Goodbye Blogger - I'll miss you.
But with wordpress, I can have my own groovy domain name, and better control over my blogging software - and you know how much I love control.
http://martytime.com/blog
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Friday, April 20, 2007
Support Prank Call
The developers had our first successful trial run of a new call recording program known as Cosinity (Brian Roy). It will allow us to initiate hands-free dialing and call recording for our support and sales reps.
We used this amazing technology to terrorize support.
http://www.cosinity.com/beta/callrecordbeta.html
User: ericm@infusionsoft.com
Pass: [standard infusion password]
Click on Prank call to Support.
Click Play.
Enjoy.
We used this amazing technology to terrorize support.
http://www.cosinity.com/beta/callrecordbeta.html
User: ericm@infusionsoft.com
Pass: [standard infusion password]
Click on Prank call to Support.
Click Play.
Enjoy.
Repository or Robot?
I was talking to the sales guys today, and they helped me realize why Infusion is so cool. I've taken it with a grain of salt because sales guys could probably convince Steve Erkel that he's cool...
But anyway...
Most database software programs out there follow the repository/retrieval paradigm: I put something into you (the software), then later I get it out. It seems to fit, since that's pretty much what a database is, but what does that do for a business?
Well, for an enterprise, it's HUGE! It puts millions of records into one place so reporting, mining, and accountability can be managed. It allows managers at the tops of massive org structures to get a peek into what's happening in their world. It allows you to forecast, track, report, search, and mine the data. And that's why they pay huge amounts of money to get it.
But what does it do for a small business?
Not much.
Yes, it organizes their stuff, and helps them locate information easier. And it helps them to stay on top of their tiny little staff. But what's the motivator for them to implement? And how much money is it going to make them?
Really, what's the most important thing for any small business? A solid marketing and PR plan, right? (I didn't come up with that on my own. I did a little research on the internet)
If there is any software out there that automatically creates and executes a complex marketing and PR plan for you given little or no investment, we could all be put out of business. But since there's not anything to date, I'll continue...
Who has time or money for a marketing and PR plan when you're struggling to make ends meet running your small business? And if you don't have time or money for a marketing plan, then the most important thing in your business just became -- time and money.
How do you get more money? You either spend less, make more, or get funded. Except that you can't get funding without a good marketing and PR plan. And you can't spend less because then you have to fire people and then you can't get the work done to pay the bills. So you only option is to make more money.
And how do you get more time? You can't hire someone else to do your job because you have to make more money to pay them, and it sets you back in the money department. And you can't just spend less time because then you won't get the work done to make money. And you can't work more because you are already working 18 hours a day. And time really is money.
What a small business really needs is an infusion (rim shot) of time. Time to spend working on the thing that really matters: the killer marketing and PR plan.
Which brings me to my robot.
Let me be clear that I hate the word robot as much as you hate this picture. But the word starts with an R, and everyone knows what a robot is.
The difference between what we offer and what other people offer is that our cool robot can perform human functions. For example, I could tell this robot over here that whenever someone's credit card is about to expire (15 days before expiration) to email them that their card it about to expire and provide an online form for them to update the date (form coming soon).
How much time did I have to invest to have this piece of work done? $0.00! Well, technically, I had to pay $2.30 per hour - which is far below minimum wage - more like Indonesian sweat shop. And that's if it's the only thing he did!! What if in addition to handling 300 expiring credit cards, he also executed 91 individual marketing pieces going to over 1,000 prospects and customers, including mail, fax, email, and manual tasks! And then he kept track of everything he'd sent so he could continue to execute the sequences. And kept track of opt-out requests, and additional information requests that would cause people to jump from one marketing sequence to another? And all in one day! For $18.00? It's hardly legal.
And it's not just about time. The opportunity cost for a small business owner to NOT work on his or her business is nothing compared to the peanuts they pay themselves. What we offer is much more - and it's less tangible than money or time. It's the freedom for people to create lasting value in their business.
Oh yeah, and we also have a pretty sweet repository.
But anyway...
Most database software programs out there follow the repository/retrieval paradigm: I put something into you (the software), then later I get it out. It seems to fit, since that's pretty much what a database is, but what does that do for a business?
Well, for an enterprise, it's HUGE! It puts millions of records into one place so reporting, mining, and accountability can be managed. It allows managers at the tops of massive org structures to get a peek into what's happening in their world. It allows you to forecast, track, report, search, and mine the data. And that's why they pay huge amounts of money to get it.
But what does it do for a small business?
Not much.
Yes, it organizes their stuff, and helps them locate information easier. And it helps them to stay on top of their tiny little staff. But what's the motivator for them to implement? And how much money is it going to make them?
Really, what's the most important thing for any small business? A solid marketing and PR plan, right? (I didn't come up with that on my own. I did a little research on the internet)
If there is any software out there that automatically creates and executes a complex marketing and PR plan for you given little or no investment, we could all be put out of business. But since there's not anything to date, I'll continue...
Who has time or money for a marketing and PR plan when you're struggling to make ends meet running your small business? And if you don't have time or money for a marketing plan, then the most important thing in your business just became -- time and money.
How do you get more money? You either spend less, make more, or get funded. Except that you can't get funding without a good marketing and PR plan. And you can't spend less because then you have to fire people and then you can't get the work done to pay the bills. So you only option is to make more money.
And how do you get more time? You can't hire someone else to do your job because you have to make more money to pay them, and it sets you back in the money department. And you can't just spend less time because then you won't get the work done to make money. And you can't work more because you are already working 18 hours a day. And time really is money.
What a small business really needs is an infusion (rim shot) of time. Time to spend working on the thing that really matters: the killer marketing and PR plan.
Which brings me to my robot.
Let me be clear that I hate the word robot as much as you hate this picture. But the word starts with an R, and everyone knows what a robot is.
The difference between what we offer and what other people offer is that our cool robot can perform human functions. For example, I could tell this robot over here that whenever someone's credit card is about to expire (15 days before expiration) to email them that their card it about to expire and provide an online form for them to update the date (form coming soon).
How much time did I have to invest to have this piece of work done? $0.00! Well, technically, I had to pay $2.30 per hour - which is far below minimum wage - more like Indonesian sweat shop. And that's if it's the only thing he did!! What if in addition to handling 300 expiring credit cards, he also executed 91 individual marketing pieces going to over 1,000 prospects and customers, including mail, fax, email, and manual tasks! And then he kept track of everything he'd sent so he could continue to execute the sequences. And kept track of opt-out requests, and additional information requests that would cause people to jump from one marketing sequence to another? And all in one day! For $18.00? It's hardly legal.
And it's not just about time. The opportunity cost for a small business owner to NOT work on his or her business is nothing compared to the peanuts they pay themselves. What we offer is much more - and it's less tangible than money or time. It's the freedom for people to create lasting value in their business.
Oh yeah, and we also have a pretty sweet repository.
Death by a Thousand Duck Bites
...props to Kelly for the title (I never heard the phrase before)
After the first couple of sessions as SaaScon, Kelly made the comment that it seemed like a lot of the big players are moving down-market (to smaller businesses). Then, towards the end of the conference, one of the moderators mentioned that he noticed a recurring theme which was that SaaS vendors are actually moving up-market as more and more enterprises adopt the SaaS platform.
Let's assume for a moment that they are moving up-market. Clearly, it opens up the true small biz market for us and makes the quadrant diagram (do we have a name for that thing?) more of a reality. But I think we need to ask ourselves a couple of questions:
1. Can we sustain competitive growth given the fact that our sales/support overhead is several times (proportionally) that of the big boys? (we have to sell/support 1,000 customers to equal 100 larger SalesForce clients) or is this "Death by a thousand duck bites"?
2. Does this get us to "The leading provider of active crm software for small businesses"?
I think the first question is answered by asking another question: When we say competitive growth, who are we competing against? Is it SalesForce and RightNow? or is it Act and Goldmine? Or is it another on-demand company out there. From everything I can tell, it's none of the above. We appear to be the lone wolf in the land of automated crm software. The big boys can't afford to come down to true small business. For SalesForce to increase their revenues by 5% in Q3, they would have to sell 83,000 seats PER MONTH on their current small business pricing model. I would imagine the same for the other large CRM vendors. And that assumes that their current pricing structure would include the equivalent feature-set of ours (which it doesn't come close to).
So, looking around - I don't see another player in the true small business space that can provide the feature-set we provide, for the price we provide it. Our sales guys said that we just don't lose sales to SalesForce. We don't really lose sales to anybody! In fact, they said that our close rate on people who attended a demo is incredibly high! And if there's no other competitors in our space, then instead of asking ourselves if we can sustain "competitive growth", we should be asking ourselves how fast we can grow, and if we can sustain our profit margins. Because if we can sustain our margins - there's a butt-load of money to be made.
And I think I answered my second question.
After the first couple of sessions as SaaScon, Kelly made the comment that it seemed like a lot of the big players are moving down-market (to smaller businesses). Then, towards the end of the conference, one of the moderators mentioned that he noticed a recurring theme which was that SaaS vendors are actually moving up-market as more and more enterprises adopt the SaaS platform.
Let's assume for a moment that they are moving up-market. Clearly, it opens up the true small biz market for us and makes the quadrant diagram (do we have a name for that thing?) more of a reality. But I think we need to ask ourselves a couple of questions:
1. Can we sustain competitive growth given the fact that our sales/support overhead is several times (proportionally) that of the big boys? (we have to sell/support 1,000 customers to equal 100 larger SalesForce clients) or is this "Death by a thousand duck bites"?
2. Does this get us to "The leading provider of active crm software for small businesses"?
I think the first question is answered by asking another question: When we say competitive growth, who are we competing against? Is it SalesForce and RightNow? or is it Act and Goldmine? Or is it another on-demand company out there. From everything I can tell, it's none of the above. We appear to be the lone wolf in the land of automated crm software. The big boys can't afford to come down to true small business. For SalesForce to increase their revenues by 5% in Q3, they would have to sell 83,000 seats PER MONTH on their current small business pricing model. I would imagine the same for the other large CRM vendors. And that assumes that their current pricing structure would include the equivalent feature-set of ours (which it doesn't come close to).
So, looking around - I don't see another player in the true small business space that can provide the feature-set we provide, for the price we provide it. Our sales guys said that we just don't lose sales to SalesForce. We don't really lose sales to anybody! In fact, they said that our close rate on people who attended a demo is incredibly high! And if there's no other competitors in our space, then instead of asking ourselves if we can sustain "competitive growth", we should be asking ourselves how fast we can grow, and if we can sustain our profit margins. Because if we can sustain our margins - there's a butt-load of money to be made.
And I think I answered my second question.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
You have a nice SaaS
Quickly, can I rant about the term SaaS?? I just don't like words that have two lowercase letters squeezed between big letters. Yes, it's very symmetrical, but it's practically just a sentence with the first letter of every word, like we used in our notes in 8th grade (INVU4URAQT). And SaaScon bugs me more, because it breaks the logic of lowercase-articles-only. Instead of SaaS, they could have used these:
StrorW
Software that runs on the Web
StraS
Software that's really a Service
SnotD
Software not on the Desktop
Was there really anything wrong with ASP? or On-Demand? or Web-based?
I think we should come up with a new name.
StrorW
Software that runs on the Web
StraS
Software that's really a Service
SnotD
Software not on the Desktop
Was there really anything wrong with ASP? or On-Demand? or Web-based?
I think we should come up with a new name.
Our Message is Wrong
More SaaS thoughts:
We can't expect to communicate with peers about what we do saying things like, "We are on-demand CRM for small businesses". We will get responses like "Oh, that's a tough space" as well as the cheeky looks, as if there were some memo that we missed years ago about how horrible the CRM space is. Also, our geographic location is sketchy. We got a few comments like, "You are a SaaS vendor from Gilbert, AZ??", as if we moved some bales of hay aside from the barn and plugged our servers in...
The "CRM" buzzword is nice for communicating to potential clients because we can leverage SalesForce.com's investment in the buzzword, but it just doesn't work for industry. We are no more a CRM provider than an 18-wheeler or Ferrari is an "automobile".
So, what are we, then? Really, it comes down to our value proposition. We don't get any testimonials from people saying: "Wow, I am so excited about the way I could save the task to my lead record and then come back later and view it!". The reviews we are getting tout the automation - the fact that they can come into the morning, sit at their desk and do nothing but watch the orchestration of 300 completely unique multi-step communication sequences across tens of thousands of leads. That's power. And I don't even think it's the tip of the iceberg of what we can do.
Template Email Guy
I heard a guy at the conference lamenting that he couldn't send an automated email from SalesForce to a client when the client signed up. These are the steps he had to follow (he recounted them to the guy he was talking to):
1. Log into SalesForce
2. Click the Opportunity tab
3. Search for the record
4. When the record was pulled up, click the "Email" button
5. Locate your template
6. Click "Send"
He said something along the lines that "it's automated in the sense that we are using a template, but it doesn't automatically go out".
Are you kidding me?? A template email is NOT automation - but people are so starved for it that they are grasping on to every morsel they can get from their current vendor.
So, you can probably guess how many of the sessions dealt with automation, or with really putting systems to work for business: Zero. Other than Template Email Guy, nobody made a peep.
But I did hear a lot of talk from SalesForce about how many kazillions of transactions they are doing per minute (a transaction is roughly the equivalent of a hit to them) . And I think they're missing the boat altogether. How about this for a measurement of your system's success: A client's ratio of transactions(hits) to actual sales.? See, I would bet 10,000 shares of SalesForce stock that our clients spend ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less time in our software to generate the same number of sales. Let's put it this way - I'd like to see a guy selling bird tricks online bringing in over $1,000,000/year using SalesForce.com.
You don't want your clients using your software, you want them making sales. (ooh, sales, not software????)
So, I don't know how to capture this into a nice tag line or acronym, but I'm convinced we need to.
We can't expect to communicate with peers about what we do saying things like, "We are on-demand CRM for small businesses". We will get responses like "Oh, that's a tough space" as well as the cheeky looks, as if there were some memo that we missed years ago about how horrible the CRM space is. Also, our geographic location is sketchy. We got a few comments like, "You are a SaaS vendor from Gilbert, AZ??", as if we moved some bales of hay aside from the barn and plugged our servers in...
The "CRM" buzzword is nice for communicating to potential clients because we can leverage SalesForce.com's investment in the buzzword, but it just doesn't work for industry. We are no more a CRM provider than an 18-wheeler or Ferrari is an "automobile".
So, what are we, then? Really, it comes down to our value proposition. We don't get any testimonials from people saying: "Wow, I am so excited about the way I could save the task to my lead record and then come back later and view it!". The reviews we are getting tout the automation - the fact that they can come into the morning, sit at their desk and do nothing but watch the orchestration of 300 completely unique multi-step communication sequences across tens of thousands of leads. That's power. And I don't even think it's the tip of the iceberg of what we can do.
Template Email Guy
I heard a guy at the conference lamenting that he couldn't send an automated email from SalesForce to a client when the client signed up. These are the steps he had to follow (he recounted them to the guy he was talking to):
1. Log into SalesForce
2. Click the Opportunity tab
3. Search for the record
4. When the record was pulled up, click the "Email" button
5. Locate your template
6. Click "Send"
He said something along the lines that "it's automated in the sense that we are using a template, but it doesn't automatically go out".
Are you kidding me?? A template email is NOT automation - but people are so starved for it that they are grasping on to every morsel they can get from their current vendor.
So, you can probably guess how many of the sessions dealt with automation, or with really putting systems to work for business: Zero. Other than Template Email Guy, nobody made a peep.
But I did hear a lot of talk from SalesForce about how many kazillions of transactions they are doing per minute (a transaction is roughly the equivalent of a hit to them) . And I think they're missing the boat altogether. How about this for a measurement of your system's success: A client's ratio of transactions(hits) to actual sales.? See, I would bet 10,000 shares of SalesForce stock that our clients spend ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less time in our software to generate the same number of sales. Let's put it this way - I'd like to see a guy selling bird tricks online bringing in over $1,000,000/year using SalesForce.com.
You don't want your clients using your software, you want them making sales. (ooh, sales, not software????)
So, I don't know how to capture this into a nice tag line or acronym, but I'm convinced we need to.
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