Interesting Cultural Recruiting Video…

Lip Dub – Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo.

Kudos to High Rise CRM, another brilliantly simple, but extremely usable application from 37 Signals

I have never been a huge fan of CRMs. I know they are necessary and without them effective sales, business development, and client support would not be possible, but they are still painful to manage. My primary beef with most CRMs is the the fact that they all try to provide every piece of functionality that any user ever might want and the end result is a cluttered, unusable dashboard of feature sets of which only a small percentage are ever used. As a result, the load and wait times become unbearable and it seems as though there are 6 steps to be followed every time you pick up the phone, send an email, or meet with a prospect or client. God forbid you get really busy for a few days. It might take you a full day just to try and get everything loaded into the system properly.

Two months ago, I was looking for a simple contact management system to keep up with my intensified focus on Business Development and decided to see what 37 Signals had to offer. Within minutes, I was up and running, happily loading contacts into my new High Rise Account and I never even had to call in the techies. For the first time in my life, I actually enjoyed using the CRM. It is so easy and intuitive that anyone can use it and it is actually designed to make the user’s life easier. While most systems are built first around the kind of trend data and reporting metrics that can be pulled with the user a distant afterthought, HighRise is built to help the user keep organized.

Oh, by the way, did I mention it is free? That’s right, you can use it for up to 250 contacts absolutely free and the paid versions are extremely affordable as well. I am not sure if the back end functionality will support everything that a large organization might want, but for anyone who is looking to get organized and looking to build an easy, usable contact database, I highly recommend it.

Technology Doesn’t Always Win, but it certainly helps…

Over the past 2 years, I slowly but surely evolved from a technology infant, to a bit of a technology geek (as far as I knew) and back to where I again, although sitting on the edge of the technology frontier, feel like a bit of a tech-neophyte in many respects. Just when I think I have a good vantage point of the landscape, I turn around and everything has moved forward fairly drastically. Combine all the daily advances along with products like Webkit and Flex SDK, and it has created a constantly moving target that can never quite be reached. It’s a bit like trying to race the sunset if you think about it. Heck, even most of the hard core geeks that could never be stumped are struggling to keep up with everything. Thank goodness for sites like Digg and Del.ico.us to keep your better half (the Development Team) up on things. But even then, there are only so many hours in a day to process the rapid intake of data, which only allows you to get so deep. Of course Google knows everything and the guys from Apple and 37 Signals are pretty much above reproach…(Sorry, I was just reciting my Geek Oath)

So, there is very little hope of ever truly being “the best” at everything, so at what point does usability outweigh functionality and at what point does practical business sense outweigh the killer application that no one will use? The answer is to keep an open mind. And to keep an open mind means keeping all paradigms at the door. There is one caveat if you are going to take this approach. You will quickly lose touch with people who have not made this leap. You can have two extremely brilliant people looking at the same business model and one sees genius and the other lunacy. It’s true. Open? Or Closed? It is a monumental leap to make. It would be like trying to explain to a baby boomer (the average baby-boomer for those I may have just offended) why Firefox is better than Internet Explorer. See, I told you so. Half of those reading this are grinning at that last comment (well, at least 7%) and I just lost any remaining credibility with the rest. That being said, now that I have my targeted reading audience better defined ; ) I will get to the point. I can do that (the smiley face) now that I am down to Mac Enthusiasts, Google-worshipers, open source “enlightened ones”, and Firefox users.

Over the past 15 years, I have throttled competition that had better technology than I did and I have lost to competition that had far inferior technology (in that order!) Imagine running a call center on a Nortel switch and then going to Lucent selling customers on why your Phone System was $50k more because it had real time access to reports. Who cares? I would rather have my reports set up once by IS anyway; now, the big “better technology” selling point has become a negative.

There are so many influences that go into the buyers thought process, and your product being “the best technology” only accounts for about 10% of the sale. What is most important is the process for operational delivery that you have wrapped around it. That is why Software as a Service is such a great idea. It allows the company to airbrush all of the technical glitches with the client never even knowing they took place. Most errors fix themselves anyway, but why does the user of the technology ever need to know (or care) that you had to reboot the server or that you got hit by a bot. My point is this, keep your mind open and know when the value of your platform as a whole outweighs the fact that there is “better” technology available on the market for various pieces of your solution. Continue to improve, but be realistic. And if that means “masking” a bend point here and there, so be it. In fact, your customers will appreciate it as long as they are getting a good product, backed by good service, at a reasonable price. As long as they are seeing a good return on their investment and know that you are committed to evolving, they will stay with you for life.

Thank you to Seth Godin for continuing to explain the evolution of the marketplace! Out.