are awesome.  Business professionals no longer have to sift through pages and pages of content.
• And with last week’s announcement, I’m now looking forward to seeing what and how @MassRelevance is going to help us even further filter Twitter.

How are you ensuring you are relevant?  What tools are you using to ensure you don’t missing anything important?

Last week we talked about Sales being a team sport.  They are no longer the “sales team,” they are part of YOUR team.  Sales is the driving force of company – it’s how we make money. Sales awareness and acquiring and sharing business information that helps spur new business is becoming and more a priority for more than just the sales department.

It’s not just about availability of information and increased collaboration, however. Sales 2.0 is also about the ability and authority to make actual decisions at the point of insight. It’s one thing to know, and it’s quite another to act.

As a recent Gartner report projected, by 2012, 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets. That’s pretty bad – just having the right information puts you ahead of the class.

But on top of that, Gartner anticipates that by 2012, collaborative tools being deployed by savvy salesforces and companies will also have enabled a shift of traditional management decisions further down the chain as cross-communication and business information becomes more targeted, relevant and useful.  I’m thinking salesforce.com might have read this same report….Chatter and now ChatterFree….

What Gartner is saying is that this is an evolve-or-die situation, in no uncertain terms. Non-hierarchical processes will win. You need to have the right information, and have the authority to wield it.

But that’s scary, right?

What makes such a paradigm shift less intimidating is, again, precise, useful and readily-available information and contextual awareness not only for sales professionals, but also, importantly, for the entire openly collaborative and communicating company — across departments and hierarchies.

Well-informed roles will make well-informed decisions. The reason the kinds hierarchies Gartner critiques have existed until now is because information had always been concentrated at the top.

Now, the right business information can be made available to everyone, democratically, with one-click tools that deliver up-to-date information at the point of a decision.

For example, a sales professional may be working on successfully closing a deal with a prospective customer, but accounting could have awareness of that customer’s problematic credit history, or a recent financial filing signaling distress. As sales professionals focus on moving the flood of productive leads through the funnel, that kind of information which may not be available to them directly is crucial in indentifying the deals that can most doggedly pursued, and it needs to be communicated across the company.

Likewise, a sales professional could be courting a customer that HR realizes a new employee used to work with, a connection that may valuable in closing the deal. An awareness of the activities across departments becomes essential, a shared business intelligence that isn’t confined to individuals but made useful throughout the company.

The right listening and business information platforms are key to establishing and effectively fostering a culture of sales as team sport, with informed and empowered roles that are authorized to make real decisions and thereby meaningfully move the needle on closing deals.

Do you know who is one the “HOT” deal list at your company right now?  Are you sitting on information that could accelerate a WIN?

The most important aspect in sales used to be lead generation, which meant identifying and connecting your prospective customers by any means necessary.

Thankfully, the tools and technologies of today’s “sales 2.0” environment have largely alleviated the most burdensome and inefficient methods of casting the lead gen net, killing the cold call (thank goodness) and allowing sales professionals to effectively target the most promising new customers through better information and communication.

Information empowers, cuts inefficiency, and increases the relevancy of sales professionals’ efforts, likewise increasing their effectiveness and the company’s customer base.

The growth of technologies to enable marketing to do a better job of lead generation has enabled a better top of the funnel effect for both inbound and outbound marketing.  We need to apply that same level of innovation and information empowerment to the rest of the sales funnel and its various touchpoints, increasing communication and awareness across the company to help close deals and share relevant information. In the same way we have increased precision and relevance for lead generation, we now need to foster the necessary analytical and coordination culture to secure the follow-through and victory.

What does that mean?

It means giving everyone in your organization the information to understand and help by enabling them to proactively listen to the target prospect, customer or partner.

Such is a shift in understanding to recognize that within the company, sales is a team sport.  It used to be that marketers brought volume to the top, sales vetted and sold through to TQL’s, and management came in for a bit of superhero work at the very end (a combo of POC and glad-handing).

Today, as a prospective customer begins to move through the sales channels and further down the funnel, a wide variety departments and roles beyond the sales force necessarily need to be aware of the acquisition. This is not only because they may have valuable insights and potential relationship networks to help close the deal, hedge any potential conflicts or identify possible synergies within the company’s activities, but also simply to better serve the customer, whose needs and expectations have themselves changed.

Sales, of course, doesn’t end with lead gen identification, or even the acquisition of the new customer, but is rather a continuous effort to best serve.

“Sales” is now a core competency across any organization, no matter the department.

At workstreamer we believe that all business professionals need a holistic view into the companies with which they interact, because all functions – whether that’s marketing,sales, bizdev or customer service – now permeate across traditional lines.

Is Sales a team sport in your company?  If so, we’d love to hear how you are teaming up to WIN!

• The Daily Pulse email – only want updates on your hottest companies? You can now exclude a company from your daily pulse email.  Just click on the gear icon in the blue header and a simple menu comes up.  From here you can Stop Listening to a company, Contribute and Turn off the Pulse email for this company.

• RSS – want your workstreamer updates in another Reader? Done.  Each company you are listening to now has a “View stream as RSS” link in the right sidebar.
• Did we miss or accidentally filter out your news or latest review?  Add it and everyone following that company will see the update.  Click on “Post a link” just under the menu bar and add the URL of your article or blog post.

• Want more about a company?  Help fill in some of the missing pieces and we’ll add the updates to your company stream.  Now when you click on a specific company, check out the Contribute link in the right sidebar.  Feel free to add anything we are missing.  Within a business day or so you’ll start to see the new updates. Here’s your chance to pay-it-forward.  Everyone following the company you contribute to benefits from your additions.

As always more good stuff is on the way!  We are getting closer to unveiling our premium version of workstreamer.  There’s only a few beta spots left, invite a colleague to sign up TODAY for free!

Here are three tools that I have been studying; learning how they can help me listen to customers.

In years past, I’ve been a part of several help desk tool implementations.  Generally, they were rather expensive boxed software products, and we had to hire consultants to help us deploy them.  We’d have dedicated IT resources to manage them as well.  Even with all that infrastructure and attention, it was sometimes a struggle to actually connect with customers.

Zen Desk is the help desk re-imagined.  First, it is completely web based, with no IT overhead required.  You can probably get it up and running in 15 minutes, and it comes pre-populated with web-forms and works with my email system.  We can easily start building a knowledge base from existing email and voice exchanges with customers.

Zen Desk also supplies some sizzle in the form of an iphone app.  This app allows our customer support team to respond to issues on the go.

From a cost perspective, Zen Desk is quite reasonable.  The most popular plan runs $24 per month per customer support agent.

Started by University of Texas graduate Lane Becker, Get Satisfaction is a super-social mix of customer feedback tool and community idea generation discussion-board.  While Zen Desk tends to favor 1:1 interaction, Get Satisfaction is all about building a community of customers around their support issues and product ideas.

You can see our Workstreamer customer community under development at http://community.workstreamer.com/.  You can also share an idea, ask a question, log a problem or give us praise directly by clicking on the “Feedback” tab on the left side of the Workstreamer app.  A reasonable starting price point for Get Satisfaction is $89 per month.

Moving from support to sales brings us to Bazaarvoice.  If you are looking for a tool to listen to what your customers are saying about your products, and then harness and purpose those comments to drive increased sales, Bazaarvoice is without peer.

Over the last 5 years, Bazaarvoice implementations have served more than 100B pieces of content.  This content was originally generated by customers giving opinions on products and services.  By listening to those statements and creating a work flow process that harvests the best content and serves it in a manner that can influence buyer behavior, Bazaarvoice has created a  powerhouse solution that is changing the way companies are being perceived online.

Bazaarvoice is headquartered right here in Austin, we are proud to share our city (and our venture capitalists) with them.  Their software is definitely enterprise class with pricing starting at $2000 per month.

As we grow our community, we are focused on listening to our customers.  By doing so we will be able to innovate new services that will allow Workstreamer customers to listen to what matters most to them.  If you haven’t already done so, please give Worksteamer at try and give us feedback – we are listening!

“Greetings! I am the Count. They call me the Count because I love to count things.  Today I’ve been busy counting the number of companies workstreamer users are listening to.  I’ve been counting for hours now and I’m finally ready.   The number of the day is 20,847.”

WOW, workstreamer users are now listening to more than 20,000 companies!  Did the Count count your company today?  Are one of your prospects or competitors listening to your company for an edge?

If you are already using workstreamer, are you listening to your customers?  Your competitors?  Your own company?  If you have not yet created your workstreamer account, get to gettin’!  It’s FREE and you’re missing out.  You may just find your next conversation starter, information you need to position yourself against a competitor or insight into your customer’s new strategy (opportunity for an upsell).

Think we’re missing something?  Not getting everything you want?  Add the missing pieces.  Once you are in workstreamer, click on a company you want to contribute information to.  In the right sidebar you will see a ‘Contribute’ link, click it.  Add anything we’re missing and within a business day or 2 you’ll start to see updates from what you contributed.

“Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.” – Bernard M. Baruch

In my mind, Listening is both an art and a science.  We have tools-a-plenty that provide the “science” of listening.  Yammer, LinkedIn, Workstreamer and Quora are all excellent platforms for listening for insight of one type or another to name just a few.

Recently, I’ve been focused on trying to develop a set of behaviors that will allow me to get maximum value from the time I spend listening.

Time spent Listening

Although I consume lots of information during the day, I don’t consider most of it “Listening”.  Listening means tracking a stream of information flow that can yield high value insight – but only when that insight is non-obvious in the context of that information stream.

For example, content directed at me specifically (emails, conversations, phone calls, texts) do not represent listening opportunities.  In those scenarios, I’m explicitly supposed to get the context.  If I can’t figure it out, it is the fault of the sender.  I shouldn’t have to be artistic in my interpretation.

Another example of non-listening is one-way mass media.  Television is a terrible place to try to listen for insight.  If everyone is hearing it, it’s not worth listening to.

Listening to understand what matters

The Art of Listening certainly revolves around understanding what matters.  I have a twitter feed for references to my company.  The other day someone by the name of Jarrett tweeted a complaint about content on our home page.  My first reaction was to restructure the content to remove the offending video.  But I’ve heard how much people like the introductory video before.  What’s going on?  Looking at the Jarrett’s twitter feed, I discovered that he was a frequent user of our products but that he did not realize that there was a better way to log into our site rather than making his way through the splash page each time.  Link provided – problem solved.

Listening for the scoop

There is nothing better than finding a diamond in the rough through the Art of Listening.  So much that passes by is old news or fluff.  But occasionally you can catch a scoop before the crowd discovers it, and use that to your advantage.  The key is to be sure you are listening to the feeds that insight might originate in.   Call me geeky, but I like to listen to job postings from prospect companies and from competitors.  At my previous company, I saw a job posting advertising for someone with a skill set in our company’s product.  And we hadn’t sold anything to that company yet. Bingo!  I also like to see what kinds of job requirements are listed on our competitor’s job postings.  Just a little window into their product, technology and strategies.

Listening for the back-story

One of my favorite listening posts currently is a website called Quora.  While Quora falls into the Question and Answer site genre, it has done a fantastic job in attracting extremely knowledgeable experts around many subjects that I am interested in.  I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to learn about the key decisions that successful software company executives made early in their companies.  Quora is a perfect place to listen for those kinds of back-stories.  A recent question posted was: What was PayPal’s most important strategic decision early on in achieving widespread customer adoption? And sure enough, several answers we provided by some of the earliest and most successful Pay Pal executives.

Understanding where you can hear the real back-story, find the scoop, or figure out what really matters are all key aspects of the Art of Listening.

Where and what are you listening to?  And, how much of it is noise vs. information you can act on?

“This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.” – Lord Chesterfield, 1740

I have a nagging feeling that I am being overwhelmed by data. Some days at work I feel like I am trying to drink from a fire hose.  It seems like the information being presented to me is so frequent and of such richness, than I am having a hard time making sense of it.

So, I decided to add it all up!  How many different pieces of data am I exposed to on a daily basis?  Mind you, I’m talking about data in the aggregate sense.  1 email = 1 piece of data.  As does one tweet, one magazine article, one advertisement on TV, one conversation with a co-worker and so on.

Here is what I came up with for the past 24 hours:

Nearly 1000 data points in one day!  No wonder my brain feels tired all the time.  I wish I had a time series of data measuring my data consumption over the last decade.  I bet that the total data points have grown by at least 100%.

This fire hose of information is really becoming a distraction as well.  I’ll start off focused on getting an item accomplished and before you know it I have wasted 20 minutes following some click-stream of seemingly relevant information, only to find myself studying something totally unrelated to the problem at hand.

According to Wikipedia’s article on Short-term memory, my brain’s short-term memory capacity is 7 plus or minus 2 items at any given time.  If that is truly the case, that explains quite a bit.  My typical meandering path through Internet research generally takes more than 7 steps – so it’s no wonder that I frequently lose focus on what I originally was researching.

Studies of multitasking are even worse.  Brain scans made of test subjects during multitasking show how incapable we are.  Everything thing from inhibiting learning to “response selection bottlenecks” can be blamed on too much information being consumed too quickly.

The net of all this research is that our always-on internet and it’s fire hose of information are contributing to a decrease in productivity and are a substantial cause of concern for the knowledge worker.

Don’t drink from the hose, sip from it’s stream of insight

At the end of the day, my information consumption methods are unsustainable.  I simply can’t remain productive while my exposure to information doubles with each iteration of Moore’s law.

My plan is to avoid the fire hose and to sip from a stream of insight:  A stream that will be automatically curated from the hose.   This curation process of picking the best and most relevant bits of information from the stream and presenting those bits in context to what I am working on is the new target for information management tools.

Another Lord Chesterfield quote explains our efforts at Workstreamer:  “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”   We hope you will join us on our journey of turning information in insight.

Here’s some of our most recent updates:

• Faster access to the details – you can now access the live stream directly from your daily pulse email.  No more logging in necessary.  With less clicks your finger will not be getting the same amount of exercise.  Consider that before ordering the biggie size at lunch.

• Want more information?  Tell us what you want.  Now when you click on a specific company, check out the Contribute link in the right sidebar.  Feel free to add anything we are missing.  Within a business day or so you’ll start to see the new updates. Here’s your chance to pay-it-forward.  Everyone following the company you contribute to benefits from your additions.  Start stacking your good juju now!

• Have you seen the new company Facebook updates and website traffic graphs? Don’t worry, we’re not wasting your time with useless comments and detailed analytics reports.  Just updating you on company posts and pretty traffic trend charts.

• We’re a small group but because of you, our users, we’re helping thousands of business professionals stay relevant and competitive.  This week special thanks to the these guys (Todd @ Minecor, Brande @ Spiceworks, Adam @ Mepco, Andrew @ 1105 Media, Naor @ Lightspeed Research, and Alberto in Nebraska) for inviting their colleagues to check out workstreamer!  Good stuff coming your way!

One of the key challenges that strategic decision-makers face is analysis paralysis.  So much information is available pointing to so many different choices, that your organization can take months to identify a problem, more months to identify the strategy, yet months again to implement, and finally even more months to determine if your strategy worked.  A year from now, you may (or may not) have fixed the problems that you are facing today.

Analysis paralysis can lead to poor decision-making and missed opportunities and it has the potential to let your smaller or more nimble competition win.  Examples abound of missed opportunities by large corporations.  Nimble players have been disrupting the Fortune 500 in manufacturing, technology, finance, healthcare, consulting, and just about any other vertical that you care to name.

Understanding how to empower smaller groups to operate autonomously, make decisions at the local level and consistently win small victories is a hallmark of today’s military training.  These same lessons can and should be applied to corporate strategy groups.

John Boyd was a USAF Fighter Pilot and military strategist whose work on shortening the decision-making cycle during combat has had profound impact on military, and then corporate strategists.  Boyd’s key concept was that of the decision cycle or OODA Loop, the process by which an entity (either an individual or an organization) reacts to an event. According to this idea, the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than one’s opponent.

Boyd hypothesized that all organizations undergo a continuous cycle of interaction with their environment. This is broken down to four interrelated and overlapping processes through which they cycle continuously:

• Observation: the collection of data by means of the senses (“listening”)
• Orientation: the analysis and synthesis of data to form one’s current mental perspective
• Decision: the determination of a course of action based on one’s current mental perspective
• Action: the physical playing-out of decisions

Of course, while this is taking place, the situation may be changing so the organization with the most adaptable “listening” strategy paired with the quickest analysis and decision process can “get inside” the OODA loop of the competition.

Boyd theorized that all large organizations possessed a hierarchy of OODA loops at tactical and strategic levels and he showed that most effective organizations have a highly decentralized chain of command that utilizes objective-driven orders rather than method-driven orders in order to harness the mental capacity and creative abilities of individual leaders at each level.

Being able to listen to the marketplace in real-time, analyze the noise for actionable information, and then react is a skill that every corporation must develop in the near term.  The competition is gunning for you.  Are you able to listen – analyze – decide – act – adjust – repeat?  Can you get inside the OODA loop of your competition?  It all starts by listening.