Nicholas Biron

Chief Executive and Research Officer

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With over 25 years of experience in high tech and enterprise software, Nick has built a career focused on corporate sales, organizational growth, and market strategy across the technology research and enterprise software sectors. For nearly two decades, he has specialized in launching and leading high-performing teams within the enterprise research space. At Aberdeen Group, he played a key role in establishing new research areas such as Wireless & Mobility, Network & Application Performance Management, and Unified Communications. As Co-Founder of Blue Hill Research, Nick led the firm’s launch and growth, overseeing Sales, Marketing, and Operations. He later served as the business lead for the US Northeast and UK regions at Mercator Advisory Group, where he directed account strategy and research initiatives. Leveraging his broad industry insight, Nick founded 3Sixty Insights to improve the software buying experience and help organizations make more informed, efficient decisions. At 3Sixty, he steers research direction, focusing on sales and marketing enablement, business efficiency, and human capital management.

The Importance of the Ding Email

Posted on April 11, 2020June 23, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

As leaders, one of the toughest jobs we have is keeping a team motivated… When you break it down, we all spend on average 7.9 hours at work, and it is difficult for anyone to stay motivated 100% of that time. We are all human after all, and it’s natural to have cycles of intensity on the job. As leaders, we all have our tactics and secrets to team motivation… One that I wanted to share with you today is the concept of the “Ding Email”, which is something that not only can help motivate a team, but something that can help a team perform more efficiently as well. So, what is a Ding Email? Well, a common practice within many sales cultures is to […]

Five Tips to Quickly Help Get Your Business Online, Before It’s Too Late

Posted on April 6, 2020June 23, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

Something that we at 3Sixty Insights have been educating the small business market about for years, has been the need to have a digital and online presence The Importance of Having an Online Digital Presence for Local Small Businesses. Yet, some still haven’t made the change. As a result, slowly but surely, businesses that have not adopted digital and online strategies have been disappearing from the landscape one by one. However, up until recently, it has been process that has been slowly but surely killing them off… But, given the current economic pressures with essentially the entire world on lockdown, businesses no longer have years to make the shift. With most small businesses looking at significant loss of revenue, and in some cases losing their complete […]

Management: It’s Time to Get Down in the Trenches

Posted on April 2, 2020October 5, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

Times are about to get difficult—there is no sugar coating it. Personally, this is the fourth time in my career I’ve seen the impact of a crashing market on the economy, and difficult times will continue into the foreseeable future. As a result, we as leaders all have a challenging time ahead of us; businesses will struggle, and with struggling business, comes very difficult decisions to make. As leaders, there is a lot on our shoulders… But, let’s not forget the engines that makes our businesses possible: our employees. Let’s face it, more often than not, our employees make significantly less than us and many could be living paycheck to paycheck. When tough economic times arise, it puts unimaginable pressures on them both professionally and […]

Marketing Performance Metrics Need to Be Just as Visible as Sales Metrics

Posted on April 2, 2020June 23, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

When you think about the health of any business, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Most people immediately go to sales numbers—pipeline, bookings, and revenue. And, they are not wrong. However, here at 3Sixty Insights, we push our clients to focus on another aspect of the business: marketing. Let’s put this into context a bit. How often do you personally purchase a product or service from a business that you’ve never heard of before? If we are being honest with ourselves, the answer is “never” or “very rarely.” This is why we believe that tracking the performance of marketing is as equally important to the health of the business as tracking sales performance. Current statistics show that it takes an average of […]

Why Small Businesses Should Always Respond to Inquiries

Posted on August 28, 2019June 23, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

As a consumer, one of my biggest pet peeves is the fact that most small business do not respond to inquiries. I’ve lost count, both personally and professionally, on how many times I’ve reached out to a business, only to never receive a response. We are talking anything from questions about a product or solution to direct buying questions on pricing and delivery timeframes—and yet, nothing… There is nothing that will guarantee a loss of business more than simply not following up on an inquiry. With so many small businesses struggling to grow or keep their doors open, it still amazes us the staggering amount of businesses that ignore inquiries… The concept is not lost on us, that back in the day there was a […]

Small Business Owners’ Resistance to Change Is Slowly Killing Them

Posted on August 15, 2019June 24, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

We live in economic times where each industry segment can have literally hundreds of companies that could be considered direct competition, all vying for the same business. This increased competition has put significant pressure on businesses to perform like they never have before in order to just stay afloat. Unfortunately, we are finding businesses that were once successful now struggling, and there is an ever increasing gap between those that are successful and those that are now forming. The retail industry is almost a perfect example of what is happening across all industries. Long-time titans of industry such as Sears, Toys R Us and countless others are closing locations or declaring bankruptcy. In contrast, you have others such as Target and Best Buy seeing some […]

Why Email Marketing Is Broken, and How to Fix It

Posted on July 16, 2019June 23, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

Email marketing is broken but still remains a strong communication channel… Most business professionals spend an unprecedented amount of time per day (28% of the week to be exact) chained to their inboxes responding to countless amounts of email! This would make one think: if you have such a captive audience, then why is email marketing so broken? Well, it isn’t broken; it’s the way the majority of businesses structure their messages that makes it broken. When you break down the messages from most email marketing campaigns, they fundamentally fall into a few categorical buckets, but they tend to focus on one thing: the sender of the message and not the receiver. Let’s dive in a little deeper on this. Most campaigns can fall under […]

Leadership and the impact of not doing what you say

Posted on July 8, 2019November 19, 2024 by Nicholas Biron

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 […]

The 10 Reasons Your Sales Team May Be on the Hunt

Posted on June 10, 2019August 4, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

We recently came across an interesting LinkedIn post questioning how to keep sales team members from leaving an organization… This is an interesting question, as Sales overall tends to have some of the highest turnover rates over any other department within an organization. Each time an organization loses another sales team member, it is not just the employee loss that hurts the organization. There are many downstream issues that affect the organization from associated revenue loss, recruitment cost, on-boarding cost, and potential loss of client trust. This makes sense as to why organizations should be finding ways to ensure good sales team members stick around longer. Engaged reps are no longer spending entire careers within one organization but hop job to job every few years […]

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

Posted on May 22, 2019August 2, 2023 by Nicholas Biron

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

Posted on April 29, 2019March 15, 2021 by Nicholas Biron

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

Posted on April 19, 2019March 15, 2021 by Nicholas Biron

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

Posted on March 27, 2019June 28, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

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

Posted on March 20, 2019June 23, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

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

Posted on March 1, 2019July 12, 2023 by Nicholas Biron

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 […]

CRM the Equivalent of a Paperweight in Small Businesses

Posted on January 30, 2019June 30, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

Let’s first start with a few reasons your team might not be using the system: Lack of Management Use – That’s right: they learned it from watching you. At times, we do see various teams making an honest effort to use the CRM tools in the way they are meant to be used. However, over time, the team has begun to notice the management team’s lack of use. The question of, “Why bother?” then comes into play. As an example, a core use of CRM is around sales pipeline management, but what is the point of keeping a CRM updated when sales leadership continues to run around asking reps for pipeline updates via email, scratch sheets, or Excel spreadsheets instead of running reports with the […]

The Small Business Sales Quota Dilemma

Posted on January 7, 2019June 23, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

Earlier today, I read “Why are Half of All Sales Reps Still Missing Quota in a Booming US Economy?” and found the article itself, and the comments within LinkedIn around the article, a little disturbing. Almost all the points were towards the reps themselves and not the businesses… Let’s face it: if any business is having more than 50% of their reps miss their sales quota, something is very wrong! No business should ever have 50% or more of their reps missing numbers, and if they are, that is a failure on the business’s part—period. As many businesses gear up for their yearly planning sessions, now is the time to really look in the mirror before developing new quotas and truly understand the business itself. […]

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

Posted on December 13, 2018June 23, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

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

Posted on November 28, 2018June 30, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

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

Posted on November 7, 2018June 23, 2022 by Nicholas Biron

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 […]