Now that both these are over, I should provide an update.

DemoCamp was attended well for a first time event. The presentations could be a little difficult in a few words, so I’ll stick to describing my impressions. You can view the presentations themselves on Kempton’s blog.

I can see DemoCamp becoming an excellent community and support network for entrepreneurs and software developers. As the word gets around, and more people attending, I think it will become a great place to show your stuff and get good constructive feedback. Hopefully a wider spectrum of attendees will come by in the future, to give it a more rounded feedback loop. It takes more than great software to make a great company. Speaking of which, ShopToIt.ca  looks like it has a great future.

The first ever Calgary CPSA Corporate Sales Challenge was also an excellent event. One that I had to participate in as well as sponsor. 12 groups of randomly put together sales teams had to go to various ’selling’ stations and show how well they understood the concept of each station, including objection handling, negotiating, closing etc. It was a lot of fun, and a great way to learn (or re-learn) selling techniques. Our sales rep, Paul Uppal and his team came in second, so I guess he gets to keep his job

I hope both these events continue on. They are novel, fun and interesting ways to bring together communities of interest that benefit everyone in the community, and at a cost that makes it available to everyone.

Demo Camp Calgary is on tomorrow at the University of Calgary with like 5 presenters and about 20 attendees for this first ever event. Per normal, first time events like this, which are 100% volunteer and word of mouth based, don’t have large crowds the first time out. This is actually good, as there will more time to get around, and the presenters will feel less rushed. Feel free to stop by. It will be interesting to see. Presenters include:

• Gwabs: Richard Hurst, Melissa Webster
• SideFinder: Mark Rosenberger
• Userful: Tim Griffin
• Shop To It Inc: Clark Johannson

Andrew Goodman is coming to Calgary on Wednesday to present at the Calgary CMA lunch seminar. Andrew is well known in the search engine world, having written one of the best books on using Google titled , ‘Winning Results with Adwords’. He is also chair of the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Toronto, coming up in June. FoundPages has two tables of guests coming, but I won’t be able to attend I have another event we’re sponsoring at exactly the same time. I’m going to stop by and try to meet up with Andrew before I head to the other event. It’s great to see another Canadian so well respected like Andrew, who in addition to Gord Hotchkiss (who is chair of SEMPO, the pre-eminent association for search engine marketers in the U.S. and Canada), make for a strong Canadian profile in the search engine marketing space.

The Canadian Professional Sales Association has a really unique event on Wednesday this week (April 25th). Called the Corporate Sales Challenge (which ActiveConversion is sponsoring) it has a very interesting format. 12 teams, representing each of the sponsors, are provided a product to learn in 30 minutes. Then they are given 10 sales challenges and rated on how their team does in those challenges. The experts judging this are some of the top sales professionals in Canada such as:

• Closing - Robert Haines
• Qualifying - Brian Pleet
• Prospecting - Craig Elias
• Cold Calling - Alice Wheaton
• Negotiating - James Istvanffy
• Goal Setting - Garth Roberts
• Territory Planning - Robert Schmidt
• Personality Selling - Noelle Daudelin
• Objection Handling - James Bergen
• Customer Management - Jeff Mowatt

As an old ’sales dog’ myself, I’m looking forward to attending this first ever event. Thanks to Craig Elias and his gang for getting this together for Calgary.

According to research from the Direct Marketers Association, direct response marketing takes up more than 42% of B2B budgets for marketing. Only 16% is for brand advertising. Surprisingly, online marketing is second only to direct mail, with 18% to direct mail’s 27% now.

I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise. According to Knowledgestorm, roughly 87% of business professionals look to the Internet first for information before making any purchase. That’s pretty significant as in the past it was more trade show, catalog and direct mail advertising that was used for B2B.

The fact that only 16% of the budget is for branding is important. It’s probably the most visible and most sexy, but the least effective marketing spend, which is why the spend is relatively small for B2Bs considering how much branding ads cost.

Although branding is important in any business, it drive me nuts when I see marketing ‘consultants’ pitch brand all the time. It’s like it was the only thing they learned in marketing school. I think this may be because advertising and marketing tends to be associated with B2C companies. I mean how many ads to you see for manufacturing companies that make things that go into other products?

That changed with the Internet and especially Google and Yahoo. Now, even the smallest B2B can advertise with great results, without breaking the bank. As a result, there are more than 300,000 B2Bs that now advertise regularly that didn’t’ before. Now that’s what I call a real disruptive force. Lots of that money goes to Google. Q1 2007 numbers for them is $3.66 billion, which blew by the analyst estimates of $2.49 billion. $1.17 billion dollars over forecast or 47%!

Over the years, I’ve informally helped a number of companies with sales ‘challenges’. Although having a working product is important, I have discovered that a significant part of success is being able to do things that we’re not comfortable with. Selling is one of those things.

Coined by a very good friend, David Lepa of SAP (way before he worked with SAP..), he once said to me that ‘Selling is an un-natural act’. What he meant was - who REALLY wants to phone up people to get rejected? It’s an un-natural act to sell, especially to people who likely didn’t invite you to sell to them.

Over time, I’ve seen this apply to entrepreneurship as well. Entrepreneurs probably have the most difficult time with it as each day they are confronted with tasks, management, sales calls that are may not something they want to do. There is a risk of rejection or failure at every step. But just as persistence and a ‘no fear’ attitude is a mark of a good sales person, it’s the mark of a good entrepreneur. Doing things that need to be done rather than what you want to do is a key to being successful.

I once cold called a billionaire in SF (which led to the sale of my last venture - but that’s another story) to sit on TeamWave’s advisory board. Not exactly something a guy does everyday, and it turned out to be the best un-natural act ever for me. Bruce helped us immensely and all it took was a phone call.

So I hope I got your attention and your nod that the fear of rejection or failure is much worse than the potential setback itself. So embrace those acts, because they usually lead to good things

It’s going to be a busy month in April and May for me. In addition to the usual crush of work of running a growth company, we have a multitude of events to attend in Calgary. Because of our product, ActiveConversion, we are sponsoring no less than 3 events, and promoting another for our online marketing company, FoundPages.

I’ll mention them in order. On April 25th, we’re sponsoring the Calgary CPSA Corporate Sales Challenge, which is a novel sales event. Ten sales teams are going to square off against each other in a selling competition. They have to learn a sponsor’s product or service 30 minutes before the competition starts and the judges are some of the top B2B sales gurus in Alberta.

On the same day, noted search engine marketing author, Andrew Goodman is in town at the Palliser, in a luncheon event April 25. Andrew has written one of the top books on using Google Adwords. Check out the details at the Calgary CMA website. FoundPages is getting a table at this so contact us if you would like to join us.

Then on May 15, another new event, Win the War on Business (WTWOB.com) is on at the Mewata Armoury in Calgary. We’re sponsoring this half day seminar that bills itself as a ‘Strategic Leadership Bootcamp’. It sounds real interesting and definitely different. The target audience is senior management, but it has a distinct sales/marketing slant to it. I might have some extra tickets ($250 each!) for this so contact me if you’re interested in this.

And lastly, we’re sponsoring a special but not yet announced event for Calgary CMA that is slated for May 30. The VP of Interactive Marketing for Salesforce.com is coming to Calgary to speak on Marketing in the Web 2.0 Era. My company is all over this as a model for how B2B sales and marketing is being done today, leveraging the web. I just saw a webinar from Salesforce entitled ‘Marketing in the Google Era’, and I suspect it will have similar elements. You won’t want to miss this if you’re into learning how the one of the smartest companies market. Contact us if you’re interested in attending.

We’ve been working with Salesforce.com lately and have developed some insight on the company that I’d like to share. We’re finalizing our AppExchange certification/partnering with ActiveConversion and this a billion dollar company to watch in my opinion.

First of all, for a large company they are approachable and consistently professional. They do what they say, and get back to you when they say they will. I’ve communicated and met with VPs/Directors there as well as ‘Certification Specialists’, with good efficiency. I think they expect the same of us partners and I have to say that it has a surprisingly good experience relative to some I’ve had. This must account for much of their success. I’ve also seen their sales and marketing in action, and they don’t have much for weakness there either.

Secondly, they have a great strategy that they are executing well. They’re turning their CRM app/database into a platform for hundreds of other apps. It’s called AppExchange and it’s basically a Web 2.0 mashup strategy in the enterprise space. There’s nothing new about having a platform and partners for it, but the first to do it via web mashups for the enterprise that make the integration seamless and fast.

Very ambitious for a CRM, but also a very smart move to become a major player in the ERP business, challenging the likes of SAP, Oracle and Microsoft using the back door via CRM vs the traditonal accounting software front door.

Salesforce.com is much more than a traditonal CRM. You can run an enterprise on it’s software with all the different apps (esp third party) available for it. It’s certainly not your father’s contact manager software. This is not a commercial for them, but something akin to admiration that I usually reserve for likes of Google. And users of their web service seem to be almost fanatic.

For those who don’t know, Salesforce.com was the first software vendor to be entirely web-based, when most everyone didn’t think an application like that could ever be scaled, secured, fast and stable enough to run in a browser. When Google was still a project at Stanford, these guys were taking on Microsoft’s client server software dominance.

It looks like they’re at it again. Keep an eye on those guys.

Due in large part to the efforts of Kempton Lam and Patrick Lor (sorry if I missed anyone), Calgary is going to get it’s own version of Bar Camp and Demo Camp. I went to the organizing meeting, which was a gathering of bloggers and entrepreneurs who want to make this happen here. The organizing and major thinking happens via websites, blogging, RSS feeds and email and the meeting is just a way to introduce people in person.

So what is BarCamp and DemoCamp? According to Wikipedia, it’s an international, open, participatory workshop event. To me it’s obvious that this a Web 2.0 way to do Web 2.0 (collaborative) tech conferences. It’s self-organized in other words. Check out the Wikipedia definition here.
As far as I can tell DemoCamp is less workshop and more pitch and less technical than Bar Camp. The catch is the pitch has to have no .ppt slides, and just be a working demo. I think video is allowed but I think the (no power) point is if you have to explain it on a .ppt, then it’s not baked enough or it needs an ‘elevator pitch’

I’m going to DemoCamp Calgary April 24, 2007. I won’t be able to make BarCamp Calgary May 26, 2007 because I’ll be at a ‘traditional’ conference at Salesforce.com Appforce in SF. BarCamp looks a little more technical and hands on, so be prepared to bring your laptop.

You’ll meet some interesting (and experienced) people, that are working on exciting projects in mostly the Web 2.0 space. People like Sarah Blue, Tom West, David Gluzman, Claudia Moore, Matthew Dorey, Nox Dineen, Mark Kornak, Ivan Sierralta, Mark Rosenberger and others. Google them (with Calgary appended) and you’ll see what I mean.

If you’re a startup, investor, web 2.0 geek, or just an interested observer, check it out. Each only last 2-3 hours. If sometimes you’re wondering ‘why didn’t I see that coming’ or ‘why didn’t I get in on that’, this is a chance to right that!

So I’m going to try to give my definition of Web 2.0, because I’ve pondered it for some time, and still think my version makes the most sense It also has some philosophical value because it appears to still be true as new web services, products, websites etc come out.

Web 2.0 is about collaboration. Whether it’s mash-ups via Google Earth, crowdsourcing in iStockphoto, sharing videos on YouTube, or even a simple blog - the most powerful, trendy, useful, creative, and analytical force on the web is the ability to combine applications, data or people to produce content that others find useful. A wiki product, like ProjectForum developed by my previous business partner, Mark Roseman, is a poster child for Web 2.0 technology.

Even Google search is Web 2.0 defined, as much of it’s search results depend on websites linking to a website that is considered credible and even authoritative. Google PageRank is based somewhat on academic referencing, where papers reference previous work. The website linking acts a form of vote, just like rating videos on YouTube. Also, Google’s paid ad network is a massive collaboration of advertisers and content providers, working together.

So although collaboration in these examples may not be the classic definition of working together, I think you would agree that they do, and because that this was not commonplace until after 2000 (Web 1.0 is pre-2001 and pre-tech bust), this constitutes many of the various explanations of Web 2.0.

Of course, there were collaborative applications before Web 2.o. Amazon is a great example and most any others (like Napster) that thrived after 2001 were generally collaborative. So there you have it - feel free to comment and disagree (and therefore collaborate ).

p.s. Mark, if you’re reading this - Art Wong recently relayed to me how when we toyed with using Workplace for virtual communities that it sounded a lot like MySpace today….