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:

• Reorganizing by Tab: we are reorganizing the Reports > Project fields by tab to make it easier to find fields. This document (CosentialProjectModuleFields_ReportAvail09_10) shows all Project Module fields and notes their availability in the Reports Module.
• Renaming Fields: We are also renaming about two-thirds of the Reports > Project field names for greater consistency with the names displayed in the interface.  After the names are changed, saved reports will run as usual, they will simply display the new Reports > Project field names.   This document (CosentialProjectReportFields_All09_10) lists all Report > Project fields, indicating their current name and the new name (if applicable).
• Deleting Unused/Duplicate Fields: We will be deleting number of unused/duplicate fields after the first of the year.  Reports that currently use these “To Be Deleted” fields will not run as expected after the fields are deleted.  You’ll want to create reports using the correct field name before the end of the year.  This document (CosentialProjectReportFields_ToBeDeleted2010) lists all the Reports > Project field names which will be deleted.

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.

We added the ability to upload documents that are MS Office 2007 files (and more) in the Companies, Contacts, Personnel, Projects, and Knowledge Management modules.  New file extensions added are: dot, docx, dotx, pptx, potx, ppsx, xlsx, xltx, avi, pmd, pst, and rtf.

We also added a mass uploader to the Contact Manager: Opportunities module.  This feature allows you to quickly upload multiple documents to Opportunity records at one time (PC only). Simply click the “Add” button in the Documents area of an Opportunity record and the new mass upload window will open. We’ll be adding this feature to other modules and areas over time.

How can a hosted solution save you money? Easy, no servers. As an example, one of our competitors provides an on-premises solution for CRM and accounting. They recommend a three server setup. Since this is a mission critical application, I will use redundant servers as my example.

1. Database Server – HP dl380 G5 – two 750 watt power supplies

2. Application server – HP dl380 G5 – two 750 watt power supplies

3. Reporting Server – HP dl360 G5 – two 350 watt power supplies

4. Tape Backup System – Dell PowerVault Tape Backup 114T – 85 watts

All told this is 3785 watts of electricity to run the three servers. Of course you can get cheaper servers that draw less power, but I would not want to run my critical business apps on any thing less robust and redundant. I will not take into account the extra cost of air conditioning because of heat generated by servers. Next set of assumptions:

1. Average cost of power – 10.03 cents per kilowatt hr – Source Energy Information Administration If you look at the tables you will see that costs vary by state. Just look up your state and find the right number for you.

2. Calculate the annual cost of 3785 watts by the average price of electricity – Source Wolfram Alpha The  average cost is $3326/year for electricity to run three servers. In Massachusetts the cost increases to $6684 per year. WOW!

Next is the cost of the servers, shipping to your company and setup. To make this a quick back of the envelope I will say the HP dl380s are $5,000 each, the HP dl360 is $4000 and the tape backup is $150. The cost of shipping these server is around $80 per box so total shipping is $200. Server setup is is another set of numbers, but lets assume you have staff who can do it as part of their job, so there is no incremental cost. The OS for each is $1029 WIndows 2008 Server and MS Sql Server is $5,737.

So back of the envelope calculation is $23,174 for hardware costs.

In 5 years it will cost you $16,630 for electricity and $23,174 for hardware or a total of $39,804.

Go green, get rid of your servers, reduce your carbon footprint and go SaaS.

We added additional fee fields to the reporting engine: 1) Net Fee – Estimated 2) Subconsultant Fee – Estimated Fee and 3) Gross Fees – Contracted Fee and 4) Gross Fees – Estimated Fees.