The MC, Macadamian’s Frederic Boulanger, is having a challenge trying to get the crowd to pay attention, reminiscent of the OCRI Awards, can’t stop the networking. He’s not trying to stop the discussion but to redirect it to the tables. As soon as he leaves the podium, the volume turns back up, the networking has a momentum all of its own. By 8:20, Fred finally manages to convince the crowd to take their seats. When Fred thanks everyone for joining us and comments on the networking the crowd applauds! They applaud the networking and the buzz in the crowd! That is magic.

November execTALKS keynote speaker Bill Currie, Deloitte

Step 1: We need to foster entrepreneurship and innovation at all levels of education.
Step 2: Re-tool the immigration system to attract and fully utilize skilled immigrants.
Step 3: Improve the effectiveness of our R&D (improve the tax credit process and centralize the programs).
Step 4: Bolster the pool of risk capital available for startups.
Step 5: Clustering, we shouldn’t expect the government to build clusters but they should support them.
Step 6: Invest in machinery and equipment (Canadian companies, on average, spend half of what their American companies do).
Step 7: Encourage the flow of foreign direct investment.
Step 8: Reduce trade barriers and find new markets (our biggest trade partner is not a growth market).

A great Q&A session follows the presentation. Hardly anyone has left the room. The last question of the session throws a challenge back to the presenter. How do we go back to our own business today and effect change? First, Bill Currie suggests, go back to your office and find a piece of equipment that is not up to standard and buy a new one. Next learn from others, engage with government and give them ideas. He tells us to look around the country at what others are doing successfully and learn from their best practices. When you create an environment for innovation and thought leadership you will attract investment money.

Fred Boulanger gets back on stage to thank the speaker and wrap-up the session. Earlier he had challenged the crowd to walk away from this event with three or four conversations that they wanted to carry on. He surveys the room to see how successful we were, better than half hold up their hands. He challenges everyone in the audience to bring a friend with them to the next execTALKS session.

It’s 9:36 and the networking has started up again. There are still close to a hundred people in the room engaged in discussion. Fascinating. The networking doesn’t have to stop, if you were with us at Scotiabank Place we’d love to know what you were talking about. Why not join the OCRI group on LinkedIn and continue the conversation there? Is there a topic that we didn’t have a conversation for that you’d like to see next time, you can reach us at ceo@ocri.ca.

As I have said numerous times over the years, I enjoy the thrill of witnessing the power of OCRI at work. One of our new members attending the event re-connected with a former colleague that he had not seen in 14 years. They are having coffee next week to see how they can continue their business collaboration.

Do you have a success story to share from attending or participating in an OCRI event or program? I’d love to hear about it and share it with others. Please contact me at wnoble@ocri.ca

Rich said the talent base in Ottawa was technically strong – but that there were some unexplored collaboration opportunities – Collaboration one of my favourite words.

The 75 or so people in the room really liked Rich’s frank talk and a general “hum” of discussion happened afterwards.

Why a hum and not a buzz? Volume!! We all agreed that 400 people should have been in the room. That would be a buzz.

We all agreed that we knew people who weren’t at this session but should be. So Ottawa’s knowledge based-sector – let’s collaborate to get the buzz back.

Next Month – Please bring your friends and colleagues to hear Bill Currie (Deloitte) talk about why Canadian productivity is slumping badly and what you need to do about it. See you on November 24th at Scotiabank Place.

NOTE – Watch for special pricing and a neat twist to the day!!

The 2011 Summit opens with a keynote presentation from Manny Villafaña, Chairman, CEO, and Founder of Kips Bay Medical, Inc. Every year, 250,000 Americans receive life-saving medical devices developed by companies founded by Mr. Villafaña, who has been designated a Living Legend of Medicine by the International Society of Cardiothoracic Surgeons and been named a National Master Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young. Drawing from years of experience in starting and growing companies, Manny will share his insights on what it means and what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

Following what promises to be an insightful and inspiring keynote session is a “can’t miss” panel discussion on the importance of medical devices for Canada. Sector leaders and experts, representing industry, academia and the research community, will take the stage to explore this $330B worldwide market that is growing at a rate of 8-20 per cent a year and expected to quickly reach a trillion dollars. Growth in the sector has been so strong, that the medical devices sector is now outperforming the pharmaceutical sector in terms of overall growth rate.

Breakout sessions will cover: policy to enhance R&D; commercialization; interdisciplinary skills training; access to domestic and global markets; venture funding for medical devices companies; and more. Carla Ubrich, a singing, songwriting humorist known as “The Singing Patient” will provide laughs with some entertaining healthcare humor at the banquet dinner.

Your opportunity to join this important discussion on the medical devices sector in Canada and take an active part in building a national medical devices strategy is here on October 13-14 at the 2011 Medical Devices Summit.

Long gone are the old days when sales people were the only source of information for buyers and consumers. Now, we have to compete with the internet. It’s forced us to take our skills to a whole new level, and a welcome one if you ask me! No more arm twisting, no more fast talking, just good old fashioned relationship building. So why is it that so many of us find this so hard to do?

There is a “missing link” to being successful in sales. It’s not enough to know your product and services, or to know how to talk to people. Today, we have to really provide value to our customers. So what is value you ask? I don’t know. It depends on who you are selling to! What we value is different for each of us, and many a sales person makes the mistake of not understanding that. Just because what someone values doesn’t make sense to you doesn’t mean it can’t get you the sale. Here’s where the skill comes in: we have to build the bridge between what the customer wants or needs – in other words, what problems/challenges/pain they are dealing with – and what we have to sell. It’s the missing link.

The difference between a successful sales person and a mediocre one is how well the sales person asks questions and listens to the answers. It sounds so simple doesn’t it? I’ll bet you are reading this saying “yeah, so…I knew that and I do that!” Well yes, but how well do you do that? Seventeen years of teaching sales and a more years than I care to admit to of selling has shown me that these seemingly simple skills of questioning and listening are not so simple after all. As a matter of fact, most of us don’t do them well. In order to be truly successful you must practice your open-ended questioning skills. Instead of saying “can you…will you…do you…”, etc., try replacing the can/will/do/are with a “what” or a “how”. You’ll be surprised at what information you can uncover about your potential customers.

Then, the challenge is to employ the other seemingly simple but yet, not so simple skill: listen to the answers. People will tell you exactly how to sell to them and what to sell them if you just listen to them. It’s amazing and simple. And yet very hard to do.

There is no magic formula in sales. It’s all about the people. Learning about your customers through questioning and listening is the secret in sales because people do business with people, and they do business with people they like! And we all like people to be interested in us!

All the panelists agreed that step one in the quest for the dream job is research and they didn’t mean the cursory 15 minute glance at the corporate web site to get a vague grasp of who they are and what they do. With the mass of data available online these days, there is no excuse for skimping on the research. Search beyond the web site, look for your potential employers on LinkedIn, find them on twitter, get a sense of how they think and what they are talking about. The more you understand them, the better that you can understand how you will bring value to their organization.

As with everything these days, customize your resumé to the job and that doesn’t mean taking the job description and working it into your CV. Demonstrate that you have the skills that they are looking for, provide links to sample projects, previous results, a blog chronicling your experience, anything that provides context to the skill set that you provide on paper. Be creative but keep it in the context and don’t be afraid to show your personality.

Don’t underestimate the value of a trusted reference, particularly if it is someone that you share in your networks. Even if you didn’t hit it out of the park in your interview, you can still score a run with a good reference. The more you can do to “de-risk” yourself as a hire, the better. Provide a list of those that you’ve worked with who you’ve gotten along with and who depended on you.

It’s impossible to capture all of the discussion but there’s more available online. Search #smartalks to follow the twitter feed. The crew at Shopify have posted a couple of recaps: Notes from Landing Your Dream Job 2.0 and AnnasNotes: Landing your Dream Job 2.0. Or stayed tuned to OCRI.TV for the videocap of the presentation.

Many thanks to moderator Harley Finkelstein and panelists Brittany Forsyth, Shopify, Mike Freeman, Shopify, Luc Levesque, TravelPod, and Doug Tetznter, Odgers Berndtson, for sharing their insights and setting the bar high for Season II of smarTALKS.

It was a great day—plenty of time for some deep networking, fun games on the tees with the sponsors while you waited for the group ahead to move out of range but not so slow that the round seemed never-ending. And the networking continued after the game, during cocktails and dinner, so much so that the event MC, Kurt Stoodley, was hard pressed at times to curtail the networking in order to hand out prizes. He is, however, a polished MC who manages to grab on to any amusing story and run with it, much to the chagrin of some and the amusement of others. Kurt’s banter even had Olympic silver medalist, Liz Manley, proudly declaring that she was good with second place, there was no shortage of laughs at dinner.

As one participant put it “Somehow, OCRI is always able to work a deal with the gods (or devil) to make sure the weather is perfect, the food great and the group of people that get randomly matched up to play together have a spectacular day!”

The only thing OCRI didn’t manage to perfection were the deerflies and mosquitoes, do you think there is an app for that? Perhaps we should put a challenge out to the developers in Ottawa for next year. In the meantime, we’d like to thank the companies who sponsored (visit ocri.ca/events/golf for the full list) this event, many of them returning year after year, and we’d also like to thank those of you who took part. This event may not be launching the next “big” idea but many a good idea gets hatched while you line up a winning putt.

Photos of the day available online.

One of the most insightful moments for me in the past quarter has been watching a new customer who is preoccupied with his competitors and what they are up to. This customer is constantly monitoring his competitors’ websites. His plan is driven by their plan. Business life is a constant litany of “they have…”, “we should …” His measure of success for a new project is that it would impress his biggest competitors. On the other hand, he is frustrated by his customers. Their lack of understanding of his business, their sense of urgency, and their need for price concessions drive him around the bend. Life is tough.

I look at another company, also one of my customers, and the CEO of that company has graduated to living a life free of worrying about his competitors. His company is focused on its customers, understanding intimately what drives them, and creating, marketing and selling new products and services that meet those needs. That company’s customers are in awe of them – “how do they do it, always knowing exactly what we need?” And this CEO’s competitors? They are constantly monitoring his website, their plan is driven by his plan, and business life is a constantly litany of “they have…”, “we should…” Life is good.

Which company sounds like your company?

These are ten broad steps I use to take companies like the first one and help them make a shift to being companies like the second one.

1. Be very clear about who your customers are. Not markets, not companies – personas.
2. Know what their buying process is.
3. Create a culture of understanding their needs intimately.
4. Define your solution by their needs, not by what you have in your bag.
5. Identify the gaps and create solutions for the gaps.
6. Be clear about which product and service features are true differentiators.
7. Be clear that 80% or more of what differentiates you is not features.
8. Package what truly differentiates your company – your knowledge, how well you know your customer’s business, and your way of doing business (your process).
9. Build a marketing process that lines up with the buyer’s buying process.
10. Enable marketing to create and deploy campaigns that emulate top sales behaviours.

OCRI has asked me to present a seminar on the B2B sales and marketing system – the Vision to Value System – that I use with my customers on May 26th. I’m looking forward to it and I hope you can join me! In that seminar, I will drill down on three areas that will help you shift your B2B sales and marketing. Don’t expect this seminar to be a theoretical PhD dissertation with hundreds of slides. Think of it as powerful concepts presented simply, a series of aha moments that shift your thinking, and some homework for you.

This decision was not taken lightly but was influenced by several mitigating factors. The May 2nd federal election has certainly had a negative impact on the participation of both speakers and attendees.

We believe that the summit is a key forum for a national discussion on this strategic sector and we remain committed to hosting this discussion at a later date. The organizing committee is currently exploring options for the Fall of 2011.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused but trust that you understand that we could not, in good faith, proceed with an event that would not meet its objectives.

This year,  our finalists (in alpha order) are:

Benbria - Communicating with relevant groups of people when critical incidents arise is a challenge for all organizations. BlazeCast, Benbria’s innovative technology, addresses these challenges by giving organizations power and flexibility to communicate more effectively.  As a result, users are empowered to streamline accountability, actionability, escalation and closure of critical issues – ensuring safety, satisfaction and prompt return to operations. 

CrowdWave  - Commercially launched in 2009, the mass participation platform enables a large gathering of people (think stadiums and arenas filled with screaming fans) to play a video game, answer a poll or make a choice together simply by moving their arms. Ten NHL and NBA teams are currently using the CrowdWave system.  Expansion plans include capturing the NBA and NHL arenas first and then the NFL and MLB stadiums.

Purple Forge - By reducing the barriers to use and deployment of mobile and social networking technologies (cost, delivery, intervals and infrastructure support) Purple Forge allows organizations to focus on creative and dynamic content. Their products open up mobile and social network communication channels to political parties, politicians, conferences and events, publications, governments, marketing organizations and market research firms.

YOU i Labs - 2010 was a big year for this young company – uSwish was launched and a lead European customer was secured; $800K in funding was secured; and, a contract was signed with Nuance.  Their unique software enables iPhone-like features on any type of hardware.  YOU i Labs has joint projects with companies such as Google, Samsung, Garmin an Motorola. With a healthy pipeline, five patents in development and two filed, the company is ready to scale up operations.

The winner will be chosen based on the overall potential for success, financial situation and quality of the management team. All four are worthy contenders!

Who do you think will win on April 7th? Find out at the 2011 OCRI Awards at Hilton Lac-Leamy.