Social Media Land Grab

I recently read an article in the WSJ regarding Social Media and how to make it effective for you and your business.

The part that I thought was interesting was the suggestion to not jump in and create a profile on every site.  First determine what your business is all about and plan your social strategy.  Good points indeed!

Except I really, really think you should – today, not tomorrow – get your profile on as many social media site as you can.   Register your name and your company name – maybe even a short tag line – every place you can.

For example, if run a company involved in dogs and dog training called Smart Dogs you should get busy – there is already SmartDogs.com, MySmartDogs, GetSmartDogs and many others – and these are just the domain registrations.

Now think about all the other social real estate properties – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs….  when you go to sign up for one of these wouldn’t it be nice to have your own name or company name?  Sure it would!

Or how about someone posting blog entries, or tweets and your customers or prospects think it might be you or your company doing the posting?

I don’t believe in cyber-squating on someones name or company – registering a name in the expectation of selling in the expectation of selling it back to them at a healthy profit – but I do think you should get your name and organization everywhere you can.

You might think this is silly or a non-issue – I did 6 or 7 years ago.

Go get yours today!

The First 3 D Steps to Getting Your Project Off the Ground

How many times have you started to kick off a new initiative and then begin to be ground down by the endless meetings, conflicting messages and lack of direction?  Project management of even the smallest plan can be hectic at times.  It’s enough to drive a person to project management software.

There a several good project management or tracking tools available online — Zoho Projects is a good choice.  Tom’s Planner is still in beta but shows promise in being very easy to use.  The key here is to have some tools available to you to be able to track progress, responsibility and accountability.

Step 1 – Discovery
The project will kick off  with a set of known variables.  The objective of the discovery phase is to dig deep and locate those gold nuggets that were not obvious or completely understood in the beginning.   We just don’t know what we don’t know – or more importantly, which pieces are the most valuable or have the potential to deliver a fantastic outcome instead of just a successful one.

Step 2 – Define
By now you should have all of the information available to really start moving the project along.  Keep in mind though, that most projects are a journey and you will continually ‘discover’ more information as you go along.  Some you can include in the project – others will have to be placed n the Phase 2 file.

Step 3 – Document
Everyone wants to skip this step – for some reason it just doesn’t seem necessary and certainly isn’t as exciting or productive as other parts of the project.  Don’t skip this one!  Get the project sponsor to sign off on what you have gathered so far – this is your blueprint for the rest of the project.

OK, there is your start.  Continue with Design, Development and Deployment.  Round the whole project off with Diagnosis – what worked and what didn’t and why.

There is no C or M without the R in middle

The sales mantra for many businesses is “everybody sells”.  I tendto believe that “everybody is involved in business relationships” (formerly CRM).

Think about it.   Anybody that touches a customer in any way – e-mail, phone, letter, blog post, tweet – is helping to strengthen (and sometimes destroy)  the relationship with that customer.   Anyone in your orginazation that has any contact with a customer or prospective customer needs to have a customer service skillset.

And that includes the people who design your websites and program that horrible maze you have to wander through to get to a live person on the phone…   who willthen asks for your account number that you punched in 5 minutes ago.  Really!  Let’s make it easy for people to do business with us.

With all the technology that we have at hand it should be a relatively easy task to allow access (not necessarily complete control) to customer data.  Sales should be able to see service tickets; accounting should be able to see potential sales; service should be able see what products a customer has purchased.  In a successful organization, the first person who answers the telephone should be able to either answer their question.  Or be able to pass the call to the person who can.

Think of the companies that you will not do business with in the future.  I’m willing to bet that it is not their product that is keeping you away, it’s the painful way that you have to deal with them.  If it becomes easier, faster or less painful to not do business with someone that will be the path of least resistance.

Just How Hard Can it Be?

I just finished reading a 1998 paper by Richard Cook at Cognitive Technologies Laboratory in Chicago on ‘How Complex Systems Fail’. This is well worth reading – twice – by anyone tasked with deploying any IT solution today. It will change the way you look at systems.

Dr. Cook has broken his paper into eighteen separate rules (or truths) such as “complex systems run in degraded mode” or as “broken systems”.    The paper is available for download at the CTL website or in Michael Krigsman’s post at ZDNet.

But you don’t have to be working with a large, conplex system or process in order to recognize the warning signs of a project in trouble. In fact, most of them are easy to spot:

No clearly defined target or objective
No plan or roadmap to get there
Not enough resources available
No accountability
….feel free to add your favorites here

I was brought up (yeah, I know, old scool and all that) with the concept that a ‘job worth doing was worth doing well’. And in order to do that we need to have a few things in place before we begin:

Reason (Why?)
Goal (What?)
Resources (How?)
Responsibility (Who?)

Plan out your next project, no matter how small it may be… it my take only a single sheet of paper. It will make a difference in the outcome.

Oh yes, the title of this post… When Kinky Freidman was running for Goveror of Texas in 2004 one of his campaign slogans was “How Hard Could It Be?”. Great campaign slogan but I don’t think you would want to manage your project that way.  Project planning is not that hard either!

Five Easy Ways to Make CRM More Productive For You

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is discipline,  abusiness process – not a product you purchase.   However with just a little bit of elbow grease (remember elbow grease?) you can start building a system that can be one of the smoothest running machines in your business.  Here’s a good start:

1- Customize Your Database
This is one of the easiest yet most powerful ways to make your customer database more productive. All CRM software products give you the tools to change the database and the screen layouts. Why not change the way your database looks and feels to match the way you do business?

And with most everything, there are right ways and not-so-right ways to make these changes. Sometimes it is just the simple things… if you want to add a field to record a date, add a new ‘date’ field to the database, not a ‘character’ field. For dollar amounts, use a ‘currency’ type field. Just re-arranging the data fields on the form can sometimes provide a productivity increase.

2- Track Sales Opportunities
Opportunity Management (sometimes called Potentials) is a great way to begin to manage your Sales Pipeline and to generate accurate Sales Forecasts.

Once you start looking at your customer database as a repository of potential revenue instead of a gigantic digital ‘Rolodex’ you will begin to start managing your sales activities in a more focused manner.

3- Automate Business Processes
Having your customer database to doing work for you is almost like having another assistant working for free.

Each CRM software product differs in the type of workflow automation offered. On occasion the automation may require purchasing a specific ‘add-on’ software product such as KnowledgeSync but the value you get is well worth the investment. Some easy examples are:

• Sales forecasts e-mailed every Monday morning
• Notification of upcoming opportunities that are closing
• Sending an alert an hour before each meeting
• Automated follow-up e-mails

4- Follow-ups
Sales 101 tells us that we need to ‘touch’ a lead or prospect 7-9 times before they begin to have an awareness of who we are and what we have to offer.

It is pretty easy in most CRM products to see which customers, prospects or leads have not been contacted in the last 30 or 45 days. A phone call or an e-mail to keep in touch will keep the relationship moving forward.

5- Start Using Social Media
Many CRM products are now integrated with social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. But even if you don’t have a product that does, you can still make social media a valuable tool for your business.

The next time you are getting ready to call an important client or hot prospect, take a minute or two and check LinkedIn or Facebook. Some days you won’t see anything new, other times you will have the chance to congratulate them on something they have just posted — like a new baby or returning from a vacation overseas — that will reinforce your relationship with that person.

Following the steps above will get you off to a good start using your CRM system.  Remember, CRM is a journey, not a destination.

Back to Basics – Four Rules

OK, sometimes we really need to go back to basics – I have been hearing from too many people recently that have had emergencies that should not have happened. Maybe we just got a little careless over the summer.

Backup, backup, backup! Really, though, you only need to backup what you don’t want to lose. And don’t forget to make sure at least one of those backups are off-site. Somewhere on-line is fine.

If you have ever had a fire or flood where all your database was at the scene you will  understand.

Don’t leave your laptop in the back of your car while you go shopping or otherwise unprotected.  Put the laptop (and any other valuables) in the trunk where it is locked and out of sight. Again, you only need to do this for the things you don’t want to lose.

Encrypt your password file(s). Do this now! If you carry a password file around with you on a USB drive or a laptop it is the same as having all the keys to your home, car, office and possibly all of your clients all in one place. TrueCrypt is great open source encryption program that will allow you to secure everything from a file on a USB drive to a full laptop or workstation.

Don’t burn bridges behind you. The older you get the more you will find out how important this is to your success. Today’s competitors will be tomorrow’s partners.

OK, now that I have gotten that off my chest I can go back to helping my customers be more successful!

Server Madness

One of the advantages of being a consultant in the IT field is that you get to do site visits with customers in many different cities. And you usually get access to their ’server room’. Sometimes you get just a tour but frequently we get to spend some ‘quality time’ with our customer’s servers.

I still remember a server upgrade we had to do in an office in downtown Manhattan. The server room was nicely located with no windows and secured by passkey. And when they opened the door to let me in… Wow!

CAT5 cables, power cords and who knows what else was literally swinging from wall to wall – it looked like Monkey Jungle in there. Have you ever seen a functioning modem swinging in mid-air? Yeah, me neither.

Apparently no one in their IT department had ever heard of wire ties. The far wall had cables cascading completely down the wall like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Luckily we didn’t have to replace too many of the cables during the upgrade but cleaning up the mess was a challenge.

Sometime later in a small town in NJ I had to upgrade a server that was located in the basement of their office building. I was led downstairs, through a conference room and down a long hall. At the end in a small alcove sat the server.   All alone except for hot water heater sitting right next to it! And just to make sure it was safe the server was resting on a layer of bricks so it would not get wet when the water tank leaked.

Many of the customers I visit have kitchen facilities in their offices. Some of those kitchens are used for their intended purpose, others have seemingly been taken over by a rogue IT staff in the last coup.

One of my favorites was located in GA. The cutout where you would normally find a dishwasher now contained two servers, side-by-side. The cables let to the counter top where more electronic equipment sat next to the sink as if it had just been washed and was now air drying. Open the cupboard and instead of cups you found the switches and several modems. Oh, and this was a working kitchen complete with microwave and referigerator.

The kitchen areas do seem popular, perhaps because they are not ‘normal’ work areas. Just recently I have seen a sever installed partially over a sink with the cables draped over the water spigot. And a server centrally installed on the top of a refrigerator.

And kitchens really weren’t that bad compared to the server I was introduced to some years back. I was ushered into a men’s room in this particular office building. OK, where is it? My customer pulled back a shower curtain and there was the server… sitting on the floor of the shower. I think I asked if the water was still connected but I don’t recall the answer.

Ahhh, the good old days weren’t that far back. But today I could have video blogged these gems of server deployment for everyone to enjoy!

CRM is Dead, Long Live CRM

There, I said it!

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is just more TLA geek-speak to make us think that that there is a technology which will do all the selling for us.   All we have to do is ‘implement’ CRM and wait for the orders to come pouring in…  

CRM is a process, a discipline, a methodology whereby we continually touch our customers and prospects to reinforce our brand or our message.   CRM is just the tool we use to manage the process. 

So then, just how are we ‘managing’ relationships with our customers?

Relationships are nurtured – processes are managed.  I am convinced that no customer is really ’sold’ —  only made aware of who we are and what we do.  Our goal is to have a favorable impression on them when they decide that they want to buy a product or service that we offer.

Really I think my biggest problem with CRM is that when I am speaking about or discussing CRM, about third time I use the term I feel like I am in an episode of ER or House  -  CRM, CRM, serum…

So I propose a newer, better, faster term — CAR: Customer Acquisition and Retention.   Add an ‘S’ to the end and you now have a Customer Aquisition and Retention System.

 Add a ‘TS’ and you immediately have a ‘Tracking System’.   And it doesn’t sound like a medical term.  My golden rule for acronyms is that they must have at least one vowell as so to be pronoucable.   Plus, it fits in well with my NASCAR Approach to CRM CARS.

How Much Do You Charge?

One of the most common questions that we get asked.  And one of the least valuable ways to begin a conversation with a potential vendor / partner / service provider.

Of course the answer is “it depends – what do you need’?  Or maybe you did really want an hour of my time?   What would you want me to do for that hour?

Pretty close to sending me to the hardware store to get a you a drill.  I have no idea what size hole you need — what depth, diameter, rock, sheet rock, etc.  How do I know that don’t just want to hammer a nail but feel more comfortable doing with a hand drill?

One way to tell professionals from the not-so-professionals is how they answer that question.  A professional in their field will begin asking questions to try and understand more about your problem and what solutions would be acceptable to you.  This is what they are trained for: solving problems in the best manner for the customer.

The not-so-professional will most likely respond with a dollar figure – after all they are just selling time, not solutions.   And they will probably give you a discount if you ask.  No mention of problem, situation or expected results.

True professionals will work with you to achieve a solution that fits your situation and expectations.  And they will be happy to recommend you to someone else if they feel that you will be better served by the other party.

Oh, by the way, that question also helps professionals select customers that they want to work with…

The Little Things

I was driviing through Richmond’s North Side a recently – a nice sunny afternoon I was between meetings. When I went to signal a right turn I heard that fast click that told me immediately that one of my signal lamps was not workiing.

I had a little time before my next appointment so took a chance and swung by Miles Auto, my local mechanic.  And of course all the garage bays are full – just my luck, eh?

I go inside and tell Kevin that I think I just blew out a lamp and ask when would they be able to take a look at it.   Kevin glanced around, saw he had a free moment and we walked back out to the lot. Sure enough, it was a bad lamp in the right rear and Kevin had it replaced in a couple of minutes. Wow, I will be able to make my meeting on time.

How much do I owe I ask, reaching for my wallet? Kevin replied “Hey, nothing – you are one of us. Have a nice day” as he waved and went back inside.

Do you really think I will take my car anywhere else?