Måns shared some unconventional as well as conventional lessons that helped QlikTech from being a small Swedish company in Lund to evolve into a global player.

Key of the conventional lessons was to a great extend what one can read in Jeffrey Gitomers books about Sales and Leadership . QlikTech would be a state-of the-art example of how to apply Gitomer’s principles in your business, hence why I don’t want to waste much time on it here. Only a few things. QlikTech really focused on sales efficiency, means giving the sales team the support they needed with lots of good cases that helps them selling. Potential customers had the full support and help of QlikTech, as well as the possibility to test their product risk-free. Sales at QlikTech is about creating a win-win-situation, in which potential new customers actually win more than the company. That creates trust, and the strategy of  underselling and overperforming results in happy, loyal customers who will advocate for you and help you selling more. Selling by being honest and helpful with solving a client’s problem, pays out in the long term, and QlikTech experienced that first hand. Read Gitomer, and you will understand.

The more unconventional lessons Måns passed on to us, and which are hugely important when you start a company, can be summarised as follows:

1. You need to have luck! But – luck is equal to opportunity times preparation. Means it is to a huge advantage if you had a chance to gather a wide experience in different fields of business. In other words, you know how things should work and ideally had a chance to execute stuff that you now need to do for your own company. Or like Måns put it, practise beats talent. If you have experience then you are more likely to succeed than when you have “only” talent.

2. The customer should win more than you. Brand value is worth more than brand awareness. Value should take 2/3 and awareness 1/3. Means it is more important that your product actually performs well rather than you just talking about their advantages and the rest is hot air. Hence why the already named underselling and overperforming will help you significantly in getting new customers.

3. Marketleadership is not about size. You may be the market leader when looking at the figures, but that doesn’t mean that you are perceived as such by your target group. In order to be perceived as the market leader, it is about the momentum than you can create by performing well, for example by gaining more new customers within a certain time frame than the competition. People will notice that and naturally think that you are leading the flock.

It is actually easier to get this momentum if you define rather small market segments and really put your effort in there. This gives you a definite advantage against bigger competitors that don’t perform equally well in the same market segment. Having succeeded there, you come out stronger, financially, reputationwise and in terms of experience  – and you can take on the next market segment much easier.

4. When it comes to going international, Måns experienced that it takes longer to sell a product in countries with long sun days. Decisions take longer to make in countries that are situated more South, in other words, it is a cultural thing. One of the many cultural factors to consider, if you ask me. Måns developed his own formula, though:

DOS (Days of Sales outstanding) = No. of sun-days * 2

Well, share your experience in the comments. Do you agree on this formula – would be interesting to know!

5. Cash is a fact, profit an opinion. Means as long as you have cash when making a loss in terms of not reaching an agreed level of profit, it is always easier to explain than when you actually have no cash to show. Simple, I think, but one doesn’t necessarily think of it this way.
Then, in terms of the product development, you should develop stuff that attracts both, brain and heart. A visually compelling interface of a software is equally important in B2B and B2C sales. We are all humans, and we are emotionally touched by great looks of a product, no matter which purpose in which environment it serves. Therefore a great design helps selling.

One should also constantly analyse the performance of the product. Partly because great cases help selling, and partly because one keeps the development going into the right direction.

All this might not be that new for you, and neither was it for me, apart from his 5 unconventional lessons maybe, but Måns managed to put everything into context. He reminded us of what really matters, and gave with QlikTech a great example that pursuing these guidelines in building a business actually can work.

So, maybe get in touch with Måns, definitely read Gitomer, and then go out there and do epic stuff!!

Sketchnote on Måns session on stage (Day 1) by EmiliaBlom

Yes, you heard right, there might be consequences. Pontus explained that journalists will not necessarily tell your story in the way you imagined it to be told. Therefore, you should think twice, if you really want and need journalists to get involved at the very beginning. Maybe it is better to let the story grow. Let other people talk about you, so that it reaches the journalist’s ears via them and not directly from you.

A journalist’s perspective of a story is not necessarily your perspective. He can give you a role in your story, which might not necessarily be the one you’d imagined. However, if you have been given a role, Pontus said, don’t try changing it. Go with the flow, may your role be good or bad, and try to get as much positive stuff as possible out of it for you. He then explains with a huge portion of self-irony how and why journalists work as they work.

As we all know and as Pontus now confirmed, traditional journalism is right now in a crisis. In the times of Youtube and blogs everyone can tell stories and spread them. So, from that perspective journalists are not necessarily needed for storytelling anymore. Of course they deny the existence of other storytellers like i.e. bloggers, simply since they are no trained journalists in the classic sense. Journalists can afford to live in this denial since they are part of traditional media like newspapers (offline and online), which have the highest reach and the most trust in the public. So journalists definitely have their own way of storytelling.

Pontus gives a maybe slightly exaggerated example with him gathering all information, taking 2 % of it, adding his own opinion and publishing it. Through the high reach of traditional media, news stories provided by journalists have a huge influence, although readers easily could gather the other 98% of the information somewhere else. Another point Pontus named is that journalists don’t reflect themselves in the public but in themselves. If the public says an article is rubbish, but colleagues praise the article, a journalist goes with the colleagues’ opinion. This is a huge difference to other storytellers like for example bloggers, as we know. Bloggers mirror themselves in the public, only that way they can grow and gather more readers.

Therefore, the journalists’ world being as it is, if you have a story, the risk is, that it is destroyed (at least in your eyes) by them because they tell it in a totally different to what you might have had in mind.

This is why Pontus urged us to really ask ourselves, if we really need a journalist to tell our stories, or if there might be more suitable alternatives via other channels. If a story then gets big enough and a journalist becomes interested in it, the likelihood of it being told the way you want it is much higher. But there is no guarantee for that either, he added with a smile.

However, if you decide for involving the press, there are a few things that you could try in order to get the attention you want, according to Jennifer.

- Be smart! In general as well as in terms of marketing your idea, product or whatever your story is about.
- Your story has to fit into the right context, i.e. into a trend, and you have to …
- …know your audience! Don’t pitch everyone, make it relevant for the journalist as well as the public!
- Give journalists a hook for them being able to tell a good news story! Unusual cases are good to have (i.e. a positive development that goes against a negative trend)
- Make it colourful! Have great details and not at last great pictures to illustrate your story, so this fits.

But, after all, Pontus and Jennifer told us, that even if you managed to have all points listed above set up in the most perfect manner, this isn’t any guarantee for you being heard. And the reason is that there simply is no recipe for getting heard. Journalism is no science that obeys certain rules, but about telling good news stories – and which stories fit when and where, they decide. Not you.

The fun part at the end of the workshop was that the participants were given the chance to pitch their story to Jennifer and Pontus. One out of three succeeded, and it really showed how hard it can be to bring your message across in a way that they could work with it as a good news story.

The body language in the picture below illustrates quite well the challenge one faces, I find.

Anyway, good luck with your next story!

The first day offered some highlights, starting with the fireside-chat with Niklas Zennström, founder of Skype.

During the panel about “The Art of Value creation” the discussion covered among other success factors if there are any special characteristics of true entrepreneurs-personalities, and it became clear that ADHD as well as Aspergers are actually of advantage in entrepreneurs. The one helps coming up with creative ideas, the other one helps with being persistent and pursuing your goal. I was surprised that these two conditions got named at all and that in connection with entrepreneurship. One the other hand, I happen to know of two great entrepreneurs, one of them has ADHD, the other one Aspergers, and they are both much more successful in what they do than “normal” people. Great that one starts seeing the opportunities of so-called disabilities and uses the advantages rather than perceiving them as a stigma!

Then, Jan Helin, Editor in Chief of Aftonbladet (the Swedish tabloid) tried to teach us about ethics in news publishing during the session called “News, Entertainment or Bullshit”. As an example he pointed to the English tabloids at the time when they exploited the whole story about footballer Ryan Giggs, which tested the current British privacy laws to the extend, some of you might remember. In all fairness one has to say, that he stated the facts and refrained from claiming that Aftonbladet always gets this ethics-thingy right.

Another highlight in the afternoon was Martin Deinoff and Fredrik Marcus from Creuna about how to focus on the important stuff when designing your website. “Extreme Makeover” really fitted the short and fun session that actually made you think about the current look of your website! They also ran a workshop about the topic in the afternoon, which was already fully booked when I registered for SIME… An indication for the quality these guys deliver! Maybe we can hire them for #NEXT12?

In the afternoon it was workshop time. The workshops are mostly run by the sponsors of the conference, and like usually, when this is the case, it seems to go direction product pitch rather than really useful stuff. My highlight was the session of “The Art Of Making An Issue Important”. I got so much useful stuff out of it, that there will be an extra blog post about it soon. So stay tuned!

Let me conclude my personal impressions of the first day with some pictures:

On the 15th and 16th of November everybody gathers at Cirkus in order to listen to speakers like  Jacob de Geer (Founder iZettle), Elísabeth Grétarsdottír (EVE Online), Sohrab Ghotbi (NY Times),   Riz Khan (Founder English Al Jazeera), Isla MacLeod (BBC), Niklas Zennström (Founder Skype) and many more.

Both days start with the conference at 9am, and from 3pm there are workshops about a whole range of different topics. Take a look at the full program here.

Apart from the conference slots in the mornings of both days, I plan to visit the following workshops, and I hope to be able to share some new insights with you here on the blog during next week.

15th of November:
- Social Business and Best Practise in Social Media
- The Art of Making an Issue Important
- Pay Day – The Future of Payments
- 15 Years of E-Commerce – Where have we come?

16th of November:
- How to partner with Brands and Corporate Sponsors
- Great free Tools But Where
- Management Lessons You Don’t Learn in Business School

SIME is a great place to meet new people and finally get together with the ones you  only know from email, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like. Anyone who wants to connect with professionals of the Nordic digital world should attend SIME. But not only that, anyone who seeks inspiration for his field of work should be coming, too. Especially since this year’s topic is PASSION, and not to forget that the Nordics always have been in the lead with developing web services that today worldwide are pretty much standard, to name Skype as only one example for many others. The conference language at SIME is English, and there are lots of international speakers invited. So no worries, you’ll be just fine and hopefully make a lot of new friends.

SIME exists by the way since 1996, and the conference has come a long way since then. From being a Swedish/ Nordic event, it is now on the way to establish itself as an international event with a number of conferences in other European cities, such as Vienna, Barcelona, Helsinki and Amsterdam.

Anyway, should you be at SIME next week, why don’t you hook up with Anja Waltemate and Laura Zoltobrocki from SinnerSchrader (founders & organisers of NEXT) or myself ?

We look forward to meeting you there!

P.S.: More updates on the different tracks you can also get from the official SIME-Bloggers!

Also, we’re happy to announce our first tracks and curators: Technology (curated by Holger Blank, SinnerSchrader), Fashion (Anitra Eggler, Internet Pioneer & Communications Expert), Experience (Peter Bihr, Third Wave), Mobile (Laurent Burdin, SinnerSchrader Mobile), and Creative (Elisabeth Stangl, 99faces.tv). The curator for Start-ups will be announced soon. As usual, there will be well an overall ’International Keynote Track’ that will be curated by Monique van Dusseldorp as International Programme Director.

In addition, there will be a community-driven track, curated by Igor Schwarzmann, where speakers proposed by you or even yourself get the chance to perform on stage. Starting today, we open our Call for Participation. Until November 29, you’re invited to submit a speaker and topic proposal at nextberlin.eu. You will be able to vote for proposals until December 20. After voting has closed, our curators will go carefully through all the applications and votes and decide who will perform on stage.

My assumption is a different one: It’s the costs.

Like I’ve illustrated a few days: The heart of Siri is definitely not the (surprisingly good working) speech recognition. The highlight is the AI machine underneath. Each question to Siri triggers a background communication between the iPhone 4S and the central cloud of Apple.

But what does a Siri dialogue cost? Nobody knows but Apple. Nevertheless, I think it is fair to assume that a Siri dialogue will have the estimated costs of a Google request. There are fairly reasonable ratings which classify these costs at about 1 cent. Countercheck: Companies which want to use Google as onsite service are paying 2 cents.

So I think the costs of 1 cent for a Siri request are rather the lower bar (especially if you consider that Google has a 10 year experience to optimize its central data centre regarding its costs).

And now it gets exciting. How many Siri dialogues does a regular iPhone user have? That’s something Apple would like to know as well. A model calculation: 10 daily dialogues make 3,650 dialogues per year. Multiplied by 1 cent it sums up to $ 36 per year. No problem for Apple with a a margin of 70 % for the current iPhone and a period of use of three years.

And this a problem for Google and its Android eco system. Google is refinancing Android with its mobile search revenues. These run up to approx. $ 10 per year and device. Further profits via licenses or hardware do not (yet) exist. In the end that is a whole lot of money counting the pure number of devices only – but it’s not enough to run a profitable cloud-based assistance service like Siri. If Google would start a Siri clone, it would mean a loss of $ 20 per device and year. At the same time they would loose the text-based adword revenues. Again, it’s the quantity that counts – this time with reversed signs.

If consumers will love Siri it will – next to an extremely strong lock-in – also cause a big problem for Google’s mobile business. A cloud-based assistance service is nowadays not fundable without gigantic hardware margins. And which provider owns these other than Apple?

Ironically, a too big success cannot be afforded by Apple either. As long as the server costs will not go below 1 cent/dialogue, Apple would get into trouble. If e.g. 100 instead of 10 daily dialogues will take place between an iPhone and a Siri machine, the nice margins would be gone in an instant. In this case Apple would have to start the development of an independent business model for its Siri usage right away.

More than a decade later, Jobs returned to Apple, and NeXT became the foundation for the great turn-around and the tremendous success of Apple. And by the way, next.com still resolves to apple.com, thus serving as a constant reminder for why we can’t have the next.com domain.

It was of course a dream of every conference organiser to have Steve Jobs on stage. But he had other, more important things to do. So besides his famous keynotes, he rarely appeared at events. One of the few exceptions was the Wall Street Journal’s famous D Conference, where he appeared five times between 2003 and 2010. Here’s the last interview he did there.

Steve, R.I.P.

NEXT will again be one of the highlights of Berlin Web Week, starting on May 2 with the re:publica conference, for the first time being also held at STATION-Berlin from May 2 till May 4, and ending with NEXT12 on May 8 & 9.

With both events alone, we expect at least 6,000 participants coming to Berlin, thus propelling Berlin Web Week to the top of the European festival landscape for the digital scene. For eight days in May, Berlin will be the epicentre of the digital world.

We are pretty much looking forward to Berlin Web Week, and we are thrilled to work on this exciting event over the course of the next eight months. Expect more on this soon.

Yesterday after business hours, I got mail from Headshift, announcing that they joined forces with (i.e. they got acquired by) the Dachis Group of ex-Razorfish founder Jeff Dachis (not to be confused with Jeff Jarvis). This was thrilling news for me, as I just got to know Lee Bryant, one of the Headshift founders.

First, he impressed me with a short talk at Lift Conference in Geneve this year. There he laconically told the audience that the 20th century was wrong. Second, he landed another hit at our own next conference in May, this time speaking about user-driven companies. And third, Lee showed up at reboot11 in Copenhagen again (no video of his talk, but a short interview).

With Headshift joining Dachis Group, Lee and his team now want to engage their second stage rockets, as he puts it on the company blog.

“Leaving behind the niche world of enterprise 2.0, we are ready to work with businesses at a senior level to run change programmes aimed at bringing their processes, internal IT and communications into the Twenty-First Century. It has never been cheaper or easier to collaborate online. It has never been easier to harness people power to drive business performance. It has never been easier to engage with customers and business partners. Yet, as we know, most companies have come to accept an overly bureaucratic, process-heavy high-cost model of doing business as the norm. They need credible partners who can operate across technology, organisational design and business analysis to help meet this challenge, not just evangelists or technology vendors. That’s our role.”

Mercedes Bunz, who also appeared on stage at this year’s next conference, has a short Guardian piece that sums things up precisely:

“In the past the internet was driven by companies communicating with an abstract user. When social platforms for private communication evolved, most firms suddenly found themselves needing to catch up – that is, in the position of second-wave adopters. The forming of the Dachis group and the acquisition of Headshift can be read as a sign that the facebookification of business has begun.”

Consumers are pushing the revolution in the banking business forward on a basis of digital technologies including smart mobile devices. Banks have to cope with this challenge to open up and answer the call for individual needs of their consumers.

NEXT Finance will take the challenge – as the first little sister event of the NEXT Conference – to face these topics and presents them in a neat conference format. The keynote will be held by Chris Skinner (The Finanser), Pelle Braendgaard (PicoMoney) will talk about Agile Banking, Salvatore Pennino (Google) will present Google Wallet and Sebastian Herfurth (Friendsurance) will introduce the insurance market place Friendsurance. Check out our complete speaker line up.

NEXT Finance is supported by PayPal and ImmobilienScout24 and sets its focus exclusively on the financial and banking industry, which has its German heart in Frankfurt. The half-day event on September 8, 2011 is an invitation-only conference aimed at high-profile decision makers of the financial and banking industry. To apply to for a ticket, check out www.nextfinance.de.