In a difficult economy we are executing our business plan and hitting all of our targets. Many forms are realizing the benefits of Cosential and our ability to integrate with any financial system. Our customers are telling us that our solution is helping them compete and produce more proposals.
In the next few months we will be releasing a bunch of new functionality which will take us to another level.
Cosential will launch a newly revamped web site using its own tools as a demonstration of the abilities of the innovative Cosential CMS platform.
The heart of our new web site runs on Cosential’s CMS technology which provides tailored solutions and seamless integration for project based businesses. Cosential includes the following new features at no additional charge.
Cosential integrates with these third party services using our new integration exchange
Additionally, our new site will provide exceptional support, rich multimedia training videos, full social media integration and information to answer our customer’s most common questions.
Software design can have a number of different methodologies. The first is a waterfall spec where everything is planned beforehand and then the software is executed. I will call this the Alfred Hitchcock method. He planned everything out before he shot any film. The other extreme is what is know in the software industry as agile or extreme programming. The boys at 37 signals are fans of this method. I call the Casablanca Method. They were writing the script as they shot the film, sometimes rewriting scenes while the actors waited.
What got me thinking about this were two different issues. One is the new “great new feature” that the folks at 37 signals released. It is called 37SignalsID. What a STUPID idea. The idea is that they give their users a common login for all of their products. This is a hack because of the method they used to design their software. They believed in keeping it simple, but what happened is that they kept it too simple. Hence they had to spend a hugh amount of time to build a hack to integrate their programs. If they had just thought ahead, and slowed down a bit and planned it out they could have gotten it right the first time, instead of the last.
Another example of this is my competitors at Deltek. Due to their strategy of acquisitions, they are forced to deal with all kinds of legacy problems. The fact that they were integrating an acquired CRM application with another acquired accounting package, together know as Deltek Vision has caused them all sorts of issues. Like having to only have one client contact for a Client in the accounting side and to duplicate the record and contact in the CRM side. Just plain dumb. If they actually rebuilt the app carefully, then this and all sorts of problems might have been avoided.
I am slowly becoming a proponent of a third way. Build it slow, but build it right. Think it through and bite the bullet. This has slowed us down but we are now able to quickly roll out great new functionality without having to deal with stupid decisions we made in the past because we were in a hurry.
Everyone should subscribe to this newsletter. Great idea about Monday morning marketing. Dana VanDen Heuvel has been marketing online for years. He is a great practitioner and has really good stuff to say. Link to subscribe http://www.marketingsavant.com/our-newsletter/
Sometime the oldies are the best. Amazing finish to a film I never heard about.
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/23/adventure-15-the-bof.html
Found a link to this really neat blog about printed letterhead. Also I have to start blogging more.
http://www.letterheady.com/
Matt Handal on his blog “Help Someone Everyday” wrote a wonderful blog post about the perfect CRM. He has a number of great ideas. I really love the idea that a CRM system should record the interactions between people. Matt is very thoughtful in this blog post. In many ways his post is really a great roadmap on how CRM systems should evolve. From the blog post:
“The Perfect CRM is also a reverse social network. This means it tracks not who you know, but rather who knows you. Each contact screen would show not just your firm’s responsible party, but who else in your company knows this contact and what their interactions with this person were.”
This points directly at some new development we are working on. Most interactions with people are meetings, email or phone calls. We have built an algorithm to measure this. This information is currently stored in calendars and email. We are building a way to connect the dots with existing systems.
Another point Matt makes is:
“To use the Perfect CRM, you have to abandon Outlook or whatever trusted system you currently use (good thing the Perfect CRM can import pst files)! If you don’t make this your trusted system, your CRM becomes the second place you look for information, which contributes to the failure of many CRM implementations.”
I really think that Outlook is so embedded into most firms that it will be a generation before anything displaces it. Therefore, instead of living outside of Outlook, I argue parts of a CRM system should be built into or work with Outlook. We use our own mail server and also gmail, so a CRM system has to work with these too.
To answer Matt’s question why some systems are so expensive and why are they so complex, one has to look at who decides which CRM system an AEC firm will buy. This is what drives the market. This is what CRM vendors focus on. There are three different types of buyers depending upon the culture of the firm. The Marketing Director/Proposal Manager, the CFO/Managing Principal or the CIO.
We have chosen to build the best, most powerful and easy to use, CRM system there is for any size firm. We compete with Deltek, Salesforce.com, Microsoft and Sage, so we really need to be a lot better than anyone else. We need to sell directly to the marketeers, business developers or the CIO. Only what I will call marketing focused firms will empower marketeers to decide which system to buy. These are the potential customer I like best. We usually win when we compete on the merits of the programs. We are the most powerful, extensible, easy-to-use and cost effective solution in the market.
Matt writes:
“Here is what the CRM firms don’t want you to know. Development costs for web-based applications have dropped dramatically over the last few years. If you know what you are doing, The Perfect CRM system I describe could be built for less than the cost of your typical enterprise CRM system.”
I disagree. It is easy to build an Access database, Excel spreadsheet or hire a programmer. Hiring a programmer or having a programmer on staff sounds attractive. But I argue that this model does not scale. Usually a home built solution will work very well, until the person who either built the system or the person who drove the development of the system leaves the firm. Then no one knows how to maintain it. This is how we get a bunch of new business. We have many customers who have spent large sums of money on consultants building a system for them in-house. After a point the firm gets too big or just can not support yet another system. Plus integration with Financial systems, Outlook and third part tools, and the continual addition of new technology is far too complex and costly for a small software project. This is why most companies do not design, engineer and build their own facilities.
There is a large part of the AEC marketplace which views CRM as an afterthought, that Marketing and Business Development are support services. Deltek an accounting and CRM vendor includes an “integrated” CRM system. If the firm decides to buy the Deltek Vision software for financials and time keeping, then it is just easy to include the CRM as well. In the view of the CFO/Managing Principal, this is good enough, because it is integrated and has a checklist of features for the marketing department. This is the main reason why innovation in CRM for this part of the AEC market is stifled, costs are high and ease of use is so bad. A CRM system designed by accountants is not necessarily the best system. Deltek doesn’t even use their own product, they use Salesforce.com. For this part of the market, being the best and lowest cost solution like Cosential even though we integrate with any financial system is not good enough.
This is why we are building a whole new suite of products at a disruptive price point. Soon it will be very affordable for everyone at an AEC firm to afford to use a CRM system, while giving the marketers and business developers the powerful tools they need. Stay tuned for more information.
In the next few weeks, we will be reorganizing the Reports > Project fields by tab, while also renaming the tabs for greater clarity and deleting unused and/or duplicate names. Important Note: If you have reports that use a duplicate report field name, you must edit your reports to use the correct field name before the end of the year, at which time duplicates will be permanently deleted.) We will be making the following changes:
Innovation, Stability, Safety, Cost Savings, Intuitive, Integration with Other Cloud Providers.
Your data can be backed up locally at any interval, source code escrow, lock in pricing, no upgrade or version costs.
Lots of reasons why cloud computing is the way forward.
For the past few months I have been thinking hard about the idea of freemium software. I am doing this because I keep getting feedback from potential customers that enterprise software is too expensive. In deal after deal we keep winning because the existing solutions are very expensive and we provide a much better economic benefit. In thinking about how to compete with a much larger established software company, price is always an easy way to go, but what do we get out of it? If I charge a little or free how can I make money? I think that freemium is a way to cut marketing and sales costs. So then I have to decide is this a way to go?
A great post today on Techcrunch “Is Free The Future Of Enterprise Software? Yes And No.” by Aaron Levie the CEO and co-founder of Box.net talks about this very problem. The best point I got from the article is “Freemium is also great strategy for products that have high switching costs.”
We are getting close to releasing true enterprise software using this model. I hope that it will be very disruptive to the industry and can help us boost sales. I am very worried that I may be making a mistake, but everything I am reading and the folks I am talking to all support going in this direction. This will become a real inflection point in our industry. Why do I think this? Well the worst thing a large business has to worry about is the small guy who can reproduce your product and only needs to make $100,000 to make it worthwhile. I am looking at a market of tens of millions and would be happy to have a million. Existing companies could never do this because it would destroy their business. I think the real trick here is not to be greedy and to be innovative about different ways to make money. So to wrap up, our mission here will be to provide a better solution to a critical enterprise software function and give it away for free. Make money by providing value around the edges.
We should be ready soon and I will be shouting from the rooftops when we are ready.
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