Best of Breed Integration

The best of breed integration means that you choose the top applications and integrate the two. This can be done with a 3^rd party integration or with a custom integration.

Pros:

• You get two tools that are best of breed and do the job exceptionally well
• Best of breed tools usually have a following and therefore you have access to a plethora of resources such as consultants, tutorials, training and addons.

Cons:

• Custom integrations can be expensive depending on the level of integration.  3^rd party integrations can at times alleviate this.
• Added complexity

All in One Tool

All in one systems such as ones that do both Accounting and CRM are generally not the best of breed but offer their own set of pros and cons.

Pros:

• You only have to deal with one vendor
• No integration complexities

Cons:

• These systems usually don’t do either job exceptionally well compared to the best of breed applications. They do however do the job.
• Vendor lock in. With an all in one system it is more difficult to change one piece of your business changes.

Listed are only two pros and cons for each type of solution. It is up to the business to decide which one is the right path for them.

What direction did your company choose and why?

Shortly after the discussion I attended as a guest and found out that it was in fact a BNI meeting. At that point I didn’t care because I had met a phenomenal group and realized that they did things different from what I would have expected.

Had the individual that told meet about the meeting pitched it as BNI, I might not had gone. I had been to them in the past and decided that it wasn’t a fit for my company.

This raises a few questions:

1. What do customers immediately think of when they hear your name?
2. Is it what you want them to think of?
3. Should initiatives to break out of a certain role be part of a new brand?

These are just a few of the questions you may want to ask yourself about your companies brand image. What issues has your business encountered with your brand?

Yesterday evening I attended the Atlanta Bloggers Meetup and had the pleasure of meeting Rob Sutton who owns and operates Bike198.com. Sutton is an informative owner who was open about his operation including the ways that he generates leads, makes money and markets.

Since I have been thinking of starting a newsletter for CRMStage.com we dove into the topic to discuss how he leverages them. Here are a few of the details that I took away from the conversation.

• Non techies want something in their inbox

Even though people are all hyped up on social networking juice, many people still want data delivered.

• Gain Trust

If you have affiliate marketing it is important to gain peoples trust and make sure that they don’t always feel like they are being pitched. This seems straight forward but we have all seen companies that overdue it.

• Click through rates are much higher in newsletters

Prior to this discussion I had never researched the specific conversion rates of newsletters vs web advertising.

Do you send a newsletter for lead generation, marketing or promotions? What tips do you have?

Too Much UI

You cannot do all of the UI development up front and show the customer. The problem with this is that to a non developer the UI in the CRM is everything. Once a customer sees the UI they assume that it works and all backend work is complete.

Too Much Code

Too much code is the complete opposite of too much UI. In this situation you will have almost all of the backend CRM functionality working but the customer will feel like you aren’t making any progress. This can lead to the customer not trusting the hours being put in during the project.

The Balance

Based on the type of CRM work being implemented it is important to find the right balance. Finding the right balance creates trust with the customer and ensures that your project goes smoothly.

It is a simple process but enhances the relationship in multiple ways. Here is how it works.

No matter what kind of email you are sent you send some sort of confirmation telling the sender that you are on top of things. This keeps the sender from wondering whether you received it, whether it went into a spam box or if they are just ignoring you. Lets look at a few scenarios that I have seen this be extremely helpful in.

1. The Invoice – You send someone and invoice. Without the confirmation email you basically hope that they received it, processed it and that you are going to have a check show up before the Net period is over. More than likely, if this person is not a Confirmation Emailer your check will be late.

The confirmation emailer receives an invoice and responds as follows. “I have submitted this for payment” ( Actual customer response ). Now you know that they received it, there wasn’t an issue with the invoice or amount and that the invoice is being processed. This response shows a healthy responsive relationship and you will return the favor with prompt responses in the future.

2. The Task – You request that someone complete a task. Without the confirmation email you don’t know if the task was received or even if it will get completed.

The confirmation emailer will reply with “I’m on it” ( Actual confirmation response ). Again, you know that it was received and is being taken care of.

The great thing about the confirmation email is that it can be short and sweet but still lets people know that you are on top of things. We all get busy and overwhelmed but should strive to be Confirmation Emailers. Our stress levels, lives and relationships will all be better because of the Confirmation Email.

The fairly short phone discussion that we had gave me good insight into the battle lines that were already being drawn in the Social CRM space. It was clear that the Social CRM that I would be speaking about and the Social CRM that the vendors offers were very different.  Neither version is wrong in implementation or approach. They are just fundamentally different.

So what did I take away from this?

1. I decided that I should preface my slides a little more than usual for an emerging technology.
2. It helped me identify a solution and marketing angle that I really hadn’t thought of before.
3. I made a new contact and discovered new Social CRM technology that can provide proven ROI for customers looking for Social CRM solutions.
4. This engagement gave me good insight into the various approaches to Social CRM and made me wonder just how many more I am going to see over the next few years.

Today I finished Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do in audiobook format? This isn’t a revue of the book, there a plenty on Amazon, but an account on how the book opened my eyes. Like buying the car and seeing them everywhere, I listened to an audiobook and suddenly saw breakdowns in the system.

Jarvis talks about the link economy and the effects of linking data across sites and content. He also explains the profound impact of the link economy and peoples ability to quickly find data and learn from that data. A few short hours after the completion of the book I was researching data for CRMStage.com in relation to the GetSocial Twitter Pro module and realized a breakdown of the link economy.

The breakdown was that many article writers and large technology sites had created news and content mentioning the hard work done by my team but not linking to that work. I don’t want to come across as whining but would like to highlight the fact that many entrepreneurs  and small businesses could be massively impacted in a positive way if credit was given. Credit, being a link.

Take a look at this example:

Inc.com writer John Brandon wrote an article How to Track Customers with CRM Tools which mentions a Twitter addon for SugarCRM, the addon which my team wrote. In this article he mentions the module, Twitter, SugarCRM and Zoho yet links to none.

So I pose these questions:

• How would links from such a popular site change the economy?
• How would links they provide promote business growth past there advertisers?
• How would it effect their business?

If I had not read What Would Google Do? I would not have realized the scale and impact of not having links in articles on these popular sites. The links that these articles are leaving out make it harder for readers to follow the path to knowledge. On a large scale the lack of links are impacting the economy. No links means data is harder to find which impacts purchasing. I am sure with enough time hundreds of other impacts could be brought forth.

In the end I want to thank Jarvis for a great book and for making me see how much of an impact the link has.

Preparation:

1. Write a script – Once you have decided on the topic that you will be covering I suggest that you write a script which outlines what you are going to say. You will also want to read through that script to determine about how long it will take. The reason that I find this important is because each time you mess up during the recording it will add to the editing time.  It also gives you an idea on the length of the video which is important depending on where the video is posted, the topic and the audience.

2. Prep the demo – Preparing the environment and doing a soft run through before recording will ensure that everything is in place before you hit the record button. If something is out of place during the recording it will either slow you down or cost you time in editing.

Recording:

Reading a script, clicking and making it all seem like a natural demo without messing up is a difficult task. I have heard of two ways that people go about recording.

1. Record all together – Recording the sound and screen while speaking and clicking is a lot of work and must feel natural to be professional quality. This is very difficult to do but can be done with practice.

2. Record separately – I have spoken to individual that record sound and the screen separately which I have also tried. The problem that I run into with this is keeping everything in sync.

At this time I have not settled on the best approach but continue to research.

Editting: Celia Dyer once told me that your can expect 1 minute of editing for every minute of recording. At first this sounded a little high but after recording and editing a few of my own videos I find this to be an accurate expectation. I have also found that proper preparation up front can save you large amounts of editing time.

One example is with setting the intended length of the video. If you record a video that is 20 minutes long and you need it to be ten then you can expect a significantly higher amount of editing time and the 1 for 1 rule gets blown out of the water.

Publishing:

1. Format – The format of the video will be dictated by where the video is being published. Before you start recording you will want to determine the screen resolution and other playback criteria and change your settings accordingly.

2. Publishing the final -The one item that I always see left out when people talk about the time to produce a screencast is the time it takes to process and publish. Once the video has completed editing it has to processed and converted into the appropriate format. the time for this varies depending on the video length, quality and speed of the system.

After the video is process and formatted it has to be published. You could always just log in to YouTube or TubeMogul and publish in minutes but that doesn’t take into account SEO or searchablility. Taking the time to pick a keyword rich title, description and tags could enhance the traffic for your video.

As always, we hope this is helpful information and would enjoy seeing your screencasts. If you decide to create them after reading this short series then please let us know and provide a link.

1. I have had people ask me to create screencasts in “my spare time” as if it is something that can be quickly executed. This also assumes that I actually have spare time.

2. In discussing the creation of screencasts with the people requesting them of me, I have been told things like “We tried it and it is easy, just hit record and tell the user how to do something.” If it was that easy then they would have recorded their own already and not be asking me to do it.

3. When I decided to start recording screencasts I really didn’t understand all the aspects that made up and went into recording.

Recording a quality screencast takes time, practice, the right equipment and a quiet space with no echo. This isn’t to say that it can’t be done on a budget or in a less than optimal space, because it can, but it does need to me more planned than one might anticipate.

When it comes to software and equipment you want to be cost conscious but not cheap. The things that you can’t do without is recording software, a microphone and, of course, a computer.

Software:
There are plenty of options for recording software and the one thing that I have found to be true is that free will cost you more. Although I had heard of Camtasia and even played with the trial the first thing that I did was download multiple free screencasting software packages to determine if I could get by with them. This was the right thing to do in order to be cost conscious but after much usage and analysis I knew that I was going to have to pay for software.

If anyone came to me now and asked about recording software I would tell them to save days or weeks off of their lives and just go buy some good software to record with. In the end I purchased Camtasia and haven’t looked back.

Equipment:

• Computer – Without getting deep into system specs, it is safe to say that you need a fast computer. Recording and editing video is a resource hog which can quickly decimate netbooks, cheap processors and old hardware. I would recommend no less than 3 GB RAM and a peppy processor. Stay away from Celeron type low budget processing.

• Microphone – Starting out I used a $10 mic which did the job as long as I was in a very quiet room. After letting Loren Norman, an avid screencaster, check our my first works I decided to upgrade. The one thing that he pointed out was the background noises and feedback that happened with a cheap mic. Norman enlightened me to the finer points of having a good microphone and upon his recommendation I went with the Blue Snowball.

Doing the research ahead of time and getting the right software and equipment will make life much less complicated when you start to record your first screencast. Keep a look out for my next post which will outline the time cost to record a screencast.

Being a SugarCRM consultant I would love to tell you that you should pick SugarCRM every time but that is just not the case.  Each CRM on the market has many similarities and differences that should be thoroughly assessed before choosing. Below are a points that need to be taken into consideration before making a decision. They are in no particular order.

Determine your budget:

Analyzing your budget will quickly knock out many vendors. If your company has less than 20 employees and a low CRM budget then you can probably dismiss going with certain solutions.

Look at vendor minimums:

Some vendors have minimums on the number of seats that have to be purchased for certain solutions or product features levels. It is important to cross check the number of seats your are purchasing with the product feature level that your company needs.

On-Site or Off-Site:

Determining if your CRM will be hosted on or off site is a very important factor for both budgeting reasons and in planning for the future. Keep in mind that on-site does not have to actually mean at your physical location, it simply means that you have access to the software and can install it wherever you like.

Certain CRM vendors are Saas only solutions which means that if they don’t have a robust API then you could have trouble doing any integrations or automation in the future.

Some vendors offer both deployment options but their on-demand ( Saas ) option is crippled and doesn’t provide root level access to make changes. For you this means that you need to ask about access permissions and module loading permissions when making an on-site, on-demand decision.

Technical Ability:

Whether or not you have a full time technical resource can be a big factor in choosing a CRM. Having a technical resource to correct issues and implement light or even heavy customizations means that you have the potential to fully leverage your purchase.

If you don’t have a technical resource then looking at a more basic Saas CRM solution may be a better choice. Another opiton is to hire consultants that can provide these services if your budget allows.

Integrations:

Integrations into other systems enable CRM software to automate processes saving precious time and money. However, if you do not have the budget or are not planning an integration for the foreseeable future then your company may be able to pick a less expensive CRM option.

There is myriad of other questions that I ask when helping a customer choose a CRM package that is right for them. The goal is to take all possible factors into account before choosing, do your research, and when possible run pilot programs before going with a solution.