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I attended a presentation last week in The Foundry for the final lecture in the Google Breakfast Briefing series for 2016. The briefing, which was well oversubscribed, focused on Google tools and insights.

It was an insightful and thought provoking presentation but it was amusing that the giant of giants had to get 3 different notebooks on stage before it could get one of the demos to work properly.

That aside, the presenter, Sarah O’Neill from Google, is a consummate presenter and one that is very much on top of her game. Sarah’s presentation on Think with Google was most interesting and it’s one of Google’s tools that you should check out at your earliest convenience.

Think with Google presents data that has been collected and collated by Google’s global team and on top of that they layer the trends and point to some forward-looking perspectives and behind-the-scenes looks at digital campaigns. This is carried out across industries, platforms and audiences. No matter your business there is something here for you. I advise you to sign up today – here.

Great presentations are memorable more often than not from an unintended action. This is what happened during Sarah’s presentation when she introduced a new expression that was new to my ears – that of the ‘time thief.’ She used a great example from within the Think with Google platform.

In it there is a section that collates all the top YouTube ads and ranks them in order of popularity for that month. Sarah played the ‘Imagine The Possibilities | Barbie’ ad (see below) and called it a ‘time thief,’ a video, she claimed, that you could watch over and over, and over some more.

It got me thinking as to all the other instances of time thief that exist in our businesses and how can we use collaborative and/or online tools to avoid them. The obvious one that springs to mind from our perspective is going to be the massive upside of using an online accounting software system such as Big Red Cloud’s. All that time wasted on manual bookkeeping and juggling excel spreadsheets when you could be spending your time more productively.

Using the concept of the time thief is a good one as it’s time that you’ll not get back. It may help to focus your mind more on those apscts of your business that could be carried out more efficiently.

Bottom line is that the more time you spend selling to customers the better off your business will be.

Next time you set about a task ask yourself is it a time thief?

 

 

 

 

Marc O'Dwyer

After completing a Graduate program in Marketing, Marc’s impressive sales career began at Allied Irish Banks, Pitney Bowes and Panasonic where he received numerous Irish and European sales performance awards and consistently exceeded targets and expectations. In 1992, Marc’s entrepreneurial spirit led him to set up his own business, Irish International Sales (IIS). Initially, this company was a reseller for Take 5 Accounts and Payroll software. Within four years, IIS became the largest reseller of Take 5 in Ireland, acquiring four other Take 5 resellers. He also found time to set up two mobile phone shops under the Cellular World brand and a web design company offering website design services for small businesses. In 2001, he bought the majority share in a small Irish software business, Big Red Book. At that time, the company was losing money. The company became profitable within two months, and Marc then acquired a payroll company to compliment Big Red Books Accounting products. In 2003, IIS were appointed as Channel Partners with SAP for their new SME product, SAP Business One. Marc sold his Take 5 business and concentrated on developing this new market for SAP As a result, by 2007, IIS was recognised as the largest Channel Partner for SAP in EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa). In 2008, the IIS Sales Manager bought the Company from Marc in an MBO. He launched Big red cloud in June 2012, the online version of big red book, to date the company successfully converts 59% of trials into sales and the number of customers is growing rapidly. Marc continues to run both Big Red Book and Big Red Cloud which now support 75,000 businesses. He is a very keen sportsman, having played rugby for 20 years, represented Leinster at under 16 and under 20 levels, and league squash with Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club for 10 years. Marc has competed in 11 Marathons, including the London and Boston Marathons, and has completed several Triathlons and Half Ironman races. He has also completed six Ironman Races in Austria(x2), Frankfurt (Germany), Nice (France) , Mallorca (Spain) and Copenhagen (Denmark)

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