6 Tech Solutions for Managing Sales Leads

These tools can both generate and organize leads so you can turn prospects into profits.

Sure, you have sales leads. But to turn them into actual revenue, you need to efficiently manage them and develop relationships. That means separating real prospects from duds, organizing all the data and tracking your key leads on a regular basis.

Sales management apps such as San Francisco-based Salesforce.com, Cupertino, Calif.-based SugarCRM or Bellevue, Wash.-based Smartsheet Sales Pipeline attempt to streamline this, but deploying a big brand-name customer relationship management (CRM) tool can be overwhelming as a first step to developing and using sales leads more efficiently.

See on www.entrepreneur.com

The Learning Factor’s Blog Has Moved

This blog has moved to:

http://www.learningfactor.com.au/blog/

Top job tips for retrenched execs

If you think a rolled gold resume is all you need to get back into the workforce, think again.

Cutbacks in a slowing economy are to be expected but many of the people who now find themselves updating their resumes are senior managers and executives more used to issuing redundancy notices than receiving them. It’s a grim time for senior executives wanting to get back into the workforce.

In addition to an economy that has remained on edge since the global financial crisis, many companies are cutting swathes through their management and executive ranks as restructures realign businesses and consolidate management hierarchies. And it’s not just companies: radical structural changes in the economy mean that many senior executives who have lost their jobs cannot assume that there will be demand for their specific expertise and experience.

See on www.brw.com.au

Agile Leadership Model – A new model for leadership in the 21st century

In this article you will find a new model for leadership in the 21st century by Thomas Spielhofer and Siegfried Kaltenecker.

The authors present a model of how managers can lead agile organizations towards success, instead of being squeezed between anvil and hammer by their teams and their boards. This Agile Leadership Model (ALM) is the summary of our personal experience and of those whom we have coached, trained or otherwise worked with. It furthermore brings together the essence of what we learned in two years of research at the Platform of Agile Management – in which we have not yet found another model that we feel can fully cope with today’s leadership challenges.

Agile Leadership Model – An Overview

The ALM consists of four different layers, which build on each other:

• Results (green items)
• Core Competencies (yellow items)
• Basic Skills (blue items)
• Common Principles (red items)

See on p-a-m.org

The global debt clock – Interactive overview of government debt across the planet

The clock is ticking. Every second, it seems, someone in the world takes on more debt. The idea of a debt clock for an individual nation is familiar to anyone who has been to Times Square in New York, where the American public shortfall is revealed. Our clock shows the global figure for all (or almost all) government debts in dollar terms.

Does it matter? After all, world governments owe the money to their own citizens, not to the Martians. But the rising total is important for two reasons. First, when debt rises faster than economic output (as it has been doing in recent years), higher government debt implies more state interference in the economy and higher taxes in the future. Second, debt must be rolled over at regular intervals. This creates a recurring popularity test for individual governments, rather as reality TV show contestants face a public phone vote every week. Fail that vote, as the Greek government did in early 2010, and the country can be plunged into imminent crisis. So the higher the global government debt total, the greater the risk of fiscal crisis, and the bigger the economic impact such crises will have.

See on www.economist.com

PwC 2012 State of the Internal Audit Profession Study

The majority of executives participating in PwC’s 2012 State of the Internal Audit Profession survey say their businesses face more risks than ever before and the consequences become apparent much more quickly.

PwC’s 8th annual examination of the internal audit profession, focuses on this rising importance of risk management and internal audit’s contribution by taking a closer look at how stakeholders and board members view critical risks and the role internal audit could be playing.

Watch our webcast to learn more about the findings where we provided a perspective on the following questions:What are stakeholders’ expectations of the Internal Audit function?What challenges were identified to Internal Audit playing a bigger and more strategic role in monitoring critical risks?How are the most progressive companies proactively handling risks by leveraging Internal Audit’s assistance to monitor them?What are the four things that companies that manage risk well doing to distinguish themselves from their peers?

See on www.pwc.com

10 Colleges Most Creatively Using Mobile Technology

Get inspired by some of thecreative ways these schools have harnessed mobile media for current and future students.
See on www.onlineuniversities.com

New evidence proves brain-training games don’t work

The desire to improve our cognitive ability through brain-training games has turned into what is said to be a trillion-dollar industry. Such games are based on the idea that testing our memory, attention and other types of brain processing will improve our overall intelligence and brain function. Companies like Lumosity, Cogmed and Nintendo are all cashing in hugely on this idea. But many scientists and experts in brain research feel the theory has serious flaws. There has yet to be concrete evidence proving anything close to what such companies claim to be able to do.

In fact, David Z. Hambrick, associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, and his colleagues Tom Redick (lead researcher) and Randy Engle will soon be publishing new evidence that fails to replicate the very study that so much of the commercial industry rests upon. SmartPlanet spoke with Hambrick about the limits of intelligence and the findings from this new and potentially ground-breaking study.

See on www.smartplanet.com

At Work, Do Headphones Help? Workers Say Tuning Out Noise Improves Focus; But Brain Studies Show Music Can Also Distract

Do earbuds and noise-canceling headphones make workers in crowded offices more productive?

Marissa Yu works in a busy office, surrounded by 120 co-workers in a mostly open space. Yet when she has a question, needs an update or tries to reach some of her colleagues, she might as well talk to the wall.

“You call their name one, two, three, four times, and they’re not responding,” says Ms. Yu, director of interiors in Houston for PageSoutherlandPage, an architecture and engineering firm. “You dial their extension and they’re not picking up. Pretty soon you’re throwing rubber bands across the wall.”

See on online.wsj.com

One third of Aussies waste time at work, Ernst and Young study shows

A THIRD of Australian workers waste almost a quarter of their day at work, a survey shows. The Ernst and Young Australian Productivity Pulse survey found the lack of productivity costs businesses more than $41 billion each year in wages alone.

The survey of 11,500 people showed the current economic slowdown particularly affects the productivity of workers who felt insecure about their jobs.

“Workers that feel insecure about their roles or are unsatisfied with their workplace have fallen further down the productivity scale as a result of the current slowdown,” Ernst and Young Oceania Advisory leader Neil Plumridge said.

See on www.news.com.au