Brian Groth's Life at Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/bgroth/feed.xml A technologist helping marketing and advertising Wed, 17 Apr 2019 03:17:34 GMT en-US hourly 1 Goodbye Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/bgroth/goodbye-microsoft Tue, 03 Sep 2013 17:23:17 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bgroth/2013/09/03/goodbye-microsoft/ After almost 20 years, my time with Microsoft has come to an end. I’ve made some great friends, met my wife, lived & worked in Bellevue, Redmond, Seattle, London and San Francisco, visited Microsoft offices around the globe, learned an incredible amount, and even collected a few trinkets and awards that I’m not sure what to do with.

If we’ve worked together and we aren’t already connected on LinkedIn, please re-introduce yourself and connect with me at http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/bgroth

While my LinkedIn profile is a good representation of my resume, I will always keep my resume up-to-date on my other blog at http://briangroth.wordpress.com/about/

]]> Excel PowerPivot Example https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/bgroth/excel-powerpivot-example Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:41:32 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bgroth/2013/06/18/excel-powerpivot-example/ For the analysts out there who haven’t embraced PowerPivot and Power View in Excel, there is a great tutorial to help you get started: PivotTable data analysis using a Data Model in Excel 2013.

However, if you just want the finished spreadsheet, I have created one that is the result of walking through the tutorial, with only two minor modifications:

  1. Worksheets have names and colors. The black worksheets originated as data from other spreadsheets or databases
  2. The "Count of SalesKey" calculated field has a KPI attached to it and can be seen in the Pivot Table

There are numerous things that should be done to clean up the spreadsheet and make the pivot table more useable, but it’s a good example to start with.

You can download the Contoso PowerPivot Example from http://sdrv.ms/13Z5b3f  (64.6MB)

If you find this useful, please add a comment and let me know.

]]> My desk after 19 Years at Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/bgroth/my-desk-after-19-years-at-microsoft Fri, 17 May 2013 13:34:43 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bgroth/2013/05/17/my-desk-after-19-years-at-microsoft/ In the past, I have blogged on my 10-year, 15-year, and 17-year anniversaries at Microsoft. I just recently passed the 19-year mark and decided to share a picture of some of the stuff I’ve kept over the years that now clutter my desk. I’ve tossed much more than I have kept during my office moves around Redmond and Seattle, then to/from London and now in San Francisco. But, here’s what I’ve still got on my desk in terms of awards, anniversary items, patents, and so on: 

MSFT desk after 19 years

]]> Sales Enablement Tips https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/bgroth/sales-enablement-tips Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:52:33 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bgroth/2013/03/08/sales-enablement-tips/ This is the time of year at Microsoft when employees put a bit of focus on where they want their career to go. For me, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about my career in sales enablement. I have to admit that I didn’t plan on this as a career, and I’ve done a variety of jobs that weren’t specifically called that, but when I look back I can see that I’ve been focused on sales in one way or another for almost 20 years.

So, I decided to give back to the sales community with this presentation:

http://www.slideshare.net/BrianGroth/sales-enablement-brian-groth-march-2013

The meat of the content is really on slide 2, which I repeat here. This is how I approach sales enablement and what I suggest the role should encompass. I use things like a mission statement and call out the goals and deliverables as a way to keep myself and my team on track. 

Mission of Sales Enablement: Positively impact revenue through the creation of sales content, management of lead generation, and effective on-boarding and on-going training of sales employees on the products/solutions, sales processes, sales skills and related industry knowledge. [yes, a thorough sales enablement program cuts across marketing, operations, product, and sales]

Goals: (1) The sales force is empowered to competently and competitively sell products & solutions so they can exceed their sales quota, (2) the sales process is well understood and followed, and (3) qualified leads are getting into the sales pipeline

Plans and deliverables to achieve the goals:

  1. Sales Training: Establish and manage the rhythm for an annual training strategy, budget, calendar and detailed training plans, along with the associated content and curriculum. This includes driving logistics and training sessions via the appropriate medium (1-to-1, as a group, remote office, central office, online, on-demand) for both the sales materials and the sales process. Manage, track, and analyze training activities tied to the CRM system to offer the right training at the right time.
  2. Sales & Lead Marketing Content: Establish and manage the rhythm to (1) create impactful sales presentations and supporting materials that articulate value proposition, unique differentiation and success customers can expect from the solutions; then communicate the availability of these to sales, including partner channels. (2) Create overview and reference materials for the sales process, skills and tools, with insights into how following the process drives product and sales improvements. Both should be tied to the CRM system to expose the right content at the right time.
  3. Qualified Leads: Establish partnerships between operations, marketing and sales to generate, manage and hand over qualified leads to sales that enable them to drive new opportunities. Measure the impact on sales via the CRM system through marketing qualified leads (MQL) that result in opportunities won.
  4. Closing the Loop: Gather feedback from sales regarding customer, partner and sales needs to create and update the training and content, while providing input to engineering teams. Also get input into upcoming product releases and marketing events or campaigns that sales needs to be aware of and possibly trained on, which will also be leveraged for lead generation.

Measures of Success: Overall employee satisfaction of the training, content and leads, delivered on budget & per the established rhythms, increased adoption of the sales process from lead generation to close, and increased sales revenue per sales employee.

If you have other ideas for sales enablement, please contact me via Twitter @BrianGroth.

]]> Big Data for Lead Generation https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/bgroth/big-data-for-lead-generation Mon, 03 Dec 2012 12:09:47 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bgroth/2012/12/03/big-data-for-lead-generation/ Going back to the idea of Technopology, I’ve started thinking about how the idea of “Big Data” comes into play, because analyzing large sets of data about your customers and your industry can create useful insights for sales and marketing. There are early adopters with this thinking and more and more businesses are beginning to look at how to harness their data from a variety of sources so they can improve operations, create new solutions, understand their customer better, and even use it to improve their sales cycle. 

Microsoft is certainly getting into the game with everything from supporting Hadoop and Hive to making the data available through a variety of services, including Excel.

What I would like to see is a solution that taps into some of the data sources available through the Windows Azure Marketplace, and based on some pre-defined business logic, automatically trigger the creation of tasks in a CRM system as a method of lead generation. This way, when world events happen, or even certain types of news related to my customer, a task can be added for me in my CRM system telling me to call my customer with a suggested topic already identified.

I’ll be thinking of examples, but please share your own ideas with me in the comments or via Twitter: @BrianGroth

]]> I now have a approved and official United States patent https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/bgroth/i-now-have-a-approved-and-official-united-states-patent Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:43:45 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bgroth/2012/10/17/i-now-have-a-approved-and-official-united-states-patent/ In 2005, I received a patent cube, which is what Microsoft gives an employee for having a patent submitted. Now, I am proud to say that patent number 8243897, “Automatic Detection and Notification of Proximity of Persons of Interest” is now an official United States patent and I am listed as the inventor. Upon a patent being accepted, Microsoft gives the employee a plaque honoring the occasion, which is what I have pictured here. 

Brian's Patent Plaque

]]> The Windows Store and your Brand Strategy https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/bgroth/the-windows-store-and-your-brand-strategy Wed, 01 Aug 2012 10:01:26 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bgroth/2012/08/01/the-windows-store-and-your-brand-strategy/ What strategy do you have to leverage Windows 8 applications for your brand? A few ideas include:

  1. A news reader related to your industry, which updates the live tile with the latest news that your consumers would care about. Think of baby-related news for a diapers brand. 
  2. A city guide that highlights your stores, with updates pushed to the live tile with the latest discounts.
  3. A shopping app for your online store that uses the live tile to highlight products I might be interested in based on previous purchases.

Now that the Windows Store is open for business, it’s time to start uploading apps that support your brand strategy. Whatever strategy you take, you’ll want to get familiar with the following:

  1. Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows 8
  2. Developing Apps for Windows 8
  3. Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 (latest version)

Stealing from the Azure Toolkit, I suggest an architecture like this for your apps, with the cloud service and notification service running on Azure. 

]]> Microsoft’s new tech for marketing technopologists https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/bgroth/microsofts-new-tech-for-marketing-technopologists Mon, 25 Jun 2012 11:01:26 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bgroth/2012/06/25/microsofts-new-tech-for-marketing-technopologists/ Microsoft has been busy releasing new technologies that a marketing technopologist should be interested in. Remember, I roughly define “marketing technopology” as tech+social for marketing purposes. Or to put another way, the technology and social capabilities that marketers can leverage to create engaging solutions for their brands. With this blog entry, I want to give my fellow technopologists some ideas on how these new technologies can be used. Here goes…

Let’s assume you have an idea for application that’s entertaining, informative, takes advantage of location data and has content that users would want to share with friends. The ultimate goal of your application is to drive brand affinity and sales. Indirectly, you’ll accomplish that by engaging your customers with this application

I suggest creating a Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7 application, with a Windows Phone 8 application to follow soon afterwards. These and other client applications should get their data from, and write back to, a set of centralized services running on Windows Azure. A web site also hosted on Windows Azure could be the central location for any support for the client applications. Therefore, you could start with the following resources:

  1. Windows 8 Metro style applications (you can offer advertising within the Windows 8 application too) for a rich, interactive experience that works great on the upcoming tablets.
  2. Windows Share feature in Windows 8 so your great content can be shared with friends
  3. Windows Azure to create the web services that will serve up the content while also tracking which content is most popular (consumed & shared). Also see the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8. You can even get started with a free trial account for Windows Azure!
  4. Windows Phone development (you can offer advertising from within the Windows Phone application too) for a smartphone experience that mirrors the Windows 8 experience. And get ready for the new capabilities that will be in Windows Phone 8
  5. Sharing pictures via your Windows Phone application so your great content can be shared with friends, or as this article shows, maybe your application is used as the method to share pictures with friends. 
  6. Windows Azure for Websites for that support/information website. You might also want the beta of WebMatrix to develop your site too if you're not a Visual Studio user.
  7. Bing Maps for the location-based and mapping features of your application
  8. Windows Azure SQL Reporting to analyze the most popular pieces of content in your application so you can know what’s working and what’s not, which should help you focus your future content and app development resources

It has been about 15 years since I wrote any real code, but I’m considering jumping back into it because of all these new exciting capabilities, products and services.

]]> My Infographic Resumé / CV https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/bgroth/my-infographic-resum-cv Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:30:45 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bgroth/2012/04/25/my-infographic-resum-cv/ I have been thinking about how to update my previous infographic resume and I’ve finally put the finishing touches on it. Introducing… the April 2012 version of my Infographic Resume:

BrianGroth_Infographic_resume_April2012 

]]> Increase Your Influence at Work https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/bgroth/increase-your-influence-at-work Fri, 06 Apr 2012 15:36:13 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bgroth/2012/04/06/increase-your-influence-at-work/ I have been doing quite a bit of cross-organizational work lately, and very much at a grass-roots level. I just ran across a book that summarizes the tactics I’ve been using, which all seem to be working well for me, so I’m sharing them here with you. The book is “Increase Your Influence at Work”

  1. Be reliable, dependable and be prepared to back up what you say with data, examples or proof.
  2. Be trustworthy by being honest and admit when you’re wrong.
  3. Be assertive by having a well-thought out opinion, stick to it and be clear when explaining it (say it simply)

It then goes on to give 6 supporting tactics:

  1. Do favors for others and don’t be afraid to ask for favors in return.
  2. Use your expertise – rely on it, keep growing it and share it.
  3. Build consensus through collaboration with others, regardless of where they are in the company.
  4. Form a network of people who can help you achieve your goals, and make sure to get a few influential individuals on your side in the process.
  5. Listen to others and understand what they need or are concerned about.
  6. Be a “thought leader” by freely sharing your ideas, but make sure people know they are yours.

If you like this topic, then you might also like a series of articles I wrote a few years ago regarding management tips. See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bgroth/archive/2007/06/08/brian-groth-s-latest-marketing-management-tips.aspx

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