Same Problems Just Smaller Numbers
Whether you run a small private business or you are director of a large corporate, the business challenges you face are pretty much the same, with the difference being a matter of scale. Crucially however, small businesses do not generally have access to well rounded, integrated IT systems to support them in their daily battles and long term strategy planning, let alone the staff to run them.
For the ‘big boys’ and from the ‘big boys’ sophisticated enterprise class software applications can procured and implemented. These large systems, which come with a large price tag and consume huge amounts of management time can, despite these facts, show excellent return on investment because of the economies of the large scale enterprise. Returns such as in increased productivity, better financial controls, and targeted investments all can conspire to produce increased customer loyalty and ultimately increase in sales and profit.
Small and medium sized businesses (SME’s) on the other hand are managing to survive despite their often very limited IT infrastructure. Small business leaders are putting their time and talents and great skill to maximize the benefit of what they have available to them. This unfortunately usually means long days, with rolled sleeves, knitting together and trying to make sense of commercial transaction data and management information residing on spreadsheets, word processors and standalone accounting systems. Just imagine what they could achieve without this drain on their time.
As an accountant myself and having worked for many types of businesses, small and large, employed to improve business processes, I have often faced the choice of either going out and implement an expensive heavyweight or to try my luck and stitch together a range of smaller systems. Neither of these two options was particularly palatable, and the reality was there is only one choice that could pass the ROI test.
With the introduction of a very different economic model, where costs are shared across many consumers or subscribers of a single service, a third way can however be achieved. Sharing the IT infrastructure costs and associated maintenance across many users can generate economies of scale required to allow smaller businesses share in an enterprise class service without the enterprise cost. The ‘TCO’ or Total Cost of Ownership based on this model can show significant savings when compared to owning and managing self hosted and maintained IT systems, assuming the skills and infrastructure is available in the first place.
With the advancement in internet technologies, ‘Cloud computing’ or ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) it is now possible to take advantage of such an economic model. Workbooks is an example of such a service, and competes successfully in this space with the ‘Prospect to Cash’ CRM offering. Workbooks long term will extend far beyond CRM; however the vision of an integrated platform, delivering rich business process functionality is already visible in the Workbooks CRM and Business Editions.
As the Workbooks Product Manager with an accounting upbringing, I am very excited about my future with Workbooks. We will continue to listen to our chosen markets, understand the huge benefits of a single integrated platform and deliver our software in the most efficient cost effective way. We understand that SME’s have the same problems as large enterprise, the numbers are just smaller.
Workbooks Wins first Thames Dragon-Boat Race for Sport Relief
Workbooks Warriors (our dragon boat team) finished first in the Sport Relief Thames Dragon Boat race last Friday. It was not the most pleasant of afternoons to be messing about on the river but it was all in a good cause to raise money for Sport Relief.
Ten teams from the Thames Valley Business Park took to the water to race three heats. The rain came and even the spectators who gathered to cheer on their teams, were as wet as those taking part.
The teams were made up of local businesses, included Oracle, Baxter Storey, Workbooks and many others. Workbooks started the race as the underdog but was soon seen as the front runner after their second heat landed a 1min 38sec time, nearly 5 seconds ahead of their closest rival.
Despite the rain getting heavier, all of the teams agreed to stay on and continue the event through to the final. And what a close race it was. Oracle’s team (called “A Complete Shambles”) was determined to take home the trophy. Despite their best efforts (and beating Workbooks Warriors’ previous best time) they could only manage second place, three seconds behind a blistering time set by Workbooks of 1min 32 seconds.
Workbooks was later presented with the trophy and confirmed that we would be back next year to defend it!
All in all the event raised over £1500 for Sport Relief and although the sun stayed away a great time was had by everyone.
We proposed that next year we would donate the ‘Workbooks Warriors Trophy’ for the fastest time set.
Bring on the competition!!!!
Made in the UK
One of the decisions we took first at Workbooks was to build our own software, and to do so here in the UK.
We’d looked around at a number of open source software packages on which we could build a service, some with licences which we could live with but none met enough of our requirements: it had to support multiple customers efficiently, support a powerful security model, be easy to use and allow us to deliver a service that wasn’t just another CRM solution. Workbooks was to deliver a complete ‘Prospect to Cash’ solution and it became obvious the only route to this was to create our own.
Having decided that we also got to choose to deliver a few more goodies, such as a completely flexible system to generate reports, and a Windows-like user interface (implemented using a Javascript framework running in all widely-deployed modern web browsers without plugins or compromise). We’re particularly proud of the user interface: comparing a traditional Web UI with the Workbooks Desktop is a bit like comparing DOS with Windows (if you’re old enough, can you remember when you could only see one form at a time?).
The next decision was that we’d build it here in the UK. This is deeply unfashionable (schoolchildren aren’t even offered the option to learn basic programming skills in most UK schools) and there is a widespread view that pretty soon all software development will be offshore. But we wanted the flexibility to react quickly as our understanding of the requirements solidified and to build a capability to respond quickly to customer requirements in the future. Plus, it gave us the opportunity to work with some very skilled developers with whom we’d built great things in the past.
Thankfully the UK government’s R&D tax credit scheme (just about to reach its tenth birthday) made things a little less daunting than otherwise. And although it still costs us more than our offshored competitors to produce software we believe it is worth it for the flexibility and responsiveness it delivers to us.
Another unfashionable thing we did was to commit to a UK-based customer support function: one of the things we have set out to do is to differentiate ourselves from our competitors through the quality of our support team.
So we’re proud to report that Workbooks was born in the UK, continues to be built in the UK and is supported by our completely UK-based team.
Winning hearts and minds in the Sales Team to support the adoption of CRM
As the adoption of Workbooks’ applications continues to grow, we get to meet leaders of a lot of UK companies, who are keen to improve the performance of their businesses.
It’s still really exciting for us to hear about just how big a difference the adoption of a broader CRM solution makes to our customers, not only in sales and marketing, but in order admin and fulfilment – removing the reliance on Word and Excel for quotations, sales orders and invoices – and giving the rest of the company visibility of the status of order fulfilment and payment.
But few implementations of any new business system are without issues along the way.
In my experience, marketeers and sales operations staff tend to embrace new systems – it’s easy for them to see how their lives will be made easier, and how they will be more productive post implementation.
But sales people have often long since come to see the CRM system as a necessary evil; a system that must be updated in order for their management to be able to measure pipeline and productivity. CRM systems often provide little or no value to the sales person in return.
So when thinking about the implementation of a new CRM system, how open is the sales team to change? Unless you can convince your sales people that a new CRM system will help them be more productive or more successful, how fully can you expect them to adopt a new CRM system?
In other words, how do we ‘sell’ CRM to the sales team?
Let them vent
As with any other stakeholders in the implementation of a new system, we advocate engaging the sales team early, and getting from them a list of issues with regard to the systems they need to use to process business and report to management. And of course, sales people are typically not slow in coming forward.
Their challenges often include having to provide the same information to management multiple times in multiple formats (think sales forecasts) and having to demonstrate that they really have followed up any leads assigned to them. They may need to complete activity reports of the calls they made or the meetings they attended in a given period, and when they close business, processing it may seem like the biggest challenge of all.
Furthermore they may be frustrated that it’s not easy for them to keep their customers up to date on the fulfilment of their orders, because sales people often have no systems-based visibility of order status.
Nurture Champions
Since most businesses are dependent on their sales team for capturing the data they need to fulfil orders and to invoice, it makes an awful lot of sense to get them on board with any new CRM system. Working hard to demonstrate how the system will address their issues is key, but is not all you can do.
Identifying and cultivating ‘champions’ in your team for a new system is one of the most effective tactics. You know the most influential members of the sales team; by harnessing their influence you help to ensure the adoption of your new system. Appointing them as part of the project team or even setting MBO objectives should ensure their buy-in.
Make it fun
Sales people are by nature competitive. Why not put in place an incentive to reinforce adoption? It’s pretty easy to measure the completeness of data on key accounts, or the cleanliness of orders submitted under the new process. Cases of wine, commission kickers or tickets to the Rugby can go a long way.
Get feedback – (and act on it)
After a few weeks – or most definitely after the first sales period end – take the time to seek feedback. Invite your CRM application vendor or implementation partner to one of your team meetings; they should be keen to help you address outstanding niggles in your implementation, not least so that you can become a reference site for them
Don’t be afraid to use a little coercion
Once properly implemented, the on-going success (and return on investment) for any business application is determined by the quality of data entered into it (think accuracy and completeness for your process). A good CRM system, with appropriate monitoring and reporting, will quickly reveal data quality issues.
From experience, nothing focuses the attention of your sales team like the threat of sanctions for non-compliance. Paying reduced commission where the appropriate order information is not provided, or on deals that we’re not properly forecasted may seem heavy handed, but once you’ve invested in a new system and process, just might help to help to ensure that you reap the business benefits you seek.
And finally – Lead from the front!
A lot of sales and business leaders pay lip service to the importance of CRM but continue to request spreadsheets from their people and may never log in themselves. With few exceptions, the most successful CRM implementations are those embraced by the management team.
Get into the habit of pulling your key management information from the CRM system. Run sales team meetings and sales reviews from it. Yes they’ll be teething issues, but when your team gets to understand that their pipeline needs to be accurate for Monday morning sales meetings – or else – they’ll soon get on board.
Traditional software companies won’t fly in the clouds
Microsoft’s recent launch of its Azure platform made me consider again whether they are likely to succeed in moving their whole business to a new model. Something that has interested me for quite a while is how hard it seems to be for traditional software companies to succeed with their ‘Cloud Computing’ efforts. There are at least two problems.
The first problem is that simply building the technology and getting the whole company (and their partners!) committed to the model is always going to take a while: educating technical staff in new architectures that can scale massively with all the implications that has, delivering applications on a new platform which was foreign to those staff, building systems for which over-the-web delivery isn’t just a bolt-on – it’s the whole point. Significantly being a player in the new world seems to require a conversion to open principles – whether these are the adoption of open standards for data transfer or open architectures. Compare, for example, Google’s approach to that of Microsoft: Google even have a team endearingly called “the data liberation front” whose role it is to make it easy to move data away from their software.
I think a second problem is more significant: that a move to the cloud brings with it a change of business model – from licensing software for the duration of that software’s useful life to a different model based on paying for what is used. Those companies in the ‘traditional’ camp have large direct and indirect sales forces which are comfortable (and paid to succeed in) selling software on a single, up-front payment. Contrast that with cloud computing where the model is that you pay for what you use: this plays havoc with those sales teams’ traditional pay structures. Incenting those sales staff to move to a new model without cannibalising their existing installed base and deferring valuable cashflow may be just too hard: effectively these companies have to build a whole new business in parallel with their existing one and manage the inevitable conflict between the two businesses and channels.
It will be interesting to see if any of Microsoft, Oracle or IBM ever get to the point where a majority of their revenue is from software delivered as a service. Of the three I suspect IBM has the best chance given their history in renting Mainframe operating systems and software. It seems more likely to me that other players, led by Google but including a host of new entrants which are unencumbered by adherence to a traditional software model, will dominate the cloud computing space.
Workbooks was founded on a conviction that applications are best delivered from the cloud so that for our customers there is “no hardware, no software, no hassle”. Who will our competitors be in five years time?