5 Secrets to SMB Profitability
David Coleman Founder & Managing Director
October 13, 2010
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David Coleman, Background
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Founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies
“The Collaboration Maven” “The soft stuff is the hard stuff!”
• 20+ years in “collaboration• Ran the first conference on collaboration 1991• Author of 4 books on collaboration• Developed EFFECTS methodology• Part of the HPSCM team
Why do I do this?
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Shifting to better collaboration can change the world!
This is MY mission
My Message1. Don’t be satisfied with poor collaboration !
2. Poor collaboration leads to broken relationships, which cost you way more than you think!
3. Make a shift to holistic collaboration
4. Your profits are eroding, collaboration may be a way out!
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Your Issues• Improve customer loyalty
• Increase product scope and breath
• Dealing with social networks
• Increasing profits
• Keeping track of people you meet
• Silos
• Attracting collaborators without giving away too much
• Adapting to change
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The 5 Secrets…1. Focus on relationships, profits will follow
2. Collaboration is like a magnifying glass it can enhance business relationships (it can also hurt them)
3. Identify critical processes that have collaborative leverage – and fix them!
4. Good relationships make unshakeable client loyalty, go to your best client’s first!
5. Credibility is critical, have you done it before you ask a customer or prospect to?
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Secret 1…
“Relationships require an ongoing interaction between two or more people”• Trust is not always necessary, but is helpful
• They hold your and every other organization together
• The only way you make $ is if someone gives it to you. More likely in the context of a relationship
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The Collaborative Shift
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Shift Happens!!
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Necessary for collaboration and relationship success!
Holistic Approach to Collaboration
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From Collaboration 2.0
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Focus on Customers/Clients
• Can you make your workflow with customers for effective?• Supply chain – LotusLive shipping example
• Sales & Marketing – LotusLive room for getting contracts signed
• CRM vs. Collaboration – PBworks
• IDEO case study
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Secret 2…
• Collaboration is like a magnifying glass! It can make things worse or better• It will not make a bad process good
• Fosters transparency, no place to hide
• Social networks are not always collaborative, only when there are interactions, otherwise they are a focused publishing media (Twitter).
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Collaboration solutions for SMBs
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Zude: SocialMix, Aggregating Social Networks
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Social Network - example
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IBM/Lotus The essential bundle for small and medium businesses
To meet the needs of small and mid-sized companies
● Web mail, store and share files, manage projects, instant messaging and social networking services priced for any business
● $7 per user/per month
● www.LotusLive.com/bundle
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UPS Shipping with Lotuslive
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Choose UPS shipping in LotusLive
Generate and print the shipping label from LotusLive
Get contracts signed in LotusLive (S&M)
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Managing Client Relationships
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Contact
Management
Forecasting
Ad hoc Reporting
CRM Document Sharing
Presales Coordination
Negotiation & Closing
Project Rollout
Support & Follow-up
The real customer relationship medium is still email & phone
CRM vs. Collaboration
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Contact
Management
Forecasting
Ad hoc Reporting
CRM Document Sharing
Presales Coordination
Negotiation & Closing
Project Rollout
Support & Follow-up
The Full Customer Relationship
PBworks Customer Collaboration Edition (keeping track of people)PBworks Customer Relationship Edition
Communications, content & coordinationIntegrated IM/chat and teleconferencingWiki pages for collaborative engagementDocument sharingProject management
Engagement monitoring for assessing opportunities
Pricing & Availability$30/user/month (customer/prospect access is free)Available early Q3
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Secret 3…
• Find critical processes with collaborative leverage and fix or enhance them
• Best place to start looking for problems
• Leverage means you get the best ROI
• Leverage can work both ways
• Example: the sad sales manager
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1. Sales & marketing (proposal development)
2. Customer service/support (exception handling)
3. R&D (new product development)
4. Supply Chain
a) Order-to-Cash Process (Customer Collaboration)
b) Purchase-to-Pay Process (Supplier Collaboration)
c) Exception handling
5. Training (internal and external)
6. Decision support/crisis management
Critical Processes with Collaborative Leverage
22©2010 Collaborative Strategies. All rights reserved
Secret 4…
Good relationships make unshakeable client loyalty, go to your best client’s first!• Clients that have bought are best prospects
• How do you create an ongoing relationship and opportunities for new business?
• Transparency helps to build trust, but understanding “local context” is critical
• It is often not about price, but about trust
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Example
Worked at NetApp 4 years ago – hourly pricing
The person I worked for moved to VMware a year ago
August, called me to do the same work at VMware ($75k project) value based pricing.
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Secret 5…
Credibility is critical, have you done it before you ask a customer or prospect to?
How IDEO solved their own problem and created a new and growing business
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IDEO Case Study:Using a “design” culture to create a social network
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•Well known design company (designed the first mouse)•Based in Palo Alto with 8 office worldwide•Now have 600 people, 3-5 people•It was common for 3-5 people in different roles and in different geographical locations to be working on a project and each person worked on multiple projects.•Last 10 years growth; the challenge became how to collaborate and coordinate effectively over time and space.
IDEO case study
• Did an internal study – people want to work with each other.
• IDEO offices were found to be good at innovation but not so good at sharing
• Hierarchies tended to support this siloed organizational structure. But organizational structure was changing…
• Started the “Knowledge Sharing” Project
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IDEO Case Study• IDEO uses “design thinking” for problem solving and creation
• Focuses on human-centered work.
• It looks at social, cultural, cognitive, and physical aspects of people working
• IDEO process is to understand, observe, synthesize (visualize, realize, evaluate, refine) and implement
• Implementation occurs through cycles of rapid prototyping (visualize, realize, evaluate, refine) which happens early and often in most projects.
• They were looking for an adaptive and innovative solution, rather than a more efficient/effective solution.
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IDEO Case Study
• Focused on the IDEO ecosystem rather than just on individuals.
• Realized there was no “silver bullet.”
• Their organization was changing: hierarchic structure to a flatter, networked structure
• The focus of the KS program was not only to connect offices across the world, but support collaboration across skills, passions and interests.
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IDEO Case Study• Successful collaboration was less about the tools/technologies,
and more about the culture and content which were critical for adoption.
• Important to capture conversations and decisions without making the employees do a lot of extra work
• Built their own tools; looked at 40 different commercial collaboration tools they could not find one that supported all of the functions they needed. • The only tool they did buy was ThoughtFarmer, which is the fifth wiki
platform they had tried. The unique function of ThoughtFarmer is that it automatically creates the linking and navigation for you with many different kinds of content
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IDEO Case Study
• IDEO started tracking usage statistics in May, 2008 and within 6 months had a 97% adoption rate
• They evolved five principles to make collaboration successful at IDEO:
1-Build pointers to people and help them to connect (like Facebook)
2- Reward individual contribution - an intersection between “what motivates me” and what the organization needs.
3- Demand intuitive interfaces – diminish any impediments to adoption, even something as small as requiring an additional login between different tools.
They used Tandberg video conferencing devices to connect distributed groups, and allow others to hear the ambient conversation (if it was left on all the time).
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IDEO Case Study
4- Go where the people already are - Rather than requiring people to change their behavior
They used large screen LCDs in the company café (at each location) and linked the screens by “wormholes” to help people interact with each other.
5- Build adaptive systems (prototype new features – Integrate into existing workflows) iterate until they work
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IDEO case study
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How was IDEO Successful?
• How is IDEO so successful with their KS program? The answer is simple (but not easy), focus on the people. Trust people, value the contribution of every employee, and don’t just focus on the technology.
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IDEO was so successful that their clients asked for the same system
All webinar attendees
Are invited to have a ½ hour strategy session with David
Just fill out the form on the CS web site at:
www.collaborate.com/strategysession
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Contact Information and ResourcesDavid Coleman – The Collaboration Maven
Dcoleman100 on Twitter or G-Mail
650-342-9197
David Coleman on Facebook & LinkedIn
Lots of resources at www.collaborate.com
“Collaborative Thinking” column in eLearning! Magazine
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