Need your numbers now?
In my ‘previous life’ as a Management Accountant, it was my job to supply the management team with the monthly management accounts together with operational and sales statistics and analysis. The monthly accounts although important were generally disregarded in favour of the more detailed performance reports on which managers were being judged and from which decisions can be based.
Sales and marketing managers unsurprisingly were interested in the reported sales performance for their areas of responsibility. The analysis would generally be a mixture of financial breakdowns as well as volume based data and when combined with budgets were all used to generate performance indicators to show how well the organisation was doing.
All of this information was all generated by the accounts department from processing transactions into an accounting system which was only accessible by the accounts people. Generally there was at least a week’s delay, often two, after each accounting period was over before these reports were available. In larger companies it is not uncommon for a period of 3 weeks to be required to get the monthly accounts published.
In a fast moving environment, waiting weeks for sales information arising from the beginning of a month can be at the very least frustrating. Understanding and monitoring performance in this way can result in decisions not being made as quickly as they could be, to correct or exploit any emerging trends. Accounting systems are necessary to provide control and statutory reporting but because of their very nature are not generally the right tool to generate analysis reports in a timely manner. Reports from accounting systems also can be very prescriptive and largely depend on the chart of accounts structure, and if new reports are required this will normally involve a considerable amount of work to make them available.
At Workbooks we take the view that the full sales process including the generation of orders and invoices i.e. ‘prospect to cash’ should all be part of the CRM system and reports and dashboards should be updated in real time. We have therefore designed our service in this way so that Sales, and for users of Supplier Orders or Schemes, Gross Margin information, can be viewed simply by logging in to the service and their dashboard and read the graphs and charts change as transactions are processed live. Sales numbers can be sliced and diced and based on whatever makes sense to the organisation, i.e. by product, market sector, geography or combinations of these, and not by what was determined many years ago when the accounting system was set up.
There are many benefits of integrating the Sales order process inside the CRM, which will, or have already been, covered by other blog entries, the point I am trying to make is simply that we understand that you need your numbers now!
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.
CRM – Can it help manage business risk?
Sales & Marketing systems are not traditionally renowned for the role they can play to help manage business risk. However, when customer service and the sales ordering processes are controlled within the context a single integrated business system, with CRM at its heart, some commercial and operational risk factors can be mitigated.
CRM is recognised as a tool to increase sales and customer loyalty, which of course is what we all want, however we also want our customers to pay their bills on time, in full, and not take advantage of services for which they are not entitled. As a finance man, my tendency is to focus on the ‘bottom line’ rather than the headline sales number, which excludes such costs as bad debts, interest payments on working capital and foreign currency losses. Avoiding these costs as far as possible and maximizing the resources within any business in my view is as important as driving up the sales numbers.
Here are some issues you might like to consider:
- When taking orders from either new or existing customers, understanding their credit status may be a simple case of checking your accounting system, however for those of you who have at distributed sales and accounting processes (i.e. more than one of you!), this is never as simple as it sounds. In addition to the credit issues, pre-existing customers may have been granted special payment terms which need to be considered when discounting or setting customer specific pricing. With very tight margins, allowing customers extended payment periods may make a big dent in any anticipated profits.
- If you deal with very large organisations or government agencies you will know getting paid can be, to say the least troublesome. Very often even the invoice format and associated backing detail has to be a very specific format otherwise they simply will not pay. The amount of management time worrying about this stuff just eats away at the margins.
- With a globalised marketplace, small businesses now have to worry about foreign currency exchange rates. When buying or selling products in any currency other than your own the exchange rate achieved on any given deal can sometimes be the difference between making a profit or not, not to mention the operational activity costs and associated costs importing and exporting.
- CRM is about nurturing our prospects and retaining customers for as long as possible to maximise the return on the investment acquiring them. That said we also need to recognise that we need to control any after-sales services provided within boundaries of what has been agreed. ‘Revenue leakage’ can occur when we provide services which we can legitimately charge for but don’t because we either forget or are not clear whether they are entitled to these services under their contract agreement. Whilst we might be making some customers very happy, receiving services for free, we probably will misappropriate resources away from paying unhappy customers.
There is no silver bullet to any of these problems; they are part of everyday business life, however with joined-up data and processes using integrated customer management systems, we can attempt to mitigate many of these risks and hopefully make more profit!
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
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!!!!
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.
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