Marketing to IT: Please Make Inventory Management Invisible, NOW!

Inventory management? A concern for marketing and information technology (IT) decision-makers? Oh, yes…

One of marketing's primary concerns is how a company is perceived. It turns out that how well your company manages its inventories of the things it sells is a primary determinant of how that company is perceived. Because if you can't deliver what I want when I want it, I'm going to be unhappy with you, regardless of how good your marketing or other operations might be.

Meanwhile, your customers, partners, prospects, competitors and purchase influencers are all increasingly participatory inhabitants of "the mobile, social cloud." Which means your company has to be there too. In ways that make your company more agile, responsive and, well, social.

And what do inventory management and inhabiting the mobile, social cloud have in common? Why, IT, of course. Unfortunately, at many if not most businesses, 60 to 80 percent of your IT budget is being spent on just keeping what you've already got working. Not exactly a running start on improvements in things such as inventory management.

What's a marketer to do?

Sit down with IT decision makers and convince them that this is a challenge you and they need to confront jointly. Then work with them to determine how and how well inventory is being managed now, and where improvements might be found most quickly. Then, look at some premise-based, cloud-based and cloud-enabled inventory management solutions and how they might help your company.

You can find a great rundown of several of these in an article published by Inc. in May 2011. My favorite: Fishbowl Inventory. It integrates with Intuit's QuickBooks and offers options that can take a company from better inventory management to more and better sales, fulfillment and resource planning and management, as recently covered by eWeek.

We in the punditocracy blather on incessantly about how business and IT have to get better at working together. A great way to foster such collaboration in meaningful ways is to focus on areas that avoid leaving money on the table while improving customer satisfaction, corporate perception and revenues. Improved inventory management can do all of these things.

A Special Offer: If you're interested in Fishbowl Inventory, drop a line to vip@fishbowlinventory.com. I've negotiated a relationship with the company that guarantees that every one of my readers who uses that e-mail address will get priority treatment and help getting started with their free trial of the software. And if you promise to share your feedback with me for possible inclusion in future blog posts or research (anonymously if you prefer), you'll get undying gratitude from me -- AND a five-percent discount from Fishbowl if you purchase Fishbowl Inventory! A win for everybody!

Yellowbook + Microsoft = A New Marketing Force for Small Businesses

Google has advertising and search-empowered marketing offerings for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs).

So does Microsoft.

Google has online search tools that are popular among users and buyers, and among at least some advertisers. So does Microsoft – more so now that it has partnered with Yahoo! in select arenas.

Google has online applications growing in popularity among SMBs and larger enterprises.

So does Microsoft.

But now, Microsoft has something Google doesn't have, at least not in the same ways. What? Here's a direct quote from the relevant news release, issued June 14 by Microsoft and its new partner, Yell Group, owners of Yellowbook among other related resources.

“Thomas Hansen, vice president of SMB Worldwide at Microsoft, said, 'Yell Group has one of the largest dedicated sales forces partnering with small and medium sized businesses and provides customers with valuable, locally focused internet directories that see over 50 million unique visitors per month. We are very excited about our plans to form a strategic alliance with Yell, as it offers us a way to better reach and serve small and medium sized businesses across the globe.'”

Here's another quote from the same release.

“Yell currently provides print and digital marketing services to over 1.3 million customers across the United States, United Kingdom, Spain and Latin America. Capitalizing on the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance and the growing consumer audience of Bing and Yahoo! Search, Microsoft and Yell will join forces to offer compelling search, mobile and local advertising solutions to small and medium businesses and to make the most of emerging business models delivered through the cloud. Under the plans, Yell will also offer the full suite of Microsoft’s SMB productivity and business software and cloud services, including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and emerging SMB-focused communications solutions. In addition, Microsoft will assist Yell to accelerate its new cloud-based services, which will provide Yell’s customers with access to these new digital offerings.”

Yell already offers a number of interesting, sometimes innovative marketing and advertising services through Yellowbook in North America and other divisions across the globe. Now, Yell Group reps will have a new, different and growing portfolio of advertising, marketing and business support services to offer.

The day after announcing the Microsoft alliance, the company announced a strategic partnership with Bazaarvoice, provider of cloud-based solutions designed to enable businesses to manage and monetize online customer conversations and communities. The day after the Bazaarvoice announcement, Yell announced a completely new corporate strategy. The company is now focused on evolving from a provider of advertising services to the outsourced marketing department for millions of SMBs.

This means SMB decision makers may soon be able to buy services for contact, lead and customer management (CRM), email marketing, online data backup, Web conferencing and other unified communications (UC) options and more from a single Yellowbook rep. Which could give those decision makers some interesting, valuable options not easily available elsewhere.

Now, Google, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM and others offer all kinds of platforms, add-ons and plug-ins intended to enable all kinds of business service combinations. But at most SMBs, one of the first questions to which they want answers is about interoperability with...Microsoft Office. So why not start with offerings that come from the source, so to speak? Especially for those SMB decision makers already doing business with Yellowbook or some other Yell Group entity? After all, "the cloud" is still basically a wild and poorly mapped environment, making the value of a known, proven guide pretty darned high to those users.

Speaking of which...

If your company already works with Yellowbook, you and your rep should be having a heart-to-heart talk very soon now. You should ask about everything from what services will be available and when to how and whether you can move and share spend dollars across multiple online and offline opportunities. You might want to focus a few questions on how Yellowbook + Microsoft might help you to offer more and better local and daily deals.

If your company does not do business with Yellowbook but does work with one or more of its competitors, you might ask your rep what their company plans to do in response to Yell Group's moves. Meanwhile, keep a close eye on what Yell and Microsoft do, and on what Google and others do in response.

Nimble: A New Take (from Some Old Hands) on CRM

UPDATE: Nimble Contact available for free as of 02/28/11 -- www.nimble.com to register!

You may recall or be sufficiently motivated to look up the nursery rhyme, "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick / Jack jump over the candlestick." With all due respect to Jack and his candlestick-traversing powers, it is often better to be nimble than quick. That's especially true for SMB decision makers who have not yet taken the plunge into customer relationship management (CRM) software – which is apparently most of them.

"Approximately 60% of CRM buyers are first-timers and most of those first-time buyers come from the small business community. What are these businesses using for CRM today? Many use some combination of Microsoft Excel and Outlook with some CRM process hacks thrown in….To the extent small businesses are using CRM, many are using [10-to-20-year-old] systems like ACT. It's hard to find a market that's readier for a technology refresh."
– Scott Albro, Founder and CEO of Focus, in an online discussion of opportunities for SMBs to succeed with CRM. (You can view and join that discussion at http://dortchon.it/FocusOnCRM4SMBs.)

So why aren't more SMBs using more CRM yet?
1. CRM's too hard – which means that solution providers have neither delivered nor sufficiently explained enough business benefit to persuade most SMB decision makers.
2. CRM's too expensive – which means that not even cloud-based CRM solution providers have delivered solutions that are sufficiently affordable, easy to deploy and use and beneficial to the business to persuade those decision makers.

And for those who were quick to adopt CRM software, many are likely now finding varying degrees of difficulty in adapting those tools to deal with perhaps the biggest thing to hit CRM since CRM itself – social media. How best to track and manage the social exploits of your customers and prospects, or to engage them meaningfully via these new channels?

Enter Nimble, founded in 2009 by Jon Ferrara. In 1989, Ferrara was a founder of GoldMine Software, developers of pioneering, multi-award-winning CRM and sales force automation (SFA) software for SMBs. GoldMine CRM, now available from FrontRange Solutions, claims more than a million users. So Jon and his team at Nimble know their way around the challenges of delivering compelling software solutions for SMBs.

In a recent conversation, Jon said two things that really resonated with me. One was that "humans want to help each other, but modern tools don't really enable us to do that." The other was that "the [relationship management software] market has not fundamentally changed in the 10 years since I left it [and sold GoldMine.]

In response to both drawbacks, Nimble combines the experience of Jon and his team with social media savvy and support, cloud-based delivery and usability that parallels that of popular Web-based resources such as Gmail, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Invitees to the current private beta test of Nimble, including yours truly, are asked to say nothing about the solutions features, functionality or look and feel until Nimble becomes publicly available. So I won't until then. I will say, however, that conceptually, the goal of Nimble is to tie together all of the contacts, calendars and communications that help to define, manage and optimize the relationships that matter most to an individual, a team or a business.

A key design goal, according to Jon, was to accomplish all of the above in ways that do not interfere with how users use the tools they use now. (A digressive mini-rant here. Do users of some CRM solutions really have to remember to send a blind copy to those solutions of every single e-mail they want those solutions to track and remember? Really? In this day and age, when rules-driven software has been around a long time?? And people wonder why more SMBs aren't yet using more CRM? Seriously??) To meet that design goal, the Nimble team first built a software foundation with robust application programming interface (API) support. The user interface I can't discuss came after that.

So Nimble promises to consolidate all relevant, actionable information about all each user's contacts, their social and professional online network connections, all messages and all activities. And to bring together internal collaboration and external listening and engagement. And it promises to do so in ways that users and administrators will find to be better, cheaper and easier than competing CRM offerings. Based on what I've seen, these are promises Nimble can likely keep, if the company can build and maintain a superior ecosystem of partners, developers and other stakeholders and contributors. Which I think it can.

Nimble the team and the company promise much more, however. For starters, the first offering, Nimble Contact, designed for individual users, will be free. Follow-on offerings will include additional features to support teams, sales forces and full-blown CRM. Pricing will likely range from approximately $10 to $30 per user per month, depending on the edition chosen. (For comparison, Salesforce.com currently charges $5/user/month for its Contact Manager for up to 5 users, $25/user/month for up to five users of its Group edition and $65/user/month for its unlimited-user Professional edition.)

If you want to see what a strong contender for the future of CRM, social and otherwise, looks like – one that users can and will actually use – visit www.nimble.com and sign up for a free Nimble Contact account. If it works for you, you can use it to start building the future of CRM at and for your business. Nimbly, of course.