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.

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.

I know, I know, the technology world is rife with slang, jargon and acronyms.   In fact we’re famous for being almost impossible for the layman to understand – I’ve been using words with no vowels for longer than I care to admit.  That said, some of these terms are important for a business owner to understand – if for no other reason than to make sure their business has what it needs.

So let’s get started!

1. Backup and recovery – the verb phrase “to back up” means that you make a copy of your data so that if you lose it you can replace it.  The noun “backup” is the copy you made and the act of replacing it is “recovery”.  You can back up your data on any sort of schedule – monthly, weekly, daily, hourly or even more frequently.  I usually recommend making a backup at least daily.  There are a lot of ways to back up your data – to a USB drive or other external hard drive, to a CD or DVD or to the cloud.  Services like Mozy and Carbonite are a business owner’s best friend.  Here are a couple other thoughts on backup and recovery:  First, make sure you are backing up everything you should be.  I had an outage about a year ago and realized I was backing up everything except my email.  Ouch!  Next, test your recovery.  If I had done that I would have realized I was taking incomplete backups BEFORE I got bitten.
2. Redundancy – redundancy essentially means duplication.  A system is redundant if services are split in two or more pieces so that if one fails you have something to fall back on.  It is important to think about your technology and to determine where and when you need redundancy.  If you are a small business owner with only a single pc your redundancy plan might be to go to Office Depot and buy a new pc.  Then you could use the backup from number 1 to be back in business in a few hours.  If you are a larger business or are looking to push technology services to the cloud you may have deeper needs.  When you talk to service providers ask them about their redundancy and look for two things:  first is hardware redundancy which means that they have split your services over multiple machines so that if they lose one you are still good to go.  Also ask about location redundancy – what if oh, for example, Hurricane Irene slammed into their data center?  Do they have services in another, preferably far away, location that can keep your business up and running?
3. Archiving – to archive means to save off old data that you want to keep around but don’t need ready access to.  Archiving is closely related to back up and recovery but with a subtle twist.  When you are archive you may choose to copy your data to a medium that isn’t as easy or fast to recover from and that is separate from your current data.  An example of this would be where you back up your current data to the cloud for fast and simple recovery but you put your really old stuff on a DVD and store it offsite.  It is important to consider what needs to be archived – you may not want to pay to back up and store all that old data every night and you certainly won’t want to add time to recover it in the event something bad happens.
4. Disaster recovery – Wikipedia says “ is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster”.  Your disaster recover plan will include your backup, recovery, redundancy and archiving plans.  It is the technology portion of your overall business continuity plan.

What does all this mean?

  by  Roger Smith

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  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.

I will start this post with an admission – I am about to flog the horse that should have been dead, buried and forgotten at least 10 years ago.  Fax machines should be like phones with cords, tvs without remotes, ironing boards and other vestiges of electronics past.  They should be things that our children ask us about with a quizzical expression as if it to say “Really?  You sent documents over phone lines as sound?”.

Yet, I can pull up a handful of websites and there is the fax number, prominently displayed after the phone number and before the email address.  As if the small business in question would rather receive a fax than an email.  I can walk into a small business, like I did recently at the garage where I get work done on my car, and there it sits.  Again, really?

I wish I could say I am the only one to write about this but alas that is not the case.  I can f ind many articles on the same topic (like here, here and here).  And yet.  My hope is that none of you read those articles or, if you did, you just didn’t get the point until now, because of some pithy thing I have to say.  Because the fact is this:  fax machines are useless and should be retired.

Why?  Well first of all, to use a fax machines you have to first print a document, then stick it in a machine and then it prints AGAIN at the destination.  That means double the paper usage, especially if that document was electronic on your end and would never have been printed otherwise.

Second, some small businesses are still paying for a second phone line to support faxes.  The ones they get about 3 times a year.

Finally, faxed documents are almost always of poor quality, faint and smudged and often crooked with parts cropped off.  That is hardly a professional image to be presenting!

There are easy alternatives.  You can email that document directly from your PC.  If it was already printed and has a signature or the like you can scan the document and email it.  In fact for lots of reasons a scanner is a better investment today than a fax machine.  Not only can you get rid of your fax machine but you can scan and store your documents, reducing the amount of paper on hand.

So why do folks hold on to fax machines with white knuckles?  Inertia in some cases.  In others the business owners don’t  have the experience emailing and scanning.  Others have a faulty sense that a scanned document is “more official” or “more secure”.  Did you know that easiest way to forge a document is to cut out someone’s signature, glue or tape it to a document and then fax it?

For kicks and grins, how about keeping track of the faxes you send a receive each month.  Is there another way to send or receive that document?  Likely the answer is yes.  If you still have a few outliers (and I would honestly like to know what they are because I can’t think of any examples) you can use a service like efax.com to support those.

Let’s  the fax die its belated but natural death and simplify your technology this spring!

Photo courtesy:

I know you get a lot of email for your small business – we all do.  Whether you keep your email on your server or on your computer it can build up over time.  It is a good idea to clean up your old email from time to time to keep from running out of space and to speed up your email.  You may find you’ll even save yourself some time when you don’t have to search thru all your emails to find things.

Do you have a lot of old messages out there, in your Inbox or perhaps in folders?  Do you really need those messages?  Some companies do need to keep records of customer correspondence but others can get rid of it after a while.  So that is the first step – delete anything you really don’t need.

Do you have old messages that you need to keep but likely won’t access often?  Archive these emails; most email clients allow you to archive emails to a file on your computer.  This physically stores the email in a separate place from the rest of your email.  You can leave that file on your computer (back it up!) or, if you really don’t think you’ll have to access those email often you can copy that file to a CD or to your backup location.

Now that you have cleaned things up a bit, look at what you still have.  Are there ways to organize it using folders to make it easier to use?  This is a great time to group email in folders.  Common ways to do this are by topic, by sender or by date.

Next, clean out your spam or junk folders if you have them (and likely you do).  Finally, take out the trash by emptying your trash or deleted folder.

There, doesn’t your Inbox feel lighter, fresher cleaner?

This will be a short post today to make up for not posting last week.  I’ll get back on track later this week, I promise.

What is keeping you from leveraging today’s technology to provide stellar customer service?  I’ve noticed a trend in the reasons I’ve heard from small business owners and it ISN’T money.  This surprised me because you’d expect the main reason to be cost.  In today’s economy cost IS something to consider and any changes or additions to the technology you use to support your business should be carefully thought out and carefully planned and implemented.

No, the reasons I hear most start like this:  ”I still have to…” or “I would have to change…” or “I want…” – in other words, it is all about the business owner, not at all about the customer.  When I hear sentences that start with these phrases the following questions come to my mind:

When I hear “I still have to…” or “I would have to change…” I wonder, have you taken the opportunity to rethink your operational processes?    You might not need that step any more.  Or I wonder if you really understand the solutions you are considering.  For example, if your response to putting in functionality for customers to self-schedule appointments is “I still have to call them to confirm or change the appointment”, you may need to look at what the services provide.  Most of them allow you to apply rules to the appointments, maybe only existing customers can self-schedule or you can specify dates and times for appointments based on the service selected.  In addition, most of the services include functionality that automatically emails confirmations and reminders for you.
When I hear “I want…” my ears really perk up – this is where it is GENERALLY about you, your sales technique and need to deal with your customer in a way you are comfortable with, your needs and not your customer’s.  When you start with “I want…” keep in mind that today’s culture is getting more technology-savvy and more technology-centric.  Your customers have lots of options on how to interact with business and more and more often they want to choose their communication channels and deal with your business when it is convenient for them.

If you keep thinking “I want…” instead of “They want…so I should…” you may find yourself left behind your more open minded and progressive competitors.