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4 Sales Strategy Lessons from House of Cards

Netflix subscribers rejoice – the much-anticipated second season of House of Cards premiered this week. Centered around an ambitious and cunning politician named Frank Underwood (portrayed by Kevin Spacey), the show has generated widespread acclaim from viewers and critics.

Underwood is known for his particularly ruthless political tactics, but he ultimately gets his way through sheer determination. While we don’t endorse any under-the-table dealings, sales professionals can still take a few lessons from Underwood when looking to advance their goals.

Keep these 4 thoughts in mind when structuring your sales strategy:

1. Know (and grow) your network

In season one, Underwood served as the Democratic House Majority Whip under a new White House administration. He had already established a reputation for cunning political insight, collecting numerous allies and holding them in his back pocket. He knows they can be trusted, and he uses them to further his goals.

Selling is a team effort, and your network plays a significant role with successful prospecting. Become familiar with you individual network, then use TeamLink to find the best path to your prospect. You stand a greater chance of success with a trusted source introduction than by reaching out cold.

2. Tell a compelling story

Most politicians are able to recite talking points and pull numbers from a recent poll. But truly gifted lawmakers can weave a story that captures the attention of their constituents. Underwood hails from South Carolina, not normally considered Democratic territory. But he leveraged his familial and military connections to win the rural seat, and then used his political talents to ascend higher.

Talking points might get you into the boardroom, but a compelling, relevant story about achieving results with similar companies can help win over prospects. Boost your chances even further by looping the customer into your story – it will show that you aim to represent them, not the other way around.

3. Engage directly

Underwood may have his loyal assistant in Doug Stamper, but he’s not afraid to do the work himself. In fact, he sometimes relishes direct contact with friends and enemies – it gives him more opportunities to read and understand their behaviors. His lengthy stay with presidential advisor Raymond Tusk served to evaluate his capabilities for higher office. Underwood is in his element during these direct discussions.

Making the initial connection is merely the first step – now you need to provide consistent, direct connections. Give your prospect a reason to keep engaging – a personalized piece of content helps build trust between both parties. There is no delegating with selling tactics – you are your own brand advocate. Make sure your profile is up to date, and enhance it with unique and curated content – think of it as a personal microsite.

4. Don’t speculate

Frank Underwood always has a plan. The entire story arc of the first season revolves around his elaborate plan to reach higher office. Underwood never makes a move without first assessing the risks and rewards – which then strengthens his tactics.

With the wealth of searchable data available from LinkedIn Sales Navigator, there’s no need to speculate on prospect behavior. Advanced segments help narrow your focus based on geographical or demographical metrics, allowing you to plan your methods before the initial contact.

Here are just a few of the data points you can leverage:

• Title
• Experience
• Seniority
• Company size
• Location

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Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications is Coming to a Car Near You

The U.S. Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have recently approved vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication systems for cars to be able to talk to each other. The goal is to reduce 70 – 80% of accidents that involve the driver’s impaired vision. By having every vehicle know where every other vehicle is in real time, we can avoid many accidents.

For example, if you’re attempting to change lanes on the freeway and you have a blind spot, it’s no longer a blind spot because your car will know whether there’s another car in the lane. If there is, it will alert you and not allow you to drive into it. Or suppose you’re coming up on an intersection and can’t see that someone is speeding on the intersecting road and is about to cross right in front of you. Your car would automatically slow down and not let you pull out in front of it.

How can a car be so smart? The type of technology used is actually a very short-range radio network that will allow the vehicles to know where the other vehicles are up to 300 feet away. In essence, it would provide a 360-degree view of the vehicle’s surroundings, allowing the car to see what the driver can’t.

V2V communications represents a profound shift in auto safety. In the past, vehicle safety was about surviving crashes. Now, thanks to V2V communications and semi-autonomous features that are being added to cars and trucks, it’s shifting to anticipating and preventing crashes in the first place.

In addition to V2V, we’re also going to have V2I communications—vehicle-to-infrastructure. This is when the vehicle will be communicating with embedded sensors in our transportation infrastructure. For example, if there is ice on the surface of a bridge up ahead of you, the cement in the bridge surface will have an imbedded sensor that can detect the ice and communicate that information to your car as it approaches. The car will alert you, the driver, and if no action is taken, the car will automatically slow down to a safe speed. In addition, vehicles that are following you will know you have slowed down and will adjust accordingly.

This technology will spread beyond cars, busses, and trucks, and at some point include vehicle-to-bicycle (V2B) communications, where the sensors are part of the bike. And if all this is possible, what about V2P communications—vehicle-to-pedestrian? After all, most people carry a smart phone that could be tied into this system to let cars know when a pedestrian is ahead. Of course, there’s more of a privacy issue around this one, but safety is important and because we are talking about a very short range of communications (300 feet), we will eventually want this added protection. Additionally, with V2V communications, the sensors can’t identify who the driver is or what kind of car it is; it’s merely letting the car know there’s another vehicle going at a certain speed and distance. The same anonymity would be true for pedestrians. The car approaching you doesn’t need to know who you are; it only needs to know you are about to get hit if it doesn’t slow down. V2V, as well as the others I’ve talked about, could save a lot of lives thanks to predicting and actively avoiding accidents.

This is all part of something far bigger, which is called machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. Some people have referred to this as the “Internet of Things,” where we are using sensors to communicate with each other and to machines.

One other element that will play into this, of course, is autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles. By now most of us know that Google has a small fleet of cars that can drive themselves. And, to date, they have logged millions of highway miles without one single accident. There are even a number of states that have given driver’s licenses to autonomous vehicles. I don’t think most people will want a car that’s going to fully drive itself anytime soon. Most drivers enjoy driving their car and having control. With that said, most drivers would rather not have an accident. Therefore, people will increasingly want their cars to be semiautonomous, which means they are driving their cars as much as they want to, and the cars will intervene when needed to prevent accidents.

V2V communications is a major step in the direction of semiautonomous cars that can keep drivers from having accidents.

What about you? Would you drive a semiautonomous car? Or is it giving away too much control to machines even if it means having an accident?

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Mobile-First Is Old News. Think Platform-First.

Google's Eric Schmidt famously said that mobile is no longer winning, it has already won.

If you still find yourself using "mobile first" as a buzzword to shift everyone in your company to mobile, you need to remember it is no longer 2013. 

Many companies have already experienced their mobile moment in which mobile traffic or revenue surpasses desktop. Almost 80% of Facebook's daily users access the site via mobile. Twitter's mobile usage is 75% of monthly users and LinkedIn will surpass 50% of weekly users this year. Other companies such as Google, Amazon, Yelp, Groupon, and ESPN are already dominantly mobile or pacing quickly towards their inevitable mobile moment.

How to get ahead? The best companies have already moved on to focus on OS centric design, specifically Android and iOS. They realized that these operating systems are intrinsically different and require unique user experiences. Designing the same product for both platforms means that you are leaving a lot of value on the table, and hence falling behind the competition.

When comparing iOS with Android, there are many known differences: demographics, device fragmentation, screen size, price point, geographical distribution, payments, and so on. In this post, I'd like to focus on three key differences that can make or break your product:

1. App Permissions - Opt in vs. Opt out

Simply put, Android resembles an opt-out experience, while iOS is opt-in. Upon app installation, Android asks users to approve a long list of app permissions. 99% of those users neither read nor understand the permissions and end up accepting all. Unlike Android, iOS makes sure the user accepts each permission only when the app requires it, making the consent contextually relevant and simpler to understand.

Putting aside which OS design is best (there are pros and cons in each), the end result is a potential game changer. Upon install, Android apps can get access to users’ location, contacts, phone calls, email addresses, and almost every piece of information that resides on the phone. If handled with respect to user’s privacy (don’t abuse your power!), Android apps can offer a more delightful, frictionless and personalized experience to the user, right from the first screen. Every app developer knows that the first 5 minutes are critical for retention and Android allows for immediate gratification. For example:

• Social apps can start by showing users a list of their contacts who use the app and their activity. They can fine tune the experience to be even more relevant based on location and knowledge of users’ personal information.
• Registration is no longer required. Using your email address or phone number, apps can already create your account, validate it by “listening” to your SMS and email, and log you right in. The infamous sign up flow is no longer needed.

Conclusion: In mobile, it takes seconds for users to make a decision about your product. Make sure you leverage user information to create a killer first impression.

2. Organic vs. Transactional Behavior

There are two main ways to engage with apps:

1. Organic - By tapping on the app icon.
2. Transactional - Through a push notification or email to perform a certain action (e.g. reading a message).

While both iOS and Android support push notifications, users engagement in iOS tends to be more organic and less transactional than Android.

Why does it matter? Organic sessions are more exploratory as users browse the app to find value. Transactional sessions are usually triggered by a notification that lands the user on very specific content (e.g tapping on "Joe invited you to connect" will land on Joe's profile). As a result, transactional sessions tend to be shorter in time spent and shallower in activity (up to 50-90% less) than organic sessions.

So, why is iOS so different than Android if they both support push notifications?Simple answer: Call-to-Action. iOS relies on the app badge to indicate that there is new activity to act on. To clear the badge, users open the app by tapping on the app icon and hence, start an organic session. Unlike iOS, Android uses the top bar indicators to drive users to open the notification tray. In addition, Android notifications are richer and more flexible than iOS, which makes the notification tray the most-used widget on Android.

Conclusion: Invest in your transactional flows. Designing an app is like designing a house. Make sure your architectural plan supports transactional use cases. Imagine your app has a main entrance (app icon → organic) and many side entrances (app notifications → transactional). Make sure every entrance is engaging enough to drive visitors to explore the whole house.

3. Walled Garden vs. Open Playground

When you develop your app on iOS, you don’t get access to many of the features that Apple apps have. iOS’ walled-garden approach cripples your ability to provide the best experience to your users. Android is much less restrictive. It allows developers to design an experience that goes “beyond their app” by integrating their product into Android’s own default apps.

Why is that powerful? The best products are contextually relevant; they work where the user works and don’t require acquiring new habits. Mobile users use certain apps everyday, all day. Professionals spend 28% of their work time reading and answering e-mail. Research shows that typical users check their phones 150 times per day, their calendar five times per day, and their alarm clock eight times per day. An elegant integration into email, or any frequently used apps, can create the exposure and awareness your product needs.

Android also allows you to “replace” the default apps. For example:

• Messaging and calling apps, such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Messenger, and Viber, can substitute the default apps to enable free and rich communication.
• Facebook Home replaces the phone lock screen to always show the news feed. Users can browse and like updates without even going into the Facebook app.

Conclusion: Think outside the box and go beyond your app boundaries. Look for contextually relevant and valuable insights that can create an intuitive experience within Android’s open platform.

Leveraging the above three key differences can transform your product. Use them to drive growth, engagement, and monetization. Develop a "platform first" approach to make sure you offer the best experience for your users and stay ahead of the competition.

What do you think? Have you noticed any other killer differences between iOS and Android? Do you have other tips for companies who are looking to invest heavily on mobile?

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“Never Heard of It, Must Not Be Big” Has Never Been More Wrong

“Eh, never heard of it. Must not be a big opportunity.” I remember the days when you could say this about a consumer website and usually be correct. Oh because it was only 15 years ago. Sure you had lots of niche businesses throwing of good amounts of cash, but if you were an investor in Silicon Valley looking for a multibillion dollar outcome, there was an informal checklist you went through:

a) Have I heard of it? [with "you" usually = 30-50 year old white male]

b) Have my associates, wife or kids heard of it? [solving the 20s, kids and women's market]

c) What are the Comscore numbers? [solving the US traffic #s. kinda]

No, No, Small = pass. Or if you found out it was big but only outside the US? “Well, they’ll have trouble making money.”

Fast forward a bit and gloriously “never heard of it” isn’t anywhere close to being a negative signal. Why? Because early adopters are no longer monolithic and many demographics now have enough population online to support services which appeal primarily to them. A teenager recently gave me the blunt description of how Snapchat conquered his high school: “It spread from the Slutty Girls to the Soccer Girls to the Math Girls to the Boys.”

And international is no longer a black hole of monetization but leading the way on many new models, such as in-app purchase.

And social + mobile platforms have created such a growth acceleration opportunity that smoldering businesses can turn into full blown bonfires faster than ever.

In 2000 “never heard of it” meant pass. In 2014, if there’s something I’ve never heard of, my heart quickens as I go to download the app.

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Productivity Hacks: Why 4 a.m. Is the Best Time to Work

 

For me, the most precious commodity in business is time. And I find I am most productive when I balance time that I spend with others with blocks of time during which I can think, write and —my favorite — build earnings models.

When I was in corporate America, I tried for awhile to schedule no meetings on a couple of Fridays every month, thereby giving myself the luxury of blocks of time to think. It worked ... sort of. But I had one significant problem: email. Some people can ignore email, but I have never formed the discipline of not checking email repeatedly and obsessively during the course of the day. It appears that I am addicted to the rush of endorphins that occurs when one receives a batch of emails, which I guess is better than being addicted to other things.

So now I work when others sleep.

I am never more productive than at 4 am. I brew a cup of coffee, I keep the lights pretty low, I sometimes light a fire in the fireplace, and I let my daughter’s cat sleep next to my computer. My mind is clear, not yet caught up in the multiple internal conversations that we all conduct with ourselves once we gear up for our first meeting of the day. And there’s a peace that comes from knowing that my family is all in bed and safe upstairs while I work. It is at this time of day that I often have a rush of ideas (some of them actually good).

Yes, this does mean I have to go to sleep earlier, but I long ago recognized that I am out of gas by about 8 p.m. every evening. Any work that I try to do after that isn’t up to my standards anyway, so I give myself a break then. I use that time to be with my children, to socialize ... and to get to sleep so that I can start again at 4 a.m

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