How to Always Get the Best Deal on a Car Rental

This post is going to be short, but this process will consistently save you lots of money on car rentals. I've used it so many times to save me hundreds of dollars, so felt the need to share it. I used this tip yesterday to save me $50 bucks. Warning, this only works if you have a Costco Membership.

Step 1. Go to Costco Travel and book a rental car that works for you. This work best if you do it as far in advance as you can.

Step 2. Every couple of weeks check to see if the prices on Costco Travel have changed. For those of you that are not aware, rental car prices can fluctuate a lot.

Step 3. If you find a lower price, book the new car rental. You now have two reservations.

Step 4. Cancel the original one. This is where Costco comes in, there is no money down to book a rental and no penalty for cancelling at any time.

Step 5. Repeat steps 2 through 4 until your trip.

Enjoy!

The Decision to Finally Start Using a Robo Advisor (Wealthfront)

I feel like I've been stalking Wealthfront. I've been following the company for years. Wealthfront is a Robo Advisor. In other words they do what a financial advisor would generally do but in a automated, less expensive way. You give them your money, they ask you a bunch of questions, you tell them your risk tolerance and they invest it in a mix of stocks, bonds etc using software and algorithms.

Ever since I got my first big boy job, I've been a student of personal finance. For a long time though, after learning the basics, my wife and I were focused on cash flowing grad school, paying off any debt and building an emergency fund that could last six months. After all my research I believe those are important steps before investing (besides your 401k). I also believe that looking for low fee, long term investments are your best bet for building wealth through investing. Even after we had a little bit of money to invest, I was hesitant, but at the beginning of the year decided to start investing in Wealthfront and here is why.

1. Their executives/company seem to believe in sound financial principles. I follow their executives on Twitter and read their blog. After consuming their content for years, I believe their leadership teams investment philosophies are pretty aligned with mine.

2. I was not doing a good job on my own. While you can do a lot of figuring out what your risk tolerance is on your own and buy into a bunch of different stocks and bonds etc (which can be cheaper), I just was not doing it. It took too much time. Wealthfront makes it pretty easy. I had more than I needed for my emergency fund sitting on a online bank account making a lowly 1.5% interest. It was time to put that money to work.

3. The first $15,000 is managed for free. That takes a lot of the risk out of trying it, so at the beginning of the year I gave it a go. It's actually the first $10,000 is free, but if you sign up with someone's referral link they get $5,000 more managed for free and so do you. Shameless plug, if you need a referral link you can use mine.


How's it going so far? Not bad, but I put my money right before the last correction, so I'm down a little but not much. Does not bother me though, I'm in it for the long haul and will continue to put money in each month. Wealthfront has been really easy to use. Happy with my experience so far.

I'm interested to learn about other people's experiences, so please post it in the comments.

One More Tip for MBA Students LinkedIn Profiles

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by the Financial Times asking for me to share some advice on how MBA's can leverage LinkedIn to get a job. There is some great advice in the article, not just from me. I recommend you check out the article here.

There is one piece of advice that they did not publish from me or anyone else they interviewed. If you can, make sure that you share examples of your work on your profile. 

This can come in a lot for forms. Here are a few examples.

-Link in your profile to a news article about a product you worked on
-Post a YouTube video of something you have recorded that's work related
-Post something you've written for work. It could be a blog post, writing sample or anything in-between.

Look at how my friend and former classmate Nathan Tanner does it on his profile.

People will be able to see what you can really do and get a much deeper understanding of your skills and abilities.

You might be saying, "What I do can't be put on my LinkedIn profile...". To that I say, dig deep. There is always something.

Secrets to Selling Over Video Conferencing

Happy new year! Another quick post here.

I recently teamed up with Sandler Training to talk about Secrets to Selling Over Video Conferencing. It was a fun discussion and full of what I hope are helpful tips.

Here are some more details of what it's about.

A face-to-face meeting can be 34 times more successful than an email according to a recent HBR article. Face-to-face meetings are always preferable when possible, but in reality, it’s not always an option or an effective use of time. In sales, face-to-face meetings can be expensive, time-consuming, and can seem like a large scheduling commitment for all involved. Video conferencing can give you many of the benefits of a face-to-face meeting while also allowing flexibility, cost savings, and scalability. Video conferencing software has become much easier to use and these days most laptops have cameras built in. We have asked sales experts what it takes to make the most out of video conferencing in the sales process, and we will share those secrets with you in this special educational webinar. PRESENTER: Derek Pando is currently a Product Marketer at Zoom Video Communications, a fast-growing, Sequoia backed Video Conferencing company. He writes and speaks on technology, sales, video conferencing, collaboration, marketing (especially product marketing) and professional relationships. He is fluent in Spanish. He's a poor surfer, mediocre runner and expert traveler. HOST: Mike Montague is VP of Online Learning & Development and a Certified Trainer at Sandler Training, where he teaches the behaviors, attitudes, and techniques of interpersonal communication needed to be more successful. He is also Sandler Training’s national LinkedIn expert for social selling.

How Product Marketers Can Make NPS Their Secret Weapon

Quick post here.

I recently spoke at the Product Marketing Summit on how product marketers can make NPS their secret weapon. It was published today, so I thought I'd share it on my blog.

You can see the presentation here.

How Product Marketers can Build a Competitive Intelligence Program

A big part of my job at Zoom has to build out a formal competitive intelligence program. I had done competitive work before, but this was my first time building a whole program from scratch. As I usually do, I consulted a few experts. Here are the three experts I spoke to that shared some great ideas that I was able to implement into my program. 

Ken Porter Director Competitive Intelligence at Adaptive Insights
Jason Smith CEO of Klue
Peter Mertens Product Marketing at Sprout Social

Below are a few tips for anyone else getting a program off the ground that I picked up for the people mentioned above and through my own experience.  

1. Have a one stop shop. This could be a wiki or google site, really does not matter, but what matters is consistency. Your company needs to know where to find the latest competitive information. I built a simple google site for our team at Zoom. This saves me a ton of time. Everything I create is on the wiki and everyone knows to look there first before asking me a competitive question.

2. Select your main competitors. Even if your industry is not large or competitive, it helps to focus in on the main competitors. In our industry there are literally 100's of different competitors, but only a handful really matter. It'll be hard to do a good job if you don't focus. Select main competitors you'll be up to speed on and let the team know that they'll be on their own for the rest. As you get more time and resources you can always expand your list, but it will be hard to build a good program if you're stretched to thin from the start.

3. No competitor bashing or feature wars. While a Product Marketer likely won't do this, assets you create can be used to do both. It's important that there is a training/sales enablement element to help the sales team deal with competitors. Otherwise, especially for new reps, it's too easy to go down those paths which will not help your company sell more. 

4. Automate how you stay on top of your competitors. As much as possible, try to make sure relevant information gets pushed to you about your competitors. Here is a list of my favorite methods. 

Google news alerts
Page monitor chrome extension
Klue
Feedly
Wayback machine

5. Other tools that help. Here is another list or tools/products that can help you with your competitive efforts. 

Glassdoor- When checking out the glassdoor of your competitors you might find some nuggets of good intel or at least some FUD. 

3rd Party Review Sites- Sites like G2crowd, TrustRadius and Gartner Peer Insights provide a ton of information on the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. New reviews are posted all the time. 

PointDrives- If you have LinkedIn Sales Navigator, use PointDrives to create public facing competitive assets. It will let you know who is looking at it and sending a customization web page will help prevent it from getting into the wrong hands. 

Salesforce- A few simple fields asking about which competitors were in the deal will help you do win/loss analysis and figure out where you might be able to help out your company from a competitive perspective. 

6. Tap into your company. Any Product Marketer that thinks they need to know more than anyone else about every competitor is in for a real challenge, but if you leverage the expertise in your company you're much more likely to have a successful program. Find the competitive experts on your sales, support or sales engineering team and build relationships with them. A lot of people like talking shop. Find ways to highlight their expertise to the rest of the company and they'll always be eager to work with you.
 
This is a work in progress, but hopefully give you a few ideas on how to build a competitive intelligence program as a Product Marketer.

Why BYU Students Should Start Their Careers in Silicon Valley

First off, this is not an anti-Utah post. I've got lots of friends and family in the Beehive State and nothing but love for BYU. I will always cheer on the great state of Utah and hope it continues to become an economic and technology powerhouse. Heck, my kid’s 529 accounts are in Utah because I’m bullish on the whole state. 

 

That being said, I felt compelled to write this post because BYU students are frequently reaching out to me to get my opinion. I’ve noticed lately that the exuberance for the technology scene in Utah (with good reason) is keeping them from seeing some of the reasons why they might want to start their careers in Silicon Valley.

Even, though the title says BYU, this could apply to any student in Utah or any other state for that matter that is considering launching their career in Silicon Valley.

Here are a bunch of reasons why you should start your career in Silicon Valley.

It's going to get harder later. It is so expensive to live here especially for single income families. The odds of you deciding 10 years into your career that you're ready to give Silicon Valley a shot are slim to none. If you're going to do it, the best chances are while you're young and have a low burn rate. You're not going to want to leave your 5 bedroom house in Lehi for a more expensive two-bedroom cottage in Palo Alto with 4 kids.

It will broaden your worldview. Silicon Valley is just a special place. It will broaden your worldview, it will change what you think is possible, you'll meet a much broader variety of people.  

More companies. When it comes to amazing fast-growing technology companies Utah has a good handful but Silicon Valley still rules the roost. There are a ton of options of places to work when it comes to world-class companies with worldwide brand recognition.

The network. I was lucky enough to start my career at Salesforce. 8 years after starting at Salesforce I can now look at my network and see that I know people at just about every major or fast-growing company in Silicon Valley from the people I met in my first job. That network has helped me in getting other jobs and helped me be better at what I do. I'll continue to benefit even more as my network as a whole progresses and people I know get bigger and more influential roles.

The halo effect. When a company does well, employees of that company often get more credit than they deserve. The same goes for when a company fails. There are immense benefits to starting your career at a company with a strong brand and a great reputation in Silicon Valley.

You’ll be better off if you go back to Utah. If you look at a lot of senior leadership of companies in Utah, you'll often see that they have spent time in Silicon Valley. The skills that you develop at companies in Silicon Valley are valued throughout the world. I've seen it play out time and time again where BYU grads come out to Silicon Valley to work for a few years, then go back to Utah getting paid much more and a much higher position because Utah companies value the Silicon Valley experience.

There are only really two major cons to living here. First is that housing is ridiculously expensive. If the primary way in which you are going to measure early career success is the size of your house, you should really not move here. Also, for a lot of people they have better access to friends and family in Utah, which is a very valid reason to stay in any place.

Utah is a fantastic place to work, but the reality is that Silicon Valley will continue to rule the tech world for the foreseeable future and there are immense career benefits to spending some of the early stages of your career in Silicon Valley.