Barking

As mentioned at Thinking Digital, here is the first pass at BuzzWord Bingo for the conference.

I’m at Thinking Digital in Newcastle this week. Went to a great presentation yesterday by Tara Hunt, slides are below, and met some great people, including one of my university lecturers Lindsay Marshall.

| View | Upload your own

It kicks off properly today so I’ll write some more about it this evening, in the meantime I wanted to post a couple of links to a blog I read about Dashboard Design we were discussing last night:

• Enterprise Dashboard
• Dashboard Spy

Normally I hate phoning large companies and getting put through their phone systems. T-Mobile is an ideal example of this - everytime I call them they make me listen to their menu options, push 3 or 4 numbers and then I get put straight through to the business team who have no idea which buttons I have pressed.

Today was different though. I called Black Horse for the first time, they asked me 3 simple questions which I answered by voice instead of key presses. It got every single one right first time even in the car, on the motorway, and on handsfree. Once I had done that a nice lady answered the phone - ‘Hi Mr Stride’, I was taken back at first but I assume from my date of birth and phone number they were able to verify who I was.

The rest of the converstation was very much in taken in awe at how well the IVR had worked and that they knew who I was before I even spoke to a person.

Well done Black Horse, an excellent example of using technology just the right amount, not losing the personal touch, and not irritating your customers.

It amazes me just how many people fail in the sales process at the first stage. Let me give you an example:

Last week I was ringing around trying to get further details about some property to let in the area. I had to ring 3 times before ‘the person I needed to talk to’ was in the office. However, before I managed to get through the lady answering the phone never once bothered to take my details or get somebody to call me back.

In this situation I was motivated enough to call back and be persitent; there are numerous other occassions when this had not been so and a potential company has lost out on a sale simple becuase they didn’t know who I was.

Using an CRM package (such as Tactile CRM) can obviously help with this, but a large part is down to the education of staff and having a process in place to deal with things like this.

Had a great afternoon at the TechCrunch UK meetup yesterday, spoke to a lot of cool people and got a few people interested in Tactile CRM.

Blagged some swag, a couple of t-shirts, a bag and a frisbee too, and managed to snap Mike Butcher with one of our dragons on his head!

I had an interesting conversation with a few guys about usability and managed to get some good tips about Corsica for my trip in July! A few cheeky beers were had throughout the afternoon and everyone was really friendly.

Well done to Mike for organising the event and I look forward to the next one.

I’ll be at the TechCrunch UK Meetup on Friday afternoon in London if anyone fancies catching up and finding out a little more about Tactile CRM. I’ll also have some Dragons to give away too!

Shoeless Joe Jackson once famously said ”If you build it, he will come” (OK, technically he didn’t say it but his character, voiced by Ray Liotta,  in Field of Dreams did).

It may well have worked in Field of Dreams, but not so in the world of business.

I spent an enjoyable afternoon at the Kit Car Show today in Stoneleigh. I went along as I own a Caterham and needed to pick up a few bits for the car (I ended up spending the grand total of £1.10). As I walked around the show I was amazed at the number of small suppliers that also offer kit versions of the well established original 7 (it had its 50th birthday last year), and it just doesn’t make sense to me. The basic Caterham can be brought and assembled for under £13,000 for a new car - the others don’t really offer anything above and beyond this, and in most cases don’t offer half of what Caterham do - they are still developing new versions of the car, have recently been brought and launched the frankly awesome R500 last month, there is a massively active owners clubs and several racing series based around the car.

This got me thinking about what we do with our products and services - Tactile CRM in particular. Tactile CRM has several competitors (like most ideas it is not truly original - CRM has been around for a while), however we think our approach to our market space is unique and we have an offering that nobody else does. We don’t aim to copy and trail behind competitor products - we were first to launch Google Contacts API integration for example; our aim is to innovate and listen to customer comments and business problems and find a way we can help to alleviate some of their issues.

Second best is never good enough and won’t get you anywhere. A good product needs to have new ideas or a new approach to the space they are in. For unique/new concepts this is a given, but when launching into an already busy space, being different is the only way to get yourself noticed.

I am a stickler for perfection, anything less than perfect irritates me and I have to do something about it.

Today was no exception, I wrote a quick management script a while back to email me with the number of people who have signed up for Tactile CRM but not logged in 24 hours after signing up so that I can follow them up (I thought this was enough time to let them get the email Tactile CRM sends if the signed up in the evening and it hadn’t arrived before they signed off).

Today was the first time that it ran with only 1 user who hadn’t logged in - imagine my horror when the email said:

There are 1 people that could do with a nudge today to remind them to login to Tactile CRM.

Urgh - quickly logging into the server, updating the script, testing it and changing my neat 4 line bash script to 6 lines and my sense of well being has been restored. It now says:

There is 1 person that could do with a nudge today to remind them to login to Tactile CRM.

It is this level of detail that goes into the products we produce and hopefully makes them run just that bit better for users.

When launching a new product, such as Tactile CRM, I have found there are two main areas that you need to work on. The first is obviously writing the software itself and the second is marketing that product and getting people to use/pay for it.

Tactile CRM has been live for a couple of months now and we are really pleased with the number of people signing up (we are currently on target for our projections). The main push now is twofold - development and sales/marketing - and more around the sales/marketing side of the application than the development.

Don’t get me wrong, Tactile CRM is an awesome piece of software from a technical/engineering perspective - it is really well built, easy to expand and add to, and the feedback we get from users is excellent. Obviously as Senokian we are comfortable with the development of an application like this as we do it on a regular basis for customers.

The new and unknown area for us however is the sales/marketing side of things. Adwords, and exhibitions/trade shows are easy to cost/plan, the difficult part is getting the buzz around the product - people and sites talking and discussing your application.

So far we have had a reasonable amount of success with our marketing, the graph below shows two decent spikes. The first was getting mentioned in the Amazon AWS newsletter, the second appearing on the new Google Solutions Marketplace. Both of these obviously drove a decent amount of traffic and sign ups to the site, however we need more people to talk about Tactile CRM.

Currently I am working on getting coverage on ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch. Which brings me on to my current dilemma. Do we add new features we think are useful, or go for the bigger ones that are likely to get more press coverage (and still be useful in the long run).

I’m thinking things like the Google Contacts API integration we did - we were doing import work that people had asked for and at the same time Google launched the new API. As a result we were the first CRM system to implement it and a few people picked it up. ReadWriteWeb included us in an article on Socialprise and helped to drive more traffic to the site. This wasn’t a feature people request but one we added for PR purposes.

So the dilemma I now face is should the next set of features we add be for PR/marketing purposes or customers. I know the answer to this question when a product has reached critical mass is to add features for users but as we are not there yet, the PR/marketing drives the users and is the most important thing at the moment.

A friend of mine emailed me last night to ask a few questions for a presentation she is doing for the Young Entrepreneurs Forum at Warwick University. I thought the answers may be of interest to some people so have posted them below:

Why did you set up in business?

Mainly because I was fed up with the crap quality of work the company I worked for produced in the web space. That and the fact that they never delivered on what they promised to staff.

What do you think of young people going straight from education into running their own business?

I worked for a year before starting Senokian. I don’t see any reason not too, the only things to bear in mind are that it can be lonely to start with (for example working in a company with existing employees will help you meet and make new friends), and also some experience you gain can be useful when you setup yourself.

The other thing to remember is that in general businesses are happy to spend more for piece of mind, for example as a student you may well build your own computer to save a bit of money. A business is more than happy to spend a few hundred quid extra, get one pre built and supported so employees don’t waste time on it.

What would you do differently if you started over?

Do it with a partner. I started Senokian on my own - with nobody to start with I didn’t have anyone to bounce ideas off or to help out when things got hectic

What would be your top 3 pieces of advice?

1. Don’t under charge yourself
2. Make the correct first impression - we don’t have a dress code, but I am always smart when I visit people for the first time, you can then use this to gauge what you can get away with the next time
3. Have fun, if running your own business isn’t fun, stop and think of another idea. Running your own business is going to consume your life for a while so you might as well enjoy it.

What are your top 3 big ‘no nos’?

1. Not having fun running your business
2. Poor branding - first impressions count, if you need to spend a few hundred quid getting a good logo etc. do it, it will pay dividends in the end
3. Don’t give people too much of a chance. You are paying their wage, if after 3-4 months they are not performing, get rid of them

What have you found scary?

How fast time flies by when you are having fun/running your own business

What have you found fun?

Meeting new people and working with businesses

Any funny or interesting/useful stories or anecdotes about setting up your business?

We have an office dog and that is always part of office negotiations when moving.