Earlier this week there was an article on SmallBizTechnology.com about how the biggest problem small businesses have in using technology is lack of education.  I absolutely agree with the sentiment – who has time to learn about technology when they have a business to run?  In the article Ramon Ray recommended spending an hour or two a week learning about technology.  From there, however, he talked a lot about technology that boosts a businesses online presence – Facebook, blogging, Twitter and local search.  These are all important but there is so much more!

So what else should a small business owner educate themselves about?  There are so many topics that it can seem like a maze but if you take a look at this list you can concentrate on a few topics at a time:

• How can you make things easier for your customer?  (easy online access to content and services)
• How can you make things easier for your staff? (remote access, simple processes, collaboration tools)
• How can you touch more prospects, close more sales and increase revenue? (CRM, email newsletters)
• How can you streamline your internal processes and maybe save money? (better integration, fewer but more powerful systems, remote hosting, cloud services)
• How can you get a better handle on your business? (reporting, analytics)

So here is a short round-up of good sources for technology information – these are examples but they should give you somewhere to start:

• online technology magazines and blogs like smallbiztechnology.com and smallbusinesscomputing.com.  I also like Laurie McCabe’s blog.
• industry specific online sources like the Law Technology News section of Law.com or Techtips on TheProgressiveAccountant.com
• online communities like American Express Open and Biznik.com
• local blogs like atlantasmall.biz

What technology topics would you like to know more about?  Where do you go to get your technical education?

by  Erin!

I have written a few posts about CRM applications in the past but I’ve come to realize that folks are still confused about what CRM is.  I think that is part of the reason there are so many failed CRM implementations – too many people don’t realize how broad the term is and when they choose a tool they do it without evaluating what they need and comparing it to what is available.  Believe me, sometimes more is NOT better.  Worse, CRM is as much a business strategy as a technology – you need both to be successful.
 

So what is CRM then?

According to Wikipedia CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a broad term referring to “a widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support.”.  Wow, that is a lot of stuff.

In an attempt to further simplify I’ve come up with an overly simple graphic (so you knowledgeable folks don’t need to tell me what I left out – sock puppet simple, remember?) to help illustrate.

If you think of the three major functions of CRM in a Venn diagram as above you can see that sales, marketing and customer service share a major function which is simply called Contact Management here but is really the information about your customers.  Therein lies the problem.  Some companies want the sales functions and contact management, some want the marketing functions and contact management.  Some companies just want contact management.  Regardless of what you want, if you don’t choose the right application you are likely to get one with all of the functionality.  Anytime you get more than you want to use you are asking for trouble.

So how do you get the right tool?

It pays to think about your strategy first, even a simplified one.  What are you trying to accomplish for your business?  Then, with a bullet list of requirements, look at the functionality of the available tools.  Don’t restrict yourself to the big names or the one your buddy uses – look at all of them.  Make sure you are getting what you really need, not a whole lot else.  Picking something that has just what you need will make installation, training and adoption immeasurably easier.

But what if I need more functionality later?

If you are absolutely, positively certain you will want, say, sales force automation in the next 6-12 months then add it to your requirements.  Otherwise, add a requirement that speaks to the ease of moving data in and out to your list.  Who knows what applications will be available a year from now – make sure you can easily get your data out and worry about what the next right tool is when you are ready.

Get help if you need it

Remember, unless you are an IT professional or CRM expert, choosing a tool and implementing it correctly can be a daunting proposition.  If you had a tax or legal issue you’d get help from your accountant or attorney, right?  Don’t hesitate to get help from your technical advisor if you need it.

Bottom line

There are a lot of CRM applications and most of them are pretty good.  It is a pretty mature technology and there are many happy customers using each and every one.  Unfortunately they almost all have unhappy customers too and many times it is because the wrong tool was chosen.  Take your time, do it right and get help if you need it.

It has been almost a year since I wrote my last blog post on cloud computing and tons has been written about it since – and yet I think the recent article on CMSWire.com that claims that small and medium sized businesses are still confused is right on the money.  So in honor of the one year anniversary of my last post I’ll take another run on the subject.

The simplest definition is still this:  if you use technology in your business without buying software and installing on your own hardware you are using cloud computing.    But what does that mean to a small or medium sized business?

More Technology is Available for Your Business

Think about all the technology you use or could use in your business – email, calendars, accounting and CRM software.  Once upon a time only large companies could afford applications like these.  If you wanted this functionality you had to buy the software, buy the hardware and maintain both, at considerable expense.  Today any size company can utilize these applications for a monthly subscription (or sometimes it is even free!).  This allows small and medium sized businesses to be more nimble and more strategic than ever before.

You Can Save Money

Not only can your business take advantage of the technology the big guys use, you can do it for a lot less money.  Since you are essentially sharing the application with others your cost is much lower.  Even better though is you don’t have to buy or support the hardware infrastructure these applications often require.  In fact, businesses that have already invested in servers and have to pay employees or service providers to support them can often reduce those costs or eliminate them altogether by moving to cloud applications.  Maybe your business requires some specialized software that isn’t available in the cloud – you may still be able to reduce your over all technology costs by running that application on servers in the cloud.  Amazon, Rackspace and others provide on-demand computing services and bandwidth which means you don’t need your own servers.  Companies like these are staffed by experienced folks dedicated to keeping the machines up, running and secure.

It Isn’t Magic

Cloud computing opens up a wealth of opportunities for today’s businesses.  Like anything else though, it is not a magic bullet.  There are costs involved and every business needs to look at their needs and make decisions to “go to the cloud” on a case by case basis.  There are access and security risks to consider and data integration challenges to address.  Talk to an experienced technology advisor about the opportunities for YOUR business.

by  Lynchburg College Archives

In today’s installment of my series on small business growing plains I am going to talk about the order-to-cash cycle.  When a business is new it is easy to get so excited about the first sale that as soon as an order is received or a contract signed the business owner immediately sends out the associated invoice or statement.  Those simple documents are full of symbolism for the nascent concern – you are for real!  You have real customers and can bring in real money!  Woo hoo!

The Order-to-Cash Conundrum

As you get bigger and busier it is easy to put off creating those all-important documents that a)represent potential income to your company and b) signal your customer to pay you.  Maybe you don’t have time to create them more than once a week, or worse, once a month.  All of a sudden getting paid is taking longer and longer.  Even if you get administrative or bookkeeping help you’ll likely settle on a set schedule for billing, perhaps once a week, that doesn’t jive with when you actually sold the order or the contract.

When you get even bigger and busier it can get worse – let’s say now you have sales people to sell orders or contract work.  Or that you have field service technicians that have to do the work that in turn leads to an order.  These guys have paperwork to get filled out and they may not be in the office every day so it is easy for that paperwork to be delayed and then, when it is finally turned it, it may be incorrect and require a cycle of rework.  Now your invoices and statements are even MORE delayed.  Add that to the fact that your customers aren’t always in a hurry to pay you right away and you suddenly have a cash flow problem.

How can you avoid or rectify this ever-lengthening order-to-cash black hole?

Order or Contract Entry

There are a number of ways to improve the order or contract entry process :

• Keep your sales customer information in sync with your accounting customer information.  This can make it quicker and easier to set up a new account for billing and make sure you apply the order or contract to the correct billing customer.  You can keep them in sync thru manual processes or by integrating your customer relationship management system with your accounting system.  Some applications integrate easily, others may require some help from a technical resource.
• Provide mechanisms to allow your sales or field service folks to enter contracts or sales orders online.  This can be as simple as having them upload a spreadsheet to a specified place to as fancy as an application that they can access remotely, maybe even from a mobile device.  The quicker you can get the contract or order entered into your billing application the faster you can get invoices out.  Where possible cut out paper altogether; if it isn’t possible to go paperless try to change your process to match paper to online records on the back end.
• Incent your sales and field service folks to enter their information online quickly and correctly.  Quite simply, if you can’t bill your customer maybe they shouldn’t get paid.  Hmm, just a thought.

Invoice Creation

• Simplify invoice or statement creation.  Avoid “special” invoices for customers and make sure any invoice or statement can be easily produced from your accounting software.  If your accounting software doesn’t do this you might want to look for a system that does or look for a billing system that integrate with what you have.
• If you can put invoice creation on “auto-pilot” where it runs on a regular schedule all on its own, do so.  If you can’t, adjust the back office processes to create invoices on a regular, frequent basis.  How regular and frequent?  It depends on your cash flow needs but daily, if it isn’t a complicated process, might not be too often.

It is easy for the order, contract and billing processes to get in the way of getting the customer a timely invoice.  Beyond prolonging the time until you get paid, what kind of message does a tardy invoice send your customer?  That you are unorganized?  That their business isn’t important?

If you think there are ways to improve your order-to-cash cycle, contact your technical advisor.  He or she can help you review your current processes and talk about where improvements, both manual and automated, might be in order.

If you thought this post was helpful you may want to check out the rest in this series so far.

• Can you keep up with your customer’s service needs?
• Are you addicted to spreadsheets?
• How long does it take to set up a new customer?

by  Arbron

Don’t act innocent, you know what I mean.  Spreadsheet software is oh so easy to use and so inexpensive (or even free).  You can use it to keep your company books, to keep your budget and forecast, to keep lists of customers, to create invoices, to create sales orders, reporting and analytics, inventory…the list goes on and on.

It is time for a spreadsheet intervention!

Following are the top 10 reasons you should stop and reconsider the use of spreadsheets in your business:

1. Sometimes the creator of the spreadsheet doesn’t know what they are doing and the calculations are incorrect.
2. If you make changes to values on a spreadsheet and save it you no longer know what the original value was.  Unless you saved a version off first, creating yet another spreadsheet.
3. If you have lots of versions, on hard drives, in email, on various computers you have no single version of the truth – whose spreadsheet is right?
4. Often the creator of the spreadsheet leaves it on the hard drive of the computer.  And often that hard drive isn’t backed up.
5. While we are on the subject of security risks, what do you think happens to all those spreadsheets you mail around?  Any idea where they go?
6. As you put more and more stuff into your spreadsheet the more unwieldy it becomes.
7. As you put more and more stuff into your spreadsheet and make multiple copies because of versioning you are now eating up disk space.  Every day.
8. They waste time.  If you pay someone to do a repetitive task in a spreadsheet, add up how much time they spend on it each week.  Then find out how much it would cost to automate that task.  The numbers are usually enlightening.
9. The second you save the spreadsheet the data is old.  Inventory is not up to date, customer contact information isn’t accurate, accounts are stale.
10. It isn’t scalable.  You can’t continue to use spreadsheets as an integral part of your business for very long without running into roadblocks from bad or inaccurate data or the sheer manhours required to keep up with them.  Your company will grow, I’m sure of it, and if you rely heavily on spreadsheets you will get mired in the muck at some point.
11. You can’t easily integrate the data from one spreadsheet to another.  So you copy and paste date, duplicating it and opening it up to errors or staleness.

See I couldn’t stop at 10.  I could go on even further but I think I’ve made my point.

Today’s business owners are fortunate – there are software solutions for most business needs and small businesses can get great functionality for free or low-cost.  CRM systems to keep up with customers, accounting systems for your numbers, inventory application and the rest are plentiful, have great functionality and have been tested to ensure the data and information they produce is correct.

I am not a spreadsheet hater – I think there are good uses for spreadsheets.  One time financial or what-if analysis.  As a front-end to a database for more detailed analysis and reporting.  For lists.  But not as an integral part of running a business of any size.  Its just not good business.

Note:  this article was originally published last week in our newsletter.  If you’d like to receive the newsletter you can subscribe here.

Have you ever thought that you need a better way to keep track of your customers or clients? Have you heard about CRM systems but not really understood how they could help your business?

If you have a service-based business…

If your business provides a service then a CRM system can help you in several ways. First, it becomes the single repository for all of the information about your customers or prospects – you and all your employees are keeping notes about emails, phone calls, quotes, deals and everything else in the same place. In that place you can make ticklers to follow up with contacts, create reports on who is calling on who and keep an eye on your pipeline. In one place you have all the information about the work you’ve done for a customer, making customer support much easier. Having lunch with a prospect you haven’t seen in a while? In your CRM you can look up references to his website, LinkedIn profile or Twitter account – won’t he be surprised when you are up-to-date on his business and congratulate him on his recent wedding anniversary!

Or if you are in the retail or hospitality business…

You can keep track of your vendors and suppliers. Create and newsletter and keep track of subscribers. To that list of subscribers you can provide special offers and incentives – and better yet, measure the effectiveness of those offers and incentives. You can create a relationship with your customers and reward their loyalty.

Of course, a CRM system isn’t one thing for one sort of business and something else to another. All businesses can be more effective, efficient and even more profitable by doing a better job of keeping track of customers and contacts. It is a smarter way to do business.

In my last post I talked about how small businesses can become more convenient for their customers if they allow online self-secheduling.   I promised that this post would talk about what online appointment scheduling services are available.  This is a representative list; it isn’t a formal review nor is it an exhaustive list.  The ones I am going to talk about are cloud-based services (see this post if you don’t know what cloud computing is) that are easily hooked into your website.

So how do they work?  There is some variance but basically:

• you provide information about business hours, who can be scheduled, what services are offered and the appointment length of each service
• you also provide setup information about how you want to be notified about appointments (email or text), what sort of confirmations and reminders you want sent to your customers (email or text).  You can also specify if you want to be able to approve appointments before they are confirmed.
• you are given a small snippet of code (or a widget)  that needs to be included on your website.  Generally these can be customized so they match your website and look like they are integrated.  You can also include “book now” buttons in strategic places on your website or other places on the web (like your Facebook page for example), sending visitors to your appointment page.

Customers can now schedule appointments online!  Back at your office you’ll have a master calendar that shows your the appointments, allows you to confirm them and to book appointments you receive from drop-ins or via phone call – all on a consolidated calendar.

Some of the services provide, in some cases based on the service level you choose to purchase, mobile scheduling, calendar syncing, online pre-payment and smartphone integration.

Service providers include Bookfresh.com; Schedulicity.com, Genbook.com, Appointment-plus.com, Appointmentquest.com, Flashappointments.com and Netappointment.com.  You generally pay monthly based on the options you select – for example it costs more for more people or multiple locations.   Prices start as low as $10 a month.

It appears that a) a lot of small business owners don’t know what “cloud computing” is and b) regardless of whether they know or don’t know they are wary of it. In this post I will clearly and simply explain what it is and hopefully clear up some of the myths and misunderstandings about cloud computing.

Wikipedia defines cloud computing as “cloud computing” is Internet- (“cloud-”) based development and use of computer technology (computing)”. Clear as mud, huh? This is simplest way I can think of to explain what cloud computing is: if you are doing something without installing hardware on your computer or a computer on your local network, you are involved with cloud computing. A great example is email – if you use Gmail, Hotmail, AOL mail, Yahoo mail or anything similar you are using cloud computing. You are using computers and programs that live in the cloud we call the Internet.  Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Twitter – yep, all in the cloud.

But what does this have to do with business, especially small business?    Essentially it means that as a small business owner you have lots of opportunities to choose whether to buy software (and likely hardware) or choose a vendor to supply services virtually over the Internet.

What are some concrete examples?  What about (lists not inclusive):

• file storage and sharing.  You can buy and install  file server and connect it to your network or use a cloud-based solution like Egnyte, Dropbox, Google Docs or Box.net
• email.  Too many examples to mention, starting with our friends at Google.
• accounting.  Good old friends Quickbooks can be run online as well as newcomers like Freshbooks
• CRM.  Salesforce.com is a pioneer of cloud computing; other entrants to the fray include Batchbook (I talk about them here), SugarCRM, Zoho and Highrise
• Word processing and spreadsheets.  In this post I talk about Google Docs, Zoho and the like
• Document Management.
• Reporting and analytics.
• and the list goes on and on.

What are the pros and cons of using cloud computing?

1. It can be fast and inexpensive to get started.  Whether you have a new business or an existing business, using a cloud-based solution can dramatically cut down the time to get up and running and reduce your initial capital outlay.  If your business needs change rapidly, using cloud-based solutions allows you to add features quickly or even move to another solution more easily.  On the flipside, as your business grows you may find that the capital outlay of in-house applications is less expensive than ongoing costs of a cloud application.  You should always read the fine print and make sure that you can easily retrieve your data and move it to another provider should you outgrow your first choice or if you are unhappy with the service you are getting.
2. Your systems and data are easily accessible.  Wow, this is a big one; think about it, you can access your data from anywhere, anytime.   Using the business center in the hotel where you are vacationing and want to check your Quickbooks?  No problem!  Your salesperson drops their pc in the lake?  Don’t worry, their contact information is safe in the CRM system in the sky.  Cloud-based applications support virtual offices and working from home “out of the box” so to speak.  Downside?  You only have access to your applications and data thru the Internet.  No Internet access?  Internet down?  Have a slow internet connection?  All of these can affect, in some cases dramatically, your access to your business information.  As a business owner you have to weigh the risks of not having access to the costs of controlling your own access (and remember, if you don’t have electricity you are likely SOL anyway).
3. Your information may not be secure.  On one hand, it may not be secure in your office either.  Is it backed up regularly and is that backup in an offsite location?  Is it on a computer or server that is secured properly on the Internet?  Is it physically secure from theft, natural disaster, etc?  Many small business owners don’t pay attention to these factors, making their systems and data LESS secure in their own office than it would be anywhere else.  Most of the companies that provide cloud-based services have shelled out a lot of dough to make sure their systems are secure, safe and stay up.  That said, not all of them do it the same way or in the same degree.  As a small business owner you should sit down and assess the level of risk you are willing to take and with which kinds of data.  Then, as you look into cloud-based applications, make sure you understand each suppliers security precautions and service level agreements.
4. You can concentrate on your business, something you are probably pretty good at.  You can leave the care and feeding of computers and systems to the highly trained and compensated personnel that work for the service providers.  It can be distracting and expensive to maintain technology; most small businesses are better off spending their energy and money somewhere else.

Bottom line? My take is that most of the cloud-based applications are good, safe and secure and are getting more so every day.  While you should certainly thoughtfully assess your individual needs, especially where accessibility and security are concerned, I believe small businesses should seriously consider cloud-computing for many of their needs.  Determining where it makes sense and how to transition your applications should be part of your technology plan.

How do YOU feel about the cloud?

Photo attribution:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/8769295@N07/ / CC BY 2.0

I thought I’d start a regular feature (maybe bi-monthly) about the software tools and services used at Clearly Simple Solutions. Of course, there are caveats to this, namely that this post reflects what I use and think is cool at a  specific point in time. What seems like the perfect tool today may not fit the bill tomorrow and I may already have a new favorite. You never know.

I’ll kick off the feature with my current favorite, Batchbook. Batchbook is a “social crm” (the company’s moniker, not mine) from Batchblue. I’ve been using it 6-8 weeks now and so far so good.

How did I chose it? I wish I could say I took copious notes at the time I was reviewing the options, but I didn’t. Personally, I cared about a few things:

• ease of use

• ability to import and export contacts

• to-do list management

• ability to keep track of communications with contacts

• some simple way to do campaign management

• low cost

• web-based

Of course, even though I was looking for a tool for my own business, I was on the lookout for tools that would work well for my small business clients as well. So I discovered a funny thing about CRM tools for small businesses – there are a lot of good ones. I felt like there were a lot of viable choices.  Many small business are successful with Highrise, ZohoCRM, SugarCRM or one of the other major contenders. What it came down to was, well, personality.  What I mean by that in this case is how was combination of design, functionality and support suitable so using it isn’t a chore?  In my case, Batchbook fit the bill.  The site and the tool had the right feel, the right vibe and the right level of functionality; not too little (some are barely more than contact list), not too much (in some the sales and marketing features made me cross-eyed).  I haven’t used the support directly myself yet but the forums and FAQs are easy to use and suggest friendly, quick customer service.

What do I like?

• It was easy to use right away.  For me, reading instructions is what you do after you can’t figure out how to do something.  I very rarely have to read instructions for Batchbook.
• The error messages, when you get them, are clear.
• It is easy to find things.
• Nothing is “in your face” or shouting at you.
• It is way easy to import and export contacts.  You can also add contacts by just forwarding an email to Batchbook.
• I love the social media connections; for each for my contacts I can monitor their Twitter activity, LinkedIn and other social outlets.
• Although I have way too many contacts for the free version, the next level up is attractively priced.
• And the tags and supertags are way cool – anything you can’t do somewhere else you can do with them.  Finally, it integrates well with Mail Chimp which was a pleasant surprise.

What could be better?

• Well, it could be faster, for a start.
• If you add a contact with tags it is two steps instead of one.
• Reporting could be seriously juiced up – I know I am a reformed software engineer but how can you do good queries with no parentheses and no ability to search for null or empty fields?
• What is up with no Facebook integration?

Other than those small quibbles, so far so good.  Not only do I like the tool, I have recommended it to a few friends.  The folks at Batchblue don’t know me from Adam so this is an unbiased opinion.  Tools like Batchbook are ideal for small businesses.

What do you use for YOUR small business?