There are many online project management tools available to help every project manager track and monitor their projects. Though many of these tools fall under the same heading (“Project Management Tools”), the range of features and functionality on offer varies.

In order to ensure that MyProjectTracker continues to meet our audiences needs, we would really like to know what do/would you need from your online project management tool?

As someone who has worked in the IT world for most of my adult life, the ease with which IT jargon slips into my customer communications is frustrating.

I constantly have to keep check on how I’m communicating to my customers and ensure it is pitched correctly.

Whatever the situation, I force myself to think of how the customer is understanding what is being delivered to them.

I try to make it real for them and relevant.

I chastise myself mentally if I find myself talking about delivering a business process. Their faces, rightly, say “so what!”

It’s not about the process, it’s about enabling a part of their business to increase productivity 20%. (As an example).

Don’t talk your language, speak theirs.

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.

So it should be with our own businesses.  While the majority of our businesses are unlikely to affect the world on such a scale as the BP problem, the overall impact will feel just as bad to those who are affected.  The pressure it will put on you as the business owner/manager and your team will be just as intense as those engineers trying to find a solution. Your impacted customers will feel just as aggrieved as those suffering from the oil approaching the coastline and destroying their livelihoods.

Your ability to predict risks to your business is a key prevention tool, but so is how you react when things go pear-shaped.  At a minimum you should have;

1. A communications plan in place for your customers. Tell them what’s going on and what you are doing about it. Doesn’t really matter how – phone, email, web-site, social media.. whatever is the appropriate medium for addressing the situation.
2. Consistent updates on where you are at in resolving the problem. I know that I get really frustrated when I call a service providers automated helpdesk and get “there is no estimated time of resolution for problem X”. It would be far better to say, “we currently have no estimated time for resolution, but we’ll update this message at <time>”. At least this way, we know when to check back for an update.
3. A strategy in place for how to deal with customers who potentially have lost business/data/sales as a direct consequence of your inability to deliver. There is always the possibility of being sued. How will you deal with it? Are you sufficiently protected by your insurance?
4. Once you have fixed the problem, an update should be sent to your customers explaining what happened and what you are doing to try and prevent it happening again. It doesn’t have to be a multi-page report in most instances, just a simple paragraph or two. A small thing that can have a huge impact on your customers loyalty.

Shit happens! How you manage your business when things go wrong will ultimately determine your ability to recover and continue to run a successful business.

Have you a basic strategy in place to manage things when they go wrong?

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.

I was pitching a great product (modesty aside)  in a boring way.

Learning to speak in the language of our customer has been one of the toughest challenges I have had to face as a start-up. In my previous lives, I have been able to talk tech because I was selling to techies. Now I have had to leave behind my background of technical comfort and drag myself kicking and screaming into the real world where people talk about unique selling points and customer benefit. Not only that, but to stand out, I have to find a way to do it that puts us above the competition.

In some ways, I consider myself fortunate in that I understood that this was/is going to be a challenge and sought help early enough along before I dug a large hole for the company. It has been a lengthy process and it’s still going. I am still working to shape the company message and still seek assistance when needed.

The ability to project a strong message for our potential customers so they can really understand the benefit of the product is too important to get wrong.

I still on occasion find myself talking about hosted project management solutions. It’s going to take some more practice, fine tuning and help but I’ll get there. I can’t speak for Eoin of course – he’d just say he’s naturally gifted.

Do you talk the language of your customer and make your message fresh?

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.

We received some great feedback from people as well, both via email and also directly where users allowed us to sit with them and observe their interaction with the product. The open beta has given us the ability to see where people were going in the product, whether there were any stumbling points, how users were getting on setting themselves up, pretty much everything we needed to see.

We have benefited enormously and aspects that we have shared, such as the “shop” site needing to be clearer, are currently being re-worked prior to commercial launch.

Why are we doing the re-work before launch? Why not just go with what we have and tweak?

Well we could have done. However, negative experience is very difficult to overcome. If potential customers don’t want to move beyond the “shop” or are not happy with a user experience at a key point in the set-up process and leave us, they won’t be back.

It takes time to attract people to the site. We don’t want to waste that effort by putting them off after they arrive. We want to ensure that when potential customers arrive that we convert as many as we can. This is why, after we got our numbers for testing, we stopped pushing for sign-ups.

I am not sure there is a correct answer as to when the best time to show your wares to potential customers is. We have done it three times now; when we were defining the concept (market research), during a closed testing phase with selected customers and now the open beta. This has worked for us, but it may not be right for your business.

The one thing I would say is that you have to show your hand at some stage – putting it off because of nerves or concerns of negative criticism is most definitely not the right approach. If you do put it off, you may never open you shop door!

What experience have you had of proving your products and services to the market?

Photo : tasteful_tn

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.

The variation in opinion as to which was the correct response has been exactly 180 degrees. To me, it is reflective of how difficult it actually is to put together a response that will please most of the people, most of the time – which is what many of us try to do.

So which is the right answer?

For me, neither – the first was overtly direct and the second overtly fluffy.  But this is exactly the challenge isn’t it? What works for me, will not necessarily work for others.

So perhaps instead of trying to please everyone all the time, we should just focus on putting ourselves forward in our communications and accept that this is who we are.

Of course I am not condoning being ignorant, rude, dismissive or intolerant communication towards our customers - but I suspect that most of them would prefer us just to be honest, ourselves and a decent representative for our business.

What are your thoughts?

Photo: DerrickT

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?

The subject is broad and deep, so for purposes of this blog, I will focus on the strategy we are taking as we consider the commercial pricing for MyProjectTracker.

So how much to charge to give value?

The correct answer is “As much as someone is willing to pay”. That’s all very well, but what happens if you are in the situation where you really are simply not sure.

For us, we had lots of on-line references we could check out to see what they were charging.  This gave us a bit of a start, but was it the correct value? Some of our features are richer than those of our competition, some are less rich – how were we to ascribe value?

Frankly, we were a bit lost! So we did what anyone should do when you feel like this, we did a survey and asked our potential customers. And guess what? They all came back with what they deemed as fair product value. Not surprisingly, the numbers that were entered pretty much came out in the same kind of area as our expected competition.

We then looked at the opportunity for our customers in terms of time saved and more effective management. Feedback from a number of our potential customers estimate that the product will be save  around 3 man days/month in efficiencies for their companies. That has to be worth around EUR750+ which will give a return on investment within a couple of hours use a month.

So we hope that we will be providing good value in our product. The next question is how to maintain that value vs the competition. This is where the intangibles come into play; customer service, staying on top of the product capabilities and releasing relevant product modules/services into the market, ensuring that the team lives and breathes the customer – pretty standard stuff really, but amazingly forgotten by many.

Have you asked yourself recently “do I over a good value proposition and does it relate to existing as well as new customers?”. Both are equally important!

Photo : wetwebwork

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?

To all of our businesses customer is king, but we often lose sight of this fact during our normal working day. This is particularly the case where the purchase is not instant i.e. it usually involves multiple interactions e.g. a piece of consultancy.

As time progresses, what tends to happen is that we become so inwardly focused that we forget that we are engaged with the customer at their request i.e. the project often turns into being “our own” and not for the customer who asked for it in the first place. We spend time on our management reports, making sure our stats look good, chasing up internal “stuff”… the list goes on and on. All vital, but these are activities should come after ensuring a continued customer engagement.

So how do we stop this happening?

There are a few simple steps that we can take.

1. At the outset of the project, make sure you understand the customers end-game. This may seem an obvious statement, but can we all put our hands on heart 100% of the time and say we took the time to really get where the customer was going?
2. Revisit 1 above throughout the duration of the project.  Engage with the customer, has anything changed? If it has, are the needs still being met? Does anything in the deliverable need to change?
3. If things start going wrong, don’t become inward looking e.g. you’ve run over-budget.  If this is your fault, then it’s your problem, not the customers. They should still get the same attention they always have and should not feel like they are being forgotten.
4. Talk to your customers regularly. This is essence of effective project management. Tell them what’s going well. Tell them what’s not – they can often help out or at least be willing to understand your view point.
5. Encourage your customers be open with you. If they can’t/won’t, no matter, you have to be open with them and continue to seek an understanding of their drivers.

Does your business consistently seek to understand your customers needs when delivering a project? What advice can you share.

Photo : TonyVC on Flickr – with thanks!

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?