Jeff Garrison

I Saw You On Twitter

I was at a networking event the other evening when I reached out to shake hands with a new connection and I said, "I am Jeff Garrison."

She responded, "Yes, from Twitter."  She had sent me a direct message earlier in the week in regards to one of my Tweets.

We skipped the "what do you do "and "what company are you with" conversation.  We already had made a virtual connection.

Tell me it doesn't have business value. 

Tell me it is a waste of time. 

I don't care. 

You make cold calls. 

I'll make connections!

Are the Winds of Cold Calling Changing?

There sure are a lot of opinions about cold calling out there these days.  Of course there are those that believe cold calling works with good technique and those who think cold calling is dead. 

The truth is it depends on what the ROI for cold calling is versus the ROI for other lead generation activities?

For example, can the business buy an inexpensive list and pay someone an hourly wage to pitch their product or services and set a number of appointments per hour?  If so, it would be crazy not to go with cold calling.

On the other hand (which is the hand that probably represents most b2b situations), even if you can buy a quality list of prospects who are decision makers with good contact information, the odds of getting them on the phone are slim.  Additionally, the more complex the product or service, the more a business needs to put into the compensation and training of the person making the calls.  The ROI starts to shift in a bad way.

Furthermore, if the salesperson needs to spend a lot of time doing research and building their own list only to make a cold call and get voice mail or shut down at least nine out of ten times, the ROI is terrible.

For large and medium size companies, the answer lies in Sales 2.0 tools.

For the SMB (small and some medium-size business), a Sales 2.0 like strategy is key.  In a nutshell, making good old fashioned, relationship based connections (a high form of networking) combined with the strength of basic CRM and online connection tools such as your website, LinkedIn, Facebook, and even Twitter is the way to go.

Where do you fall on the cold calling spectrum.  It is an alive and kicking strategy or is it dead?

Photo on flickr by jgh photo

Great Business Software is F.I.R.M. (Part 4 of 4)

Great Business Software is Malleable!

Ideally, when new software is rolled out in a company, it mirrors the internal business processes and captures all the information necessary to analyze the business and make decisions.  However, to remain competitive, businesses must always be tweaking their processes and the information used to analyze the business.

Show me a company that has not evolved significantly in the last five to ten years and I will show you a dying company!

Herein lies the business systems problem.  After a series of adjustments to company processes, the software no longer mirrors the business process.  The more a company "evolves," the more they must work outside their business system creating performance and information inconsistencies that result from working around the system.  This problem is even more pronounced when a company has multiple locations each creating their own coping mechanisms.  After a while, they may not even look like they are part of the same company.

Malleable software systems solve this issue.

When a company makes a relatively permanent tweak or process innovation, a malleable software design allows them to tweak their business systems as well so that it continues to mirror the business process.  Of course the discipline of Innovation Process Management is not easy, but that is a subject for another time.

How would malleable software have impacted your business over the last five to ten years?

Photo on flickr by thinkpublic

Great Business Software is F.I.R.M. (Part 3 of 4)

Great Business Software is Reportable!

Where is the information?  That is the question.  There is a continuum of information availability and integrity.  On one end of the spectrum, there is no systematic collection of information in a company and decisions are made based upon the most recent anecdotal information. 

Picture the farming community at the county level.  The county represents the company.  All the farmers are trying to produce corn in that county, but nobody keeps any record of yields from year to year.  The farmers just say things like, "planting early seemed to work good for my neighbor last year so I am going to try it this year."

In the middle of the continuum is where information is kept in silos.  

Like in many companies, eeach farmer is collecting information about how to improve their yield and storing it in their individual "silo."  They may share their findings with the rest of the community, but informally.  Furthermore, even though they have a shared vernacular, there may be subtle differences in how they perceive and process information which impacts the integrity of their findings relative to their neighbor.

At the other end of this continuum, you will find companies that have a systematic way of conducting their business and the collection of real time information is simply part of the process. 

This is like modern farming where information such as soil samples and data from yield monitors are coordinated based upon GPS coordinates and fed into a giant database.  Farmers can use the collected information from many fields to plan a strategy for the coming season.

A F.I.R.M. business system allows for data to be systematically collected with integrity as a part of the every day business process.  It is organized in such a way that information is easily extracted into a format that provides a good look at what is happening. 

Management can spot and react to negative trends early and they can spot and leverage positive tends to get ahead of the competition.

Photo on flickr by takomabibelot

NIGO

"Not In Good Order," or NIGO, is a term often used to describe incomplete or poorly done paperwork and applications received in an office for processing from customers or sales people in the field. 

What are the costs associated with NIGO?  They are whatever it the costs to get things which are "not in good order" into "good order?"  Administrative labor, greater long distance phone bills,slower turnover and lost opportunities (time kills sales) are examples of these costs.

One overlooked cost, and perhaps the greatest, is the opportunity cost.  When problems are created by things that are NIGO, who solves them?  Often, your "go to" people must get involved.  These are your most productive and creative people. 

When they are fixing problems, they are distracted from taking care of those things that are "in good order" and, from a sales perspective, represent good business.  In other words, they are distracted from doing what they were hired to do! 

After all, how many job descriptions state that the employee will spend 25% of their time fixing problems that shouldn't happen in the first place?

How do you fix NIGO?  With Interwoven!  Interwoven systems are systems that simply don't allow NIGO. 

Read about Interwoven and answer the questions, "How does NIGO impact my company and what would we gain from Interwoven?"

Photo on Flickr by Jeffrey Beall.

Great Business Software is F.I.R.M. (Part 2 of 4)

Great business software is Interwoven!

There are several signs of a system and software that are not interwoven. 

• Silos of spreadsheets kept on individual PCs
• Procedures and processes differ from one location to another
• Different ways of handling things from one person to another even in the same location
• The ability for employees to determine when, how, and if information is going to be recorded in the comapny system
• Information used by management may be inconsistently defined and collected and is not up to date

Imagine a recent conversation I had with a company that is a wholesaler for several different manufacturers of competing financial products.  They receive thousands of applications every year, many of which cannot be processed because they are incomplete or not filled out correctly.  The problem is that every person gets to decide how they are going to do it.  The cost to the wholesaler is huge in that they must spend a lot of time seeing that these applications get fixed and completed.

Ask yourself, what processes in my company are dysfuntional like this?  What are the hard costs, soft costs, and opportunity costs?

Interwoven ... a better way!

An Interwoven system is like a Navajo blanket.  The thread and the artists unique vision combine to make a beutiful fabric.  They cannot be seperated.  Nor can great business software design be separated from the unique vision and processes of the company.  They are interdependent of each other.

Interwoven business systems and software look like the this.

• Everybody loves the system becuase doing their job would seem very difficult without it
• The software mirrors the process exactly.  There is no process "outside" the software. 
• All the input is consistently defined as to who, what, when, where, and how it is done.  The integrity of the input is extremely high.

The obvious benefit to Interwoven business systems and software is the integrity it brings.  All the i's are dotted and t's are crossed (except for the occasional, pre-defined exceptions).  This will go a long way towards eliminating errors of many kinds that cost money and damage the reputation of the company.  Not to mention that customers will recognize that "your people really know what they are doing."

There are at least two major benefits that are not so obvious--Proliferation and Unleashing Talent.

These two advantages will be addressed in Part 4 of this blog post. 

Photo on Flickr by mj_picks. 

Great Business Software is F.I.R.M. (Part 1 of 4)

Great business software is Frictionless!

Have you seen a scenario similar to this?  Acme Medical Device Company leases a medical testing device to customers and can't match up all the leased devices with customers.  Dozens are "missing in action."

Customers call requesting a device and need it to be shipped out immediately.  The company employee acts heroically.  They calibrate the device, package it, and ship it.  Then they procrastinate recording the device id and the customer it went to because the business software was is cumbersome to use, that things would start to pile up if they took the time to use it.  The employee thinks, "I'll put everything into the system before I go home."

This is not Frictionless.  Even though there is a place inside the system for all the information, the system may "hang" or lock up while people are trying to use it.  Maybe the design requires the user to jump around the system to input information.  Maybe it requires several mandatory steps that don't add value to the process. 

Frictionless is easy to use.  People love frictionless.  In this case, frictionless might mean that when the customer calls, it is easy to create a new customer profile while on the phone with them.  It is easy to select from an electronic inventory list the device that they need and the id number of the device is automatically assigned to their profile.  Furthermore, the sytem allows a shipping label to be printed right from their customer profile simply by clicking a button.  Everything it does it does fast.

For the business owner, CEO, or CFO, the relevance of Frictionless is this.

What is it costing us to not have Frictionless systems?