MyProjectTracker – The Blog

It is more than a little ironic that the initials of the company responsible for what is likely to be one of the greatest man-made natural disasters of this decade, is the same as the two that begin the phrase “be prepared” i.e. BP. They most certainly were not in this instance.
As each day passes, the scale of the problem facing the company and those in the path of this disaster becomes clearer and clearer. The PR machine is in full operation, country leaders are calling each other to pacify fears, engineers are working frantically to come up with solutions. Unfortunately, nothing so far is fixing the problem at hand and it will be some considerable time before it is brought under control.

Now I’m no engineering expert or oil rig risk analyst but surely someone, somewhere has asked the question “what do we do if there is an under-sea blow-out caused by..” and the answers have already been considered.

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I won a copy (thanks Andy Beal) of “The Referral Engine” by John Jantsch (which was nice) and it is a great read for anyone interested in growing their business through referrals. One section starts with the sentence “People don’t talk about boring companies..”. He’s right, they don’t!

This is a challenge that I have faced since setting up MyProjectTracker. For months, it was all about features and capabilities. The 15 second pitch included the words project management (and yes, I could see peoples eyes glaze over!). In other words spoken like an IT person selling to an IT person, not as a marketer or sales person to a business owner.
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We thought long and hard about going for an open beta test on MyProjectTracker. On the plus side we felt we’d get honest feedback from people who did not know us i.e. not the friends and family brigade. On the negative side, we were putting the product out there and leaving ourselves open to criticism.

We elected to go for it and opened up the product so anyone could sign up to and have a look around. We felt the benefits of open and honest feedback far outweighed the risk of exposing ourselves to potential criticisms.

We pushed the product for exactly one week directly to companies and via the usual social media channels. We decided to ease off once we had about 125 users signing up. We had a target of 20% of those people to actually go beyond the look around and actually get themselves setup and using the product in anger.

We hit our target in less than a fortnight – delighted. We got our sign-ups and our 20% of active users – a mix of businesses from single person consultancies to our largest, a company with 30+ employees. A good cross-section we felt.

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I read a post yesterday from the team at 37Signals and found the on-going commentary fascinating.  The post concerned two approaches to a response being sent to a customer who was looking for a bigger discount.

The first reply was very direct and essentially said;

“sorry, but no can do over and above what we are already offering“.

The second was more flowery in approach and basically said;

“we’d love to have you as a customer and feel your company would benefit” along with a re-dressed version of what is being sold on the website.
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To me, value proposition is simply the value a customer receives when buying a product and/or service. It applies to both new business and to servicing existing customers. A business has to create this value proposition for its customers and make sure that the value proposition is viable and sustainable.

How do we translate the concept into our pricing models and offerings?
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I read a great blog recently about compelling events and it got me thinking about the way that many of us in business project manage our customer deliveries.

The context of the compelling events article was essentially that each event had a defined date and were as a result of a particular business event. The one piece of the post that provoked my thoughts was the element discussing the need to understand the customers compelling event i.e. why is the customer doing this project in the first place?

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CRM is an important concept for us all and I believe the importance of it has been hidden under a load of jargon placed on it by software suppliers.

Customer Relationship Management a.k.a. CRM as a concept is geared very much towards the larger scale business and is misunderstood or worse, ignored, by smaller enterprises as a consequence. Software companies have made small fortunes creating CRM applications that deliver incredible insights into your customers to help you achieve both loyalty and sales. It is often through the software houses that we hear about the CRM space and what it means to business.

But what is CRM really? Does it apply to smaller companies and do you need software to do it?

In a nutshell, CRM is about finding out more about your customers and to utilise that information in a way to engender loyalty and increased sales. That’s it, nothing more or less.

Does this apply to your business and ours? Yes it certainly does! Every business wants to keep its customers and to increase sales.

This is the point at which people get nervous of CRM concepts as it starts to create thoughts/concepts of “change” and “investment” and “IT” and “time”.

Well it shouldn’t make us nervous and it most certainly doesn’t mean an enormous investment of capital and/or time.

The outputs of effective CRM practices are;

1. Loyalty.
2. Encouraging more sales.

Simply breaking it down to those two phrases certainly makes it easier on the eye as to what you are trying to achieve.
Think about your business – does this mean an expensive investment or is it simply making sure that you look after your customers correctly each time (deliver what you say, when you say and with a friendly face).

This delivers loyalty that will inevitably deliver greater sales as word of mouth is a very powerful tool – especially if you consider the amount of blogs, social networking sites etc on the internet that can be used as “word of mouth vehicles”.
It does not have to mean investing in high-end data mining and CRM analytical tools that are, for the most part, outside of the budget of most of us.

What it does mean is that we look at our operations to ensure they are geared to providing the best possible service to our customers along with the ability to identify and understand their needs.

Where can your operations improve to help better understand your customers needs?