Smart Calling in this new Era of Engagement

I see two things that people hate most about their jobs: the stress stemming from the millstone that is their email inbox and cold-calling salespeople. We will take on email another time. Everyone hates cold calling. You do as customers and prospects and we do as sales and marketing folk from IT Solution providers. You hate it because it is relentless, intrusive and keeps you from doing your real job. Plus you only recollect the really bad/rude/don’t-take-no-for-an-answer experiences. We hate doing it because it is highly stressful and mostly  unproductive. Customers would be shocked to know the actual hit rate for getting through to a prospective client with a need is less than ½ of 1%. But we have to do it because no business has ever grown by sitting around waiting for orders or projects.

Unfortunately finding new customers is a necessary evil for every business. For most businesses a certain number of customers will be lost every year (blamelessly) through natural attrition such as acquisition, changed direction, new staff, business failure etc. So in order to grow, a business needs to not only replace the attrition with new customers, but find even more lucrative clients. We are going to seek out new  prospects and we are going to contact you, if we believe your company can derive business value from our services. Plain and simple, that is our responsibility to the business.

The key point from the above paragraph is what research can we do and what engagement can we have with you to justify our belief that your company can derive business value from our services? Our objective is to turn cold calling into smart(er) calling. We want to get through to you and spend quality time with you if there is a fit for both organisations. Whether there is a fit or not should be based on prior knowledge of timing, your business and your IT requirements.

So how are we going to go about it in 2013 so that we achieve the outcomes we want without alienating and annoying the world?

The root of the problem and the cause of bad feelings on both sides of the table is that the first wave of CRM technologies have made it much easier, cheaper and efficient for even small companies to carpet bomb the market with emails, hardcopy flyers and cold calls. Quantity over quality has poisoned the experience for everyone.

Our objective now is to use new technology to “warm up” the call. Social Media Marketing is one of today’s biggest catchphrases. It helps businesses like ours become familiar to/with the prospects we want to engage in a way that was not possible before.  One central tenet of Social Media Marketing is the value of  referrals and recommendations. Referrals and recommendations are the life blood of a business and have been around forever, but new social media technologies have improved their mapping and automation. New technologies such as marketing automation tools and engagement via social media are also  immensely helpful in initiating the engagement/interest so that any calls (solicited or unsolicited) will be more productive. These new technologies enable us to be much more intelligent about who we contact and to which relevant content we direct them.

We are adapting to social media marketing and how it can help grow our business. Count me out if it totally replaces the trust and personal relationships that make being in this business so rewarding. I am far from convinced that our increasing number of twitter followers, page views, hashtags, likes etc.  will have  a direct outcome on the number of new clients we expect to acquire. It is how we develop from that activity. But it gives us an opportunity to provide thought leadership and react effectively to the reactions.  It is a two-way street. We are definitely able gain better intelligence about our prospects from whom they follow, what they saying in social media and by whom we can be referred to them.

Here are 4 examples of how I am using Social Media daily to “warm up” calls and improve probability of more meaningful engagements on both sides with our clients:

•  Accuracy – I use our MS Dynamics CRM system to check recent activity with a customer/prospect, but I trust LinkedIn more than our CRM System for the accuracy and more importantly, currency of its information. That is not a criticism of our CRM, it simply because social media is self-edited and therefore more likely accurate and up to date.
• Best place EVER to find out about the competition – For one, people say too much by nature so there are always competitive nuggets to pick up from the Look Ma, I’m Winning posts. Also by seeing who is connecting to whom mainly in Twitter and LinkedIn, you can glean lots about the competition. Retweets, endorsements  etc.  are great providers of Hmmmm, now I get it moments.
• Keeping connected – People move from one company to another and that information is delivered very efficiently by Social Media. I always reach out (OUCH, couldn’t avoid one of those awful neologisms from the land of my birth) to any customer or prospect that has changed companies. Without fail, I usually secure a meeting.
• Finding the Referral – researching a company or contact for that shared experience or mutual contact that might be a helpful introduction. I use LinkedIn InMail to great effect here. Note that InMail needs to be used sparingly, professionally and must be customised and unique.

New technologies and techniques in B2B social media marketing  can increase positive familiarity for both buyer and seller. We still owe it to ourselves and the business to develop upon that familiarity with a proactive engagement (call me old-fashioned, but I believe a phone call still to be the best method or even better a face to face appointment).

We are going to call you. We are going to ask if we can come out and see you. That won’t change for the foreseeable future. We have to, but we will do it the right way.  Try to think of it as a shared experience with a desirable outcome for both parties. We promise unconditionally to make best use of technology, and have the prerequisite knowledge to improve the worth of the call to you. It will be a smart call, not a cold call. All we ask in return is that you consider taking the call  due to improved probability of benefit for you.

Speak to you soon.

Make or Buy Circa 2013

The phrase Make or Buy has been part of the business lexicon and business decision-making for a very long time.  Small companies have to buy almost everything as they don’t have the internal resources. When they grow, they may bring more activities in-house.  As a company gets much bigger, their economy of scale can tilt towards the Make decision as they will have calculated it to be lower in cost and able to deliver customisation to suit their business.  The former #1 Car manufacturer, General Motors, made its own steering gear, transmissions, seats, electronics, manufacturing equipment etc.  It was a great model for them for a long time.  Then they suffered terribly in terms of cost competitiveness and flexibility when things got rough.  When I worked for them in the mid 80’s (EDS), GM thought it was big enough to create it’s own alternative to Ethernet called MAP (Manufacturing Automation Protocol).  I still keep in touch with the guys who worked on it.  It was a great idea and well executed.  Ultimately it failed as a Make decision due to the weight of the external market and lower cost to Buy.   A great current example of a Makedecision that is working well for someone is Google.  They are now likely the 5^th largest server maker according to Intel (http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/09/29853/ ) and they don’t even sell any of those servers to external clients.

The main topic of this post is to explore Make or Buy in the context of Information Technology Service Delivery, the business segment in which my employer, Richardson Eyres successfully operates.  The debate for in-house vs. externally sourced IT is not new either.  Service Bureaus, Turnkey Solutions, Application Development vs Off the Shelf, Outsourcing, ASPs and the now omnipotent Cloud Computing are the historic technological representations of the classic Make or Buy decision when it comes to IT.  Some of these historic models came and went because the underlying technology was not flexible or scalable enough for customers to adapt a service to their specific needs and resident  skill sets.  A big issue would have been the concern around the absoluteness of handing over the keys to the farm and the tendency of such arrangements to stifle innovation.  Companies have always talked about focusing on core competencies and repurposing staff to more strategic initiatives and IT vendors have always spent eye-watering amounts of marketing funds trying to convince those companies that their products/services would enable just that if purchased.

Make or Buy has a new breadth and refinement in this era becoming dominated by Cloud Computing and Social Business.  Taking a step back, it could never have happened without several outstanding modern technologies: server & storage virtualisation, advances in security, low cost memory, multi-core CPUs, affordable WAN bandwidth and other very clever software including open source technology.  The combination of these technologies has meant that Cloud service providers can build an infrastructure platform that is scalable, flexible and affordable.  Customers can select and adapt offerings to their specific needs.  Today, Make or Buy is no longer an either/or, it is much more of a sliding scale decision and that sliding scale is most certainly tilting in the direction of Buy.

Today IT decision making is scaled along how little to Make and how much to Buy. And that is great for business customers in terms of choice and cost reduction.  The 3 main as a Service categories of Cloud Computing are arguably Infrastructure (IaaS), Platform (PaaS) and Software (SaaS).  There are many others subsets and variations:  Backup, DR, Business Continuity, File Sharing & Collaboration, messaging, archiving, Software Development, application delivery… can all be bought as a Service without the keys being handed over because Cloud, by its very nature, ensures a great level of portability.  So business are able to hand over as much as they wish to and make solid decisions about what to make and what to buy comfortably knowing that they won’t be stuck if needs change quickly.  There are a fantastic number of new businesses offering very mature cloud-based services for specific infrastructure, platform or application requirements; in specific vertical markets; and  for both general and specific business needs.   With Cloud Computing, companies can easily find their rightful place on the Make or Buy scale technically and commercially.  The business can then achieve goals of retaining core competencies and focusing key staff on strategic initiatives.

One of the things of which I am most proud about our company, Richardson Eyres, is our ability to adapt our company (sales, engineering marketing and management) and solution offerings to the shifting business models for IT service delivery.  Traditionally we have helped our clients execute on the Make decisions with our expertise in Data Centre infrastructure, Enterprise Storage and Virtualisation Technology.  Now we still contribute to customer project success in that traditional fashion, but we also offer scalable and flexible ITaaS through our own re cloud express platform and our outstanding Cloud Services vendor partners.  I am convinced that our traditional Data Centre technology expertise provides us with perspective and advantage we now apply to help clients arrive at the right decision on where to place themselves on the Make or Buy scale.

My  advice would be to get out there, get what you need as a Service to achieve the current goals of the business and devote your thinking to the more important strategic concerns because you won’t be locked in.  We’re happy to help.

How soon will the phrase “Nobody ever got fired for buying…” be used in a sentence with flexible IT as a Service?  Not soon enough! Shame that it just doesn’t seem to have the same ring to it as in the old IT parlance.