• 5/17/2012 7:30 – 9 am Implementing and Using SFDC Chatter strategically within your organization
• 7/19/2012 7:30 – 9 am SFDC Success and Implementation; Incentivizing Staff to use SFDC
• 10/4/2012 7:30 – 9 am DreamForce Overview, Key Insights, Presentations
• 11/15/2012 7:30 – 9 am Topic TBD

Email nicole@maconraine.com to be added to the meeting invite list and user group. You can also join our user group on LinkedIn.

1) For a presentation delivered at SaaSUniversity.com, there is a new deck called “Overcoming the Challenges of Implementing Activity-Based (usage, transaction billing) for ISVs, MSPs and SaaS Operators.”

2) Another presentation yet to be delivered that dives into the critical process flows necessary to implement activity-based billing, especially bridging the gap between CRM and ERP. Content is most relevant for ISVs and SaaS operators.  Deck is titled: Understanding the Critical Processes in Subscription+Activity-Based Business Models.

3) A deck delivered by Chris Couch, COO of Transverse with Susan McNeice about billing as a critical marketing touch point and using subscription and activity-based billing to build better relationships with customers.

4) Fantastic review of TRACT by Ben Kepes: http://www.diversity.net.nz/reflecting-on-rlm-transverse-billing-and-subscription-vendor/2012/03/22/

5) How to add products with subscription, usage or activity-based pricing to your CRM system

6) New article on SoftwareCEO.com titled “Does activity-based billing create un-needed complexity?

If you have any questions, drop me a line.

Customers are dynamic.  Their needs change.

A new set of connected products and services intimately tuned to the needs of dynamic customers is emerging. New relationship-based content, applications and data services are being launched every day by established and emerging companies.

More than just subscriptions, companies such as Google, NetFlix and others are launching new services to existing customers to deepen loyalty and reduce churn. Companies agile enough to re-configure and personalize pricing on the fly are the ones that will retain the customer relationship.

As companies move beyond simple pricing models such as “unlimited” or “all you can eat,” there is an emerging requirement for rapid implementation of activity-based pricing that customizes a consumer’s utilization of a service to an optimum price level.

Companies thinking about launching activity based billing models are embracing concepts such as lean, agile development and perpetual betas as they adapt to the fast incremental cycles necessary to launch new services. Product launch time frames must compress and new services should be launched in weeks instead of months or years.

While product launch cycles are being compressed, developing billing infrastructure to support these activity-based pricing launches has proven to be a problem for some companies because of limitations in ERP and G/L platforms. These platforms are built for selling product in single transactions; they are not designed for monetizing relationship-based, connected services. These platforms lack the ability to manage the Activity-To-Cash cycle – the ability to establish a relationship and capture revenue generated by that relationship.

For those launching new services, it means billing systems, order to cash processes and more importantly a new set of processes called Activity to Cash(TM) must be customized and implemented for each new billing or business model.

My client, Transverse, makers of www.tractbilling.com, has done a great job explaining the Activity to Cash process.

The Activity-To-Cash cycle layers on top of ERP and GL platforms. it nurtures and expands the relationship businesses establish with their customers at the inception of processing an order and then activating, provisioning, assuring, billing and collecting payment for a service. The Activity-To-Cash cycle leverages the capabilities of real-time rating & charging, analytics, and entitlements to monitor how people engage with a service and then allow on-the-fly changes to product and service configurations to further entice consumption and usage by customers.

For example, with entitlements, advice-of-charge can prompt a customer to top up an account and a follow up with a coupon or promotion might entice that person to further engage and consume.

Whether connected products/services digital store fronts or brick and mortar subscriptions, for companies seeking new revenue, the ability to adapt billing to rapidly evolving business models is critical.

A new set of services is emerging. Content, applications, data and cloud-attached brick and mortar services such as Netflix and Car2Go are disruption traditional markets and reaching new types of customers and realized new sources of dynamic revenues and new profits.

Companies thinking about launching these types of services are embracing concepts such as lean, agile development and perpetual beta as they adapt to the fast incremental cycles necessary to launch new services. Product launch time frames must compress and new services should be launched in weeks.

Simple pricing models such as “unlimited” or “all you can eat” are being replaced by activity based pricing that customizes a consumer’s utilization of a service to an optimum price level.

That means the financial and technical infrastructure required to support these new product launches must also undergo transformation.
Finally, it means billing systems, order to cash processes and more importantly the set of processes called Activity to Cash must be customized and implemented in unique ways for every product launch.

How is billing transforming your business? How are pricing and promotional bundles changing the way you engage with customers?

http://www.biztechmagazine.com/article.asp?item_id=660

Every reptilian instinct in my body wanted to find a way to bad mouth the agency’s work. But their creative, positioning and the execution was brilliant. We couldn’t find fault in the agency’s work.

We dug deeper and asked to look at their new CRM – the foundation for the entire product launch and the basis for all of their prospecting efforts. It fueled their direct mail, email newsletters, catalog mailings and sales outreach.

The problem was immediately obvious. The turd in the proverbial punchbowl was data quality. The client had spared no expense building world class creative and but left the task of data hygiene to a group of marketing interns who would rather mop the floors than scrub data.

In the post mortem, we learned the interns received various Excel files containing old data, questionable lists, incomplete lists and exports from a variety of personal contact management applications. Then, with bubble gum and bailing wire, the master list was normalized, checked for obvious data format requirements and imported verbatim into the million dollar CRM.

In hindsight, the client was incredibly candid. No one wanted to own the data hygiene. It wasn’t sexy and it cost a lot of money to do right.  So, in the hopes of prevent future CRM data quality disasters, here are few tips you can use to get the biggest bang from your CRM dollar:

1)    Data quality is not a one-time event. Your data will get dirty and cleaning it is an ongoing set of activities so it helps to design processes that keep data clean. For example, after an email blast, a single individual should be responsible for removing or updating undeliverables. In addition, sales people should also be responsible for keeping data clean. They own the accounts and it is in their best interest to champion the data. Additional quality checks such automation of duplicate record checks also stops problems before they get out of hand.

2)    Duplicates cost you. A single company record should be tied to a set of addresses and contacts. Failure to tie together information about an account to a single company record dilutes the effectiveness of the data – especially in key account selling.

3)    Humans matter. While automation of data clean-up is useful, humans are essential to the process. Computers miss things that are usually obvious to a human such as a division’s relationship to a corporate entity.

4)    Protect your data from good intentions. With CRM, it is far too easy for individuals without an understanding of data hygiene practices to import data from external sources. An equal opportunity automated and a manual review process should always be applied to external data before it is imported.

5)    Find a balance. It is easy to be compulsive about data quality but it is not practical. Your data changes every day, making sure it is always accurate is not financially feasible. That is why it is important to strive for “good enough.”

Good data is the foundation for effective CRM. In B2B it is impossible to build strong marketing unless you know the names of the people most likely to buy from you. Maintaining a clean CRM punchbowl requires more than a summer intern.

NOTE: This article originally appeared on the ZoomInfo blog: http://zoominfoblogger.wordpress.com/tag/ben-bradley/

We’re rolling out a new website. It is in early beta right now.

The idea is simple – we ask IT managers 4 or 5 questions about their experiences with specific technology and we specifically ask them about implementation “gotchas.”

We conceal everyone’s identity and publish those answers and various gotchas in a document. That document is available for for anyone to download free of charge.

Our first document titled Before You Buy Microsoft Dynamics NAV was just released. We expect the people that download this document will be people who are contemplating a first time installation of Dynamics NAV. We have a few more documents in pipeline now on topics such as CRM, accounting software, various incarnations of SharePoint, Professional Services Automation and ERP.

I expect these documents will be updated regularly as new insight becomes available.

You can get a copy of the first draft of the first document here: http://beforeyoubuy.it/before-you-buy-microsoft-dynamics-nav/

I don’t know if this will work but it seems like a good idea. That’s where you come in…

What would you do differently? Is this report useful? Should we dive deeper? Are the questions the right questions?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Please email me ben@benbradley.net with comments. Thanks!

The first question…when and why do client engagements go wrong? We grouped our own experiences and also some of the experiences of a few of our clients into a collective bucket. Overwhelmingly, client engagements go south when expectations are not properly documented. This is true in marketing professional services, this is true in marketing widgets, this is true in a marriage.

Managing expectations is most difficult because often the buyer of professionl services does not have a clear idea of what they want and need.

Expectations are also way too optimistic, too complicated, poorly defined, and are impossible to measure.

So the sales process then becomes a process of definition. Sales engagements need to move clients forward in their own decision-making process.

Some of the take-aways from the Six Sigma consultant were quite simple — the biggest one boils down to people. Better project definition is attained by attention to very simplistic and what may seem like naïve rules that we have stolen from agile development:

Definition: as a starting point, what problem are we solving? Have we designed a project to solve the problem? How quickly can we solve the problem? Take one problem at a time. Start with discrete “blocks” of tightly defined projects framed with expected results, start/finish dates and clear ROI goals.

Ownership: Who owns the project? Is the success of the project tied to their compensation? What is the intended result? Starting with the sales force, where is the most friction? Involve the customer in a recurring evaluation of the accuracy and relevance of the current message, pitch and offer.

Measurement: How will this program make money? How will we measure it? Success equals sales.

Action: Are we making decisions quickly? A decision not to proceed is better than no decision.

Quick turn around: All projects are executed and completed in discrete timeframes not to exceed 4 weeks. Each time intervals represents a small iterative milestones. Large problems are broken into smaller pieces.

Demonstrate and communicate progress: After every project, there is something to see, touch, and evaluate. There is “stuff” that is useful and measureable and working (or not working). This happens during the project, not after the project. This helps keep the project on track, on target, and on budget.

Everything is a test: Test early and test often.

Everything changes. And changes again.