• Google For Jobs
• Google Cloud Jobs API
• Hire

Google for jobs was expected since a while: If you have a powerful, AI enabled search engine, and that job searching is also a search after all, then it’s quite normal to see it out verticalized for jobs. Given the strategic role of Google as the mother of all traffic acquisition and SEO strategies, all other existing job search engines collaborated with Google with no hesitation: LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Monster and basically everyone else. Google for Jobs was announced at Google I/O and is live as of 6/20/2017.

Later last month Google also announced (silently?) Cloud Jobs API, in order to give some additional tools to the community of developers. Like any strong strategy, you need developers to create some custom apps to increase your impact on the market. The Google Cloud Jobs API enables developers to build more sophisticated job search tools using Google’s For Jobs search engine.

And today, Google announced Hire, in direct competition with Oracle’s Taleo, Greenhouse, LinkedIn and Jobvite, Brent John, Google’s Product Manager for Hire (no he is not for hire:) ) considers that hiring is still a problem. In a Google Blog post released today, he writes: “it takes an average of 52 days to fill an open position and costs about $4,000 to interview, schedule and assess each candidate. At the end of the day, that adds up.”. Hire is supposed to help fixing this problem.

Thanks to a tight integration with G Suite (formerly known as Google for Work), Hire streamlines the process of managing the interactions with the candidates, who may have applied to the job, using Google For Jobs. Emails are synced in Gmail, interviews are in Google Calendar and can be run in a Hangout Video Call (or in person) and documents are shared using Google Drive.

This video shows how scheduling can be done with Hire and Google Calendar.

Hire is the name of the product resulting from the developments done by the Bebop team acquired by Google in 2015. It was a “development platform that makes it easy to build and maintain enterprise applications,” as Google CEO Sundar Pichai described it at the time. This was also how Diane Greene, founder of Bebop joined Google. She is now leading the whole Google cloud business unit.

For now, Hire is only available to Google’s G Suite U.S. clients with less than 1,000 employees. It is proposed as a paid-for add-on service, with prices varying depending on the size of company without further details (no you can’t just order it yet, but only asking for a demo; that’s how sales work, or don’t work, at Google).

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In our latest report we told you things are changing in the Global PLM landscape: The Global PLM Market has now a new leader.

In 2017, Siemens PLM gets ahead of Dassault Systemes and becomes the Global Leader in PLM, thanks to a superior execution, products performance, organic growth but also in a significant manner due to several acquisitions in the past few years, the most important being Mentor Graphics which represents around one fourth of the combined entity.

1. Siemens PLM Software
2. Dassault Systemes
3. Synopsys
4. Autodesk
5. Cadence
6. PTC
7. SAP-PLM
8. Ansys
9. Mathworks
10. Oracle-PLM

Order one of our recent reports and learn more:

• Global PLM Market Report 2017
• European PLM Market Report 2017
• GLOBAL MCAE, Simulation & Analysis Market Report 2017
• European MCAE, Simulation & Analysis Market Report 2017

… and let us know if you need any custom market report while we have our heads into the latest data.

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You think PLM and its market segments are stable and always the same old story? You should think twice.

We are excited to announce the new series of PLM reports vintage 2017. Pre-order them now and receive them by mid June.

Check the table of contents for each of them here:

• Global PLM Market Report 2017
• European PLM Market Report 2017
• GLOBAL MCAE, Simulation & Analysis Market Report 2017
• European MCAE, Simulation & Analysis Market Report 2017

… and let us know if you need any custom market report while we have our heads into the latest data.

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Technology Has Eaten The World

A few years ago, Marc Andreessen first declared that “software is eating the world”. We have been mostly inclined to intuitively believe the trend he was referring to, but we were missing undisputable proof. Now we have quantified proof, at least for the domination of the technology as a whole if not specifically for software.
On Friday, I looked at the top 5 quarter-end market caps for the first quarter of 2017. All five are technology companies. I went back 11 years to the same day and saw that on March 31, 2006, only one out of the top 5 market caps, namely Microsoft, was a technology company. The top market caps were rather diversified, including financial services, industrial groups, technology, and of course oil production giants.

Eleven Years Ago Today

The sixth market cap on Friday was ExxonMobil, with $347 billion, which is 15 percent less than Facebook, ranked fifth. This quarter-end day quotation was not exceptional; this ranking seems to be stable and solid.
So what happened in the last decade at the top of the market cap list? When we look closer (see the graph below), we notice that the non-tech companies have stayed more or less in the same range while the tech companies have recorded unimaginable growth rates. Apple, Google, and Microsoft jumped to the top of the list, joined by Facebook and Amazon. Facebook went from $4 billion (our estimation of the then-private company’s valuation) to $410.9 billion. That’s about 10,000 percent growth in 11 years! Amazon grew about 3,000 percent in the same period.

We have just never seen anything close to these growth rates for this size of company and valuation. And for those who think that because these numbers are exceptionally unusual, there should be a bubble, well, Facebook’s price-per-earnings ratio is only 40. To put this in perspective, Microsoft has kept a P/E ratio in the same order of magnitude since the ’90s, well before the dot-com era. This does not mean there will be no market crash or bubble bursting; I am just saying that these companies are generating real revenue and profit just like the old top 5 companies, even though their services are often intangible.

Evolution Of Top Market Caps In A Decade

And we are just in the middle of the revolution. The next waves of automation and applications that are the result of what technology has achieved so far are around the corner. Transportation is about to be revolutionized with self-driving cars. The construction industry is next with houses built faster, better, and at lower cost. Inside homes we are going to see connected and smart equipment everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised to see leaders in transportation, construction, and travel among the top 10 market caps within the next decade.

Darius Lahoutifard

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From a pure real estate marketing standpoint, this was an outstanding event; very well organized, with an upscale standard for running open houses (great but not unusual) but also with live music inside the properties, VR demos and initiation for newbies, In n Out and dessert food trucks, valet parking, etc.

The use of Virtual Reality by Real estate marketers was a win win approach; Tech providers got access to consumers and could test their reactions and gather market intelligence while the realtors contributed to building a sophisticated high end brand for their real estate company, stood out of the crowd and attracted more people (like me).

The VR system was from TRANSPORTED VR, a Silicon Beach startup focused on Virtual Reality for the real estate market. Founders Matt and Patrick were showing their app with 2 of the platforms that they support as of now: Samsung GR (mobile based) and Oculus Rift (PC based). I tried the Oculus Rift and had a great experience of virtual navigation through the immersive environment of the virtual house with clickable screen menus available for direct shortcuts as well as house features pop ups when you looked at them. (for example kitchen appliances details). An immersive experience which is far more valuable than flat pictures.

The multi billion $ question is: when, how and by who is the RE/VR market going to be cracked?

In our VR Market Report published recently, we provide guidelines to qualify the future of VR applications out of the obvious gaming market, under “VR for Work” which also includes real estate. There are clearly great opportunities but also quite some challenges there. Among other reflections :

• – The problem VR for real estate is solving
• – Measuring the weight of the “added value” and compare it to the “effort”. How to increase the earlier and to decrease the latter
• – How to cross the chasm from the excitement to regular use
• – Which platforms are more adapted for VR for Work or specifically in Real Estate
• – Market outlook for both “VR for fun” and “VR for Work”

If you are involved in VR as an entrepreneur, as an investor or as an executive make sure you get your copy and feel free to contact us for any question.

Darius Lahoutifard

The post VR in Real Estate appeared first on Sales & Leadership Training.

This article was previously published on Venture Beat.

VR is hot!

But is it permanent?

Those of us who are old enough to have seen the rise of virtual reality in the ‘90s and then the fall and then another rise in mid 2000 and then another fall, know that the present hype about virtual reality may not be sustainable.

That said, we have also seen in the past that for some technologies, after several cycles of hype, the innovation finally does become mainstream. One example is personal organizers (mobile calendar and contacts apps) on a portable device. Palm OS and PDAs rose in 1996 and fell a few years later, and then Pocket PC and Windows CE rose in early 2000 and fell. It wasn’t until the emergence of iPhones and Android smartphones that those applications became sustainable.

So the big question is: Is VR here to stay this time, or is it hype?

To find the answer, my firm has been researching the VR market for the past few months. We evaluated and estimated product sales for over 30 companies and 40 products globally through revenues and units sold/used for each of the vendors. Here are some of our findings:

1. In 2016, hardware makers dominate the VR market. Sony (PSVR) is clearly leading and is taking one third of the whole market. This is thanks to a) the large installed base of about 40-50 million Playstations sold to users who are the perfect target for a VR upgrade and b) the best balance of price/performance for the VR headset around the $300-$400 price point.

2. Sony is followed by Facebook (the Oculus platform) and Google (Day Dream, Card Board, Tilt Brush, etc.); neither company has a VR user base anywhere close to Sony’s, and their products are either at the low end or a bit too expensive. Still, both companies are generating hundreds of millions of dollars already in 2016, thanks to their brand and the quality of their technology.

3. Samsung follows with another mobile headset (Gear VR). And HTC is close behind with its high-end headset, Vive, thanks to its partnership with Valve and the very popular Steam platform.

4. Content providers, mostly game makers, as well as technology providers come next. This has to change in the coming years (and hopefully will change) since that’s where the bigger value resides. But it is normal to see hardware makers emerge first: Hardware vendors had to ship their kits to developers. Now that there are enough headsets out there in users’ hands (or rather on their heads), it’s time to accelerate generation of content (games, mobile apps, desktop applications, etc). The result of this effort will be more VR games and applications in the coming months and years.

5. Towards the bottom of the top 20 list, we also see vendors positioned in the “VR for work” segment, with VR applications in collaboration, education, industry, military and defense, science and medical, and other research fields.

To dig into more data about the VR market, purchase the report from here.

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You can now grab a VR headset and explore the earth from your own room or office, in a fully immersive mode, and with a real sense of presence.

For fun or for work, checking out a friend’s new house or remotely checking a neighborhood where you may want to rent or buy, exploring the nature or learning about new geographies, we have all been using Google Earth since its introduction back in 2001. Today Google took Earth to the next level: You can now get immersed into exploring mother earth.

From wherever you are, stroll the streets of Paris, soar over Yosemite, or teleport across the globe:  WALK AROUND,  FLY, or  BROWSE… Go anywhere. Google Earth VR puts the whole world within your reach. Take a peek at some of the incredible sights you’ll experience along the way in the preview gallery here.

For now it is available on Valve’s Steam platform, with a HTC/Vive headset.

What? Not a VR fan yet? Well enjoy the regular video here!

And check our Market Report on Virtual Reality :

https://www.01consulting.net/portfolio-item/vr-virtual-reality-market-research-analysis-report-2016/

The post You Liked Google Earth? You’ll Love Earth VR! appeared first on Sales & Leadership Training.

• Music festivals,
• Film events,
• Sports events.

Imagine, for instance, the 360° camera attached to a drone flying right above the players in a soccer match. The ability of looking into different directions at your convenience and being in an immersive mode is a killer. The sense of presence is created with a high quality (hi-res) vision and sound.

That said, the most successful applications, in my opinion, will be those which will not require a VR headset, even though they could provide a feature-rich experience to those with headsets. I would like to see it with a light headset, or with no headset, on my mobile with a rather large screen, simply by orienting the mobile in different directions just like the actual 360 players running on mobiles which YouTube first implemented and others (including Facebook) followed by adopting. I may want to insert the mobile into a light VR headset if I am at home or in the office.

Pixvana’s SPIN is one platform to watch in this field of 360° Video Streaming.

I previously wrote this post on Linkedin.

Check our new report on VR!

The post 360° Video Streaming in high resolution is almost there. appeared first on Sales & Leadership Training.

Growth Hacking Enterprise SaaS Sales

What’s new in Sales?

You have heard many examples of successful growth hacking techniques mainly used in BtoC websites, social networks and market places. Facebook, Twitter or Airbnb have great stories about how they hacked their growth. But how about growth hacking sales in SaaS? We are talking about higher value per customer and smaller volumes, but is it a reason not to be able to drastically increase growth?

Before getting there, let’s see how things have changed. If you have a long experience in Enterprise Sales, you have seen the fast evolution of the Sales Process at SaaS companies who sell Enterprise or other Business application technologies.

1. Direct Sales is predominant

The Internet has removed intermediaries in many segments and Enterprise Sales is no exception. We are seeing VARs and other channels playing a much less important role in most cases. Even though integrators still play a key role in deploying the solutions, their role as sellers or even advisers to recommend solutions has drastically reduced thanks to higher level of customers’ awareness and their direct connections to the vendors.

According to Matrix Partner’s recent study, Channels represent in average only 5% of SaaS companies’ sales. They used to represent in average 30% to 50% in the last decade.

2. The Sales Cycle has become INFINITE!

In the old days, often more than 50% of customers’ lifetime revenue was taken at the time of the initial sales (and much more if you exclude the maintenance revenue). The sales cycle was defined as the period of time from the initial contact to the PO. That model is gone. Sales cycles make less sense today. Now the revenue collected from a customer is spread out over time. As you can see in my graphic below, after the initial sale, the cumulated collected revenue from the customer grows significantly thanks to the renewals, upsells and expansions. I am replacing the traditional sales funnel by the symbol of infinity; amazingly, the 2 funnels side by side do look indeed like the symbol of infinity in mathematics! We like symbols and metaphors in sales, I hope you enjoy this one.

In the past, vendors could unfortunately make it through without necessarily providing a great customer support. Anecdotally, vendors used to even “control” the users group by organizing and financing the events to make sure all communication is smooth. Today customers’ satisfaction rates are much higher. They share their experience publicly on social media. Organizing these communications through social media groups is still both desired and feasible, but customers have much more freedom. The great consequence is that SaaS companies must provide excellent customer service. Besides, the very nature of the SaaS business model, where each year (and sometimes each month) the vendor needs to be the best in class in order to avoid cancellation, pushes vendors to maintain quality and novelty.

Sales Funnel, Before	Infinite Sales, Now

The socialization of customer support creates a new channel for upsells and expansion. Frontier between Inside Sales and Customer Success Teams or Community Managers is now a bit blurry. This leads to my next observation: Sales are needed everywhere now!

3. Sales Organizations have become more sophisticated: more roles, more tools and more automation

As customers got connected to the web, some power started to shift from the sales rep to the customer. In the old days, a good Account Executive had full control on the sales process. He/she was the one to deliver the sales presentation, educate the prospect and make a proposal. He/she was the main if not the only source of information for the prospect. Today the prospect already knows a lot about the product (webinar replays, articles,…) and the price (if not public for the Enterprise market, usually there are lower packages sold online giving good ideas of prices). As a consequence, sales organizations adapted themselves to more sophisticated customers by working smarter and became themselves more sophisticated so that they keep the control. Sales are going to be omnipresent wherever there is interaction with customers in order to seize sales opportunities. Some organizations will provide sales trainings to all customer facing employees, while others include sales persons in each department.

4. Social Selling

I could not write about the trends in sales without mentioning Social Selling. There is a lot of hype about Social Selling. It’s an absolute must that every salesperson needs to understand and practice. LinkedIn has even created a social selling index page which shows your SSI (Social Selling Index). Check yours! If you are in sales and you are not in the top 1% of your Industry Rank, then you need to fix it fast (since you have naturally a lot of non sales connections, you should be in the top 1 or 2%, unless you are selling a product or service to sales people).

However, Social Selling IS NOT selling! It’s sales people’s social existence. It’s about connecting to people (including your partners and clients obviously), building relationships, engaging and educating. You need to exist! Imagine an after work company event in the old days where your company has invited customers, partners, suppliers, employees, shareholders, everyone. Imagine you are sitting in a corner, not talking to anyone. That’s who you are if you are not into social selling. You don’t exist. So you can’t sell if you don’t exist. But existing is not enough to sell. It’s necessary but not sufficient. You need the good old fundamentals of sales to be successfully selling. So make sure you are “social-selling” and don’t forget that it’s not selling. To re-use the analogy to that event, you need to get back to your prospects after the event and apply your winning sales process and effectively SELL.

5. Fundamentals of the SALES PROCESS have not changed though

Even though many phone calls got replaced by emails and instant messages, and that some simple sales processes got automated thanks to some brilliant marketing automation techniques, at the end of the day, sales people need to convince customers that their product or service is the best solution to the customer’s needs. The bigger the opportunities, the more you need rain makers. The fundamentals of sales have not changed. And sales methodologies like MEDDIC or building your own winning sales process become mandatory to help sales teams rationalize what they do and allow successful sales teams to drive the sales process.

Growth Hack Your Enterprise SaaS Startup

Now let’s see some of the Growth Hacking Techniques for Enterprise SaaS companies. A few of the examples below are based on my real experience with Business Hangouts that we growth hacked from zero to over 1 million business users in just 12 months. Obviously not all our hacks are listed here. It’s all about your own creative ways of finding the “hacks”. Many of the hacks are updated forms of older marketing tactics such as retargeting, email marketing, adding share buttons in your content, adding “powered by” links, customization and personalization of the content, Slideshare presentations, Quora answers, etc. The comprehensive list is very long, as you can see, however I am particularly excited to talk about the four techniques outlined below.

1. Little Apps on big market places

In the early days, all startups dreamed of partnering with big names. They hired senior execs called “VP Alliances” whose job was to sign a piece of paper called a “Marketing Partnership Program” with a big name company (very often the place he/she had worked previously) so that the startup could include the logo of that name in their Partners slide to raise funds or to sell. The practice was hugely expensive and didn’t really deliver results in terms of sales.

Today all the big names in tech have market places for desktop applications, not to mention the App Store and Google Play for mobile. For instance Google Chrome web store is quite easily accessible to developers for any application running in a chrome browser. Google Apps Market place is a great place if you have some sort of integration with any of the Google Apps products. If you don’t, create one to get there. Mobile is even better. You will be surprised to see how fast you can attract users from Google Play or App store. Be creative; build an easy fast basic app with an excellent design but limited features to capture leads from the early adopters in the Mobile Enterprise market.

2. Freemium model

The popular and effective freemium model can also be applied to enterprise SaaS. It is always possible to find the right scope of features so that the client can get a job done in limited cases or for a limited number of times, without leaving money on the table. You can monitor the use of your platform by free users and fine-tune the scope if you feel there are too many of them and you would like them to start paying. When it comes to attracting new clients, freemium is definitely better than time-limited trials; the client tends to develop a more permanent relationship with your company, and there is a good chance that sometime later they may upgrade to premium.

3. Marketing Automation Techniques implemented early

Once you have generated traffic with free accounts, the next step is to scale them up to paying accounts. You don’t need to wait until you are generating $1 million of ARR before implementing marketing automation with Marketo or Hubspot. You can use some basic, but important, auto-responders to automatically welcome, train, and coach your new free subscribers by sending them educational videos, white papers, case studies, or other educational materials as they sign up. The emails can be sent out  on time-based and event-based sequences several times a week.

4. Concierge onboarding

Automation is good but limited, and does not replace the good old human voice. It certainly can’t compete with concierge onboarding: making a phone call (or even better, a video call) to a brand-new customer. For high-end products with a number of free sign-ups, this service can be offered for free clients. But even when you have thousands of free daily sign-ups and a more limited number of paying clients, you can still onboard the paying clients to maintain them, reduce churn and increase upsells. That’s the role of a dedicated person or team, an inside salesperson with a technical background, or even a customer success who had been trained for sales. You can read more about concierge onboarding here.

Early Stage Startup

Now, how do the above techniques apply to very early startups when we are designing and developing the product? In many early stage startups, there are not that many sales persons if any. This conversation is for late stage startups and larger companies, right?

Wrong! If you think reflections about sales should be considered only after you have an ARR of $1 million, you are missing crucial opportunities. Remember, nothing happens until you sell something to someone. Of course, you are not going to hire huge sales teams until you have validated your winning sales process. However it is important to integrate some of the best practices of growth hacking as early as possible so that your early experimentation provides realistic and conclusive results. If you want to understand and master your full sales process, you need to test that process in parallel with product features and the whole package as early as possible.

The process of selling enterprise SaaS starts at the inception of the product and can be expanded as follows:

1. MVP demo (lean Startup model), some call it MSP (Minimum Sellable Product)
2. Customer’s feedback
3. Improved MVP & First Dollars billed ( could be a POC)
4. Repeat 1, 2, 3 with other clients
5. Automate the initial sales and learning process using Marketing Automation tools
6. Build free Apps (and connectors) to leverage large platforms market places in bound traffic (alliance strategy)
7. Inside Sales teams to close small deals/clients and for a smooth on boarding of new clients
8. Enlarge business in each client: Account Executives take over
9. Scale up the sales team

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