Nicholas Biron
Chief Executive and Research Officer
nbiron@3sixtyinsights.com

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Nick has more than 25 years of experience in high tech, including 24 years of corporate sales and organizational growth experience in the enterprise software, high tech and technology research industries. Over the past 18 years, he has specialized in building and managing a variety of organizations & territories in the enterprise research industry. As a team leader with Boston’s Aberdeen Group, Nick was responsible for the initial launch of new and emerging enterprise technology research practice areas, such as Wireless & Mobility, Network & Application Performance Management, and Unified Communications. This role was dedicated to building out and maintaining these new areas along with creating the initial research and account planning. As Co-Founder of Boston’s Blue Hill Research, Nick was responsible for the initial business plan, launch, and continuous growth overseeing Sales, Marketing, and Operations. Later, Nick served as the US North East & United Kingdom business lead overseeing account and research strategies for the territory for Mercator Advisory Group. After spending the past 24 years strategizing with businesses of all shapes and sizes, Nick noticed a pattern of challenges within the software buying cycle, both on the buyer and seller side and founded 3Sixty Insights with a goal of helping organizations make better and more efficient decisions.

Leadership and the impact of not doing what you say

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Trust and respect are at the core of all truly great leaders. A team that trusts and respects their leader will follow them into any battle and will fight until the bitter end without question or hesitation… When a leader loses the trust and respect of their team, the structure of the team falls apart and failure is all but eminent. This concept seems to be lost with many leaders in government and business today, and as a result, trust in government is at an all-time low, and employees are no longer sticking around organizations for decades at a time with the average tenure of employees 25 to 34 years old is only 2.8 years. There are many factors that lead to lack of trust […]

Search Engine Optimization – What is it and why is it so important for Small Businesses?

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The internet has been around for a while now, and so has Google… Yet, most small businesses have no idea how the internet or Google work, leading to one of the major reasons for business failure in today’s market. There is no escaping the fact that almost all sales (business and consumer) start with an online search, and this isn’t new. About ten years ago, we used to share a stat that around 50% of sales start with an online search—and this was ten years ago. Since then, that percentage has grown exponentially to 87%, quickly making online search one of the top facilitators for how buyers find and conduct research around items they are looking to purchase. This quite simply means, regardless of your […]

Another Manufacture Rushes to Market and Fails

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We continuously talk about how business moves at the speed of light these days and how businesses need to react to the market just as fast, but how fast is too fast? Samsung recently has been receiving criticism for major manufacturing issues regarding their folding phone before it even hit the market. Over the past few weeks, Samsung had been sharing preproduction versions of their $2,000 flip phone, only to have them fail within hours of first use… This, unfortunately, has become more the norm than the exception. The problem is that businesses are rushing to get their products to market without using them first and doing the proper smoke testing before adopting consumers as beta testers. This recently took center stage with Boeing, where […]

Picking a Job Based on your Potential Manager is a Huge Mistake

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Anyone on LinkedIn most likely has seen an article or two floating around encouraging people to pick a job based on a manager vs the company itself… Let us first start off by saying that any manager absolutely has the power to make a job an enjoyable or frightful experience for their employees. And any good leader knows it is completely in their power to do everything they can to make a job experience as enjoyable as possible. We’ve all had good and bad managers; however, making a decision solely based on who your potential manger will be is a HUGE mistake… Here’s the reality: regardless of the manager, when starting a new job, you become married to the company and not the manager. If […]

The Importance of Having an Online Digital Presence for Local Small Businesses

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I was reminded the other day of exactly why it is important to have an online digital presence in this day and age… Even though online and digital mediums have been around for more than 20 years, it seems that many local small businesses are still slow to pick up on the trend. We do understand why, as it was not too long ago that all a local small business needed for marketing was a good Yellow Page advertisement, a good direct local mail flyer, and maybe a well-placed radio ad. These worked extremely well for decades… However, from a traditional marketing perspective, times have changed. For example, Yellow Pages have gone from the must have item for every home, to getting thrown in the […]

Salesforce.com Pushes Businesses to Adopt New Lightning Platform

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On December 17th, 2018 Salesforce.com announced a strategic move to shift all accounts to their new Lightning platform on a rolling basis… Salesforce.com’s new Lightning platform actually isn’t all that new as it has been around for a few years now, officially launching shortly. We find this forced shift to the new platform a little disconcerting, as most organizations are not ready for this shift. The challenge is that Salesforce.com’s growing customer base of 3.75 million users has become extremely familiar with the existing platform. Personally, I cannot remember much of a change in the overall platform for the past ten years. With this new change, Salesforce.com is essentially forcing their entire userbase (with the exception of early adopters) to relearn this new platform… This […]

The Industry and Technology are Killing the Industry, not Millennials

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  There is a fundamental shift in consumer-driven businesses that has been emerging over the past few years, and it’s shaking up industries and businesses that once stood as giants for decades. Almost daily, an industry giant is either declaring bankruptcy, layoffs, closing locations, or reporting yet another quarter of subpar numbers. The writing is on the wall…. Yet, most industry leaders are refusing to accept reality. Instead, they choose to blame millennials for their demise… Along with these bankruptcies, layoffs, and store closings, we also see newly published articles regarding how “millennials” are completely decimating industries, businesses, and traditions that have stood the test of time. Here’s the thing: are millennials really to blame? We think not… We are believers that the industry and […]

The Importance of a First and Last Impression in Today’s Economy

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Whether you sell million-dollar software implementations or you’re a local restaurant making your debut, first and last impressions matter! Let’s face it: in today’s market, competition is fierce, brand loyalty is down, and consumer attention spans are short, making it harder to win and retain business—even if you execute flawlessly… This is a primary reason why giants of yesterday are crumbling around us daily, as they have all but forgotten the fundamentals of sales and customer excellence. There used to be a time where a brand could and would hold its own, even if the sales and marketing teams “didn’t give it their all”. As an example, there was an old popular saying that “No one ever gets fired for buying IBM”. Pretty bold statement […]

The Importance of Interdepartmental Communication in Small Businesses

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In today’s environment, businesses move faster than ever. This makes aspects such as simple interdepartmental communication within any organization extremely important—but increasingly overlooked. Things that get missed can be simple items such as an interdepartmental understanding of how new customers are interacting with your various teams and solutions. But why does this matter, you ask? Let’s say Sales brings on a new “unique” client. This client has been following your organization for quite some time and realized they can use your solution to solve a “very unique” problem they have. Fast forward a few months, and this client with a “unique” use-case of your solution is producing results that are off the charts, along with seeing exponential gains in revenue. This is great, right? Well, […]

Social Media and Online Forums, Hidden Gems of Customer Insight

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There are little that essentially go unnoticed… Consumers spend significantly more time online today than they did 10 years ago, and that amount of time is projected to keep rising in the foreseeable future. When online, consumers are spending their time across multiple activities ranging from social media to shopping, and conversing about experiences and issues regarding business and brand interaction. One way they share their experiences is via online reviews, which 3Sixty Insights covered in a previous article (Landmark Case with TripAdvisor, Makes Businesses Think Twice About Reviews), but there are more ways in the form of Social Media and other online groups and forums. In this article, we’ll cover the various online communities where consumers share their insights and how businesses can create a […]

What Is Omni-Channel Marketing and Tips for Developing an Omni-Channel Strategy

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Omni-Channel Marketing is a new term that has been thrown around increasingly more over the past few years, and it is a strategy that most organizations regardless of industry should develop, as it makes a heck of lot of sense. However, we find that there are still many organizations that are not exactly sure what Omni-Channel Marketing is or how to properly deploy an Omni-Channel strategy. 3Sixty Insights believes that not deploying an Omni-Channel strategy is a huge mistake, and it is inadvertently hurting thousands of businesses today and leading to the fall of the many consumer-based retail giants of today. In this article, we’ll cover exactly what Omni-Channel Marketing is and some tips for developing and deploying a strategy of your own. Setting the […]

Digital Document Management for Small Businesses

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You would not believe how many small businesses still have no true way of managing their documents besides folders, file cabinets, or saving files directly to their computers. If you are reading this and that is how you currently manage your documents, we are truly sorry…. Reasons vary, but still, all too often we come across organizations that have file cabinets full of old sales agreements, invoices, and legal documents. Now, there was a time where paper documents were the most efficient means of storage, but those times are long gone. The cost of digital storage has dropped significantly over the years, and technology has caught up to a point where the ease of use makes the user experience straightforward and easy. Typically, when we […]

Landmark Case with TripAdvisor, Makes Businesses Think Twice About Reviews

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It was announced on Wednesday, September 13th of 2018 that an Italian man would be jailed for nine months for running a business tied to fake TripAdvisor reviews. Reviews, especially for consumer-based businesses, mean everything… and unfortunately there are too many businesses that are more than willing to circumvent systems to provide fake reviews for products and services. We always highly recommended against using these services, as at the end of the day, it will negatively affect your business. Not only do real customers eventually catch on, but organizations such as TripAdvisor, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Yelp are all working on solutions to combat such practices. This means that those reviews will eventually fall off, and there could be other ramifications such as fines or […]

Sales Is a Numbers Game, How to Increase Sales Without Increasing Pipeline

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Sales is a numbers game, right? In sales, this is something you are constantly told, typically followed by the need to get more opportunities into the pipeline. This roughly translates to the more opportunities that are in the pipeline, the more business that is likely to close. We do not disagree–sales is a numbers game, but there is another way that game can be played, and that is increasing the close ratio. Here’s the thing, we disagree that the numbers game should always be pushing for bigger pipelines, as it eventually leads to employee burnout and puts unnecessary stresses on your account base. Working to increase the overall close ratio actually creates a more efficient sales team and leads to happier sales reps in the […]

My How Times Have Changed.. or Have They Really – the Rebirth of Small Businesses

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Something interesting has been happening over the past 10 years and it is reminiscent of the “good old days”…  The 80s, 90s, and early 2000s saw a shift from family owned small businesses and restaurants to big box retailers, chain restaurants, and malls across America. There was also the likes of Walmart moving into small towns and becoming the center of commerce, putting family owned general stores that stood for decades out of business almost overnight. Then there was Sears, a pioneer in catalog sales, shifting away from their core of catalogs and into malls. Those decades were profit years for these giants of industry as they dominated the consumer market. But then in the mid-2000s, something happened: huge revenue gains turned to single-digit growth, […]