This week Billtrust launched a major new version of our flagship product CustomerCare.  CustomerCare is our online archiving and reporting tool that allows customers to easily view all of their billing activity in realtime.  This tool has been a home run for our customers with thousands logging on every day to better serve their end customers.  I'd like to say I had this grand vision of building this product from the beginning, but the reality is much different.

One of our first customers back in 2002 asked for copies of their bills burned to a CD for archiving purposes.  Seemed like a good idea, they wanted a permanent record just in case they needed to get a copy of a bill.  We charged them a little bit for our time and effort, everybody's happy.

I visited this client several months after they went live to check how they were doing.  They proudly showed me their "CD Binder" that contained all the CDs we had sent them and told me how much easier things were now that they could grab copies off of the CD once they figured out which CD it was on.  I asked how often they did this, and they replied "a couple dozen times per day".  This was the light bulb moment for CustomerCare.  Never did I imagine that they would be using these CDs regularly.  I fell into the trap of giving them what they wanted instead of first asking what problem they were trying to solve.

CustomerCare started out as web version of the CD archive but has grown into all encompassing self service tool with reporting, resending, configuration, marketing and much more.

Figuring out what to put in a new release of a product is a bit of an art.  A lot of people design software based on customer requests.  This sounds good, who wouldn't want to give the customer what they want.  The problem is that you wind up with a lot of "CD Archive" products that may solve the problem, but not in the best way.

We take a different approach.  We of course listen to what our customers say.  We have a formal Customer Advisory Council that gives us ideas, we periodically  survey our entire customer base, and our sales people are always funneling in new requests.  This is great stuff but is just one piece to the puzzle.  

We break new release capabilities into 4 distinct areas

1. Bug Fixes - yes, unfortunately sometimes bugs creep in
2. Customer Requests - as described above, some of the best stuff comes from customers
3. Continuous Innovations - these are advancements to a specific area of functionality that we have a good feeling customers would like, but they're just not asking for them
4. Discontinuous Innovations - These are the most fun.  Whole new areas of functionality that solve big business problems, and the customers don't even know they have the problem.

Like many organizations, Billtrust has a direct sales force that does a fair amount of cold calling (i.e. calling a lot of companies, speaking with a lot of people, trying to see if there is a fit for our solution). As the CEO, I'm also the recipient of a lot of inbound cold calls.  What follows is my personal experience of what to do, and not to do.

The Bad

• Don't call me and offer to send a few investment ideas my way, no obligation. I know this game.  You tell half the people to go long a stock, the other half to short it.  The stock is likely to move one direction and you look like a genius to 1/2 the people.  Not to me.
• Don't call and tell me it's not a sales call.  I'd actually prefer you to be honest.  If you lie out of the gate, no chance I'm talking to you.
• Don't call and leave a voice mail with your name and number, but no company name.  This doesn't make me curious, it makes me feel like you're trying to trick me into calling you back.
• Don't call and ask me to listen to a five minute recording which will then be followed by a survey.  The NRA has been calling me every day for a week wondering if I'm worried that the United Nations is trying to take American's guns away.  Uh, frankly I'm not too worried about that.
• If you do get me on the phone, don't talk for five minutes without pause.  Did you really call to hear yourself talk for that long?

The Good

• Good - Instantly tell me your name, the company you're with, and the purpose of your call.
• Better - tell me about companies like mine that use your product and services and the benefits they get
• Best - do your research on Billtrust and call with an intelligent synopsis of why Billtrust needs what you've got.
• Bestest - find somebody I know and ask for an email introduction.  If you can convince someone I know to introduce you, I'll always take your call.  I might not buy, but I'll certainly listen.

Last week I had the pleasure of watching the best basketball shooter on the planet do a clinic for our local travel basketball association.  Dave Hopla - the best basketball shooter on the planet. Quite a big claim, certainly I didn't believe it going in.  That's him on the right with my daughter Amanda.  Certainly didn't look like the best shooter on the planet.  I think I could take him.

When I arrived, Dave was warming up shooting one handed shots from all over the court, including three pointers.  He took about two hundred shots and I didn't see him miss.  Might need to revise the "I could take him" claim.

He then began the clinic portion where he was going to shoot roughly 300 shots over the course of an hour while discussing with the kids how he became a great shooter - and how they could too if they wanted it.

What I learned is that the lessons for becoming a great shooter are the same lessons that will allow you to be successful in just about any endeavor.

Think Positive - He started by asking the kids how they were doing and got a chorus of "Goods" from most of the kids.  His response was something along the lines of "Well that's too bad, because I'm doing GREAT and you guys are just good!" at the top of his lungs.  He doesn't like calling them foul shots, because foul is a negative word. To him, they're free shots.  Your left hand isn't your off hand, another negative word, it's your balance hand.  To be great, you've got to think positive.

Aim High - His goal with every shot is not to make it, but to swish it.  Not most of his shots, but every single shot. From everywhere on the court.  In every practice.

Set Goals - When Dave was a teenager he was taught one of the most valuable lessons you can learn - setting goals.  He set goals of making varsity, making all county, getting straight A's - and he wrote them down.  As I've blogged about before (here), you can't achieve your goals if you don't know what they are.

Practice - You want to be really exceptional at something, you've got to work at it.  Every day he strives to be better.  In business, are you working harder than the competition?  Are you taking the right steps to be the best project manager?  Are you learning new programming techniques?  Are you reading business books to become a better manager?

Track Your Progress - Dave's got notebooks dating back to when he was 16 of every practice session, how many shots he took and made from every position on the court.  While this is borderline spooky, this is what it takes to be the best.

Be Persistent - Dave got cut from several basketball teams in high school.  Giving up would be easy.  He chose the more difficult path.  Work even harder.  He didn't have much talent, but he was going to work harder than anybody on the court.

Below are the results from Dave's clinic.  336 shots taken.  9 misses.  Truly one of the most amazing performances I've ever seen.  What makes it even more amazing, is this was a bad day for him.  He had driven to New Jersey from Maine that morning and was a little tired.  Check out his web site - this guy is amazing.

Last week Billtrust turned 8 years old as a company.  What started in my basement has blossomed into a widely respected industry leader in the outsourced billing space.  With a network of 6 interconnected print and mail facilities across North America and cutting edge electronic billing and payment technology we've really accomplished a lot. 

I'm not the type to focus on past accomplishments, I seem to always be worried about what's next.  That's why it's so important to take the time to celebrate.  We kept this celebration pretty small with a barbecue today that we had to move indoors because of the rain.

Here's a nice picture of some of the team with their Magic 8 ball shirts in the shape of an 8.

We do all sorts of things as a group - summer picnic, holiday party, company bowling, monthly barbecues, Halloween costume parade, football pools, etc.  Not only are these fun, but it really builds great camaraderie which ultimately leads to a higher functioning team.  I'm sure we could do more.  In fact, I've encouraged everybody to come up with other ways we can celebrate.  To date, I believe I've only rejected one idea - Bring your dog to work day.

Eight years is a long time but it went fast because we have a great team and it's been a fun ride.  Thank you Billtrust team, you deserve all of the credit.

Running a project, managing a family, building a house are all complicated undertakings. There are dozens of tasks with different priorities, people you need to speak with, emails to follow up on, questions to be answered, blog posts to make - lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Sunny, from the Billtrust implementation team, seems to think that I have some secret sauce to maximizing my productivity so I said to myself - "Self, that sounds like a blog post".

There are lots of web sites that you can find (like this and this) that give suggestions on maximizing productivity. 

Here are my top tips:

1. Turn off all of your email pop-up messages - Any task that you work on requires a certain amount of start-up time to become fully productive.  If you're constantly being interrupted by those annoying Outlook pop-up boxes, you're mind gets reset and you have to start over.  This is a no brainer.  Do this now, don't read on, I'll wait.
2. Turn off Instant Messenger - same reasons as #1.  Do you really need to be instantly reachable?  OMG! LMK when you're done.
3. Call your mother and tell her you love her.  This will make you feel good about yourself, which will make you more productive, and also you'll spend less time worrying whether you called your mother to tell her you love her.
4. Think in the car/subway/bus on the way to work of the three things you absolutely must accomplish today.  When you get to the office, write them down, and don't leave until they're done.
5. Don't be a slave to Outlook or whatever your email program is.  Email is one of the best productivity tools invented. You can communicate with many people at any time of day at any location in the world and do it all asynchronously (i.e. both sender and recipient don't need to be available, unlike a phone call). However, and this is a big however, email can be a huge distraction if you're constantly checking it.  I struggle with this all the time.  Start by checking email just once per hour and then see if you can do it once every two hours.  I promise you that there is nothing in your inbox that needs to be checked every 5 minutes.  I've been recently been shutting down Outlook altogether to avoid the temptation to check.
6. Don't answer emails that aren't directed at you.  I'm of the mindset that if people want an answer from you, they should either include only you in the TO: line of the email or specifically ask for your input in the body of the mail.
7. Reply / file / delete - You should do one and only one of those three things to each email. If your Inbox has more than 5-10 messages after you're done processing email, you've got a problem.
8. Stay fully caffeinated.  Some people think I have a Diet Coke problem. They're probably right, however if you're not awake and not alert, than you're not going to be productive.  Each person needs to figure out what they need to be awake and alert.  For me, it's a D.C. every few hours.
9. YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE ONE, AND ONLY ONE, TODO LIST - You know what drives me crazy, waitresses that try to memorize my order because half the time they forget something.  I swear I'm not impressed that you don't have to write it down.  You could probably build a house without a blueprint, but why would you?  This couldn't be more true for items on your TODO list. You might remember what you have to do, but you definitely will remember if you write it down.  My personal preference is to use the Outlook Tasks list. I've added a custom column called priority that I rank each of my TODOs with a 0 thru 9 (all geeks start there numbering systems at zero, how about you?).  Each day I scan my TODO list and make sure I've got the priorities correct and then I bang out as many as I can. On the flip side, there are people who have many lists and I think this is self-defeating.  If you do this, you're burning too many cycles managing your lists.
10. Stop reading all those blogs.

We had an interview today with a salesperson who had previously worked at a competitor of ours.  I find these types of interviews to be incredibly helpful, but not for the reasons that you might think.

There are dozens of competitors in the outsourced billing space.  There a bunch of different flavors of these companies but they almost all started as dedicated print/mail companies.  Some of the them added a specialization for billing and a few added electronic billing capabilities. We routinely take business away from our competition since we started at the beginning with the premise that we were going to be offering an end-to-end integrated paper and electronic billing solution, so it just works better.

Finding great sales people is more art then science. Finding great sales people with industry experience is really really hard.  Like any industry, most great sales people have jobs and are paid a lot of money.

Interviewing sales people from the competition offers the obvious benefit that these people should be pre-trained on industry terminology so if you do hire them, the training curve will be shortened.  Interviewing the competition offers the added benefit that you can probably learn some interesting things about your competition that isn't publicly known - strengths/weaknesses of their product set, sales strategy, etc.

However, the biggest reason I like doing this is not to find out about the competition, but to find out what the competition thinks of Billtrust.  Today I learned several things that our competition thinks about us that are so far off base, that it's nice to know we're competing against them!

We quietly received notice last week that the United States Postal Service (USPS) would no longer be  accepting mail from bulk mail processors on Saturdays in two of our locations (Central NJ and Chicago).  This wasn't a formal bulletin, it was sort of buried in the back of some other document and arrived less than a week prior to the USPS implementing the change.  This won't affect delivery of mail, just acceptance from large processors.

I blogged earlier this year (see here) about some changes that I thought might save the USPS some money and it's nice to see the USPS taking some actions.  However, I was a bit alarmed at how they sort of snuck this through.  Bulk mailers represent a huge revenue source for the USPS.  We prepare very "clean" mail that allows the USPS to do their job very efficiently.  We are likely the most profitable part of the USPS business (which after losing several billion last year, is saying something).  If we were to roll out a change to the Billtrust customer base that negatively affected a customer's business, you could be sure we would be as far out in front of the issue as possible.

Instead, the USPS gives their most profitable customers almost no notice and very little time to plan for the impact.  Not a great way to run a business.

Fortunately, we were able to come up with some contingency plans with some other USPS locations.  We are also about to open our fifth and sixth and print/mail facilities so the impact on our customers will be negligible.  Still, it would be nice for maybe a courtesy heads up.