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.

I have spent a number of hours over the past few weeks, bringing air and light to the far recesses of my son’s bedroom and removing a winter’s supply of mud, bugs, dust and pollen from my screen porch.  So that makes it time for my second annual post about spring cleaning your technology.

The Current Clean Up List

To get us started I’ll refer you to my previous posts on the topic – every year you should look at your website to see if needs to be refreshed (and it probably does!).  There are more great tips for cleaning up your website in this post from Moreover Technologies. You should also clean out your old emails or at least archive them out of your mailbox.  Finally, I’ll add here my continued plea to put your fax machine of its misery.

Read more »

by  RossW

I have written other posts about cloud computing and I am sure you see articles and blog posts about it all the time.  Today I want to narrow in on how cloud computing can improve how you run your office without buying hardware.

Reducing Software Costs

Most of us use the ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite – it is great but it can be expensive.  Some companies have found they can get close to the same functionality but for free with other office suites such as Zoho, Google Docs, and OpenOffice.

File Sharing and Collaboration

Not too long ago if you wanted to share files with your co-workers or employees you had 2 choices.  You could install a network your office or you could employee “sneaker net” – trading files on (used to be) floppy drives or (today) flash drives.  Now there are a lot of choices for online file sharing and collaboration – from simple tools like Box, Dropbox, Google Docs, Zoho or Egnyte, to setting up an intranet via a hosted version of Microsoft SharePoint.  Depending on your needs and which tool you choose, you can not only share files, you have instant access to capabilities like controlling access, tagging, keeping multiple versions of a document or searching across documents.  Even if you have highly sensitive documents, there is a cloud vendor that can  help you.

Providing Remote Access Regardless of Device (almost)

A cool thing about the file sharing and collaboration tools listed above is that most of them support file access and viewing via any browser and have special purpose iPhone or iPad apps.  It is great to be able to refer to documents and share them while you are out of the office.  The only problem is that you can’t EDIT the documents.  Unless, of course, you purchase a special purpose app, of which there are several.

Beyond the file sharing and collaboration tools, another more recent addition to the cloud parade are cloud-based desktops – in this case instead of having your software installed on a specific machine where you can only use when you are ON that machine, you can can have a virtual desktop that you can access from any device with a browser.  Since it acts just like your desktop (because it is) you can run any application that is on your desktop.  How cool is that.  Vendors in this space include Desktone, OnTheNetOffice and tuCloud.

Making Software Upgrades Simple

Virtual desktops bring another simplifying factor to your office – what if you could do away with installing software on each individual machine and keeping up with releases and patches on a one off basis?  Virtual desktop functionality allows you to create a “master” desktop with all the software your company needs and to replicate it across your users.  Time to upgrade or apply a patch?  Do it once and everyone gets it!  You can even create one-off masters if there is specialized software only a few folks need.  Of course, you still have to pay for the software licenses for each user.  I know, always a bummer to find out there isn’t a magic pill to rid you of software costs!

I hope this helps you think about concrete ways cloud technology can help you simplify your office, expand your capabilities and maybe even save you some money.  If you have used tools like these and have a story to share I’d love to hear them!

by  Search Engine People Blog

Quick, can you tell me which is your most profitable customer?

Or as the headline points out, pick the dimension or view of your company and tell me what, who, which is most profitable?  Or least profitable?  And can you tell me why?

There are typically three answers to this question:

Companies in the first group answer with a resounding “No way!”.  Why?   Likely the information they need to analyze these points is all over the place – in different systems that don’t talk to each other or worse not in any system at all.  Maybe some in an accounting application and the rest is in a spreadsheet somewhere.  Or maybe on a napkin in your sales managers pocket.  You know what I am talking about.

Companies in the second group answer with “of course”.   This sounds pretty good until you ask the next question which is something more complicated like “who are your top 5 most profitable customers by product line?”.  What I find at this point is these companies have some decent rudimentary analytics, likely manually extracted from various systems and housed in a spreadsheet.  This is not altogether bad – they know what metrics are important to their company and have a process for producing those metrics.  The problem is that this isn’t scalable – as soon as you want to change the question, even slightly, you’ll find the metrics are created in an inflexible way.  Someone has to go back and manually change the spreadsheet, maybe making another version, maybe disconnecting it from the base data.  The thing about analytics is that as soon as you know one thing you want to know something else about that thing – it never ends!    This means static spreadsheets, while  good for getting your feet wet, won’t last long.

Companies in the third group can answer with “of course” and then proceed to further analyze their business for key insights and trends.  In this case they have integrated their data from various systems and sources into a source for analytics and reporting using business intelligence tools.  These tools allow them to more easily change their questions without re-doing  bunch of spreadsheets.  Some of you have probably heard about business intelligence and business intelligence tools and dismiss them for use by small and medium sized businesses.  It is time to think again!

What has changed in BI tools?

Traditionally large enterprises have been able to leverage BI tools and data warehouses to gain tremendous insight into their businesses.  They can do things like predict what products you might like to buy after an initial purchase or tell a store how to most effectively position products on their shelves.  They can analyze service routes and call center performance.  There really is no end to what CAN be done – it just takes money.  A boatload of money.  Money on software and hardware and lots and lots of money for people (either employees or consultants) install, configure and make sure all the pieces work together.  In recent years this has started to change.  There are tools that run as a service (SaaS, in the cloud) that provide many of the capabilities that the large BI tools can.  These smaller, nimbler tools can pull data from your existing systems (even files and spreadsheets) and organize it in a way to be easily accessible for analytics and reporting.  Usually your expenses will be a monthly subscription for these tools and probably some initial consulting help to get you started (some of the vendors purport that you don’t need that but I’m dubious – at the risk of venturing into the realm of self-promotion I think that some consulting help at the beginning to define goals and metrics and help choose a vendor would save most businesses money in the long run.  But I digress.).

In short, what do these BI tools do?

They can  help you measure and manage your business, enabling what-if analysis and the easy ability to change the questions you are asking.  They make pulling the data together from diverse sources easier and less painful.   They create “one version of the truth”.  Some even package up solutions for function-specific analysis – pipeline analysis (sales), financial analysis (finance), cost analysis (operations) , or supply chain analysis (supply chain).

How do I get started?

There are a number of good vendors in this space.  They include (but are not limited to) Birst, Pivotlink, Gooddata, Easy Insight, Jaspersoft, and Zoho Reports.  Each of these has different features and integrates data in different ways.  If you have someone experienced with analytics and reporting on your staff you are in luck.  Otherwise your next step is to talk with your technology advisor to determine what your needs are and which product suits them the best.  Then you can put together a plan that lays out initial steps and associated costs.  Start with a plan, start slow and measure your progress (use metrics to measure your analytics!) and soon you’ll have greater insight into your business.

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?

Retail and food service businesses probably don’t have this problem but service companies that are growing know exactly what I am talking about.  After identifying a customer, engaging in a protracted sales process, and wrangling over the fine details of the contract you are ready to begin providing services to your new customer, and better yet, start invoicing them.  But when you talk to the various parts of your company you realize it is all a lot harder than you thought.  Why is that and why does it take so long?

To answer that let’s look at a typical set-up a medium-sized company might have:

• Your customer is hopefully already set up in your CRM system, at least as far as your sales folks are concerned.  You will want to make sure your customer service folks have them set up for their needs too.
• You will want the new customer set up in your accounting system…
• And your billing system..
• And in whatever operational system(s) you use (consulting firms might have project management systems, shipping companies might have logistics systems, wireless carriers will have network systems).

Even if you don’t have individual applications for these functions, you still have people who have to know about the new customer and to adapt their internal processes to accommodate them.

So why would doing this take a long time?  If you are a smallish company it might not be too bad – you may have to update your various applications, spreadsheets or lists yourself or holler over to the guy in the next chair.  As your company gets bigger, however, you’ll likely start dividing the work functionally – you may have an accounting group or department, another for billing, another for sales, one for customer service and another one for the operational aspects.  Suddenly getting everyone on the same page, and better yet, with the same information, becomes a challenge.  As you become more successful and grow you may find that your automation has become fractured – some groups have grownup applications, some use spreadsheets or their own databases.  This uneven growth and lack of integration across the organization becomes more and more difficult to manage.  Which leads to increases in your cost to onboard a customer.  And, because every group updated their processes and systems manually you may have played “telephone” with important information like customer name, addresses, contact info, etc.  This in turn will lead to issues down the road doing analytical reporting about things like the profitability of a customer.

The good news is this not a new problem – millions of companies face this all the time.  Think of it as a good sign, a growing pain for a successful company.  It is a legitimate problem though and if left to get out of hand can bog a company down, making your organization a modern day Tower of Babel.  Here are some of the symptoms:

• You have  ”bad data” – which is, generally in this situation, inconsistent data.
• You miss key dates – for example your contact stipulates an SLA period for follow up on issues that never made it to customer service.
• You notice frequent miscommunications with customers.  Or about customers.
• You experience more the than usual instances of over or under billing.
• Or your numbers aren’t what you expect but you don’t know why.

What can you do?  Here are some thoughts:

• When you start to see these symptoms force yourself to take the time to stop and take a look around.  If you are still small you may be able to institute some policies and procedures that govern how new customers are set up.  Something as simple as a check sheet can go a long way to staving off problems.  Collaborating with lists and spreadsheets in the cloud might help as well.  Look at Google Docs, Zoho, Dropbox or the like.
• Listen to your employees carefully for statements that indicate the symptoms such as “We’re doing business with ABC in two different offices and it is so hard to keep it straight.  Sure would help if they were set up the same in both places!”.  When you hear this ask probing questions to figure out why.
• Take the time to document your processes.  Then review them and look for inefficiencies and opportunities to automate processes or integrate processes for which you already have applications.  As a bonus you’ll have training material for onboarding new employees!
• Review the processes regularly, at least annually, as input into your technology plan and budget for next year.

Like I said earlier, this isn’t the sign of a “bad” company, just one that has grown by focusing on getting the job done and not “how” the job gets done.  And as you can see, taking a look at the “how” now and again can help you continue to grow.

Has your company experienced this growing pain?

When was the last time you took a look at your small business’s website?  I bet you set it up a few (or maybe not so few!) years ago, spurred on by your nephew, daughter, or friend and have not done anything to it since.  As part of your spring cleaning you should take a pass thru your website to see if it is up-to-date and correct.  Better yet, consider hiring a professional (usually a marketing professional) to give it a once over.  Don’t be afraid that they may want to redo the entire site – they may well suggest that.  That is how they make a living, after all!  Insist that they just do a review with a list of suggestions and a cost to implement each suggestion.  Pick what seems appropriate to you and that you can afford.  You may even be able to make some of the changes yourself.  Areas to consider:

• It sounds simple but I bet I can pull up 10 websites and at least 9 of them are dated earlier than 2010.  If I am a potential customer and see your website hasn’t been updated since 2007, it doesn’t give me warm, fuzzy feelings about your business.  Having no date isn’t a great option either; customers and prospects want to know that you are keeping up with things in and with your business.
• Re-read the text; does it still make sense today?  Does it still have the same voice you want to have represent your business?  Or is it too stilted and formal?  Social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) has driven the Internet to a less formal, more intimate voice.  You should still be professional online but you may want to consider your language in relation to changes happening on the Internet.
• Are your products, services and prices up to date?  You should certainly update them if they are not.  If you don’t specify your products, services or prices you may want to consider adding them.
• Consider adding links to social media (and diving into social media if you aren’t already there).
• Make sure you site is search engine friendly – and by that I mean with today’s search engines.  The search algorithms change constantly; your site might have performed well in 2007 but might not now.
• Update graphics or photos if they look dated.
• Make sure you site is loading quickly.  Not only does this add to a better user experience, the search engines are starting to “grade” sites on their performance.  Slow-to-load sites will be penalized.
• Your customers and prospects want to know about who they are doing business with.  Consider adding an ‘about us’ section and be sure to include affiliations, etc.
• Finally, make it easy for folks to contact you.  So many sites force users to use their sign up form – this is a convenience for the site owner businesses, NOT for the user.  Sure, it automatically updates your email list but if I want to talk to someone NOW I want to have a phone number available or an email address I can use directly.

These are a few ideas for “spring cleaning” your website, to add a little spit and polish to your online presence.  If you have other ideas, I’d love to hear them!

Wow, we are part 5 of the series on how to use technology to improve customer service with your small business.  No foolin!

Today I want to talk about online chat, also known as live chat or click-to-chat.    This is a feature you can add to your website that allows your customers or prospects to choose to communicate with your company real time, using text.  It can be implemented in a number of ways and can provide a variety of service-related benefits to your small business:

• Your customer service folks can be involved in multiple chats, allowing them to help more people at one time than they could on the phone.  Not only can your representatives have multiple chats going at once, you can “can” responses to frequently asked questions and your reps can use them by pressing a single button.   You can increase customer service while reducing operational costs!
• It allows your customer service people to engage in communication that is more conversation-like than asynchronous email.  The number of people that engage in live chat or instant messaging is on the rise so this a communication channel that many are very familiar with.  Finally, while it is real-time and comfortable, it allows for a level of anonymity that some people prefer.
• Customers or prospects that engage in online chat generally have a higher tolerance for waiting for service (but not too long!) – by definition they are online and can easily multitask while they are waiting for answers to their questions.  When they are on hold on the phone they are usually much less patient.
• Most, if not all, live chat implementations allow you to push content, via links, to the recipient.   You can provide FAQs or a how-to videos easily, for example.
• If you have an e-commerce site where you sell a product, most live chat vendors provide “shop with me” functionality that allows you to gently guide your customer thru your site and address any questions.
• You can set up live chat to proactively engage users if they spend a long time on a page or repeat actions that indicate they are having a problem.
• All of the chat conversations are logged and saved to a database.  You can use them identify frequent customer problems or diagnose customer-service issues.

Live chat can provide benefits beyond improved customer service.  Most of the vendors provide functionality that helps you better understand how users interact with your site and to optimize it.  You can proactively engage prospective customers at key place in your site, perhaps speeding up the acquisition or conversion process.

As with any new technology, there are a lot of best practices you can employ to improve your chances of success – just as there a lot of way to screw it up and annoy your customers and prospects.   This is definitely a place where you should get professional help to make sure you are doing the right thing for your business.

If you are interested in learning more about live chat, contact your technical advisor and see if live chat needs a place in your technology plan.

I attended a very nice panel discussion yesterday (Using Technology to Grow the Firm, sponsored by Creative Growth Group) and one of the topics that came up close to the end was adoption of new technology.  This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart so naturally, since it is on my mind, it is this week’s topic.

Technology that is under utilized or unused (shelf-ware) is the bane of every company.  What starts out as an well-intentioned investment in the firm becomes, well, a sinkhole for money and time.  We’ve all heard of the multi-year, multi-million dollar ERP or CRM projects that end up getting scrapped because no one in the company can or wants to use the system.

For a small business the lost investment might not reach the dollar size of a failed project for a huge company but the results can be devastating because the failure affects virtually everyone in the enterprise and proportionally the level of investment is usually much higher.  Entire books have been written about project failure, I won’t rehash all the gory details here.  Instead, here are a few questions for small businesses to keep in ask themselves when they are thinking about putting in new technology.

• Is this technology part of an overall technology plan that takes into consideration your overall business goals and objectives?  If it is not or you don’t have a plan you probably aren’t setting yourself up for success.
• Does this project have a well-defined adoption plan?  (Yes, on paper.  It isn’t really a plan if it isn’t written down.)  Just purchasing training, while hugely important, is NOT an adoption plan.
• Do your employees truly understand the value of this technology to the organization and their part in making the implementation a success?  If they aren’t bought into the change you can still be successful but it is much much harder.
• Does this new technology really provide something that makes your employees’ jobs easier and better?  Does it fit with the way they work?  Or is it just another thing to add to the long list of stuff they gotta do every day?  If it changes how they work significantly, has the new workflow or business process been identified and documented?
• Is someone truly accountable for making sure the technology is used and the investment is realized?  I recently heard a story about a dentist that spent tons of money on new software for his dental practice.  As part of the deal he got training credits and he made sure all the assistants and office employees went to training.  Then he never mentioned the system again…he wasn’t holding his employees accountable for using the new system nor did he delegate that accountability to anyone else.  So guess what?

Bringing in new technology is a huge investment of time and money for a small business.  It is important to take the time to think it through.  If you aren’t sure how to do that, get some help from a reputable consultant or technical advisor.    If it is truly worth doing, if it is going to help grow your business, isn’t it worth doing right?