Posted by Randy Wadle on Thu, Aug 19, 2010 @ 03:51 PM
Most of us can't just break out the old toolset and dive into a project like rebuilding a car engine? Why? Two reasons:
- You probably don't have the expertise to accomplish this task without messing up the engine even worse then where it started.
- Even if you did have the expertise, your standard garage toolset likely is not equipped with the tools needed to accomplish the task successfully and in a timely manner.
Everyone knows the old saying that if you only have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. I think that old addage applies to many of the behemoth CRM tools such as Salesforce.com. They have a solid set of standard tools...a hammer, screwdriver, and maybe a pair of pliers and these work fine for tracking and organizing basic business processes. But these systems struggle to deliver game changing results that will propel their clients to another level. Why? Because they focus on delivering the same basic solution to a PEO or Staffing company as they do to a cement company, law office, or multi-national jewlery retailer.
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=74456&page=3
This is a great article on Salesforce.com's CEO. Clearly Salesforce has been a leader in the revolution towards cloud computing and software that does not require significant infrastructure or IT personnel to maintain. I envy the vision and determination of these types of leaders and their ability to translate that vision into explosive business growth.
What I have found is that most companies have a level of sophistication and a unique way of doing things that makes them who they are. Don't get me wrong, I am a big believer in "best practices" and not re-inventing the wheel at every turn. But if all companies operated the same, virtually all products and services would be commodities. I don't believe that is realistic nor do I think the world would be a very exciting place if it were true.
Successful companies take pride in their uniqueness and strive to continue to advance their competitive advantages. Quite often, especially in the professional services market, it is their uniqueness that they sell to their prospects. In a growing number of industries, a company's ability to effectively leverage technology is one of the primary drivers for it's success or failure. The PEO industry (co-employment) is definitely one of those that can heavily leverage technology to improve sales and service, streamline operations, and make better decisions.
The PEO sales and service process is fairly complicated, at least compared to most industries. Leading PEOs require a more focused set of software tools that can be integrated and molded to their unique processes. These processes drive their ability to compete and to profitably serve a growing client base. Filling the gaps with hard drives full of spreadsheets, word forms, PDFs, and custom DBMS apps will only take them so far.
Buying a toolbox that includes tools to match the level of sophistication your business needs from a vendor that understands those needs will provide a return on investment instead of a investment to return (to the way it was before). If you aren't able to clearly define the expected ROI from a new technology implementation or project, than it's probably not a good fit. If you don't get a good feeling that your chosen vendor understands your needs, it's definitely not a good fit.
Let's face it, implementing Enterprise CRM software is a significant investment of time and money. So make sure that the solution has worked for other businesses that are similar to yours and make sure that the software does not box you into their way of managing your business.
Posted by Randy Wadle on Mon, Feb 15, 2010 @ 04:13 PM
Why would a software company bungle through the production of a commercial about Peanut M&Ms?
Actually, the Peanut M&M, despite being a terribly addictive vice of mine, is a pretty good analog for the way that ClientSpace is architected. We go through a detailed analysis of the architecture in a presentation video at http://www.netwisetech.com/peanutmm.
If you want to see why we are sticking with building leading edge software rather than video production, click here to see the Superbowl commercial you will be glad you missed.
Posted by Randy Wadle on Mon, Nov 23, 2009 @ 07:30 PM
I looked up the definition of scalability on Google and found lots of descriptions of computer hardware and software, cloud computing, etc. The one simple definition that I liked the best was this one from investorwords.com:
"The potential for a business or an aspect of a business to continue to function effectively as its size increases."
While this captures the essence of what scalability means for a business in terms of its processes and resource utilization, I believe it leaves out the fundamental reason why scalability is a critical topic for leaders of growing companies. I think worthwhile addition to this definition would be:
" without requiring linear increases to production, delivery, and service resources."
Since businesses get paid for their output, increasing the output potential of your resources (people, equipment, contacts, etc.) has a significant and direct impact to your bottom line.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it?"
Maybe you are happy with the level of output being produced by your resources already. Your business is profitable and you are a market leader. What is your motivation for "tinkering" with the way you sell to or serve clients, automating your processes to improve scalability, regularly evaluating your business to determine what areas to nurture?
The answer lies in a famous quote from Benjamin Franklin "When you're finished changing, you're finished". And why was that such a wise statement? Because circumstances (economic conditions, motivations, values, and technology) are continually changing. New businesses invent themselves using the circumstances that exist at the time. Successful businesses have defined and repeatable processes that are continually measured and reinvented in response to changing circumstances. If your business isn't continually reinventing itself, then the very essence of your organization, what you are selling to your customers and how you are selling it to them, may no longer align with current circumstances. Given enough time, your competitive advantages will erode in lock step with your profit margins.
Let's contrast three different scalability models and how they affect financial performance over time.
Inverse Scalability
This model depicts a company that gets exponentially less efficient as growth accelerates. Profit margins erode as the business grows and becomes more complex. Production, delivery, and service procedures that work optimally at lower output levels cannot keep pace with growth and eventually lead to investment requirements that outpace corresponding revenue increase.
Linear Scalability
This organization is able to keep pace with growth but requires a similar increased investment in resources to handle opportunities for growth in revenue. This model does lead to increasing profitability and is supported by processes that are responsive to changing circumstances.
Exponential Scalability
This organization embraces changing circumstances with adaptive processes. It is continually looking to squeeze additional capacity out of existing resources. Procedures include embedded success criteria and measurements that will spotlight high impact opportunities for improvement. Over time, this organization will capture expanding market share as competitors can no longer compete from a cost or quality perspective.
Simple Steps to Improving Scalability
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Identify best performing employees in each key area of your business and analyze what makes them best. These people are the nucleus of your success; encourage, reward, and empower them to propogate their success to their co-workers.
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Prioritize the functions that are served by these high performers by importance to your business. Assuming your business is a for-profit enterprise, profitability is the end goal so try to define how each function ultimately affects the bottom line. Not all functions can be directly tied to profitability but if you cannot come up with any way that successfully executing the process ultimately improves profitabililty (or whatever the ulimate success measure is for your organization), then you should question the importance of continuing the process.
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Rate the prioritized function list on a 1-5 scale by frequency, repeatability, complexity, and breadth (how many clients it affects).
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Determine your strategy for selecting processes to reinvent. One approach will seek to tackle the highest impact processes first regardless of how difficult it will be to introduce changes. Another approach looks for quick wins and selects easily improved processes to drive momentum for the overall process improvement effort. Either approach is valid and the two can be combined by choosing one challenging process and a few from the low hanging fruit bucket to tackle in a phase.
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Thoroughly document the best practice for the process. Each step in the existing process should be outlined with dependent steps clearly defined. Real life examples or models should supplement the documentation where possible.
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Examine each process looking for wasteful or redundant steps, opportunities for reorganizing steps to eliminate delays, and most importantly, ways to implement new technology to streamline or automate the best practice.
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Clearly define how the new process will be measured and the timeframe for reviewing the results. Process improvement projects with no defined measurement or formal feedback loop reduce the chance of universal adoption resulting in a strong return on investment.
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And as made famous on shampoo bottles for ages...Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
Process improvement and measurement is the key to scalability for any organization. All businesses have repeatable processes and most of those processes would benefit from standardization, automation, and measurement. Successful businesses expect and challenge personnel to "get better with age". These businesses are typically full of motivated and empowered leaders that embrace change and enjoy coming to work each day.
With increasing optimism, business owners prepare for a new year that will restore growth, opportunity, and the entrepreneurial spirit in America. Is your business ready to ride the wave or will you be caught in the undertow.
"It is never too late to become what you might have been."
George Eliot
Randy Wadle
rwadle@netwisetech.com
(866) 474-0922 x701
Twitter / Facebook
Posted by Randy Wadle on Wed, Sep 09, 2009 @ 12:52 AM
Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you have heard and read a lot about "social media", "Web 2.0" and "inbound marketing" lately. To understand this stuff, you have to understand the language. But there's a catch, the language and rules are re-invented almost daily by literally millions of world wide bloggers, twitterers, Facebook friends, and YouTubers.
This new information culture is evolving at a pace that is staggering. Knowledge workers today are expected to process more information in a week that a citizen in the 19th century would be exposed to in a lifetime. Not surprisingly, our attention span has become extremely short. If we don't get the point of a message in the first few words (140 characters is the de facto standard brought on by twitter), we move on. We have become "bold readers" trying to quickly gauge the content of a message by piecing together a few bold-faced words to determine if an article is worth the investment of a few minutes of our time. Our brains are struggling to evolve/rewire to be able to compete in this new age of information overload. With the explosion of blogs, social networks, podcasts, and other easy to publish content available on the Internet, this "problem" will only magnify.
Advertisers are having to work harder and harder to get a tiny piece of the crowded mindshare for potential buyers. Remember the days when you actually watched "it's the real thing" commercials and went the fridge for a Coke? As a kid were you proud that you knew what was in a Big Mac? Today, with streaming videos of popular TV shows, TiVo, YouTube.com, Hulu.com, advertisers had better get into a consumer's brain before they learn how to use the TiVo remote control or the laptop mouse because no one has time to let the advertiser's content "push" their way into their brains. There are far too many other sources of information that that are of interest to them available within a few clicks of the remote or mouse.
This stuff certainly smells a bit like the latest trend huh? Probably a similar attitude to a lot of business owners and executives when this new fangled thing called the world wide web was born in the early 90s. Watch this video to see the pace of adoption of social media. You can't afford to ignore this revolutionary trend if you wish to reach the sophisticated, web 2.0 savvy, global consumer. These consumers, individuals and businesses alike, understand how to sweet talk Google to get what they want. They rely on tweets, blogs, and friend feeds to guide their decision making. They trust traditional forms of marketing and advertising less and less and rely on media that makes investments in many traditional types marketing largely a waste of time, money, and bytes.
The interesting element to this new age of information is that there amongst the endless meaningless chatter, there are articles that seem to be written specifically for my needs; creative art and literature that would have never been found; explosive collaborative scientific progress that would never have been discovered; a link back to family or friends that I have not heard from for decades. If we can just sort through the mess, there is powerful knowledge, life changing relationships, and experienced wisdom in there somewhere.
So what is the answer to the dilemma for business? You need to get your message to potential buyers but the traditional methods no longer work. This is where terms like "inbound marketing", "social networking", and "peer-to-peer networking" come in.
Internet search portals (Google and others) have been around for a while. But with the advancement in technology and increased consumer awareness on how to use these tools, these search engines have become THE PRIMARY SOURCE for a potential buyer to learn about your products and services; and much of what they learn is NOT from your corporate website. Nothing will ever replace the importance of a relationship on many types of sales. However, ask yourself this question...in the last year, how many significant purchases have you made without "googling" the company, the owners of the company, the salesperson that initially contacted you. You probably searched blogs and message boards for buyer content on their experience with the company or its products. Maybe you searched for competitive products and services to determine if you are getting a good deal. In fact, it's not unlikely that you have viewed the salesman's Facebook and LinkedIn profile, know the finish time of their last 5K, and have checked out their grandmother's 90th birthday party photo album. You learned all this by typing their name, and maybe their company name, into "google" and clicking search. No, you are not the only one out there that does that...well maybe I'm the only one that checks the 5K times but you get the point. Potential buyers know how to find things that they are looking to buy on the Internet. If you aren't on the radar when they are looking, you are missing the majority of the ready to purchase buyers.
Even with these powerful search engines, potential buyers take Joe Cocker's advice to determine what is worthy of spending a moment of their miniscule attention span. Consumers depend on friends, family, and business colleagues to "bubble up" what they should care about. These individuals are connected in social networks and communicate with each other in short bursts of consciousness that can only be deciphered by those that know each other personally. In many cases, a well connected close friend or trusted business colleague can spread the word about your awesome product or service far more effectively to potential buyers than an expensive newspaper or TV advertising campaign.
But the key to being successful with either of these intiatives (Internet search or social networking) is to provide interesting information to be consumed. Well placed and targeted content is essential to draw potential buyers to your website ("inbound marketing"). This can be achieved by creating new content using blogs and web content management systems or by being an active contributor with thoughtful insight and comments on blogs and content that others produce. Really both of these strategies should be considered and become part of the daily/weekly routine for your marketing department (and ideally all of your capable staff). Blogging systems and sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook make it very easy to share things that are of interest to you with those you are connected with. The more useful content your company or people are associated with, the more eyes are learning about your products and services.
Tweet you again soon...
Randy Wadle
rwadle@netwisetech.com
(866) 474-0922 x701
Twitter / Facebook