Using IT To Focus On Your Customer

Early on in a B2B organization’s growth, you probably had one or two key customers. Your business was geared solely and completely to focusing on those customers. You focused like a laser beam on their needs, their wants, and their requirements.

However, as we develop more customers and grow our business, we can begin to develop a tendency to focus  inwardly rather than that laser like outward focus on our customers. You can recognize this tendency when people’s job descriptions become so specific on tasks, that there is no mention  of how those tasks affect, improve, or alter the satisfaction of your customer base.

I freely admit, many of these ideas I mention below blur the line between marketing and IT (which is why both those functions should be joined at the hip) but as many growing businesses don’t have full time marketing staff, lets look at some ways that IT can help fill in the gap.

1) Actively monitor what people are saying about you, and about your competitors. Setting up tools such as Google alerts, or Twitter search will alert you to conversations that are happening. These conversations could give you insights on improvements to your offerings that competitors don’t have, or even highlight a prospect who is dissatisfied with a competitive product. Funneling this information through the appropriate parts of your business could be as simple as an e-mail.

2) Actively monitor how people are using, or hoping to use, products such as yours. To do this, ensure that you have set up analytic software on your Web Site, and secondly, using tools such as Google’s Ad-Words key word tool, look at the search queries that people use when looking for tools or solutions in your space.

As an example, in my organizations product space, I was able to identify that the term E-Mail was often used in conjunction with the keywords I was looking at. I can translate little piece of data that into;

Show me products in this space that can send E-Mail for me.

This shows me that having our solutions E-Mail enabled (they are) is something that we should call more attention to in our marketing and Web Site content.

3) For your existing customers, If they order from you every month, is re-ordering a round of faxes and telephone calls? or can IT create a system that allows these orders to be created easily and electronically?

4) Actively record and report on all issues that come in to you via telephone or e-mail. Data that is too often ignored! but if 10 calls a week are about the same concern or issue; what are you waiting for?

The SMB Takeawy

Nothing magical about the above ideas, they boil down to one thing; listening, and responding to what your customer needs.

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People, Not Tools

Just a few weeks ago I wrote: Hiring SME IT Leaders; Results or Skills?

Johanna Rothman wrote: People Are Not Tools and says it much better than I did.

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Photo Credit cloois via flickr

My Car 2.0

My car went into the shop for its first service last week. Along with the usual maintenance items, I asked the dealership to check out a little gremlin in how the transmission was shifting gears.

They upgraded the software!

Yup. Software.

The software that controls the engine management system.

As you might have guessed, when I told some friends that my car had to go in for a software upgrade, that drew a few chuckles!

The point of this story?

Technology is embedded in what we do. On both a personal as well as a business level.

We can look nostalgically back at the old days, but what we do with tech will keep marching on. We need to adapt our businesses. We need to ensure that we are leveraging and managing that technology as much as we can. It is simple;

If we don’t in our businesses, another business will.

We can look at 20 years into the past. Can we look 20 years into the future?

Can we know what that will be like?

I can’t. 20 years ago, could we predict cars with GPS, in cabin DVD, Blutooth, adaptive lane control. etc etc?

The only thing I can say for sure is that it will be different. And unless we want to join the lines of buggy whip makers, we will have to keep adjusting, keep changing.

This post was inspired by Frank Reed

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Image Credit purpleslog via flickr

On-line Backup – Speed Bumps

I previously wrote about some of the due diligence questions to look at on looking at hosted, on-line backups.

Michael Krigsman at ZDnet has some personal observations from experience on that very topic.

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Photo Credit gwen via flickr

Published; The Hard Questions For Your Tech Team

Thanks to Jim and Ian, Canadian Business Magazines entrepreneur supplement PROFIT published another article by me on asking the pointed questions that ensure you are getting the most value out of your IT Staff or suppliers

The column is for growing business owners, ‘C’ level execs and managers, and briefly covers;

* How quickly can we fix breakdowns?

* What’s our long-term plan?

* How are we managing our tech spending?

* What will we do if a tech disaster strikes?

* How are we using technology to boost productivity?

The full column is here!

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Is Generation SaaS Here?

Treb Ryan at Sandhill.com posts the argument that this recession may be just the nudge required to push Software as a service (SaaS) over the tipping point of user adoption, possibly leaving installed software packages as a footnote in the history of the Internet.

I easily fit into most of the boxes that Mr. Ryan argues will spell the decline of the old school complex, application architecture.

….expensive, difficult to use, challenging to integrate and complex to install

Check, check, check, and check again!

I know I may sound like a broken record if you have been reading this blog for a while, but for those of us the SME space, there are still a few land mines that we have to beware of.

1) A SaaS provider of ours recently unilaterally changed the terms of our agreement. Will that have an effect on you if it occurs to you?

2) A lot of the providers in the SaaS space, and a lot of the reams of digital ink written about it are still very US-centric. What are the liabilities and jurisdictional risks we need to consider? As an example, if I, as a Canadian business, do business with Cuba – am I liable for a visit by the US Patriot Act police if my data is hosted on a SaaS vendor’s servers in California?

The SMB Takeaway

I am not saying that these are necessarily deal breakers, but a full evaluation of the risks, as well as the benefits are required to calculate if it is the best option for you.

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Real SMB IT: Hardware And That Damn Morning Coffee

Let me paint a picture of two scenarios here, if they have not happened to you yet, buy a lottery ticket, because sooner or later, they will!

Scenario Number 1!

It is too early in the morning, but you manage to pour yourself that coffee, sit down at your desk, and promptly spill that coffee all over your notebook keyboard.

Scenario Number 2!

It is still too early in the morning, you still manage to pour yourself that coffee, power up your computer…. and meet;

a) a black screen
b) a blue screen saying something along the lines of BOOT ERROR KERNEL FAULT IN MPORTDRV.SYS
c) Maniacal laughter as your PC grinds to a digital halt

OK, so number three was exaggerated, but the first two were not!

As an owner or manager of a smaller business, I am sure that your technology service provider set up a server for you. They probably handed some backup tapes to whom ever is sitting closest to the server as well!

But are you actually using that server?

Or are those proposals, invoices, and reports just sitting on each persons computer or notebook?

uh huh??

You probably have most of them on your machine right?

The SMB Takeaway

Your Tech Services provider may have set up your server to back up all your data, but most likely they did not set it up to back up data on every individuals personal computer!

And if your data is not on that server when the coffee meets the notebook keyboard….

Good luck with any data recovery.

Even if you travel a lot and absolutely need your data, every few days make sure that you at least make a copy of it on your server. If your machine dies, at least you have something!

An ounce of prevention….

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Photo Credit cathyse97 via flickr

Hiring SME IT Leaders: Results Or Skills?

As small to medium business Owners or Managers, at some point you realize that the time has come to look for some leadership to take control of your IT  team.

Like most businesses, in your early stages of growth you probably hired your IT staff based on particular skill sets that you needed. Perhaps those skills were with certain Point of Sale systems, database software or email servers, etc.

While skills and experience are critically important when supporting and fixing your existing technology and software tools, that requirement for a particular skill level begins to change as you begin looking for higher levels of IT leadership. Those exact skill sets can become less relevant than business results.

That is not to say that there can be zero technology skills!

As SME managers, we need to wear many hats. That includes your IT managers. We need (‘we’ meaning  business technology leaders) to maintain our technical skills, but we also need to grow the more business results oriented strategic planning, relationship, and project skills.

Skills, Results: Let me paint an example

As a growing business lets imagine that you have reached the point where you have decided that you need to invest in a larger resource planning (ERP) or financial application.

This can be a huge investment, so after many discussions with your peers, and maybe a consultant or two from your local Chamber of Commerce, you think that a particular product will be perfect for you. Lets also assume that those same discussions convinced you that to support this type of technology initiative, you will need to go beyond your current break/fix  tech geeks to a true business technology leader who can be responsible for delivering the value you need for this investment.

Answer this question;

When you call the placement agency, or publish the advertisement, what importance do you think skill with the product you chose should carry in your hiring decision?

The answer is not necessarily much!

Next, lets assume you are now interviewing a few candidates for that IT leadership position.

One particular candidate looks excellent. She has great recommendations, and has successfully implemented ERP or financial software a few times already!

But! she has never used, or even seen that particular ERP or financial vendor’s product that you want to implement. Do you think that matters? Do you write her off the short list?

Here is a tip!

A strong business technology candidate will pick up different software skills easily. Example; I was once flown in to fix a problem with software environments I had never seen before, it was less than two days until I understood enough to fix the issue.

It is the skills to discuss, negotiate and implement the processes behind the software are the harder ones!

Your candidate can demonstrate that he or she has obtained the results that you are looking for several times, it is only because each time she was using products that are competitive to the product you have chosen that you are considering knocking her off the short list.

So in this example, the demonstrated results this candidate can show far outweighs their lack of skill with your chosen software package.

The SMB Takeaway

Skill and experience with a particular product can be critical when you are hiring someone to babysit a particular tool or product, but demonstrated results is the critical metric when you need leadership to provide business benefits from your IT investments.

Hire Well!

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X-Box Support Incident From Hell

Three  days of X-Box live support hell. And what is worse, the root resolution would is so obvious.

As a parent – I should be able to control, or Administer all my kids accounts, heck I only have one, imagine if I had several of them!

This is being written on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon as I sit on hold for the 7th time, in about 6 hours of calls since Friday night.

You see, my son is a minor, so setting up his X-Box live account needed my name, credit card details – the usual bits and pieces.

Yet through the X-Box console he was able to change some of this information into his name.

So now the name associated with the credit card is no longer me, yet of course my name is not the “gamer tag” identifier.

So basically X-Box support is telling me to Eff Off.

There is a reason that in technology we identify parent – child relationships, in that the child (or leaf) objects inherit permissions or restrictions from the parent (or container) object.

Come on Microsoft, get it together on that.

PS it is still not resolved

B2B IT And Your Value Proposition

A September2009 Harvard Business Review article by W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne is an excellent piece on strategy. I wanted to pull out one comment in regards to the Business to Business space. The authors recommend that B2B businesses work on maintaining two value propositions;

… one for your customers and one for your customers customer

This is something that few businesses (large or small) do really well. But some can do it very, very well, and outperform because of it.

To revisit a conversation I wrote about previously, I had asked which is the easier sale; one where a customer needs to be sold on your product, or one where a customer comes in looking for your product.

I think that the answer to that one is pretty clear!

But what about when the end buyer does not purchase directly from you? Can we still get that customer researching their local market to find your product specifically?

The answer is yes. Effective marketing and brand awareness can do that. In this post I will stick to my IT experience and ask;

For Managers in B2B SME’s, are there ways that your IT can help your marketing efforts? Help in getting your customers customer looking for your product?

The method and ideas may differ depending on your industry, but how about some samples;

* Successful case studies prominently displayed on your Web Site, made easy to create by efficient content management systems?

* A Blog that allows your senior leadership to start down the road to being deemed as thought leaders in your industry or market?

* A world class web site that easily refers a prospect to your partnered retail network?

The SMB Takeaway

Again, these are just some off the cuff ideas, but in the SME manufacturing or distribution business, keep this second value proposition in mind – the one for your customers customer.

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