A One-Eyed Man is King

Recently I came across Intuit’s Billing Manager.  It is a VERY simple way to invoice your clients and keep track of payments.  Did I mention it was free?  It lets you send unlimited invoices to unlimited clients.  Seriously, you can sign up and have an invoice sent out in less time than it will take to you to read this post. 

Billing Manager lets you (for a fee) make use of Inuit’s Merchant service to accept credit cards, and you can even seamlessly upgrade to Quickbooks online.  Pretty slick of them.

Seriously, if you need basic invoicing and payment tracking ability, you should check this out.

Serendipity is an amazing thing.  I just happened to read these two blog posts back to back. I read both of these blogs regularly and I find myself nodding as I read them many times.  Today though, by some chance I read them sequentially and it really set off a firestorm of ideas.

The first was by Seth Godin, speaking on getting referrals.  He postulates, “The only thing that will make you remarkable is being worth remarking about”.  So that’s on the front side.  Getting people to refer business to you is all about being worthy of their efforts on your behalf.

The second post was by Steve Curtin, speaking about customer retention.  He says (quoting from Exceptional Service Exceptional Profit) “Individual customers are irreplaceable”.  Once you lose a customer, he’s gone for good.  You have to know how much a customer is worth to you over a lifetime and then treat them accordingly.

This all came together in a very concrete way because DirecTV has been trying to get me to come back to them for months.  I switched to cable because I got lousy service.  Plain and simple.  Even before I ditched them, they continually tried to get me to sacrifice my friends and family to their vengeful god by offering me money and discounts.  Honestly, if they had just treated me fairly, I would still be with them.  (I’m lazy.  I don’t change unless I have to.)  If, heaven forbid, they had treated me well, I would have told other about them.  FOR FREE EVEN!

Don’t be DirecTV.  Be fair and you won’t lose irreplaceable customers.  Be excellent and your work will spread beyond your reach.

A few days ago, I was talking to a person for whom I have the utmost respect.  I particularly respect his ability to sit with a client and make a solid connection in a very short amount of time.  If you have an angry client situation, this guy is the ultimate troubleshooter. 

He told me about a situation where he was sitting with a client and talking about raising the rates that they were being charged.  Anyone who has ever had to do that knows that it’s not fun for either side.  He described how he showed them usage figures and told them about the increased costs based on the client’s growth.  He made a rational, intelligent case for the increase. 

The client didn’t get it.

In spite of my friend’s explanation and facts and figures and considerable powers of persuasion, they didn’t really understand.  All they heard was, you’re going to have to pay more.  They got to the end of the meeting and, being the perceptive person that he is, he knew they didn’t get it. 

He told me that he stopped just before they were about to get up to leave, and he said “Guys, I just want to say something before we leave.”  He proceeded to tell them in BASIC, REAL terms why he had to raise their rates and why he couldn’t continue to serve and maintain his high standards at the old rate.  He was sincere, he was direct, and they got it.

For me, knowing how superb a communicator my friend is, this was a wake-up call.  If this guy struggled in making his audience understand, how much harder do I need to work to get my point across?  How much effort do I need to expend in connecting with the people I need to communicate with?  How much more thought needs to go into reducing the noise and increasing the signal in my conversation?

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(In case you wonder, that’s the symbol for Real Numbers.  And no, I’m not a math geek…)

A guy I knew years ago used to say, “What’s the difference between a consultant and a trusted advisor?”  The answer:  All of your money.  He almost always got a laugh with that one, but just last week I was reminded of just how true that can be. 

How can you tell the difference between a consultant, a hired gun, and a person that you can trust to give you the very best advice for your situation?  Here are a few thoughts:

1. Time.  I’m sure everyone can think of a professional in their life that dings them for every second possible.  A lawyer, a mechanic, an accountant, maybe?  Not that there’s really a problem with that, after all everyone needs to earn a living.  The trusted advisor goes above and beyond the “billable hours” mentality and really takes the time to understand the business and its needs.   
2. Perspective.  I think all consultants, both good and bad, want to deliver results.  It seems to me that their point of view can make all the difference.  If I look at a solution from the vantage point of the dollars that I will make first and the value for the client second, that makes me a consultant.  If I have truly taken the time to understand a business, its people and its goals, then I can really understand value first and worry about the money I will make second.
3. Investment.  I’m talking about truly being (I hate this term because it gets abused so much) a partner.  I honestly feel that your success is my success, your challenges are my challenges and that your failure is my personal failure.  How well you do matters to me.

I got to witness a great field tech who has achieved all of these things in action last week, and it was a thing of beauty.  That’s the bar to which all of us as service providers should be striving.  Thanks for the reminder, Will.

I tell you we get no respect, right?  I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous – everyone hasn’t met me yet.  (Rodney was great, btw.)

But seriously, I totally understand the feeling that seems to be common in IT workers.  These days we are being squeezed to do much more with far less resources.  Often we are totally focused on acquiring hard skills just so we can keep up with the avalanche of new tech that comes out daily.  And let’s be honest with ourselves for just a second, we’re always looking to beef up our resumes and make ourselves as marketable as possible.  These things have the very serious potential side effect of putting us out of sync with the needs of the business.

I spent some time with an IT department today that was a living example of this.  They were very determined on the course of action that they decided was the best one.  They were obviously passionate about technology and felt these investments would make a hugely positive impact on the business as a whole.  See if this sounds familiar:  “This is just what we need to do.  I don’t care how you pay for it, we just need to do it.  We CAN’T roll out in phases, we NEED it all.”  I hear things like this and I think: Danger, Will Robinson.

Let’s break this down a bit: 

1. You the technology worker can’t (or won’t) be writing the checks personally to cover the cost of whatever you are proposing.
2. You will NOT be the sole decision maker for any kind of large project.  (At least I never have been.)
3. Whatever new thing you think is going to turn your network into rainbows and unicorns MUST bring MORE value (basically increased revenue or decreased costs) to the business than will be plunked down to make it happen.

Hopefully these three statements will put things into perspective that technology can relate to a little better.  What it boils down to is you must play nice with others. You must know what the business wants and what it needs (different lists sometimes).  If you want to have a project funded, take the acronym ridden quote that your vendors gave you and translate it into what your business stands to gain from it.  Bend over backwards to forge the strongest bonds possible between technology and the decision makers.  Make sure that you know what is important to them and always remember to align your proposals to their strategies.

PS.  If you’re not being invited to the meetings where they ultimately decide on these matters, that’s a bad sign.  Trust me.

As someone who works for a company that is typically in the role of a vendor, it was an interesting twist to find myself across the table from one of our vendors.  It actually was a great experience for me as it gave me a renewed perspective on what it’s like on the other side.  The timing was even better for me because right before the meeting, I happened to read this great post by Steve Curtain the customer service guru.

Steve talks about the good being the enemy of the best and how many companies are content to let good (or adequate) service be their standard.  This gets them lukewarm customers that jump ship at the drop of a hat.  Few companies, on the other hand, will go out of their way to consistently give the best customer service and this results in loyal customers that promote the company to others. 

I think that when the relationship is in trouble is one the best opportunities to show your customer what kind of service is your standard.  Maybe it will go down like this:

You:  I’m sorry to hear that you’re not happy with our product/service/As-Seen-On-TV Ab-cerciser, Mr. Soares.  Can you tell me about the problem?

Customer:  Yes, I’ve written out 41 points of why I’m not happy with your company.  Shall I read them to you?

You:  Sure let’s take them one by one, and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong not to like us.  Ready go.

Have you ever had to witness something like this?  It’s painful.  How your customer feels is FAR more than the sum of the 41 points he has listed out.  It’s those feelings you have to address above all and make sure that the other person knows you GET them, really and truly understand where they are coming from, and that you will make it right.

What if the conversation started like this:

You:  I am glad that you let me know about your problems with our company, Mr. Soares.  Can you tell me some more details so we can decide on how we’re going to make the situation better?

Customer:  It boils down to the fact that I was expecting X and all I see is Y.  I really NEED it to be like X.

You:  I am very sorry about that.  I know that we can get you to where you need to be.  What if we…

Don’t believe me?  Try it on your next disgruntled customer.  If they don’t turn into a promoter for you, I’ll send you a full refund, no questions asked.

This week’s roundup of free tools is dedicated to a good friend of mine who has jumped into the entrepreneurial deep end with both feet.  We were talking a while back about online strategy in general and I realized how often this kind of stuff comes up with small business folks.  Obviously I am biased here, but I really believe that a good web strategy can be a huge part of launching a successful venture.  So here are some great free tools that help you get more out of your online presence.

 Google Analytics – This is a really good place to get started with measuring your web site traffic.  You sign up for a free account, and they will give you a little piece of code to embed in your site so it can do it’s Google-riffic magic.  Once that’s there it will give you a sweet dashboard that will tell you where your traffic comes from, how much time people spend on your site, and how many pages they hit before they leave.  If you don’t know how much traffic you’re getting now, how can you possibly know what is working to increase it?

WordPress – If you want to show your customer that you are committed to their success with whatever it is that you do, you should have a blog.  This is my favorite blogging software.  You can let them host it (free), or you can load it on your own site (also free).  It’s hugely customizable and yet is very capable right out of the box.  It is dead simple to get a great looking blog going in no time.

Feedburner – Another great free Google product, Feedburner will give you insight into how well your blog is doing.  It will track your subscribers and give you insight into what you can do to optimize it.  It will also sort of guide you along with different things you can do with your blog and your feed. 

Once upon a time, before I was the free-wheeling business technology crusader that I am now, I worked for a small business with about a 40 user network.  The dictator owner of that company was a real character.  A somewhat odious character.  Anyway, I remember something he told me once that has always stuck with me.  It’s a very simple formula of what all businesses have to do to be successful. 

1. Get the work.
2. Do the work.
3. Collect for the work.

Obviously, if the business fails in any of these areas, the business will fail entirely. For some reason the crude simplicity made an impact on me and I think of it often as I talk to businesses about their technology needs.  To follow this theme, I’ve chose three great free tools to accomplish these basic functions of a business. 

ZohoCRM – This is but one of the tools in the Zoho lineup, all of which seem pretty solid.  I especially like the free version of this CRM products as it allows 3 users and has a ton of great features.  In addition to the “CRM basics” like account, contact and lead tracking, you get cool things like case management and nifty dashboards like this:

It’s very easy to sign up, less than a minute I’d say, and is fairly self-explanatory.  If you’ve used other CRM tools in the past, you should have no problems at all.  If you want some more features like sales forecasting and built-in email marketing, you can upgrade at any time to the Pro version for 12/month per user.  You can also downgrade at any time, which I thought was interesting.

EasyProjects.net – This is a pretty nice package for managing projects, consulting time, and activities.  It takes a bit longer to get started than ZohoCRM, but it wasn’t too bad.  It has a very cool Interactive Gantt Chart done in Silverlight that I liked a lot, as well as reports, dashboards and pretty nice search.  The free version only comes with a single user license, but you can have an unlimited number of customers login and collaborate with you on your projects.  There are a couple of times when I thought the site itself was a little clumsy, but there are a ton of great features.  When you’re ready for more users, you can get 5 for $75/month.

Office Accounting Express 2009 – I never set out to pimp Microsoft products with this blog and frankly, I am shocked at how many of their free products are good enough for me to recommend.  (I know that people will call me a fan boy regardless.  ::sigh::)  This is a solid product though.  Obviously they have stolen heavily from Quickbooks to make the familiar interface, but you can customize most of the screens, which I think is handy.

You can’t manage inventory with this version, but you can do all sorts of other neat stuff like take PayPal payments directly within the software.  Also, you can set up a quick and easy E-Commerce site from the “Online Sales” menu.  You can even set this up to have multiple users accessing your company info.  You can’t beat the price for all of this accounting goodness!

How do you know if your IT provider is doing a good job?  How do they stack up against someone else you might partner with?  Here are some ways you can figure it out. 

**Check back in with me and I’ll post a spreadsheet with all of this nicely laid out for you.

(BTW:  If you’re an IT provider, you may be tempted to just move on.  Clearly there is a TON of material on YouTube that needs your attention.  Perhaps, though you might want to run through these test and ask yourself, “How do I rate?  What level of service am I providing?”  Just a thought…)

The Metrics

I’m a big believer in gathering data and measuring performance.  Here’s a list of important things to be measuring if you’re using outsourced IT.  (Honestly, these are some of the same things I measure for our internal IT staff also…)

• Response time – How long from the time of notification of a problem until it BEGINS to be addressed? 
• Resolution time – How long from the time of notification until the problem is resolved?
• Incidents per Month – How many times did you have to call?
• Unresolved Issues – How many things are left outstanding at a time?
• Incident Cost – How much did you pay each time?
• Issue Recurrence – How many times did the SAME issue come up?

Think about how your guys stack up.  Do they give you any kind of usage data about how your partnership is going?  Could you easily get the averages for the above?  If not, why not?

The Relationship

This is the more touchy-feely part of things.  It looks to find out how you overall feel about working with your technology partners.  There are some critical indications here that may even outweigh the metrics we discussed earlier.

On a scale of 1 to 5 rate the following of your IT provider (1 being strongly disagree 5 being strongly agree):

1.  They are there when I need them.

2.  They follow through on their commitments.

3.  I always know where we are in the process.

4.  If I had to change providers tomorrow, it would be fairly painless.

5.  I am comfortable with our disaster recovery and security plans.

6.  Our disaster recovery plan has been successfully tested.

7.  They listen to and understand our business and our problems.

8.  They proactively seek out technology to help us achieve the company’s goals.

9.  They go the extra mile.

10. Their services have improved over the time we have used them.

Total up all of the scores, then multiply by 2.  If they rate lower than a high 70, what are you doing with them?  It’s time to make like Tina and drop your Ike like yesterday’s newspaper.  Seriously, if you can’t rate them higher than a C, what are they really bringing to your partnership.  How successful can your business be with C technology support? 

I love free software.  It’s like Christmas morning every time someone tells me about a cool new web application or utility.  I adore the “best free apps” issues of PC Mag or Maximum PC.  There is a tremendous amount of value out there just waiting to be discovered.  In honor of this, I declare Free Tools Friday to be a permanent fixture here.  Enjoy!

General/Business Tools:

1. Quickbooks Online Basic from Intuit – Intuit?!  GIVE SOMETHING FOR FREE?  You must be mad!!  But it’s true.  See for yourself.  Go ahead take a look. (Right-click the link and click “Open in New Tab” – unless you’re using Internet Explorer 5 or something.  You’re not are you?  Using IE5, I mean…ok, take a deep breath, we’ll get through this together.  Go to www.getfirefox.com right now and click the giant green download button.  No, I MEAN RIGHT NOW!  GO!  Oh.  Sorry.  No, I wasn’t yelling.  I just got a little excited.  Ahem…)  Seriously, they are delivering some incredibly good software for free.  The free version is limited to managing 20 customers, which is really the only downside.  You can upgrade seamlessly to the other versions for a monthly fee, which have more features.  The thing I like best is that you don’t have to worry about installation or backups.  Sweet.
2. AntiVir Personal from Avira – I have a confession to make.  I HATE antivirus software.  All of them.  I’m quite prejudiced that way.  I begrudge their use of my system resources that could otherwise be devoted to getting my trashy TV fix from Hulu or even good old-fashioned zombie killing in Left4Dead.  I hate that they try to think for me and block access to this file or move that file to quarantine.  Wow.  That was very therapeutic.  ANYWAY, if you must run antivirus software (don’t listen to me, you really must), then this is about the best free package I’ve seen.  It uses very little of your system’s capability and provides excellent protection.
3. Office Live Small Business from Microsoft – You may think that Microsoft giving away office tools for free is even crazier that Quickbooks being free.  That’s what happens when you get the lead-pipe cruelty reputation of an evil empire.  In reality, they have a TON of apps (some good ones even) that you can download and run for free. This product is their version of Google Apps without the in-browser word processor, spreadsheet etc.  However, Google Apps will run you $50/user per year, so it’s a bit of a trade off.  I think Office Live is noteworthy because it (obviously) plays nice with the Microsoft Office suite: Word, Excel, Outlook.   Getting things set up is fairly simple and should be very familiar to Microsoft users. 

If you have any favorite free apps, I’d love to hear about them!