Joey Ricard

Genius Weekly Updates for 2010-03-28

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CRM Development

A smart man once told me “If you can’t measure it, you can’t track it”. This is what we take to heart when it comes to CRM, we keep track of our customers and where our business is going.

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. If you have customers, you need to manage them.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Which one of your customers buys the most annually?
• Which one buys the most monthly?
• Which customer has frequented the most this year?
• Which customer are you losing?
• Which customer bought the most last year versus the least this year?

Those are simple questions to ask when a CRM is being developed. Customer Relationship Management tools not only help you to run reports, but it also helps you manage your sales team. With our reporting you cannot tell what ads are working for your company, where your business is coming from, or you number one reason on why you are losing business.

There are all types of objections sales people come across during the sales process. Without statistical analysis, you cannot run a report to see where you business is going to and why. The average sales cycle takes about 3 months. Following up makes for about another 20% of the close rate. Post-it notes do not help to close, a CRM tool allows for the proper close rates. It also allows your sales team to know what is in the pipeline. A lot of sales forecast are based on guesswork. With a CRM you can see what status the sales process is in, what is expected to close; allowing you to budget more accurately.

The real key is finding good CRMs that work. There are lots out there, and there are lots that are not user friendly. With the right research, we can integrate it with a cloud computing solution and offer far more flexibility and mobility then anyone.

In previous companies we had our sales team accesses their Customer Relation Management tools via iPhones. They can update them on the road, and even with their blackberries.  This is why Cloud Computing gives you the leverage that your competitor does not have. You can simply insert more employees in the sales force by just adding a hosted desktop or developing your own CRM development via a Managed Server.

A good CRM allows you to add and remove sales people, managers, and administrators; creating a more secure environment. If your company is not using a CRM tool, I would definitely do the research and look into one, custom or cookie cutter, it will only increase your business.

The Value of Something – Confidence vs Arrogance

Some people in life look at the value everything is worth; their sunglasses, their car, their clothes, the type of watch they wear, and how much they make.

I understand 100% that we should value everything, and appreciate the value of things and people in your life. Some people bring more value than others, and some people bring less value.

Now that we have covered what value is and we all understand how value works, let’s go over confidence.

Confidence is understanding your value and how you are valued among others. People with good strong confidence do not second guess their value in life, and know when they do something it is exactly what is asked from them.

Now confidence can be confused with arrogance. If you do not take the time to analyze a person you can easily miscategorize someone as confident when they are arrogant and vice-versa.

Here is the difference in someone that is confident versus someone that is arrogant.

Someone that is confident knows their value, finds value in others, and cherishes the values others bring.

Someone that is arrogant thinks their value is among everyone else, assumes peoples value, and typically looks at you as a replaceable item versus a valuable person.

I am writing this because I want others to look at themselves, and think… am I confident, or am I arrogant?

• Do you look at what others have and think I deserve that, or I can do better than them?
• Do you look at someone and think this person is not the “type of people” I hang out with?
• Do you look at someone and think they are a loser because they do a particular thing?

Someone who is confident brings value, someone who is confident finds value in every person, someone who is confident is a leader and helps instill these attributes in others.

You can tell the difference in a confident person and an arrogant person by how many long term relationships they have. Someone who is arrogant will tend to use out a person until the value is gone, like they do with all things in their life. The confident person tends to keep people around, because he helps them when they are low, and helps them seek the value they can bring. They cherish long term relationships and seek a more meaningful purpose to life than just value.

Purpose of a Website

Purpose of a website

When developing a website, you need to make sure you have a purpose. A lot of people or companies want a website, but get distracted on the purpose of the website to start.

Some people will call this purpose a “Call to Action”. You may have an ultimate purpose of the website like “to make money” but there may need to be a call to action to create the drive for that purpose. When developing your website, first think about what you want the website to do for you or your company.

Are you going to provide a service?
• Carpet cleaning
• Computer repair
• Litigation

Is there a specific product you are trying to sell?
• Marble or Stone
• Cars
• Electronics

Is this an informative website?
• A blog website
• How to Website

Are you going to inform people about yourself?
• Resume website
• Autobiography website

Is it going to be a forum website (social website)?
• Members chat

After you get your thoughts together you would want to get a brainstorm chart setup. Create a data flow of the website. Try to draw from beginning to end how the user would navigate the website.

You would want it to start with your call to action on the front page. This will decrease the bounce rate (the amount of time a user stays before leaving the website). If you have your call to action on the front page, they may click that leading them to an information page. From the information page, you may want to get contact information or inquires for the user. Now you have warm contacts and you can turn them from a prospect into a client.

When you have this mapped out. You now have your purpose, along with your call to action to maybe even a map of the operational flow of the user.
You want to define your purpose, call to action, and flow diagram before going into development. When you have this developed you have the website concept in pretty good focus.

Our company specializes in developing focused websites. We help draw out the purpose, create a call to action that will fulfill that purpose, and then develop a plan in which it will operate.

What is Cloud Computing?

A simple answer, Cloud Computing is making use of new internet based technology which uses the “cloud” (internet) to do the processing versus the client’s machine.
There are different flavors of Cloud Computing.

You have a client based Cloud Computing system where the Clients are the host, and the hosts are the clients at the same time. You see a lot of this in file sharing applications where they create a large distributed network that communicate over certain ports or protocols all defined by the same users that use the applications.

One of my favorite examples of how the power of Cloud Computing can revolutionize today’s industry is the example of Folding@home. Folding@home was designed to help solve large computational problems like protein folding and other molecule dynamics. When the PS3 was released they used their new processer to help out in the project. Because of PS3’s release it broke the Guinness Worlds Record as the most powerful distributed network. The world’s strongest supercomputer runs at about 1.7 pediFLOPS. The PS3 distributed network achieves speeds of just over one pediFLOPS currently, making it the third strongest computational force out there.

Why is this relevant? Because this is the future of computing; not only to rely on servers, but clusters of servers, cross communicating in large clouds, delivering data at super fast speeds with close to unlimited resources and expandability.

Cloud computing allows you to focus on your business. You have large datacenters with multiple connections to ISPs, ensuring a clean connection with no downtime, huge data repositories with pedibytes of storage available (1000’s of gigabytes), and complete flexibility of your system without being tethered to any hardware.

Without being tethered to hardware these days and working out of the cloud, you have the freedom to expand the company to multiple locations, countries, or even users, without having to worry about the entire IT infrastructure. This saves time, costs, and overhead in so many avenues.

Using thin clients, or basic laptops and desktops you can use the strength of enterprise servers and accomplish more without having to worry about the pitfalls of managing technology.