“Like” Wow…When did eCommerce Crash the CRM Party?
May 1st
I’m happy to say that all these years of tilting at windmills, trying to get folks to think holistically about eCommerce with respect to front-office CRM are beginning to pay off. In a recent Gartner report cited in a terrific software blog by Louis Columbus, he cites Gartner giving equal heft to eCommerce priorities relative to Sales, Marketing and Customer Service. Obviously, right? eCommerce systems are a means to monetize the Social Enterprise, one of the tangible metrics for measuring positive customer engagement that is the nexus of front-office CRM. The bottom line for “Likes”. Succeeding as a Social Enterprise means thinking holistically about eCommerce beyond traditional marketing, sales and service functional boundaries because functionally oriented “inside-out” approaches to CRM can undermine holistic benefits. An “outside-in” approach that starts with the Customer, anticipates their needs and sets up a framework for response is far more likely to drive positive customer engagement. Driving more eCommerce transactions should be one of the goals for this engagement, and a logical way to measure CRM success in the Social Enterprise. |
Responsive Web Design in e-Commerce
Apr 10th
Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a recent web design trend that is an evolution of an older concept. In the early days of the web, sites were typically designed for specific monitor sizes and resolutions. As monitors became larger and less expensive designers had to contend with leveraging the extra available page real estate while still maintaining an appealing experience for customers with smaller monitors. Designers often accomplished this through fluid layouts, in other words, the site would expand to accommodate the available screen resolution. Fast forward 10+ years and the popularity and opportunity of the mobile enabled customer now has designers dealing with the opposite problem. Web sites that have been steadily expanded to accommodate larger screen space are not as able to effectively service the customer browsing the site on a smart phone or tablet.
The challenge is how to provide a streamlined experience for the mobile customer while maintaining the essential essence of the online experience. The standard approach for the past few years has been to split the mobile experience into a separate web site, i.e. provide www.edlconsulting.com for the normal browser based user and mobile.edlconsulting.com for the mobile user. While this approach has been successful one criticism has been that it doubles the resources needed to maintain a web presence. Even changes that are as simple as switching to a new logo require the change to be done twice and tested twice. If done properly maintenance between the two sites (web and mobile) can be significantly reduced, for example, by sharing content between the sites, but the fact remains that there are still two separate sites.
Responsive Web Design combines up front usability decisions along with specific implementation techniques with the goal to provide a single web site that services screen sizes from the largest cinema capable display down to the smallest smart-phone; a single set of HTML pages. A customer browsing the site from home goes to the same web address and is served the same HTML pages as the customer browsing the site on a smart-phone while commuting home on the train. The difference between the two experiences is driven by the CSS that is used to style the pages. The ideal is that long term maintenance costs are reduced because there is now a single web site to develop, maintain and test.
E-Commerce adds a layer of complexity to this ideal. An e-Commerce Responsive Web Design approach needs to be concerned not only with presenting content and branding for a range of screen sizes but must also take customer interactivity into account. E-Commerce buy-flows may vary widely depending on particular industry requirements. Implementing a RWD driven site according to these requirements can be an arduous process if not done carefully and from the correct perspective. Traditional web design typically starts from the richest level of experience, the browser on a desktop, and then considers smaller form-factors after this first design is done. Often these initial designs fail to translate effectively into the mobile space where speed and simplicity are king.
A new perspective has emerged that reverses this traditional approach. Instead of starting with the desktop browser the design and implementation are first completed for the mobile platform. Taking this approach, called Mobile First Design, forces the design to be streamlined as much as possible. The site, brand, and buy-flows must all be distilled into essential elements so that they make sense on a device that fits in the palm of your hand. Not only does this simplify the visual aspect of the design but it provides a chance to rethink what is core to the e-Commerce experience. Once mobile site is complete then development moves up to the next larger form, the tablet. Additional features, richer graphics, and more content can all be added at this point while maintaining the original distilled design. Finally, the site is implemented for the browser with the additional screen real-estate, functionality, and processing power that the desktop platform can provide.
Time Travel…A Tale of Sales Tool Evolution!
Apr 5th
The tools of the [sales] trade have changed remarkably since I began my career 20 years ago. That fact struck me on a recent business trip to San Diego even harder than the strange weather (It was 30 degrees warmer in Chicago than Southern California – in March!). On this trip, I got more work done during my flight than I could have done over the course of a full week 20 years ago.
It was truly like time travel.
Yes, sales tools have changed…Actually, sales tools have been radically transformed over the past 20 years. Only after the day had ended, when I was eating dinner and reflecting, did I piece together just how amazing the transformation has been.
Here is a summary of the tools that I leveraged…
First, the travel itself. I booked my trip through Travelocity, managed my trip through Tripit on my iPhone, and boarded the plane (using my mobile boarding pass of course). In the “old days” this would have called for me collaborating with a travel agent via phone while the agent looked up options on their private terminal. Then, I would have received physical tickets in the mail, and checked in at the airport to receive physical boarding passes.
On to the research. I began by the exploring the backgrounds of the clients with whom I was to meet, literally gathering more information than a team of people could have done over several days in the 1990s. I accessed bios on each attendee of my meetings via
LinkedIn, then accessed breakdowns on their company via Data.com and Google Finance. Finally, I Checked Radian6 and HootSuite for any social media postings by or about them or their company.
Then there was the preparation of meeting materials. While in the air for the 4 hour flight (which used to be 4 dead hours) I worked on my PowerPoint presentation, connected to the in-flight wi-fi on American Airlines, collaborated with my co-workers via Skype to complete the presentation, then emailed it to my team at the destination.
Suddenly, Radian6, my social media listening tool flagged a newly published article about another key client of mine. Before I landed in California, I had clipped that article, emailed it with a congratulatory note the my key contacts at this important client, and landed a meeting with their CEO, all of which was neatly and automatically tracked and summarized in my cloud-based CRM system, salesforce.com.
On the way to my meeting, I called up the mobile version of salesforce.com on my iphone, downloaded a map to the meeting place, called my contact, and logged a note to remind myself of our conversation.
Nothing short of stunning, really.
In one day, I had leveraged “sales 2.0″ tools including:
- Wireless internet during a flight: Go-Go in-flight internet on American Airlines (converting 4 dormant hours to productive time)
- Cloud-based CRM: salesforce.com and integrated email
- Online intelligence: Data.com, Google Finance
- Social media: Radian6, HootSuite, and LinkedIn
- Mobile solutions: salesforce.com mobile, Google Maps,
This is such a fundamental paradigm shift for someone who began in sales at a time when the fax machine was breaking its own paradigm of physical document delivery (Remember?…”It sends the contracts over the phone lines as data and then re-assembles them on the receiving machine!”).
So, before jumping into your next big day, take a moment to reflect and appreciate the progress we’ve made.
Of course, as a famous time traveler once said, ”It’s always a big day tomorrow – I’ve got a time machine; I skip the little ones!” – The Doctor
Do You Really Want To Own The Stack?
Mar 29th
Bill Loumpouridis
There are a handful ways in which to implement a Cloud environment. I will cover both the pros and cons of each.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) vis-á-vis Amazon Web Server (AWS) is Cloud at its most elemental. That said, AWS is one of the fastest growing public clouds available, and AWS has transformed the start-up landscape by providing outsourced infrastructure for mere pennies.
In the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud paradigm, the platform provider provides a “stack” of services that may include a meta-database, programming environment, and web services layer as well as other capabilities such as workflow and authentication. In the case of Force.com, this “stack” of technologies significantly reduces development and support complexities, as well as speed-to-market.
This approach is taken to its logical conclusion in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, the highest level of cloud implementation where the business functionality of the application is the primary focus.
So what’s the incentive to choose one route over another? In my experience, the decision to choose one or the other can depend on the priorities of the organization making the decision. In an IT-centric model, the tendency is to choose Infrastructure-as-a-Service because it provides the greatest degree of flexibility and control; flexibility with regards to which software vendors to use at certain points in the stack, and control over how resources are allocated and fine-tuned.
Along with the flexibility of owning the stack comes added complexity resulting in increased risk.
A Platform-as-a-Service route tends to be the route chosen when line-of-business and functional leaders are most influential in the decision-making process and no SaaS applications are available to meet the stated business and technical requirements. It is also the route commonly chosen when IT and business are closely aligned.
Ultimately, functional heads of Sales, Customer Service and eCommerce, for example, are more inclined to choose Software-as-a-Service when this is an option because the complexities of owning the stack is essentially outsourced to the software application provider, freeing them to focus on business issues vs. the technical underpinnings.
A terrific real-world example in the eCommerce space would be a debate on whether to pursue a hosted version of Magento vs. a Cloud solution like DemandWare or EDL’s product, CloudCraze. A hosted instance of Magento would theoretically provide the best of all worlds – Cloud elasticity and flexibility. But do you really want to own the stack? Owning the stack means maintaining in-house expertise in MySQL, PHP, Magento Application Server and whatever other web server technology is being implemented. Not only that, each of these technologies represents a potential point of failure in the operation of your eCommerce storefront along with the integrations to back office and CRM.
Outsourcing the stack to a Platform-as-a-Service vendor such as salesforce.com dramatically decreases this risk. Arguably, this approach is less “flexible” with respect to mixing and matching software vendors but avoids perceived “lock-in.” Which approach is best for you? Only by appropriately weighing risks and benefits can the answer be derived. You can probably guess what my answer is.
Beware the Kodak Moment: 5 Ways the Cloud Keeps You Clicking
Feb 6th
Bill Loumpouridis
I was genuinely saddened by the news of Kodak’s latest moment: filing for bankruptcy. The good news is that for every Kodak there are literally hundreds of new start-ups doing what Kodak should have been doing: filling the void to provide socially-enabled photo-sharing, video-sharing, the latest digital image capture/manipulation, and other digital technology ad infinitum. These startups are able to do what they are doing on shoestring budgets, largely because Cloud technology provides inexpensive, production-ready environments that foster innovation and scale effortlessly.
Innovation and risk go hand-in-hand. In my experience, cloud technologies substantially reduce key risk elements – time and cost – and thereby enable the innovation required for long-term sustainability. Specifically, the Cloud enables you to practice behaviors that keep you clicking in the startup economy.
1. Fail Fast. Cloud technologies provide the fastest path to go-live. The faster you go live, the faster you can determine your level of success. There’s no greater lesson than failure, so if it’s inevitable, better to get there sooner rather than later.
2. Cannibalize yourself before others do it for you. Part of failing fast means trying things that might cannibalize your existing customer base. A classic example of this is the software industry, where the shift to subscription-based models is cannibalizing once-lucrative software upgrade cycles.
3. Focus on business models vs. infrastructure. Because the move to cloud essentially outsources your infrastructure needs, you can focus your organizational energy and resources on fine-tuning your business model vs. keeping the lights on.
4. Leverage the power of the ecosystem. There are hundreds of startups out there creating the building blocks for your next business model. Why invent when you can assemble, innovate and out-maneuver?
5. Stay lean and hungry. No matter how big an organization becomes, maintaining a “startup mentality” is key to energizing and motivating your workforce. Cloud allows you to keep the conversation focused vs. maintenance of the status quo because so much of your operational requirements have been shifted to third parties.
It is now painfully obvious that the inventors of digital photography failed to cannibalize themselves quickly enough to survive. A Kodak moment to be remembered, but not repeated. Looking ahead, there is certainly no shortage of start-ups looking to fulfill the maxim, “capitalism abhors a vacuum” and the Cloud is ready to help them.
Green Bananas
Jan 31st
One day earlier this month, I got up for my morning routine and went to pack my breakfast – which, since my wife became a nutrition coach and got me on a solid path, usually consists of some whole grains and fresh fruit. I’d been craving a banana and had not had one in a while. I rounded the corner to my kitchen, filled up my coffee, reached into the fruit basket and without even looking broke off a banana from the bunch. The ensuing “snap” let me know what my eyes now confirmed – it was a [very] green banana and was not going to do me any good that day. “Maybe by the end of the week,” I said. The more familiar scenario in my house is that we find there are several brown spotted bananas which we quickly convert to banana bread and all is well. But as I completed my commute to work that day it got me thinking. Do we have any “green bananas” in our pipeline?
Looking at my firm’s business after the big push to the finish in 2011 had my team wondering about the top of our sales funnel, which we had not done in a while.
After spending so much time nurturing the mature opportunities through the more time-consuming stages of qualification, proposals, contracts, and closure, we turned our eyes to the top of the funnel, and were not happy with what we saw. We had just baked a big loaf of banana bread but the basket was lower than we liked, except for a some [very] green bananas.
How many times have you found yourself dealing with the mature deals in your pipeline like those ripe bananas and wondering, “Now what?” Or, looking at a bunch of green bananas and wondering how long it would be until you can eat?
Well, it’s all about managing your produce:
- Block out time to shop for green bananas. Treat your demand generation and lead follow-up time as sacred. Book time during your week for this “appointment” of new sales activities and keep that meeting no matter what. Bring in the fresh stock!
- Spend time balancing ripeness. Get face-to-face with your clients. Never Eat Alone. Use coffee in the morning and lunch in the afternoon as ways to strike up conversations in your network to keep the produce moving through the process. It may not pay off today, but your deals will mature when you need them down the line. Personally, I’m finding more people willing to grab a quick coffee or be treated to an eat-in lunch at their office these days than taking time for dinners or playing rounds of golf like the heyday. The point is, you need to spend one-on-one time to ripen your deals.
- Rotate your stock. My firm EDL Consulting uses salesforce.com for CRM (full disclosure, we also do consulting on the product and it is my personal favorite after using many over the years – contact me if you’s like to learn more) but whatever CRM system you use, be sure that it serves its core purpose – to allocate your precious resources across the portfolio of opportunities to maximize your business by helping your customers. To do this, you need to be sure about where you are in the buying/selling process. You need to know that you are taking the right action and applying the right resources. Use your CRM system to ensure you are not ignoring new opportunities while you’re focused exclusively on the “closing” end of the funnel. You need to spend time in each stage to get the most out of your produce.
Stick with this more balanced approach to your selling activities and you’ll create a more balanced sales funnel. You’ll have some nice green bananas, some delicious yellow ripe ones – and yes, hopefully, you’ll also be making lots of bread!
Legacy Software Giants Finally Embrace the Cloud
Dec 29th
Bill Loumpouridis
Why did it take so long for Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft to truly embrace the cloud?
Business models are funny things. In the Internet Age, the right business model at the right time can catapult a company to fame and fortune practically overnight. Groupon, Zynga and others are a testament to this. Similarly, the inertial drag of an antiquated business model can be the root cause for the rapid demise of others. The tech industry is littered with many flameouts like Palm and RIM.
The obstacles that legacy, premise-based software vendors face to Cloud presence are not so much technical, as they are strategic and logistical. Channel sales and distribution models, which make up the bulk of sales for large legacy independent software vendors (ISVs), rely on one-time payouts for software licenses for their viability. These ISVs have bridged the gap in the short term by slapping “Cloud” stickers on their software CDs and providing financed leases to their software and then passing on the cost of the financing to their customers.
Another strategy is to hedge; buy a cloud company and live in both worlds simultaneously. SAP, with its purchase of Success Factors, and Oracle, with its purchase of RightNow, are buying access to Cloud distribution strategies as much as they are buying technology and customers.
2011 will be remembered as the year these slumbering giants finally woke up to the promise and potential of Cloud technology. Buying their way in is the only way to play catch-up, and that’s great because I hear that Larry Ellison throws great parties. The challenge in harmonizing these disparate architectures into holistic solutions, however, will be formidable.
The $30,000 Limited Edition iPhone 4
Oct 2nd
Bill Loumpouridis
In case you missed it, over the summer Gresso announced the release of a diamond-encrusted iPhone 4.
While there is always a market catering to the egos of hyper-rich, it made me realize that what Apple has done is democratize technology on a level that is absolutely unprecedented. If Warren Buffett decided to spend his entire fortune tomorrow to find a “better” cell phone, he could not buy a better cell phone with better apps. He could buy a better case from Gresso, but the phone itself is the same one that you or I could buy at our local Verizon or AT&T store. This is the same phone that will be obsolete in 2-3 years because of the amazing innovation machine that Apple sustains.
That’s democratization.
It’s not just the phone itself, either. It’s the access to continuous innovation. The App Store ecosystem is an unprecedented cauldron of curiosity, innovation and genius. While I’m using Apple as the poster-child for democratization, the same is absolutely true of the mobile phones included in the Android ecosystem.
In many ways the Cloud has done the exact same thing for Enterprise IT. For the first time companies with small IT budgets have economical access to Cloud-based infrastructures and applications worth billions. They have access to the greatest security expertise on a time-shared basis. While the milk is not free, it’s silly to even consider buying the golden calf.
Is building out a new corporate data center the moral equivalent of purchasing a $30,000 Gresso iPhone? In most cases, my opinion would be yes, it is. There is a reason that cloud infrastructure companies like Rackspace and GoGrid are displacing corporate data centers: for most businesses, the subscription model for infrastructure is far more economical and enabling than traditional on-premise solutions. And access to the constant innovation for load balancing, performance and security represents democratized access on an unprecedented scale. Far too appealing to pass up.
How’s Your Start-Up Going?
Sep 30th
Bill Loumpouridis
I’m always invigorated by the energy, enthusiasm and out-of-the-box thinking I find at start-up events. The most recent Founder Showcase event I attended in the Bay Area did not disappoint. A bonus for me was that I got to meet one of my heroes – Mark Suster, whose blog I consider one of the finest in the start-up world.
In my own recent blog entry, Spontaneous Ecosystems, I wrote about the fact that “what you get in Web 2.0 is that the barrier of entry goes to zero”. At the Founder Showcase Naval Ravikant’s killer keynote elaborated on this point by describing the current era as the “age of fee leverage”; meaning it has become so inexpensive to start a company that “everyone has done it.” Leverage in this case is defined as access to cheap “capital, labor, and machines.” The access to “machines” being provided by cloud providers such as Amazon have become ubiquitous. Nearly every startup that I spoke to at the Showcase is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their technology platform. In addition to AWS, other IP Platforms mentioned by Naval include Apple’s iOS and Facebook Connect, both of which have spawned ecosystems of a scale unimaginable a few short years ago.
It is really stunning how much Cloud Computing has completely democratized the technology startup landscape. It’s almost like in LA, where 80% of the population is working on their screenplay. Even here in the Midwest, newsletters like Tech Cocktail and Flyover Geeks tirelessly promote countless local start-ups on a weekly basis. I truly believe that we are at an unprecedented age for developing the next big idea. The only barriers to entry left are self-made: fear, uncertainty and doubt. Beyond that, The Cloud presents no limits.
Mobile Me, Mobile You
Jul 14th
Bill Loumpouridis
How does Apple keep doing it? I recently read an article about how Apple is the most undervalued company in America. We’ve come a long way from the time when there was general agreement with my hero Andy Grove talking about the evils of vertical integration he describes in his book, Only The Paranoid Survive – where hardware and software on a device are controlled by a single vendor. I guess Apple proves that vertical integration is fine after all. Especially if your vertical is…everything.
Personally, I abandoned PCs about 3 years ago, and EDL standardized on Apple Macs about 18 months ago. I was a late adopter of the iPad, although I did buy a handful of the devices for our technical staff to play with. Now with the advent of the iPad 2 and iCloud, we are unveiling CloudCraze – iPad Edition, a client application built natively on the iPad.
This is a major step forward for any organization looking to enable a mobile workforce with an enterprise-class, secure and completely un-tethered eCommerce experience. We’re happy to be announcing this application the same week that Apple is announcing iCloud.