Is Your Company Great, Or Yet To Be Good? - 5 Basics:

So many business leaders I chat with these days pontificate about how their company will be moving from “good to great” as their business plan. Well great, unfortunately what I have witnessed of late is  many customers would be happy if the same companies would just be “good”. 

There is just too much “big hat no cattle out” there when it comes to understanding why people buy today.  Some companies believe “if you build it they will come”. Yes, at first, but will they come back?  Loyal customers and repeat buying is the basic yet so many companies never learn it. They constantly look for new customers to bring in but rarely track the patrons they are losing for little reason.

I submit, buyers would be happy if the basics were executed, as today’s buying climate has very low expectations. With all the “brew ha ha” about CRM systems and Web enabled visibility, it still is about getting a quality widget to the customer ( in a box, on time, in good condition, fast, paid, and few returns or call backs, period).

Five “Good” customer basics to remember before you even think about trying to be “Great”. Consider these if you offer a product or service B to B or B to C:

1)       They want to buy your product, but you make it too difficult to buy. Listen, you may hear..."I want it now, without the “story” of how to buy, I’ll lose interest fast….."

2)      "I want your product to make me happy, even for a moment, if your quality is less than I expected, I’m unhappy for a long time."

3)      Are you easy to find, understand, and remember on the web, storefront, phone number, Email,  and catalog?

4)     Can  they understand your five P’s and S within 15 seconds? Price, Product, People, Promotion, Promise, and Service?

5)       Are you a fun to buy from? Tom Hopkins once said. “People buy emotionally, then defend their decision logically".  Guess what, Joe Girard also said  "If you patron has even one frustrating customer service experience, they will warn 250 other people not to buy" (His law of 250).

                                                                                                 

You will notice there is nothing new here, other than to say just master all five before you try to move your company to “Great”, there are no shortcuts.

Philadelphia Area Software Company Bites Into The I.T. Big Dogs!

The Little Software Company That Could:

Want to know of one real time web point & click CRM visibility application that is working well in the small to mid market company world?

After visiting middle market companies these last six month’s regarding information systems from Citrix and SAP to IBM I’m amazed to find one small I.T. company that “gets it” and quietly flies under the radar scope with its outstanding software and applications.

The basic affordable application is a slap on middle ware that allows all information to flow back from the customer to all functional areas of the company up to the “global” CEO view. Regardless of the legacy operating system or software, this is an expandable bridge that gets a company up and running with state of the art systems within weeks!

A user logs into the company website Id and immediately sees the applicable view, all on one screen, based on that user's security level. Customers see real time status of all relevant activity in top to bottom chronological event order. Each page view with a click, can flip an Excel spreadsheet for the inevitable user wanting a different sort. Each event is a hyperlink that clicks ever downward for the data that supports the view.

To my amazement once you see it and go back to most large company systems you see glaring flaws and large company information issues over and over such as:

•The entire companies numbers cast too wide a net and need to know (other person’s data) filtering is a huge problem.
•Most other systems involve huge expensive training issues.
•Millions of B to C end customer buyers in the Internet world are still on simple computers (really!, check your log pages) i.e. AOL, dial up, web TV etc. and can’t use over engineered source architecture.
•Outside sales forces and field managers still don’t have data that is applicable to giving them accurate real time views to communicate with their customers.
•Internal accounting departments still keep “off line” data invisible to the outside field forces.
•Even many CEOs still struggle with retrieving information and go to their CFOs to pull off line data.

The name of this software company is MKS Inc. (http://www.mksinc.com/) Its owner (MIT graduate) Vic Hansen (veh@mksinc.com ) and small but very competent staff are the primary brains behind this simple yet cutting edge application. What they really do is simplify the customer service experience to a self serve mentality that gets adopted and used very quickly.

How many times has your company done a system conversion only to be held back because it is too complicated to get employees and customers to use? This is one contact you might want to reach out to. This powerful application is what you have been looking for. It beats the big dogs hands down in an apples to apples comparison for a whole lot less pain!

PLM, SaaS, CRM, And The Crowded Airwaves

The (Retail Supply Chain Software) Greater Fool Theory Strikes Again.... Or BUY MY Tulip Bulbs, They Will Make You Rich!

The new sexy jazzy Internet software gold rush I've witnessed this month is a ton of software companies claiming to have the latest, greatest supply chain software solutions (PLM, SaaS, CRM,etc.). This last month has amazed me, all spin their solutions for the Big Box retailers and most claim to have the ear of the same companies, truly amazing......

Many name drop-Walmart, Best Buy, Costco, etc and all seem to be in the favored son position of Microsoft, waiting to be hatched. Is this the next "Greater fool theory?" I'm truly amazed at the number of companies burning capital to hire software developers building elaborate IT boxes that they can't sell to anyone......They want to get attention and sell the software company to some bigger "fool".

Don't get me wrong, I do believe in PLM, CRM, SaaS, as the future. The reason for this blog is buyer be careful.......... I currently see a lot of legacy IT folks doing the applications for pragmatic buyers and management at these companies not owning the applications being shoved at them by outside "consultants". My humble opinion is the new world order needs to have relationship folks to get it "sold" and adopted by the rank and file. Many are expensive toys that are put on the shelf......

The really great systems installations have been team efforts and are sold and installed by non IT management as the leads supported by IT. Be careful, it's not Kansas anymore......... and certainly not plug and play technology.....