Workbooks Summer Release – ships in 2 weeks.
As a SaaS business we are releasing new versions of our software every 3-4 months. Having completed our weekly QA meeting today, I’m pleased to announce we have set a release date of Friday the 23rd of July for Workbooks CRM and Workbooks Business.
This release (in common with nearly all our releases) has several significant new areas of functionality, plus lots of minor improvements based on feedback from our customers and prospects.
The new areas of functionality include:
Email Dropbox
This allows our customers to automatically store emails sent from any email client in Workbooks. It’s pretty simple to use, you just need to add a special address on the ‘cc’ or ‘bcc’ line of the email you are sending, and it will be automatically sent to Workbooks and stored against the relevant records.
Alternatively, if you have received an email from a client and you want to store it in Workbooks, you just need to forward it to the drop box address.
We are also developing a specific ‘plug-in’ for Microsoft Outlook which will also synchronise addresses and diary entries; this will be released later in the year.
I really like the drop box functionality because it’s simple to use, and importantly it works from any email client. It’s especially useful for me as I’m increasingly using my iPad as my email client of choice.
Bulletins
(also known as MOTD – Message of the day, not Match of the Day!)
This functionality allows us to communicate with users more effectively. It allows us to ‘pop-up’ useful information for first-time users and also to publish ‘hints & tips’ on a regular basis inside Workbooks, rather than people having to visit our knowledge base.
Summary Tab
We’ve also added a ‘Summary Tab’ to the majority of records. In the case of People and Organisations this gives a consolidated view of all the Notes, Activities, Emails, Opportunities, Cases and Documents they have been involved in.
It’s a really simple way of quickly getting a picture of what a Person or Organisation has been up to.
As I mentioned, the new release goes live in a couple of weeks but we are always looking for customers to join our beta program, so if you’re interested email us at beta@workbooks.com
Business Start-up and Raising Funding
Last week I was invited along to the Business Start-up Show at ExCeL in Docklands to talk to budding entrepreneurs about how to raise external funding.
Having recently closed a second round of Angel investment, I was asked to talk about my experiences and what types of things potential investors what to discuss.
In the current financial climate when Banks are seemingly only lending money to established businesses, Angel investors and Venture Capitalists are pretty much the only source of funding for business that needs capital to fund R&D.
Both VCs and Angels are pretty savvy investors, so a key theme of my presentation was about operational execution and the importance of really understanding how to target prospects and execute a sales and marketing strategy.
They know the importance of clearly defining your ‘go-to-market’ strategy and tracking KPIs within a business, so if you want them to invest their hard earned money in your venture, you really should have good answers to questions like:
- Who is your target market?
- How are you going to acquire your customers?
- How many leads do you need to make a sale?
- How long is your sales cycle?
- Why are you more likely to succeed than your competitors?
The presentation was well attended and lots of people asked for copies of the slides – so I’ve uploaded them here.
Giving your sales a MEDICAL
At Workbooks.com we are frequently engaged with organisations who are looking to improve their sales execution. So I wanted to share a set of slides that Edward Berks our VP of sales put together on the importance of a sales process and a common language in sales and marketing.
We hope you find them useful.
5 Reasons to choose SaaS over traditional software
For small and medium size organisations, Web based applications like Workbooks.com provide a much more cost effective way to deliver effective I.T. to your business. Here are five reasons why:
Simplicity
With applications delivered on-line, all the complexity of the underlying IT is no longer your problem. At Workbooks.com our customers don’t worry about upgrading hardware, or which operating system version supports which database, or which VPN will work. We take care of the IT complexity so you don’t have to. You just need a computer with a web browser and you can access your business applications from anywhere.
Guaranteed Levels of Service
At Workbooks.com we guarantee your applications will be available 99.5% of the time. In the event we don’t deliver (which has not happened to date) there are penalties to be paid by us. Typically with most traditional software you get no guarantee on how well it will perform.
Cost Effective Pricing
There are a number of reasons why we are able to deliver ‘enterprise class’ applications to our customers at a much more cost effective price than traditional software. Including the fact our infrastructure is shared across multiple customers, so there isn’t the cost of unused I.T.. Because we don’t ship traditional software and have a controlled environment we don’t have to test our software with different versions of operating systems and databases, or write installations manuals or write upgrade guides for our customers. All these reasons allow us to produce solutions at a much more cost effective price.
Security
For the majority of our customers their key business information is more secure in Workbooks than it was in their previous I.T. systems. At Workbooks.com we run two geographically separate datacenters which contain the I.T. infrastructure to deliver our applications. Both datacenters have virtually identical equipment and your data is automatically replicated between the two. So in the unfortunate event that a disaster occurs such as a bomb or a fire in one of the centers, the second datacenter can continue delivering the Workbooks service. In addition to this highly available infrastructure we maintain a rolling backup of your data. All our customers benefit from this common infrastructure, although we do keep each customers’ data in a separate database to ensure your data remains confidential. Compare this infrastructure to what you have in place today: What would happen if there was a fire at your building? How quickly could you get new servers, reinstall all the relevant software? and How current are your backups? Would you be down for just a few days or would it be weeks? What impact would the downtime and potential loss of data have on your business?
Long Term Customer Relationship
We believe that this last point to be the most significant. At Workbooks.com we charge you an annual fee for the service. The truth is by the time we take into account the sales and marketing costs of acquiring a new customers and the money we have already spent on the infrastructure we don’t make any profit in the first year of the relationship. So it’s important that you stay with us for several years. This means we are very focused on ensuring you remain happy customers over the long term. You can contrast this with traditional software vendors who make the majority of their profit on the initial software license sale and have a relatively small ongoing support fee. Their focus is on getting you to buy the license and not necessarily the longer term view.
Easter Bunny at Great Ormond St. Hospital
With Easter nearly upon us, the team at Workbooks.com felt the need to make our marketing more philanthropic.
We ran a survey of 750 UK based IT resellers to gain some insight into their views of CRM and Business applications and for each response we received we donated an Easter Egg to kids at the Great Ormond Street Hospital.
As you can see from the pics below we had over 150 people take the time to fill in our short questionnaire and in the office we have quite a lot of fun packing the eggs for shipment!
In terms of the survey, there were some interesting results. 17% of the respondents didn’t have any kind of CRM system in place, which I thought was quite high considering we are talking about IT resellers who you would expect to be pretty savvy with the business benefits CRM can deliver.
Over a third felt their CRM implementations would be more effective if the CRM system contained sales transaction information. This is no surprise to us at all. For sales and marketing folks there is significant benefit in having access to transaction data, which is typically locked-up in the Accounting System. Marketeers can run up-sell / cross-sell campaigns based on customers’ transaction history for example.
Another significant advantage is for customer support teams; over the past few months we have come across several resellers who believe they are giving their customers free technical support – because their support engineers don’t know if the customer is entitled to support or not. Having a more ‘joined-up’ view of their business data, provides the opportunity for some quick revenue wins, by ensuring customers are renewing their support agreements.
We hope that kids enjoy the Eggs and make a speedy recovery.
John
Raising Angel Funding via the Enterprise Investment Scheme
As you may have seen from our recent press release we successfully completed a 2nd round of funding for Workbooks, raising another £2m in Angel finance. This takes the total amount of funding we have raised over the last 2 years to £4.1m.
As I spend a lot of my time talking to other owners of UK businesses, the topic of external funding comes up quite a bit in discussion. The question that comes up most often is – How did you raise the money?
So let me provide some answers.
How did you raise Angel Finance?
Simply put, we were able to identify a group of ‘high net worth’ individuals (Angel Investors) who believed that our vision and business plan is compelling and as such were prepared to invest their cash.
Also the UK Government helps quite a bit through the Enterprise Investment Scheme.
The EIS Scheme is a Government scheme to promote investment into UK Business. If your business qualifies under this scheme(and many do), it provides tax incentives for investors including 20% Income Tax relief, potentially 40% Capital Gains Tax (CGT) deferral relief and any gain that is made from the investment will be completely free of Capital Gains Tax.
So if an investor is investing £100k, they can claim back £20K in income tax relief. If they have any capital gains bills to pay the HMRC, they can defer up to another £40k, so the cash flow impact of investing £100k can be as low as £40k. This combined with the potential of significant tax free returns can be very appealing to angel investors.
(Editors Note: At Workbooks we provide SaaS CRM systems not tax advice so best you get your own & speak to a professional advisor)
Where does an Angel put their money?
When we founded the business back in 2007, the credit crunch hadn’t really taken hold. So when it hit, one of our concerns was how easy would it be to raise investment money during the recession.
However the collapse of the banks created some very interesting issues for high net worth individuals: All of a sudden keeping all their money with high street or investment banks seemed a lot more risky than ever before and the current returns were not attractive to say the least . So many of the Angel investors we have spoken to over the last 12 months have been much more willing to look at EIS qualifying investments as an alternative home for their money.
Whilst we are big fans of the EIS scheme here at Workbooks, I would like to see it extended and some of the rules relaxed to make it more effective.
For example there is a limit of £2m which can be raised in any one funding round. I have no idea why it’s £2m, I would have thought £10m would be much more sensible. That way not only start-ups, but medium-sized businesses looking for additional investment would benefit. Especially now, when trying to get any bank to part with cash is pretty tough.
Clearly having tax incentives from the government isn’t enough on its own to get Angels to invest their money. You need a compelling story too, but using the EIS scheme can be a real benefit.
Workbooks Roadmap – latest
As part of our strategy of being open and transparent with customers and prospects, we like to make our product development roadmap as public as possible.
This strategy isn’t without its challenges, not least the fact we are always responding to customer requirements and, as such, the roadmap continues to change.
That said, we have now developed a roadmap structure which allows us to commit to certain new features, whilst also giving customers some visibility of what else we might develop over the next 12 months.
The current roadmap is now published on our website at: www.workbooks.com/products/roadmap.html (here)
The roadmap contains two types of item:
- Committed items – these are improvements to the product which are committed to be delivered in the dates specified.
- Candidate items – these are improvements we would like to make, but currently haven’t committed.
Please let us know which of the candidate items you would like to see developed first, as we tend to prioritise new enhancements based of your feedback. We will be implementing an on-line voting system for customers, but until that’s ready feel free to email us at: pm@workbooks.com to let us know which enhancements (that aren’t already committed) you would like to see in the product.
John
Google Chrome – not as polished as we would like
As a vendor of web based applications, we take a very active interest in the development of web browsers.
Over the last couple of years we have seen Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market being challenged by the likes of Firefox, Google’s Chrome browser and Apple’s Safari.
This has been a very good thing indeed. When Microsoft dominated the landscape, little innovation was taking place. In particular IE6 and IE7 had very poor javascript engines. For those of you that don’t know, javascript is the underlying technology that enables us to develop rich User Interfaces (UIs) like Workbooks.com. Because the javascript engine in IE6/7 was slow, it meant that running and rendering more complex richer web pages took more time.
If you have ever used Workbooks CRM in IE7 and compared it with the performance in Google’s Chrome you will see Chrome is 10 – 20 times faster than IE7. The emergence of these new browsers has prompted Microsoft to raise their game and IE8 is a significant step forward, albeit still slower than the others. Competition really is good for the consumer.
So in general we have been a fan of these new browsers and Chrome in particular.
However our enthusiasm has been dented a little over the last week, because of Google’s strategy of automatically updating their browser without letting you know.
Google released Chrome 4 on the 25th of January, unfortunately the release also introduced a bug which stopped our users downloading attachments from Workbooks.com.
So we spent a whole day last week, developing a workaround, testing it and then releasing it to our servers.
As a software vendor I recognize that no software is perfect and dealing with bugs is part of life. However if Google took the same approach as Microsoft and actually asked you to upgrade rather forcing you, at least you could make an informed choice.
Clearly there is downside in allowing people to choose, because you need to support multiple versions for a longer period. However if Google is looking to replace Microsoft as the OS of choice, either their QA needs to get better and their release cycles a little longer, or they should move away from a strategy of automatically updating.
That said – in the round we still much prefer Google’s browsers to Microsoft’s and would still recommend it to customers over IE – until our view changes.
John
Getting Started
Welcome to our new Workbooks blog!
The intention behind this blog is to keep everyone up to date with the progress of our business and our products. We might also use it to occasionally pass comment on our industry and the world in general.
Let’s start by giving you the background on the company and the people involved. We founded Workbooks back in October 2007 at Jenny’s kitchen table over coffee.
Four of us got together with a view to building a leading SaaS provider of business applications for the SME market. You might ask why would anyone create a business that completes with industry giants like Salesforce.com or Sage?
The answer is we were very frustrated!
The four of us had previously founded a company called BlackSpider Technologies. BlackSpider was an SaaS provider of email security solutions and when we sold the company in 2006 (to SurfControl PLC) we had approximately 2000 customers and 90 staff operating in 3 countries. Having grown the company from inception we were frustrated at the lack of good business applications for small and medium size businesses.
Like many companies we have purchased IT systems for specific departments, Sage for accounting, Salesforce.com for CRM. These standalone applications quickly became ‘islands of information’ which caused no end of problems for the business. For example all our transaction information (purchase order, invoices, credit limits, etc) were in Sage. This was great for the accountants, but meant that the sales, marketing and support folks didn’t have access to the information.
The accounts department rightly didn’t want sales and marketing people logging into Sage where they could create invoices and post journal entries! But in reality the sales team needs access to some key pieces of information, such as credit limits and previous transaction history.
So if a sales guy wanted to see which how much a customer had previously paid, or if a marketer wanted to run a campaign based on purchase history the only way was to export data from Sage and import it into our CRM system. Then we had to try and ‘dedupe’ the data and the whole process became a real can of worms.
We wanted some joined up business systems which were targeted for the SME market. When we looked round the only products which were close were Oracle and SAP, however they came with a seven figure price tag and required a small army of IT staff to make it work.
So having sold BlackSpider in 2006 and having completed the 18 month transition period at SurfControl, we decided we could build an integrated suite of business applications that would be delivered online, so you wouldn’t need your own army of IT folks.
So here we are in February 2010, over two years later and having built Workbooks CRM and Workbooks Business, which addresses the problems I described.
We made our first sale back in May 2009 and have been rapidly developing our product’s capabilities based on the feedback of our ever-growing customer base.
We have had lots of good ideas from people on how we can improve Workbooks, so we now have a feature list as long as your arm. We are continuing to roll-out new enhancements about every 8 weeks, so if you are a customer please don’t hesitate to drop us a note about what else you would like and we’ll do our best to include it in a future release.
We have a release of the product scheduled for early March and I’ll provide more details on what’s coming with the next few posts.
John Cheney