In my last post I talked about what to consider when moving to the cloud – and by the time I finished my first sentence or two I realized that the things you need to consider when deploying cloud applications are much the same as when you make any large technology change in your business.  I also realized I had more to say about this topic than would comfortably fit in one post (or even two!) so let’s chat some more about making large application, architecture or platform decisions, shall we?  Today let’s focus on some more factors that can make a large implementation harder or easier.

  by  ismh_ 

Are you adding new functionality?

You may find that adding new capabilities with a new system is somewhat easier than upgrading or replacing functionality that already exists.  Let’s say, for example, if you have a service business like an HVAC company and you decide to implement click to chat functionality on your website for the first time.  You don’t have replace something that already exists and retrain your staff.  You will still have to train them and create new processes but is often easier than changing old habits.  You will likely add interfaces to your other systems but that is almost always easier than mucking around with existing interfaces.  Contrast this click to chat example with swapping out your accounting system.  My head just hurts thinking about all the spaghetti that likely has to be unraveled!

How many other systems does it need to interface with?

If the technology you are adding is standalone then woo hoo!  It sure is nice not to have make sure systems talk to each other.  Oh, wait, this is the real world and I can’t think of anything that is truly standalone.  Let’s use our click to chat example – you’ll certainly have to integrate with your website.  You’ll likely want to interface to your CRM too – at the least the person chatting is a new contact.  They may also be a sales prospect or be trying to open a service ticket.

The more integration points a system has, the harder it likely is to implement.

Is it strategically important?

Are you adding technology that is going to be a game-changer for your business?  Then it will be harder because you absolutely, positively have to get it right.  The system has to work correctly, it has to integrate seamlessly with the rest of your business, and your staff (and possibly your customers) have to understand the implications of the new system and how to use it.  Our click to chat example is one that, while it will add customer service benefits, is likely not to be strategically important.

What are your regulatory constraints?

Is your industry free of regulatory constraints?  Or are you implementing a system that falls outside of these constraints?  Accountants, lawyers and medical professionals have constraints around client records and files.  When they are implementing systems that affect those records or files they have to tread carefully to make sure they remain in compliance.  In these cases technology change is harder.  If however, these same professionals are implementing an online appointment system, they are likely to have an easier time since this is outside the regulated areas.

So why is it so important to know what is easier or harder?  I’m not trying to talk you out of making technology changes – far from it.  Small businesses have a lot to gain by leveraging technology to their advantage.  It is critical to realize, however, what you are getting into and to make sure you plan for enough resources – mostly time and money – to do the job right.

Everyone is talking about cloud computing – heck I’ve written a good bit about it myself.  How do you know if your small business is ready?

First off, I’d argue that making any large technology change requires readiness – not just moving to the cloud.  So keep the following in mind when you consider any major infrastructure or application change.

  by  zolierdos

What Business Need Does it Fill?

What are you trying to accomplish by making a change?  Save money?  Open up new revenue opportunities?  Allow your staff or customers new functionality?  Improve processes and inefficiencies?  Any of these could be good drivers for making a technology change but be sure you know which it is and that you can clearly articulate why you want to make the change.  First of all, you want to make sure you aren’t chasing the latest bright, shiny object.  Second, any change will something your company will have to work through – it is never magic – so you want to make sure you can clearly articulate the business benefits.  Finally, going through the cost/benefit exercise, even if informally, will help you determine whether the benefits are worth the costs, both in hard dollars and in internal change costs.

Does it Support Business Processes?

Does the new toy support existing business processes?  How ingrained and mature are these processes?  On one hand if they are mature processes, it is easy to define those processes and map them to what will need to be done in the new environment.  On the other hand, if they are mature processes and don’t map well to the new functionality, your level of complexity in the change management arena just went up – a lot.  The same goes if you have no existing business processes or if they are ill-defined or ill-understood.  Things just got harder.

Here are some examples:  Let’s say you want to bring in a CRM tool.  Do you have a sales process?  A support process?  Are you going to try to teach your staff a new tool AND a new process?   Or is your current process inefficient and the tool will help streamline it?

Do Your Employees (and You!)  Have the Skill Sets They Will Need?

How tech savvy are you guys anyway?  I’ve found that many of the new applications are fairly easy to learn if a) you understand the underlying business process and b) you are reasonable comfortable with most common business tools (Word, Excel, email, etc.).  If even these basic tools are difficult to use then once again your level of difficulty score has gone up.  You’ll have to add time and effort to training and support.  Do you have an IT staff?  If so, are THEY comfortable with the new architectures and environments?  How much training and support will they need as well?

Don’t go into any big technology change without thinking about these three factors.  It is worth getting help from a professional to do a simple readiness assessment so you know the true cost of the change you are contemplating.

What if…

• You have an IT services firm and, despite having a backup and recover plan, you have a major outage and a large number of your customers lose their websites?  Do you say “oh well, we recovered what we could” or do you say “we will make it right and rebuild those sites for you”?  How much would that cost?
• You own a restaurant and your connectivity to your credit card processor goes down and you have no backup method for taking cards.  Do you revert to “cash only”?  How much would that lost business cost?
• You are a professional photographer and you drop and break the external hard drive that houses all your photos for the past 5 years – including the ones from last nights wedding photo shoot?  What is the cost of this loss?
• You are a lawyer whose files are now ruined by the fire that broke out in the office next door and quickly spread through the building?  What is the cost of recovering (if you can) copies of what was in those files?
• You own a consulting firm and the day before your monthly billing run you lose the computer that had the billing records for the whole month.  How long before you can bill your clients correctly?

I read an interesting article on CMSWire today called In the Cloud, the Role of IT Changes.  The opening argument was that now most companies, large and small, outsource things like wiring, copier support, phone support and the other “crawl on the floor to connect wires” type of IT work.  Now that they are also starting to move applications away from their premise and to the cloud, what role is there for IT in a small or medium sized organization.

I agree with the conclusion that IT will not go away.   The activities that IT folks do will change from installing, supporting and monitoring applications in house to choosing and managing vendors and external applications and making sure any integration work.  IT resources will be aligned more tightly with the business and focus on how the business uses the software and how the software might be configured to be most efficient.

In fact, as technology becomes more strategic for companies, the IT roles becomes more strategic and less “cost of doing business”.  How can your business best leverage emerging technologies?  What is your level of risk in various circumstances and how can you mitigate that risk?  Are you signed up for the appropriate level of service for your company?  Have you negotiated the best possible deal?

The points in the article are all good but how does this apply to small business?  I think it leads to a number of questions that each business owner has to address:

• do I have the time and knowledge to make technology decisions?
• do I have the time and knowledge to choose, negotiate with and manage any number of vendors?
• do I have the time and knowledge to integrate the solutions my business needs?

  by  philcampbell 

I haven’t posted about the tools I use for my small business in a while, which is a shame because I use Mailchimp every month.  It is also a shame because Mailchimp is a local Atlanta company and I am all about supporting local businesses.

What is MailChimp?

So what is Mailchimp?  It is a super easy to use email publishing platform.  Most companies use it for email newsletters but you can use it to email anything from regular old letters to invitations and  coupons.

Easy to use

There 3 main activities to creating a newsletter:  creating your email list, creating the campaign and monitoring the results.

1. It is a breeze to import your contacts – directly if you use a CRM (customer relationship management system) that integrates with them, thru a CSV file if you don’t.  I use Batchbook so I just share the Mailchimp API with Batchbook and click a button and my contacts are moved over.   You can manage your contacts in Mailchimp but I highly recommend you do that in a CRM.  Hmm, sounds like a topic for another blog post.
2. Once you have a list created you can create campaigns from their templates or from scratch.  They have a ton of good-looking templates.  If you are familiar with Word or WordPress you’ll find them very simple to use (and pretty hard to break).
3. The provide great reporting about how many people opened the email, what and where they clicked, etc.  You can even access the reporting on your mobile device.  They provide you with a ton of information you can use to improve the quality of your campaigns.

More advanced features

They include a lot of advanced features beyond just sending email.

• They have integrations with Facebook, Youtube , Twitter and more so you can share your email campaign on almost every social network.
• They also integrate with events hubs like Facebook and Evenbrite so you can use those tools with Mailchimps great templates.
• They have a good reputation for avoiding spam.  What this means to you is that a high percentage of their emails get delivered.
• It is easy to integrate their forms into your website if you like.
• Finally, you can do fancy stuff like a/b split testing (two versions of an email to see which performs better)

Cost

If you have fewer than 2000 subscribers and send fewer than 12000 a month you can use Mailchimp for free.  Only catch is they put a small logo on the bottom of your email.  It is small and unobtrusive so I am ok with that. Here is what it looked like at the bottom of my last newsletter.   If you don’t want the logo or have a bigger subscriber base you can get a paid account.   Monthly plans start at $15 and are based on your number of subscribers.  You can also opt to pay as you go.

What is the best part?

I mentioned the CRM integrations earlier but the company has obviously made a conscious effort to be open – they integrate with a multitude of other applications.  They integrate with more than 20 CRM applications, more than 20 CMS (content management system) applications and more than 20 e-commerce applications.  They actually integrate with a lot more partners but I got tired of counting.  What does this mean to you?  It means that when you use Mailchimp for your email marketing you stand a great chance of having that data  (coming in and going out) integrate with something else you are already using or thinking about using.  In today’s world of cloud computing this is no small thing.  I also think it shows the right mindset – do what you do well and play nicely with others who do what they do well.  We could all learn something from that.

  by  Yury Cortés

In the past few years there has been a proliferation of specialized business applications for every kind of business. Lawyers, accountants, spa owners, music teachers, golf courses – all these businesses have a variety of niche software applications built just for them.  Have a camel farm?  I bet someone somewhere has built “camel farm technology in a box” just for you.  This is a great development – if you are starting a new business there are specialized tools just for you and most of them are cloud-based and inexpensive.  These days, if you can think of it, someone has built it.  Just for you.

What is the downside?  First, they try to be all things to your niche market.  You may end up with functionality you don’t need and when you get stuff you don’t want it can make using the rest difficult or at least confusing.  Second, because you using capabilities that everyone else in your business is using, you are just “keeping up”, not using technology to give you a competitive edge.  Third, to some extent you are buying into a certain business model, one that may not be what you had in mind.

And then there is the ugly – some things these applications do very very well but some are just awful.  Areas where I see consistent poor functionality are CRM, websites, integration and reporting.  For example, I belong to two clubs that use “club” software – applications are are expressly built to support membership clubs.  They use different vendors but they both have the same problems:

• They both keep member databases but they are rigid and clunky and don’t have features a lot of clubs would find in a simple CRM tool like tagging, keeping track of correspondence and notes or social integration.
• The both allow the clubs to create websites but they are confusing, hard to use and frankly create butt ugly websites.
• There is no integration or easy way to get your data out. For example, you can’t easily integrate your member list with something like MailChimp.
• The reporting is canned – as long as you want to ask the question they have a report for you are in good shape.  If not…well, just don’t ask that question.

  by  alexanderdrachmann

I read an article yesterday, part of which really grabbed my attention.  In Accounting Today Daniel Burress has an post titled Three Technology Trends Your Firm Can’t Ignore.  It is his third trend that had me saying “amen!”.

In this last point he describes how it isn’t enough to ask people in a small business what they want – most of the time they will ask for features or capabilities that only slightly make them more efficient or productive.  Why?  Because most of them have no idea of what is possible, what can be done with today’s software applications.  To truly apply technology to a business in a way transforms it, the questions have to go deeper, closely investigating the current work flows.  What do people do day to day?  Why do they do those things?  Do those activities have business value?  Would the business be better, faster or stronger if no one had to perform those activities?  Or if they could perform those tasks more easily and more often?  What would the business be like if that work flow was automated or wholly changed?  These questions apply to any kind of business, not just accounting firms.

“The key is to go to the next level and give people the ability to do what they currently can’t do, but would want to do, if they only knew they could. After all, people really didn’t ask for an iPhone or a BlackBerry. The hidden need was the ability to access their email and Internet without being tied to their desktop or laptop.”  This simple quote from the article says it all – don’t ask them what they want to do but can’t.  Find out what they could do and see if that changes how they work.

So who asks these questions and creatively applies technology to your business?  Chances are, no one.  That is a shame.  If you are interested in creatively applying new technology to your business or even utilizing what you already have in a deeper way, get some help.  When you need to understand the new tax changes you talk to your CPA, right?  And you consult your insurance person about the affect of health care reform on the benefits you provide your employees, don’t you?  So think about getting help with your technology too – consult your technical advisor and I’ll bet you’ll be surprised by what you learn.

Implementing a CRM (customer relationship management) system can be a huge undertaking for a small business. Done poorly it can create more work and inefficiencies for an already small staff. Done well it can revolutionize a business by improving workflow and make it easier to touch customers regularly and meaningfully.

I’ve written some other articles on CRM here and here so if you need a refresher pop over to those and pop back.

There is a lot of literature about CRM success and failure and frankly it would make any small business owner go screaming into the night – most stuff has been written for large businesses that have to implement CRM across huge sales teams, whole marketing departments and a 24×7 support staff.  Most of these articles have very little to offer a small business and what is meaningful is hard to find.  Today I’ll share my top tips:

1. Make sure you understand your overall business goals.  What goals do you want a CRM application to support and what business issues are you trying to solve?
2. Choose a technology that fits your business.  Price and features, though critically important, can’t be the only criteria.  Does the tool fit how your company works?  Is it a cultural fit – a free-flowing, unstructured application might fit a design firm better than one with strict linear processes.
3. Before implementing the tool, define the processes that support the goals in the first bullet.  Don’t just dive face first into the deep end – take the time to figure out the new processes and to configure the tool for those processes.
4. Figure out how and where the new tool will integrate with your other systems.  For example, if you want the contacts in the CRM to update in your accounting system, get that working.  Or if you want your sales folks to see aging data when they look at a contact, get that working too.
5. As you are implementing the tool, be sure to promote the processes.  That is a nice way of saying “make folks use the process”.  I’m not saying to throw them into the pool (another pool metaphor – hey it is summer and it is hot) – they need help, support and training.  At the same time, don’t let them circumvent the new way of doing things.  You’ll only slow down adoption and perhaps create a culture of “we really don’t have to use this”.
6. Finally, even though I am saying you should make folks use the new processes, make sure you allow time to revisit and revise the processes.  You won’t know everything when you start and it makes sense that you might have to make some tweaks.

Small businesses, from professional services to retail establishments to service organizations, can benefit from a well implemented CRM.  Take your time going through these steps.  In many cases it makes sense to get some help; find a technical advisor who can help lead you.

Have you implemented a CRM in the past year?  What went well and what went poorly?

Technology has advanced so much in the past few years – I can’t imagine a world with no internet on my phone, no ability to make dinner reservations online (love Opentable!), no easy way to get directions or maps when I need them or no Angry Birds.  Yet every once in a while I get slapped upside the head with a business process that is, well there is no nice way to say it, so 1990s.

I recently took one of my dogs to the vet – no, this article isn’t about my vet.  They are fairly high tech and progressive (shout out to them!).  As part of completing the check-up I had to get new supplies of various medicines, including heartworm preventative.  Merial, the maker of the heartworm medicine, was offering a $12 rebate if you bought a certain minimum number of dosages.

Going Back in Time

Here is where things got a little surreal.  The process to get the rebate was this:  vet has to give me an extra receipt.  I had to fill in a paper form, attach the receipt and mail to Merial.  Then I have to wait 6-8 weeks for processing.

Really?

There Has to Be a Better Way

Why couldn’t I fill in a form online with some sort of code from my vet receipt?  Or why not allow me to scan the receipt and attach it to the online form?  And why on earth does it take 6-8 weeks to process anything these days?  Other than making sure I’m not sending in multiple copies, what is there to process exactly?  The de-duplicating can easily be done by computer and then it is a matter sending a transaction to an accounts payable system to cut me a check.  Heck, maybe they could have been really out there and deposited the money in my PayPal account.

Ok, so maybe I’m cheap – I did fill out the form and send it in to get my $12.  Unfortunately I’m left with an unfavorable impression of Merial – which is probably not fair because there is a 99% chance that someone else is actually processing their rebates.  In addition – Merial likely had a marketing goal tied to those rebates.  How many folks do what I almost did and just throw it away because it was too much trouble?

Time to Look at Our Own Businesses

This got me thinking – how many of our business processes are inconvenient for our customers?  How many of them leave our customers with an unfavorable impression?  How can a business owner use technology to make things easier for their customers?

By the way, this is Jester, my old girl.   She probably doesn’t need a year’s worth of heartworm preventative anyway but we can always hope!

by  cambodia4kidsorg

I’m going to show my age here because I remember the work world before email.  Yes indeed, business communication was via snail mail, interoffice mail or the good old telephone. It wasn’t until the late 80s that email became so ubiquitous.   I think email and its importance kind of snuck up on me and went from “hmm, how are we going to use this” to “how can we live without it?” in a blink of an eye.  Today, can you imagine not checking your email a gazillion times a day, using your mailboxes as a data repository or missing out on the latest special at your favorite restaurant?  I can’t.

The Future of Email

Yet this morning I read a recent blog post on Hubspot that really got me thinking.  It had lots of statistics about a variety of things but one stuck out to me - web-based email usage dropped 59% among 12-17 year-olds.  My eleven year-old son is just starting to use email – does it mean he’ll quit before he really gets going?  Here is another statistic from the article – 91% of people have unsubscribed from email lists they formerly subscribed to.

What Does it Mean?

What does this mean to your business?  Your current customers are becoming more fastidious about the email they accept.  It is critical that you provide valuable and interesting content to keep their subscriptions.  And that you avoid scammy content at all costs.  At the same time  your future customers  aren’t on email at all  - they are texting, using IM or are on Facebook.  What is your business doing to reach customers in these areas?  Are you ready for the email-less generation?

I would be interested in your thoughts on the future of email and how your business is moving beyond it today.  There are some other interesting stats in this article, let’s save discussion them for another time, shall we?