Twitter Starts Hiring Sales People In London – But Stays Coy About A Euro HQ

There’s been a lot of speculation in recent months about where Twitter would put down a European base in its efforts to expand its operation. Certainly I’ve been bugging them in the last few weeks about whether they would come to London. But now we have the answer: London it is – at least for five people whose jobs will be largely about sales and commercial partnerships.

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MyNines Relaunches Private Sales Aggregator With New UI, Sales Calendar And More

MyNines, an aggregator of private sales sites, is relaunching today with a number of new features and a more streamlined user experience.

Launched in March of 2010, MyNines aims to help consumers sort through the daily flash sales sites. MyNines aggregates products from various online sample sale sites and allows shoppers to find them all in one location. Users can search and filter by designer, category, highest discounts, as well as deals ending soonest, most viewed items, deals under $100, and newly listed. MyNines currently aggregates from over 80 sites, including eBay’s Fashion Vault.

With the relaunch, MyNines has rolled out a complete redesign of the site and a new feature called “Boutiques,” which includes sets of products from various sample sale sites curated by stylists, fashion bloggers and celebrities (this is very similar to Google’s Boutiques.com).

One of the most useful additions to MyNines is the sample sales calendar, which will aggregate the sale events from pretty much every sample into a calendar format to see which designers are featuring their sales on flash sale sites each day. You can also subscribe to the Sample Sales Calendar via Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple iCal and you can set sale reminders for specific sales and MyNines will email you when those sales start.

While MyNines does aggregate actual products from a massive number of flash sales sites, some of the biggest players in the space, like Gilt Groupe, have not signed in to be included in the site’s feeds (although Gilt’s sales are included in the Sample Sale Calendar). The site’s founder, Apar Kothari, seems optimistic, however; that eventually all private sales sites will sign on to give MyNines a feed of their daily sales. Kothari adds that MyNines will soon start rolling out more personalized shopping features and will suggest certain sales and items to members based on what sales they click on.

View the original article here

MyNines Relaunches Private Sales Aggregator With New UI, Sales Calendar And More

MyNines, an aggregator of private sales sites, is relaunching today with a number of new features and a more streamlined user experience.

Launched in March of 2010, MyNines aims to help consumers sort through the daily flash sales sites. MyNines aggregates products from various online sample sale sites and allows shoppers to find them all in one location. Users can search and filter by designer, category, highest discounts, as well as deals ending soonest, most viewed items, deals under $100, and newly listed. MyNines currently aggregates from over 80 sites, including eBay’s Fashion Vault.

With the relaunch, MyNines has rolled out a complete redesign of the site and a new feature called “Boutiques,” which includes sets of products from various sample sale sites curated by stylists, fashion bloggers and celebrities (this is very similar to Google’s Boutiques.com).

One of the most useful additions to MyNines is the sample sales calendar, which will aggregate the sale events from pretty much every sample into a calendar format to see which designers are featuring their sales on flash sale sites each day. You can also subscribe to the Sample Sales Calendar via Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple iCal and you can set sale reminders for specific sales and MyNines will email you when those sales start.

While MyNines does aggregate actual products from a massive number of flash sales sites, some of the biggest players in the space, like Gilt Groupe, have not signed in to be included in the site’s feeds (although Gilt’s sales are included in the Sample Sale Calendar). The site’s founder, Apar Kothari, seems optimistic, however; that eventually all private sales sites will sign on to give MyNines a feed of their daily sales. Kothari adds that MyNines will soon start rolling out more personalized shopping features and will suggest certain sales and items to members based on what sales they click on.

View the original article here

Andreessen Horowitz Hires a New Partner…from Sales?

When Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz launched their venture firm, they talked a good game about things being different; about having a smorgasbord of partners skilled in different areas that could tag in-and-out of portfolio companies as appropriate. And a lot of that sounded like the usual “value-add” venture capital spiel.

But two funds into the firm’s life, that vision is starting to take shape. Witness today’s announcement that Mark Cranney will be joining the firm as a partner. Cranney isn’t some techy whiz-kid, visionary founder or even a financial wizard. He’s a sales and operations guy and his job will be to help teach Andreessen Horowitz’s predominately engineer-centric founders and CEOs to be a little bit more like those things many of them decry: a sales guy, an MBA, a grown-up manager. Look at him! He even looks like a sales guy!

In addition to coaching founders and helping them find the right management talent to hire, Cranney will be building essentially a pre-sales organization within the firm that will constantly scout purchase-level managers at Fortune 500 companies, to pave direct lines to them and know in advance what kinds of products they want to buy, leading to a shorter, almost pre-qualified sales cycle for Andreessen Horowitz’s companies. “The weakness at a lot of venture capital firms is that we know the CEOs or CIOs, but we don’t know the managers making the purchase decisions,” says Horowitz.

I asked how big this group would be and Cranney declined to answer saying that was “proprietary” (See! He talks like a grown up manager too!) but he scoffed when I called it a “gargantuan task,” pointing out he’d built huge sales teams from scratch several times in his career. “That’s the easy part,” he said. Not for the typical geeky founder, of course, and that’s the point.

Like a lot of the firm’s team, Cranney worked at Opsware with Horowitz and Andreessen, where he was the executive vice president of worldwide field operations. He grew the headcount from 10 people to 350, grew revenue from $18 million to $150 million, and had four years of 100%+ growth in new bookings. That’s just not a skill set you see at most VC firms.

If this team works as advertised, it’ll be a huge, huge advantage for the firm. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this become a trend among the well-heeled venture funds, especially if this renaissance in business software blooms. As Cranney says: “If you want to sell to companies you gotta put boots on the ground. That’s not changing.”

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3 Tools Realtors Can Use to Increase Sales on the Web

Greg Meyer is the customer experience manager and listening post for Gist. Reach Greg online at @GregAtGist on Twitter, or at greg@gist.com.

Realtors are passionate people, especially about their relationship with customers. One of the ways that they connect with these customers today is through the use of social media, and the methods for doing so are, themselves, becoming much more varied and sophisticated.

Realtors are also dealing with much more savvy customers. Today, customers want to buy a house or refer a real estate agent to a friend on TwitterTwitter, FacebookFacebook and other platforms, and agents know they need to be there to provide an open door to customers and provide an authentic, unique experience along the way.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely already familiar with social media 101. So, what are some of the ways you can increase home sales with the latest tools? And, how can you reinvent the home buying experience in clever, innovative ways? Here are three recommendations and accompanying tools that will not only increase sales, but will enhance the overall customer experience and set you apart from the competition.

It’s easy to upload static, one-room images of homes without giving your customer any real knowledge of what the home actually looks like. Instead share true-to-life panoramic images of your properties.

360 Panorama, an iPhoneiPhone app from Occipital, allows you to do just that –- share rich, full images of properties that are stitched together in real-time without any photo-editing work on your part. You can easily share these images over social networks like Twitter and Facebook to give your customers a deeper glimpse into their next potential home.

The broader trend: Be a salesperson, but sell something real — don’t just sell an idea. Easy-to-do panoramic images not only highlight the actual nature of the home, but give your customers a realistic expectation.

Many people look online for an agent who knows the most about a given area or city. For realtors, it has become more about adding credibility while still making it easy for customers to get to and understand the information they need to make an informed, home buying decision.

There are plenty of chart making tools out there, but the one that I’ve found to be most useful is FusionCharts.

Combine this with data pulled from Zillow and Trulia APIs (or if you prefer, their widgets) and you have a deep, intelligent way to inform your customers on everything they need to know before making a purchase. Anything from the latest mortgage rates in their state to historical home prices by zip code or neighborhood.

The broader trend: Differentiate from the crowd by being known as the realtor who provides deep insights into what is, at times, a data-deluged market. By providing credibility-building information and sharing it via social networks, you’re providing a transparent view of your unique understanding and also educating your customers on everything they need to know.

You’re busy, and so is the marketplace. There are plenty of agents in your neighborhood today and all of them want to sell your customers a house. The problem is that none of “your” prospective customers can find out what they need to know without you. So, how can you make finding a house as easy as possible?

Create a comprehensive and easy-to-use property listings site with AgencyLogic’s PowerSites tool. PowerSites is a single property website generator that has robust property listing layouts. The trick that makes this tool stand out from the rest though is its integrated social marketing approach.

First, you create the PowerSites listing, which comes loaded with high quality photo options and a selection of professional, real estate-specific layouts. Then, your PowerSites listing is automatically added to your Facebook profile or page, depending on your preference. There are also options for video, blog and podcast integration for those of you who want to beef up the listing even more.

Here’s an example of a complete listing.

Hopefully, knowing about these customized and task-specific real estate tools will take your customer interactions to the next level on social networks and elsewhere online.

It’s about making the home buying experience that much easier by delivering realistic images, deep data visuals and an integrated marketing presence to customers through robust tools, while still supporting your customer in one of the most emotional and important purchases they will ever make: Buying their next home.

Disclosure: Gist is a MashableMashable sponsor.

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Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, MarsBars

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