Modern Tools for Service Contractors, Part 3: Outbound Sales and Marketing
Both residential and commercial service contractors rely heavily on new sales for growth. Where residential contractors rely on converting inbound leads, commercial contractors lean on a mix of inbound and outbound tactics. This post lays out a handful of sales tools that are not only easy to use, but also extremely powerful across the entire lifecycle of new sales from prospecting to closing. Residential contractors will likely find more value in the last two sections, while commercial contractors will benefit from the entire suite of tooling listed below.
Google – Discover Great Prospects
Let’s start at the beginning of the sales cycle: Prospecting. Who are you trying to sell your services to? Google makes it extremely easy to find the best prospects if you know how to take advantage of its powerful search features. For example, if you are a commercial HVAC company trying to find the best restaurants and restaurant groups to sell to, here are a few different search techniques you could employ:
- Review and Price – The best prospective restaurants are likely to both serve high-priced meals and have good online reviews. Use the review and price filters to find these restaurants as I did for this search in Atlanta, Georgia.
- Site Search – The “site:” search feature can be used to search public directories such as www.manta.com. For example, you can search Manta for restaurant groups in Atlanta via Google with a search query that looks like this site:manta.com restaurant group Atlanta.
- Advanced Search Operators – Further narrow down your search results by using other advanced Google search operators such as quotations for exact string matches and “-” to exclude certain terms. For example, you can search for the exact term “Restaurant Group” in Atlanta and exclude consulting companies with this search “Restaurant Group” Atlanta -consult. Find a full list of Google search operators here.
LinkedIn – Find Contact Information
Now that you’ve targeted the companies you would like to pursue, it’s time to find the correct contact and their information. Start by using LinkedIn’s advanced search to search by title, company name, location, and any relevant keywords. Much like advanced Google searches, you can use quotation marks for exact string matches. You can also use “AND,” “OR,” “()” operators. For example, you could search “president OR CEO OR owner” in the title field or “(facility OR general) AND manager” in the title field to find the facility manager or GM. Once you find the profile for the person you need to contact, use a Google Chrome extension such as Email Hunter or FindThatLead to unearth their email address.
Note: LinkedIn can also be used to find prospective companies by using relevant searches. For example, searching for “Restaurant Group” in the keywords field, “CEO OR president OR owner” in the title field, and limiting to relevant locations returns very useful results. For more information on using LinkedIn in the prospecting process, check out our blog post Lead Prospecting Guide for Tech-Savvy Contractors.
Pipedrive/PipelineDeals – Manage Sales and Prospects
Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms help organize and manage your sales pipeline. An entry-level application such as Pipedrive or PipelineDeals is perfect for companies new to CRM, while platforms like SalesForce and Infusionsoft will be a better fit for larger, enterprise sales organizations. These platforms house all sales related contact information and tasks to ensure that nobody drops the ball in the sales process. Email integrations makes it easy to log communications so that no one has to dig through emails to understand the last or next steps in a deal. When properly managed, these applications help any sales rep handle more prospects, deals, and opportunities.
MailChimp – Build Value with Customers
MailChimp is a great entry-level email marketing platform. Setting up your first email marketing campaign is a breeze with their simple interface that takes you from contact list to beautiful email in no time. Because of its widespread use, MailChimp integrates with many other applications including WordPress to collect contact information on your website and CRM (like those mentioned above) so that your company can easily broadcast marketing messages to prospects or customers.
Email marketing provides service contractors with an incredible opportunity to build tremendous value with both their prospects and customers. Simple, targeted emails can endear you and build trust and credibility. This is especially true when you:
- Predict the Future – If you predict the future of their service needs accurately, your customers will be blown away. For example, an email campaign to customers warning them about possible equipment failures they could expect with changing weather will let the customer/prospect know that you are looking out for them.
- Provide Helpful Tips – Tips that will help your customer save money in the short run will result in more loyalty and higher lifetime value for each long-term customer.
- Offer Seasonal Discounts – This strategy will both fill the slow months with off-season work and build strong relationships with your customer base.
Take a close look at your sales organization and ask yourself if you have the visibility and productivity you need to reach your personal and company goals. If sales is an integral part of your growth plan, these tools will not only make your life easier, but also accelerate your business development. Every single tool listed above is either free, or extremely cost effective. Your only commitment is the time it takes to learn a new tool which I guarantee will be far outweighed by overall sales performance improvements.
Reread:
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Modern Tools for Service Contractors, Part 3: Outbound Sales and Marketing
Unlike residential field service companies, commercial service contractors rely heavily on new sales for growth. For the residential contractors reading this post, please skip to the section below about MailChimp as it contains insights that apply to contractors on both ends of the spectrum. For commercial contractors, this post lays out a handful of sales tools that are not only easy to use, but also extremely powerful across the entire lifecycle of new sales from prospecting to closing.
Google – Discover Great Prospects
Let’s start at the beginning of the sales cycle: Prospecting. Who are you trying to sell your services to? Google makes it extremely easy to find the best prospects if you know how to take advantage of it’s powerful search features. For example, if you are a commercial HVAC company trying to find the best restaurants and restaurant groups to sell to, here are a few different search techniques you could employ:
- Review and Price – The best prospective restaurants are likely to both serve high-priced meals and have good online reviews. Use the review and price filters to find these restaurants as I did for this search in Atlanta, Georgia.
- Site Search – The “site:” search feature can be used to search public directories such as www.manta.com. For example, you can search Manta for restaurant groups in Atlanta via Google with a search query that looks like this site:manta.com restaurant group Atlanta.
- Advanced Search Operators – Further narrow down your search results by using other advanced Google search operators such as quotations for exact string matches and “-” to exclude certain terms. For example, you can search for the exact term “Restaurant Group” in Atlanta and exclude consulting companies with this search “Restaurant Group” Atlanta -consult. Find a full list of Google search operators here.
LinkedIn – Find Contact Information
Now that you’ve targeted the companies you would like to pursue, it’s time to find the correct contact and their information. Start by using LinkedIn’s advanced search to search by title, company name, location, and any relevant keywords. Much like advanced Google searches, you can use quotation marks for exact string matches. You can also use “AND,” “OR,” “()” operators. For example, you could search “president OR CEO OR owner” in the title field or “(facility OR general) AND manager” in the title field to find the facility manager or GM. Once you find the profile for the person you need to contact, use a Google Chrome extension such as Email Hunter or FindThatLead to unearth their email address.
Note: LinkedIn can also be used to find prospective companies by using relevant searches. For example, searching for “Restaurant Group” in the keywords field, “CEO OR president OR owner” in the title field, and limiting to relevant locations returns very useful results. For more information on using LinkedIn in the prospecting process, check out our blog post Lead Prospecting Guide for Tech-Savvy Contractors.
PipeDrive/Pipeline Deals – Manage Sales and Prospects
Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms help organize and manage your sales pipeline. An entry-level application such as PipeDrive or Pipeline Deals is perfect for companies new to CRM, while platforms like SalesForce and Infusionsoft will be a better fit for larger, enterprise sales organizations. These platforms house all sales related contact information and tasks to ensure that nobody drops the ball in the sales process. Email integrations makes it easy to log communications so that no one has to dig through emails to understand the last or next steps in a deal. When properly managed, these applications help any sales rep handle more prospects, deals, and opportunities.
MailChimp – Build Value with Customers
MailChimp is a first-in-class entry-level email marketing platform. Setting up your first email marketing campaign is a breeze with their simple interface that takes you from contact list to beautiful email in no time. Because of it’s widespread use, MailChimp integrates with many other applications including WordPress to collect contact information on your website and the CRM’s (like those mentioned above) so that your company can easily broadcast marketing messages to prospects or customers.
Email marketing provides service contractors with an incredible opportunity to build tremendous value with both their prospects and customers. Simple, targeted emails can endear you and build trust. This is especially true when you:
- Predict the Future – If you predict the future of their service needs accurately, your customers will be blown away. For example, an email campaign to customers warning them about possible equipment failures they could expect with changing weather will let the customer/prospect know that you are looking out for them.
- Provide Helpful Tips – Tips that will help your customer save money in the short run will result in more loyalty and higher lifetime value for each long-term customer.
- Offer Seasonal Discounts – This strategy will both fill the slow months with off-season work and build strong relationships with your customer base.
Take a close look at your sales organization and ask yourself if you have the visibility and productivity you need to reach your personal and company goals. If sales is an integral part of your growth plan, these tools will not only make your life easier, but also accelerate your business development. Every single tool listed above is either free, or extremely cost effective. Your only commitment is the time it takes to learn a new tool which I guarantee will be far outweighed by overall sales performance improvements.
Reread:
Icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com is licensed by CC BY 3.0
Modern Tools for Service Contractors, Part 2: Inbound Marketing
When folks ask me about working in a small business, I point to the imaginary hat rack in the corner and say “I get to wear every single hat on that rack depending on the weather.” This analogy is especially true for owners and managers in service contracting companies who will act as technician one day, and sales rep the next; customer service representative another day, and scheduler the next. Heading into the slow cold season, one of the most important hats that modern service contractors must don is that of the high tech marketing nerd. When business slows down, it’s time to hunker down and focus on web presence to maximize inbound traffic and leads.
WooRank – Website Analysis & SEO Tool
Let’s start with your company’s face to the world: your website. WooRank has a very handy, free website analysis tool that will generate a report of the good, the bad, and the ugly for your website. Primarily, WooRank will indicate aspects of your website that need improvement in order to enhance your search ranking on Google search results.
WordPress – Website Content Management System
If your company website remotely resembles The World’s Worst Website Ever, it’s time for an update. WordPress is a popular website content management system that makes it easy to build and manage websites from templates so that you don’t have to know code to get great results. If you are using a web agency to build and manage your website, ensure that they use WordPress so you can:
- Adjust your website content if your agency can not respond to your update requests quickly.
- Easily switch agencies due to the widespread use of WordPress.
- Take advantage of WordPress Plugins such as NearbyNow (read more below)
Synup – Online Review and Listing Monitoring
Synup is a great tool designed to help improve your company’s digital presence and visibility by:
- Summarizing and updating online local listings for sites like YP.com and Manta.
- Reporting search engine results for the keywords leads use to find businesses like yours.
- Notifying and summarizing online reviews for major services such as Google and Yelp.
In past posts, we’ve discussed the impact great customer service has on your company’s digital reputation and the importance of online reviews. Synup’s review notifications will help you appropriately respond to bad reviews and tell you when it’s time to run around the office and give everyone high fives when you receive good reviews:
NearbyNow – Search Engine Optimization and Online Reputation
NearbyNow helps the best service contractors showcase their great reputation online and improve local search results. Need some proof that your company can dominate Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Try searching for an electrician in Atlanta or any surrounding city. For example, check out the results for these searches:
Did you notice that TE Certified Electricians was at the top of all three searches? That’s the power of consistently using NearbyNow. By visiting their website, you can see how TE uses the WordPress Plugin to publish their amazing customer reviews to their site.
Read our blog post Nearby Now & ServiceTrade Can Improve Your Local Search Results to learn more about NearbyNow and how it integrates seamlessly with ServiceTrade.
Don’t be scared to wear the nerd hat. Modern marketing technology is easy to use and the products listed above will drive traffic to your website and grow your customer base.
Read the first installment of the Modern Tools for Service Contractors series, Part 1: Operational Efficiency, and stay tuned to the blog for the next, and final, installment Part 3: Direct Sales and Marketing.
Icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com is licensed by CC BY 3.0
Modern Tools for Service Contractors, Part 1: Operational Efficiency
Over the last couple years, we’ve compiled a list of free to low cost, easy-to-use applications and products that we often recommend to service contractors. These products range in benefits from operational efficiency to lead generation and fit into a modern ecosystem of tools necessary for service contractors to adapt to the business challenges (and opportunities) presented by the evolving nature of the Internet.
Part 1 of this series will focus on simple products that will boost your company’s operational efficiency. Each one of the applications below will save time so you can focus on growing your business.
Fiverr – Task Outsourcing
Too busy to consider making any changes to your company processes? Buried under a pile of spreadsheet work and data entry? Fiverr is here to the rescue. Fiverr connects you with thousands of individuals all over the world who will perform any task you hand them for as low as $5. After your first gig, the Fiverr term for a transaction, you will be on a constant lookout for opportunities to outsource work to save time and money.
Slack – Chat Application for Teams
If you are still communicating with your coworkers via texts and one-sentence emails, consider the switch to Slack. Slack is a chat application that works on any desktop computer or mobile device. Slack makes it easy to chat directly with anyone on your team or communicate in predefined groups. We typically recommend that service contractors set up chat groups for every operational division so that schedulers and dispatchers can quickly communicate with techs in the field. This setup also makes it easy for technicians to communicate and lean on each other’s expertise.
Google Apps or Office 365 – Office Productivity and Collaboration Tools
Strong opinions about these solutions can be found all over the Internet. Microsoft diehards swear by Office 365 and Google fanboys and gals will forever be loyal to Google Apps. We’re here today to to tell you that both products are great! What really matters is that they are both cloud-based products that enable your company to easily collaborate on work and focus on service delivery instead of server IT.
TSheets – Employee Time Tracking
Time tracking for any hourly employee is difficult, but service contractors have the additional complexity associated with field technicians who are not present in the office. TSheets enables remote time tracking via their mobile app which connects back to the accounting system to summarize payroll and job costing. The application even provides overtime warnings to prevent excess payroll spend.
InvoiceSherpa – Accounts Receivable Automation
Once an invoice is sent to your customer, InvoiceSherpa not only provides them with a convenient payment workflow, but also reminds them when the invoice is due. Prebuilt reminder timelines ensure that your customer receives appropriate messaging according to the payment due date. For more information, read our previous blog post about InvoiceSherpa.
None of these applications are difficult to use and each of them requires little implementation. Take advantage of what the internet has to offer so that you can save the time you need to focus on engaging your customers in thoughtful, modern ways.
Coming up next:
- Part 2: Web Marketing
- Part 3: Direct Sales and Marketing
Note that we’ve purposefully excluded accounting applications on this list. Every company needs a back-office financial system that meets their needs, and there is no accounting system that is a perfect fit for every company. With that said, we do have strong opinions about what makes a good accounting application. Read our eBook, The Practical Guide to Buying Software for Service Contractors, to learn why every service contractor should use a web-based accounting platform that does NOT claim to be an all-in-one.
Icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com is licensed by CC BY 3.0
Highway to Success: The Power of Customer Satisfaction
Your service contracting or field service company is a car casually driving down the highway to success, but the online giants are changing the rules and the road at a breakneck pace. For example, our blog post Google Home Services and its Impact on Small and Medium Businesses summarizes one of Google’s latest changes that will impact service contractors. Effectively, this update replaces the top search engine results with “pay to play” advertising results. Google is not alone in their frequent updates. Yelp, Angie’s List, Amazon, and other online giants that interface with the customer are frequently adjusting to a constantly-advancing technology landscape where standards for customer experience are set by up-and-coming tech companies like Uber.
Though it may seem impossible to adapt to this ever-changing, digital road, there is good news. Through every change the online giants undergo, there is one constant: customer satisfaction. On the highway to success, customer satisfaction takes many forms and leads to great outcomes.
Online Review Supercar
The online giants want your money and he who pays the toll will have access to the customer. If you won’t pay the toll, your competitors’ money will suffice. This will not change. The only way you will profit in this environment and beat your competitors is to make customers so happy that they sing your praises via online reviews. You will still have to pay the toll, but your customers’ reviews will put you in the front seat of a Ferrari that will make your brand shine to new prospects.
While your competitors are driving Camrys and Accords (the most common cars in the US), your prospects will drool over the opportunity to hop in your supercar. If you are hesitant about the possibility of bad reviews or doubtful about their efficacy, here are a couple facts that you may find interesting:
Paying the toll for digital impression won’t change, but a high quantity of positive reviews will convert those impressions into substantial business.
Word-of-Mouth Bypass
Every service contractor or field service company is familiar with the power of word-of-mouth marketing. For many service companies, word-of-mouth is their only marketing strategy. As a marketing professional I would NEVER recommend relying solely on this strategy, but there are clear benefits to diversifying marketing efforts to include some word-of-mouth efforts.
- Subvert the Giants – Word-of-mouth marketing enables companies to subvert the toll enforced by the online giants. While the giants evolve, friends and colleagues will continue to talk about their favorite local businesses as they always have – enabling your company to create its own road to success.
- Trust = Easy Sale – When prospects discover companies through friends and colleagues that they trust, the sales cycle is simplified for those businesses. This trust enables the businesses to command a premium price because the prospect is already committed to the recommendation.
- Social Media Megaphone – In the past, personal conversations were the only opportunity for word-of-mouth marketing. Social media provides your customers with a megaphone to instantly tell their network about the incredible (or not so incredible) customer experience they had.
The word-of-mouth bypass can help you get to where you are going, but it can be slow. Always keep your bypass open to pick up new customers, but don’t spend too much time and energy building new roads when there is a four lane available (even if there is a toll).
The Customer Satisfaction Engine
Satisfied customers will be the engine for your new supercar. With the proper channels, your happiest customers will propel you to success. Here are a couple key principals to follow:
- Customer Experience > Customer Service – Since we’ve already covered this topic in depth in a recent blog post, Customer Experience is More Important to your Service Business than Customer Service, I’ll provide a quick summary. The term “customer service” connotes reactive phone calls with disgruntled customers. On the other hand, a great customer experience is a designed process that results in longer, more rewarding customer relationships.
- Provide the Outlet – Enable your customers to tell the world about your company. Don’t be afraid to solicit reviews from your customers on Google, Yelp, or Angie’s List. If you’ve built a strong relationship with your customer (see #1), they will be more than happy to promote your company. Similarly, providing them with an easy way to tell their friends and colleagues about your good work will jumpstart your word-of-mouth marketing. Whether you leave cards behind, offer discounts for referrals (here is an interesting post about Airbnb’s findings on the matter), or engage them on social media, be sure to take capitalize on the relationship you’ve built with your customers in a way that attracts new prospects.
No matter how the online giants change the rules or charge their tolls, customer satisfaction will always lead to success. A well-designed customer experience has the power to turn your customers into a high-octane marketing engine.
Don’t bring an operations knife to a customer service gunfight: Customer engagement must be the first priority in a connected world
“Why yes, I regularly purchase products from mail order catalogs” said no one in the last 20 years. Yet 20 years ago, most catalog retailers were thinking to themselves “If only we could improve our operations and reduce our cost of delivery, print, and call centers, we will outprice the competition and really rake it in!”
This line of thinking is obviously absurd in the face of Amazon’s success and the Internet commerce imperative every surviving retailer has now embraced. However, this “internal operations is all that matters” mindset is still rampant in commercial service contracting companies today. Like the retailers of the 90s, commercial service contractors are focusing their systems upgrades on internal operating efficiency and accounting when instead they should be girding themselves for the internet shootout that is going to occur in the war over customer engagement.
Efficiency ≠ Growth
So why did catalog companies believe that operational efficiency and outpricing the competition would provide them with the edge? Much like commercial service contractors today, they focused on tactical, cost saving goals that were easy to understand. For example, it’s not difficult to calculate that reduced windshield time for technicians will result in fuel and vehicle maintenance savings, increased availability for billable calls, and decreased price for the end customer. The math seems pretty simple right? Reduced costs = Increased profits and growth
This equation is WRONG.
What the equation is missing, and what catalog retailers failed to recognize, is the eroding demand that occurs when customers inevitably switch to a competitor that provides a better customer service experience. Amazon, eBay, and the hundreds of other online retailers provided shoppers with a simple, online experience that resulted in the downfall of the old-guard catalog retailers. Commercial service contractors are at risk of the same demise if they don’t provide their customers with an engaging and enduring online customer service experience.
Step One: Demand, Step Two: Efficiency
This is not all to say that commercial service contractors should neglect operational efficiency. For example, Amazon has one of the largest, most efficient distribution models in the world. However, the distribution model was developed well after their ecommerce platform released to the public. Amazon understood that an efficient distribution model didn’t matter if they could not engage and retain customers. By first building the ecommerce platform that shoppers enjoyed, Amazon drove demand that later supported the construction of their distribution model.
How to Avoid the Catalog Trap
How can modern commercial service contracting companies avoid the catalog retail trap? Stop obsessing on operational efficiency and cost reductions. These are important, but hardly matter to your customer when another company provides much better customer service. When you lose all your customers to an internet savvy competitor, no amount of operational efficiency will lead to profits on zero revenue.
Take a page from Amazon’s book. Focus on generating demand by engaging customers online and providing them with an amazing customer service experience that keeps them coming back for more. Strong customer engagement and a reputation for amazing customer service will yield robust revenue that offers the possibility of perpetual profit. You will have the privilege of focusing on improving operational efficiency for many years to come if you survive the internet gunfight that you will inevitably face in the next few years.
Sushi, Sun, and the Digital Wrap: Second Annual OBX Customer Retreat and Fishing Tournament
The second annual ServiceTrade customer retreat on the Outer Banks of North Carolina was another huge success. Twenty-six customers representing 21 states and two countries (thanks Rick for traveling from Calgary) joined us to plan a future where service contractors build a premium brand through technology-enabled customer service. We also sent five boats offshore for a fishing tournament, and the winning boat laid 635 pounds of bigeye tuna on the dock. Congratulations to Dan Dibeler of K&D Factory Service of Allentown, PA for being named the most valuable angler after he landed a whopping 215 pound bigeye tuna for the winning boat. Check out the photos of the offshore activities:
The theme for the meeting was the Digital Wrap, a concept for how service contractors use technology to create a premium brand in a connected world. The two big insights that were reinforced throughout the meeting were:
- Customer equipment records and data are critical as the foundation for better communication and better decisions. ServiceTrade should make it easy for the service contractor to plan and manage all aspects of maintenance while also keeping the customer in the loop on the critical budget and failure risks that lead to painful expense surprises or business disruptions.
- Using the Internet to project service capabilities and collaborate with customers on decisions and service activities that drive better outcomes is important. Having the data is half the story, and communicating in a scalable manner the capabilities and recommendations of the service vendor based upon that data is the other half. Customers generally make good decisions when presented with thoughtful evidence of the need for service.
The Internet is going to drive a new level of customer expectations and service contractor capabilities. We are excited to be joining some great companies as both customers and technology partners to show the market what is possible when low-cost, non-proprietary technology is applied to deliver amazing customer service. We believe we can get to a place where labor rates are irrelevant because decisions will be driven by business outcomes, risk management, budget planning, and peace of mind. If you are interested in building a premium service contractor brand based on amazing customer service (or if you just want to make plans for next year’s event because you love offshore fishing), get in touch with us and see what all of the excitement is about.
Don’t Get Gigged by Software – Measure the GIG
Lots of companies get “stuck” (or gigged) with bad software because they do not know how to measure the quality of the vendor during the sales cycle. One of the best ways to measure a software company prior to buying the application (aside from the advice in the The Practical Guide to Buying Software for Service Contractors that talks about avoiding dead-end PC apps, non-SaaS products, etc.) is by measuring the software vendor’s GIG – Growth, Innovation, and Gross margin.
These are critical measures of a quality software company, and if your vendor does not meet certain criteria, you will be in a bad situation over the relationship. The reason that they are critical is because performing well on these measures provides a software company with access to capital. Capital is critical in order to drive research and development activities that lead to competitive innovations that help you drive your business forward. Without capital (either in the form of high gross profit or investments based upon high gross profit), the software vendor will inevitably “gig” you over and over again for services charges associated with getting it right for your situation – not a sustainable business model for the vendor or for you. So what should these metrics look like?
Growth – A software company that is not growing at least 20 – 30% a year is dying. They might not die quickly (depending upon the gross margin), but they are certainly not moving forward. Faster growing competitors will ruthlessly devour their customers and slow growth will become no growth and will eventually become death. Ask your prospective vendor how many customers they are adding per week/month/year and the average annual subscription value of those customers. Ask them for how much customer churn they are experiencing – i.e. how many customers quit the platform. Validate this information the best you can, although it might be difficult. Ask for the names of the new customers and the names of the customers that quit. Check them out and make your own assessment.
Innovation – A software company that is not delivering new features every month is dying. Modern SaaS companies deliver new capability monthly (unless they are very large, and then it is often quarterly – certainly not “every couple of years”). Ask the prospective vendor for a list of new features delivered in the last six months and validate that list with customer references. Ask the references how fast the vendor moves, and their level of satisfaction with the rate and quality of new innovations. New innovations drive growth, which, when coupled with gross margin, drives access to capital, which drives growth and so on.
Gross Margin – A software company that is not delivering gross margin of at least 60% is not a software company. It is a service company, and it is dying (unless of course their goal is to be a service company, but that means the application is dying). Service companies are very different than software companies. They don’t innovate. They charge you for services. And you pay a $1 for every $1 of improvement or change in the application. With a great software company, you pay less than a penny for every $100 in innovations delivered because your subscription payments get pooled with thousands of other customer subscription payments to drive research and development which drives innovation which drives growth. Subscription margin typically runs 80 – 98% gross margin. It is the fuel for a software company. Services are simply the smallest required investment on the part of the customer to get onto the application (training, setup, etc). The blended gross margin across subscription and services needs to be above 60%, otherwise the company is dying. And you are throwing your money away when you make them your vendor.
If you have ever been “gigged” by a software vendor, you know it is not pleasant. Avoid it in the future by measuring the Growth, Innovation, and Gross margin before you buy. A big GIG is the best way to avoid getting gigged.
Stop Texting. Start Messaging!
On several occasions, I’ve walked into a meeting with dispatchers, schedulers, and service managers who were glued to their phone texting with their technicians in the field. Why should the office staff use a tiny keyboard on a phone to update and respond to the techs when they have a full size keyboard and monitor at their disposal? Text messaging has been a huge advancement for connectivity between these folks and their field technicians since the turn of the millennium, and now applications are available to speed up and enhance this communication. Here are a couple free solutions that will enable the office to use their computers as a hub for messaging the techs in the field and anyone else on the team.
Windows
Multiple applications are available that enable messaging between Windows PCs to smartphones in the field. All of these applications will have to be installed on the technicians’ smartphones in addition to the PCs in the office.
- Skype – Typically thought of for video chat, this application is great for general messaging use.
- mysms – A newer application that includes integration with the standard sms text functionality on Android devices so techs can continue to use their favorite texting app as long as mysms is running in the background.
- WhatsApp – A widely used messaging application (over 800 million) with rich mobile functionality, including location sharing, and a web-based chat client for office users.
MacBook
Any of the applications listed above will work for Apple users, however Apple computers have a messaging solution built in that does not require technicians to install a new mobile app on their devices. An application named Messages enables office staff to send and receive text and other messages right from their Apple computer.
Paired with their personal devices, office staff can use the above applications to send messages from any device and receive messages on all devices. Much like call forwarding, this is handy when stepping away from your desk for meetings or lunch.
Don’t let anyone in your office waste more time pecking away on a tiny smartphone keyboard. Not only will these applications save your office time, but also increase the amount and improve the quality of communication with the field.
Password Headaches? Some Simple Advice to Ease the Pain
Cloud applications are like banks: Your money is much safer under lock and key at the bank than it is under your mattress because anyone can “hack your house.” Bank security is as good as it gets, but like a bank, your data is only as secure as the keys to the vault; your password(s). You will have security problems if you use one password for everything or you keep your passwords on sticky notes, notepads, or spreadsheets.
For maximum security, you should have a unique password for every application and you should update them on a regular bases.
Keeping up with numerous usernames and passwords can be a very frustrating task considering the number of online tools you use. Like me, you may have a list of 20-30 username/password combinations that you use regularly. Fortunately, there are products that solve this problem for your PC, Mac, and mobile devices:
– LastPass
– 1Password
Both of these products operate in much the same way. They create a secure, encrypted “vault” that secures all your credentials behind a single password. Whenever you are prompted to login at a website, simply enter your “master” password and these applications will enter your credentials automatically. Whenever you create credentials or change passwords for a website, these products automatically store the data in your “vault.”
You only need to remember one password, that’s it. Your data is secure in the cloud, and your credentials are safe in your vault.
