Here’s my selection of the best articles from the Business Internet last week.

Do you get really ticked off by those commercial WiFi spots, in stores, coffee shops, airports, and hotels etc.  You know the ones where the access is shown as public, but only so as you can login and buy access by the hour.  They drive me demented.  Public WiFi should always be free, in my opinion.  Of course it isn’t, but its suddenly become a lot more accessible with Skype Access a subset of the telephone service which now lets you log in to those networks and pay by the minute out of your Skype account.  It looks as if the charge is £0.11/minute in the UK, which isn’t cheap I guess but it will certainly be a lot more convenient.

If you’re into FP7 ( and I am) there’s really good news just announced.  In an effort to stimulate European economies the Commission has decided to increase the total spent on FP7 grants next year by €700 million, up to €6.4 billion.  We’re involved in the ICT part which has been allocated €1.2 billion in 2011 alone.

Mashable asks Is Social Media Failing to Provide Leads? which is a bit rum for an outfit that’s spent the last year or so raving about the business potential of social media.  We published our own thoughts on this subject in A Role for Social Media in B2B

In Information About Information Seth Godin continues his series about how the Internet is changing everything with the availability of data, opinion, and all forms of information.  I hope you’re keeping up with storing all your own information in Front Office Box.

In Simple Calls to Action Chris Brogan gives us an example of how one new business uses the front page of the web site to attract attention, create aspiration and do something.  I need to work on this for our own site.  What does it tell you about yours?

Where Are You in the Third Breakthrough? is our article building on Seth Godin’s first post about global instant information – The Big Sort.  This a case of get with it, or prepare for extinction.

And in Selling Gets Harder Everyday we wrote about how the inexorable increase in competition in every business is driving down the cost of value.  We’re all in a race to the bottom and our only defence is how we get to use our ideas to create value for customers and clients, without adding to their costs

Free business software seemed a good idea at the time. We had all these clever ideas about the cost of software dropping close to zero, and knew that would change the market for enterprise software. We wrote about our strategy and its experiment, finding out what the new business model would be for software.

At the heart of the strategy was an assumption. You would use our software (for free), and we would make money (not from you) because you were using it. We could make this work with an innovative approach to building and managing Front Office Box, keeping costs as close to zero as possible. You would want to use it because it does a great job, elegantly and simply. In fact you’d like it so much you’d tell all your friends about it, so we wouldn’t have any marketing costs either.

We were anticipating business software would follow the same path as social software (we’ll include Gmail in that bracket), and that’s where we made our mistake.

We managed to attract you from all over the world to our site, and persuade you to want a Front Office Box. We managed to get you to sign up for our free software.

But we didn’t manage to persuade you to use it.

Adoption was always going to be the problem – that’s been the case with software since the beginning of time. Every vendor has the same difficulty – thats why Microsoft software is so complicated. Its trying to do everything for everybody.

We have now definitively proved, to ourselves at least that the concept of free business software doesn’t work and never will. Social media marketing doesn’t work for business software, and never will.

Serious business people would rather pay for software (but not much of course). Tyre kickers sign up for free software, but they don’t have a need for it or the motivation to make the most of the opportunity.

Serious business people don’t hang out on Facebook, Twitter or Linked In all the time either, so they aren’t going to reached there. The people who do are looking for entertainment not ways to solve business problems.

So you didn’t take us seriously, because our business software was free. It seemed a good idea at the time but you just didn’t have a problem you needed to solve. That’s OK with us. We’ve learned a lot in the process. And from now on we’ll be charging for our services.

Front Office Box users will get:

• Multi user accounts they can administer themselves
• Great content offering our experience in sales, marketing, and small business management
• Our discoveries as we explore the business internet finding better ways to use it for business
• Access to our network of friends and other business associates

They’ll have to pay a modest fee for it of course, because you didn’t take us seriously when it was free.

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• Waving to Myself – Am I Really That Sad
• This is what you get, and all you get – Stuff that just works
• Integrate Voicemail with Sales Management
• Small Business Goes Global

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July 4th, 2010 - Posted in Business Internet, Front Office Box  |  Add a Comment Business Internet, Front Office Box. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. -->

Four simple Sales Tools can make the difference between the average sales performer and the Ninja superstar. They have nothing to do with clever tricks or motivating philosophies. They have everything to do with being organised, focused and productive.

Anybody responsible for sales, from the raw recruit to the Managing Consultant, will produce more revenue when they use these Sales Tools to manage their time.

Sales Funnel

You have a territory, perhaps geographic or industry based, and everybody in that territory who might buy your product should be in your sales funnel. This is pool you fish in for prospects, or depending on your product, cultivate them. In the sales funnel you research, evaluate and sort potential customers into those you’ll target, and those you won’t.

Activities in the funnel might include telemarketing, email campaigns, exhibitions – anything that gets attention and builds demand. Your objective in the funnel is identifying targets and turning them into suspects – people not currently in a buying process but with an interest in your product of service.

Sales Pipeline

You have active prospects – people in the process of evaluating your product. They are in the buying process and need a different level of attention – evaluating their requirements, business imperative, process and propensity to buy.

Activities in the sales pipeline will include requirements surveys, proposals, presentations, references and contracts.

Sales Process

You need a standard way of doing things. A way of pitching prospects and managing their perceptions through to the sale – a sales process. Whichever process you choose, it has to be yours. You own the results, so you own the process and are responsible for improving it wherever possible.

Activities in the sales process will include presentation, qualification, negotiation and contract close.

Sales Plan

Failing to plan is planning to fail might be a trite phrase but the sentiment is inarguable. It’s either plan to be successful or hope to get lucky. Professionals plan while amateurs hope.

Activities in the sales plan will include understanding the business imperative, identifying the decision makers and influencers, ensuring there’s a budget and time frame and making sure your support resources will be there when you need them.

Regardless of your business, product, service or territory? Whether you’re the business owner or a commission based producer? Whether you’re a managing consultant or selling home services?

Using these simple Sales Tools will help you organise, focus and sell more. I guarantee it.

And by the way, if you decide some great software would be helpful, with templates, processes and examples come back and see us. That’s why we built Front Office Box.

You Might Also Enjoy

• Surviving Sales Management
• Sales Managers Survival Guide – Review Questions
• What Is Your Sales Strategy, How Well Does It Work
• Sales Training Ideas Which Work

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June 30th, 2010 - Posted in Sales Manager  |  Add a Comment Sales Manager. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. -->

Front Office is rapidly becoming a modern generic term. Everybody seems to be recognising the need to have a Front Office, but I wonder if they’ve done the extra thinking about processes and systems. Without the right philosophy and tools any Front Office is nothing more than a new name for the typical call centre, or service counter. And that’s quite often what happens when large organisations adopt new ideas. The only things that change are the words they use. Everything else remains business as usual.

Last week I came across the best example yet – a union official. He claimed the budget cuts being imposed on a particular government department wouldn’t only affect the notorious for waste Back Office. They would also mean reductions in the Front Office – the part of the organisation dealing with the public, providing those services we apparently need so badly. So now we have it – unions and governments recognise they have Front Offices too.

The term originally started in the hotel industry with the concept of the front desk. The theatre business adopted the concept with its Box Office morphing into the Front Office. Subsequently the idea spread through service industries into manufacturing, and finally into government.

Now we have the full picture. Organisations of all types recognise they have back offices where the internal processes are performed, and front offices where they interact with people outside their business, or department – where the external processes enable different interests to meet and collaborate.

The type of organisation doesn’t matter. Those external interests can be the public, customers, followers, partners and even supply chain. What does matter is those all have their own interests, processes and organisations. In the Front Office our systems have to allow us to interact with other people’s ways of doing things. That means they need to be flexible, and empower (not control) our sales and customer service staff.

In The Difference Between Back Office and Front Office we commented on an article written by CRM expert Denis Pombriant. In this blog you’ll find lots more comment about the need for flexible, enabling software in that space where customers run into bureaucrats who can only see the world from their own perspective.

We believe this stuff, and that’s why Front Office Box works the way it does. Not the way the accountants or IT guys want, but the way sales and customer service people need. It’s enabling technology – not a mechanism for management reporting.

One day the world’s going to realise the Business Process Re-Engineering movement got it wrong, at least as far as customer service is concerned. It’s impossible for any provider to decide which is the best process for customer service, because the customers are in control of that.

You Might Also Enjoy

• Business Planning for Entrepreneurs and Start Ups
• Planning and Task Management for Getting Things Done
• Getting It Right With Checklists
• Making Email a Business Process

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June 30th, 2010 - Posted in Management Built In  |  Add a Comment Management Built In. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. -->

Planning ways a business will operate requires a vision, strategy, objectives and tactics – where are you going with it, how will you get there, and how will you keep on course? It also needs a template for the process, milestones, checklists and schedules to help you organise your thoughts.

For most small businesses, planning is a nightmare. There are so many more questions than answers the planning hardly seems worth the effort – especially when the whole picture can change if a client or customer decides to change the rules of engagement. Why bother with planning when no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy? Nevertheless failing to plan is still planning to fail. If you can’t figure out where you’re going and how you’re going to get there the chances are you won’t make it. You just have to build the variables into your plan, and review and revise it as circumstances change.

Planning needs a process – a way of breaking down the ultimate objective into digestible chunks and filling in the gaps as new information emerges. And that process becomes much more manageable with the tools for the job. Business roadmapping with the right process and tools needn’t be a pointless chore. It can be more like a mind map, with goals and actions to reach them.

With our process you can start simple and expand the detail as appropriate. Watch the video to see how you can

• Set a goal – in our case this is a plan, with ownership, timeframe, description and tags
• Add Milestones – the important steps in the process, with due dates
• Add Actions – associated with milestones and as you need them
• Assign Tasks – with due dates and responsibilities
• Review Schedules – of who is planned to do what, by when, for which project.

You’ll see why Front Office Box is much more than just small business CRM. It’s a really smart way of organising all of your business information so you can find it when you need it. We built it to use ourselves in our consulting business. It’s software which works the way small businesses do.

Register for your Front Office Box today, and get the right template for getting on with your business.

You Might Also Enjoy

• Now Everybody Has a Front Office
• Planning and Task Management for Getting Things Done
• Getting It Right With Checklists
• Making Email a Business Process

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June 29th, 2010 - Posted in Management Built In  |  Add a Comment Management Built In. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. -->

Business strategy always comes first, before the business plan, in my book at least. Marketing, Sales, Delivery and Finance strategies are all components of that business strategy, but follow on from it. The business plan consists of each of those strategies, to the extent we’ve developed them. It doesn’t have numbers in it until we can explain the how, who, why, what, how much, developed in the strategies.

Building that business strategy needs to be a process, just like most of the other stuff we do. The process helps us start from a place we haven’t figured out yet, and end up in another we haven’t decided yet. And my process begins with a road map. It starts where we are now and passes a number of milestones each of which points to the next. As we progress through the milestones we can adjust our course, changing the plan as the facts change.

Road Map

The first milestone is the road map itself. Here’s what it looks like before we’ve done any work

Value Proposition

Define a value proposition which sits in clear blue water. Which benefit will we offer to which end users and partners. In this way we’ll position our new business. We’ll have our elevator pitch, our keywords and a personality.

Resources

Define our resources – what do we have available to support the business.

Delivery Model

Define our delivery model – processes and resources we’ll use to deliver value to the people who’ll be paying us money. With this we’ll be able to explain how we’ll deliver the value proposition.

Market

Define our customers – who will we deliver to and how will the value reach which end user customers.

Marketing

Define our marketing strategy – how will our customers know about our value proposition? What will be our process for attracting their attention, engaging their interest and establishing their adoption of our solution.

Sales

Define our sales process – prospecting, pitching, closing, contracts, customer service, account development.

Resource Needs

Define our resource delta – what do we need that we don’t have.

Business Model

Build our business model – here’s where the numbers start – market size, value and prices, volumes, costs, cash flow, investment required.

As of today we don’t have any of this detail, so, whilst we can explain the technology and what we think is our market, we don’t have a business strategy yet.

But we do have our road map.

Once we’ve filled in some detail of our own there’ll be a white paper covering this topic and we’ll publish it in our Downloads area. In the meantime you’ll find lots of interesting papers there about business planning and process – all free (for the moment).

Hopefully you’ll come back to find out the rest of our story as it develops – a living case study of building a business from scratch.

And even more hopefully you’ll take a few minutes to comment, or add your own thoughts. We can all use some additional perspective when working out our business strategy.

You Might Also Enjoy

• Building a New Business – Living Case Study

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June 24th, 2010 - Posted in Building our business Case Study  |  Edit | Add a Comment Building our business Case Study. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Edit this entry. -->