Why Permission-based Marketing?

Do you still market to people without their permission? Are you aware of how much you hurt your brand when you do so?

I was reminded this week how many people still don't understand the concept of permission-based marketing. I received an unsolicited email from one of my LinkedIn Connections which was a blatant plug for their company. I instantly disconnected from them.

I also meet with many clients who's idea of marketing is to send emails to their contact databases, where none of the contacts were added to the database using opt-in email marketing approaches. Web etiquette dictates that sending emails to people who haven't asked for them is poor form. In fact, no matter how good your intentions or the quality of information you are emailing, unsolicited emails are SPAM.

It also doesn't matter if you are a public sector organization or charity. The same rules apply. In fact there is only one rule.

Never, ever, send an email to anyone that hasn't given you permission to email to them first.

How can you build your permission-based email lists? Here are just a few suggested approaches:

1. Develop a following. You can do this in many ways. Building your personal and corporate LinkedIn pages must be taken seriously. Blog. Join Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit. Tweet. Post videos in YouTube. Facebook. All of these approaches will build a community of followers who will naturally develop a curiosity towards your offerings and investigate them on their own. This will also create the community or communities into which you are ready to start building your email lists. And developing a following means creating real value with good content. It is not a simple matter of tweeting what you had for lunch.
2. Build the email list. If developing a following is the art, building the email list is the science. This is typically done through tastefully constructed offers to your followers. A great example might be a subscription to a newsletter. You need to ensure the content quality in the offer is as good or better than what is being offered in your social media offerings. The placement of of the subscriber offer can be placed in the sidebar of a blog or in other content you produce. It is an option the follower may select based on the promise of more good content which they have already become accustomed to consuming by following you.
3. Use an email service provider to maintain your email list. This is critical. It provides the double opt-in mechanism to gain subscribers and allow them to unsubscribe in the future if your content no longer interests them. It is the only viable approach to maintaining and segmenting your lists to ensure you maintain the focus of the various interest groups you will develop over time. It is also critical because it stores the approval for you to send emails to your subscribers.
4. Be Consistent. Once you have built your email list, ensure your content is true to the promise you made to get your followers to share their email with you and join as a subscriber. There is no better way to lose subscribers than to fall short of their expectations with inconsistent content relative to the offering you made at subscription time.

There are many organizations which understand permission-based marketing, but many more who are just plain lousy at it. If they can't SPAM you with emails because you checked "off" that option on their site, they get a telemarketer to call on to you instead. This is self-defeating. Permission-based marketing applies equally to any communication you might have with your client or stakeholder. The tools are available to nurture your following, and subsequently your subscribers, but you have to start now to develop the community.

To those that argue this sounds like it is too long term, I would argue that short term SPAMMING and cold calls generate very little in the way of results. If you compare the results of both approaches over a six month period, the permission-based marketing approach will generate significantly better results in the same time period. And you don't have to take my word for it, many others who write about this topic feel the same way.

I believe strongly that if you are not using permission-based marketing you are destroying your brand. You appear callous, desperate, and not at all customer centric. If you were to research what is being written about your company on the web through social media and rating sites, you would see first hand the damage your unsolicited emails are causing.

I strongly encourage any organization not using permission-based marketing to start today. There is no other viable approach to marketing.

Website Customer Experience Checklist

You've decided a new website is long overdue. You are committed to getting it right this time. What key steps can you take to ensure success?

Many organizations start down the path of building a new website with an abundance of enthusiasm. On website launch day accolades are generously distributed to the marketing company for its design and the development team for its tenacity in stamping out bugs and delivering a usable system.

Six months post launch, the rumblings begin about how we might "do it" differently next time and within a year there is a wholesale movement from front line staff and sometimes the CEO for yet another new website. Sound familiar?

So how can this be avoided? How can we develop websites that are built to last?

If you've been following my blog you know I write mostly on customer experience. So you likely expect me to focus on website design principles to improve the user experience and maybe approaches which ensure your website reflects the brand you are working so hard to build. But that's not the focus of this post.

If you are looking for website experience information there are many good sources. Here are a few (you can download them without providing an email - a bit refreshing for a change):

1. Forrester's website user experience scorecard
2. Forrester's website top 10 scorecard
3. Forrester's website brand review scorecard

So where will I focus? My feeling is that website success is determined before the first wireframe is developed or the first design is initiated. It all starts with a business foundation for your website project. Here is my Top 10 checklist for website development success.

1. Will the website reflect your primary purpose? Corporations tend to struggle with this one less than non-profits / government. Often websites are viewed as large content repositories which talk about "our organization and our offerings". Users to the website are greeted with volumes of content, with little understanding of how they can be engaged meaningfully to aid the organization in achieving its primary purpose. This disconnect often happens because the website is given a lower priority by leadership, not tapped for its true potential, and assigned lower risk transactional functions or objectives.
2. What's the website being built to do? This seems obvious, but when I read the objectives for web development projects they are often very fuzzy and clearly hijacked by the marketing department. An objective should have a measurable outcome (remember SMART?). Will the new website sell more products and services? Recruit more members? Increase customer satisfaction with improved service levels? Reduce operating costs? Increase donations? How much and by when?
3. Will it do your business? If your new website is not an extension of your business into the communities you serve (and communities include paying customers) then you should go back to the drawing board. I have talked about online customer service in other posts, but I think we need to go far beyond customer service. Your website must seamlessly integrate with your back-office and make doing business with you easy. If you collect money, customers should be able to pay online and check outstanding balances online. Product manuals and training should be online and available as video or podcasts where applicable. Online forums, newsletters, and company bloggers are now only table stakes for any website. Customers should be able to do business with you on their time and in their preferred method on your website.
4. Will you address the needs of key segments and communities? Not many organizations have the luxury of dealing with a homogeneous base of stakeholders. What are the key segments with which your new website needs to interact? What are the communities which already exist with which your website and social media strategies will need to interact? What are the needs of those segments and communities? Have you surveyed them to solicit their input and needs? I am often reminded of a Venn diagram I have seen many times. In it, the circle on the left defines "what we provide on our website" and on the right is "what users want on our website". The overlap of the two circles in the middle is tiny. You need to avoid this mistake by asking your users in advance. 
5. Will the site be customer centric? This is my favorite topic. Some day the tried and true tabs across the top (Home, Products, Services, Solutions, About Us) will be replaced with something more like (Your problems, Your needs, Your potential solutions, Customers we have like you, What you might want to do next, How else can we help you?, Want to join our community?). 
6. How will you support mass customization? Mass customization is the future of the web so you might as well get started. In the most advanced form of mass customization the user is able to store a version of your website which they tailored specifically for their own needs through their interaction with it. Automotive companies do this by allowing you to store car configurations on their site. You might have to start with some reasonable goals in this area. What are the dialogues you can offer which are customized to user's needs?
7. Is your team engaged? This is not a project for the marketing department. Include the CEO and ensure you have representation from all parts of the business. They all have amazing insights to share. Identify a role for providing input from your customer segments and communities, but don't abdicate responsibility to them. Your core team must decide what is best for your organization.
8. Have you identified the processes required to support the website? This goes beyond technical support. Who will have ownership of content development of identified sections of the site? What is the expected time budget required? Be realistic. The content on your website must be kept fresh and current - always. In addition, what other business processes (backend systems, marketing communications, etc.) must provide support and work hand-in-glove with the website? Document these processes and identify process owners who are accountable for quality and results.
9. Do you have an integrated social media strategy? And this isn't just a corporate Facebook page. I had lunch with a social media guru a couple of week ago who told me there about 800 social media "channels" out there. How do you navigate them, monitor them, and ensure they work collaboratively with your new website?
10. Have you selected the right platform? I have a strong bias here. I am a Drupal bigot. And it appears other mainstream bloggers are coming around to the same way of thinking. You require a CMS platform which can work in the Cloud, be supported by a large base of global experts, is social media aware, and can scale to meet the needs of ecommerce and high throughput, while supporting advanced search and the semantic web. We have used Drupal to deliver hundreds of client projects.

Considering this Top 10 list will put your website project on a stronger foundation. The focus provided by the checklist will ensure you optimize customer experience on your new website, while achieving your business goals.

Website projects are perhaps one of the most important pillars of implementing your business strategy. I believe we often don't assign the correct importance to our online presence through lack of focus, stingy resource allocation (in terms of budget and key internal resource participation), and by treating the exercise as a marketing project instead of what it really is - a critical business initiative which requires a strong business focus. And just like any other investment you make in your business, your website investment must produce business results.

Customer Experience and the Cloud

Are you using the Cloud to deliver a superior customer experience? This is the year to add it to your todo list.

When I talk about customer experience, inevitably people start rolling their eyes in their heads and hoping I don't plan on talking too long. Usually it's because, like me, they are tired of hearing about the one recent lousy customer experience in their organization which created the fire drill where management and unlimited resources were deployed to get the customer happy again. Like most organizations faced with this situation, they provided hundreds of good customer interactions before this poor, highly visible customer experience sabotaged all of the excellent work.

While the fire drills are mostly avoidable with good business practices, it's not my primary focus when I talk about customer experience. With most organizations we focus on the changes required to close the gap between the customer's current experience and their expectations. For organizations which consistently meet customer expectations across customer touch points, the next goal is exceeding customer expectations. My work usually requires that we evaluate each of our primary customer touch points and re-design the customer interaction.

Before any work can be done in developing new customer-facing processes, I believe an organization must adopt some critical design principles in creating an optimized customer experience:

• Consistent - we need to say the same things, make the same promises, and deliver the same capabilities across all of our communications, websites, customer-facing organizations and front-line staff. Certainly our solution performance has to back our claims.
• Customized - every communication, buying and service interaction needs to respect the unique wants and needs of the specific customer. All customers have preferences with respect to the level of detail they require, expediency, needs discovery, and psychographic tendencies. We may also need to tailor the discussion to match the individual's authority within their organization.
• Socially aware - we need to acknowledge the communities where customers discuss our brands, service levels, solutions, and integrate these discussions into our customer experience strategy. Savvy customers always discover disconnects between the community and any claims you make - you will pay heavily for it.
• Content rich - customers require valuable information in their interactions with you, whether it is detailed business discovery in the buying process, comprehensive use cases and customer testimonials, or extensive online training. This information must be available in different media formats to match the consumption preferences of the customer. YouTube has proven that while the information must be of acceptable quality and professionally delivered, in general audiences will not penalize you for less than perfect production values. In other words, get the information to customers versus waiting to make it perfect. Customers will also accept, in fact encourage, beta tests of new information offerings.
• Permission based - OK. I could have included this in the customized design principle, but so many organizations are screwing this up I have included it as its own design principle.

I don't include design principles such as "visually engaging", "interesting" and other such principles. It goes without saying we need to engage the user. Assuming you can offer an experience which addresses these critical design principles, you will be well on the way to improving the customer experience you offer. Sure, you need to design the processes and conduct change management / training, but in general I see too many organizations start with process design before getting the design principles right.

At some point you might be asking yourself - "Why is Kalvin emphasizing the Cloud in this blog post (and actually almost every other post)?" "Is Kalvin trying to optimize his blog for search terms?" Well, actually not. There is one primary reason why I include the Cloud (and even with a capital "C") when I talk about customer experience...

It's because that's where your customers hang out. (sorry...you knew that was coming)

The majority of solutions we use to enable improved customer experience will either reside in the Cloud or use Cloud technologies to enable communication, whether on a PC, Netbook, Tablet, or mobile phone. And what do we believe will be the emphasis of these Cloud-based solutions over the next couple of years?

• A new online experience - our websites need to move from online brochures to mass customized engines to allow user-driven discovery. Websites will adapt to the needs of the customer. Our direct communications will also become customized to the needs of our customers based on critical customer segmentation information volunteered to us through permission-based marketing approaches.
• CRM becomes CEM - CRM has evolved from contact management, to pipeline management, and perhaps in its latest form, to some form of adversarial sales process where we evaluate and document our strengths and weaknesses in an account plan with a view to closing a particular piece of business. When CRM finally evolves into a collaborative, problem discovery and solution building process directly with the customer, it will become a true Customer Experience Management solution. This will  not likely be achieved by the traditional CRM vendors, but more likely through the addition of bolt-ons which bring the customer into CRM through a collaborative, online front-end. The bolt-ons will live in the Cloud.
• New measures are needed - we need to revisit our measures for customer experience. Of course sales are the ultimate measurable result, but not a reasonable proxy for measuring customer experience. Results are created through day-to-day activities which need to be measured for quantity and quality. What activities will we measure in our new socially enabled world? What is actionable social traffic versus noise? How will we achieve the necessary transparency we require to measure new KPI's? Expect to see an explosion in new analytics  and measurement tools which seek to create transparency in the Cloud.
• Customer 360 on steroids - it will be an exciting time for anybody tasked with implementing the design principle of consistency and attempting to measure it. Regrettably, it is going to be difficult. Pulling together information from Cloud-based solutions is still difficult to achieve unless the service provider has already built an interface you require. Integration of information and processes in the Cloud will require investment.
• Product management in real time - I don't want to appear to be too "far out there", but social media and crowd sourcing present opportunities for real time customer feedback which may be harnessed to gain a deep understanding of high value problems we currently solve, or could solve, by brokering our strengths.

In the coming weeks I plan on discussing these topics in more detail, both to look at the business-ready Cloud computing technologies in play (always with a view to business impact), and the business functions and processes impacted in your organization. The overall focus will always be Customer Experience Mastery - mastering the art of exceeding customer expectations.

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Not delivering customer service in the cloud?

What are you waiting for? Online customer service is easy and inexpensive to implement in the cloud. And the best part? It has one of the highest ROIs of any cloud-based service.

I am still surprised at the number of organizations which have not moved their customer service delivery into the cloud. In fact, many still attempt to manage customer cases (or tickets) with systems behind their firewall where customers cannot get online self-service access to check on the status of a case. Worse still, we see many organizations delivering service management without any case management or ticket tracking support at all. Cost and the resources to implement customer service solutions have typically been significant barriers to this lagging group.

The cloud provides some extremely cost effective approaches. In this post I will discuss two options; they are: 1) An integrated sales/service cloud using salesforce.com; 2) A newly launched standalone offer called SmartQ from the makers of 5pm Web, a project management solution we use daily for managing client projects. Both approaches offer a powerful solution. We will discuss the pros and cons of each later.


The Integrated Sales & Service Cloud from salesforce.com

salesforce.com has developed its sales and service clouds to work hand-in-glove to provide an  integrated solution. You are able to follow the customer through a complete life cycle from lead, to opportunity, and finally to becoming a customer account. During the customer life cycle there are many points of contact where it makes business sense to allow the customer to have direct interaction with the salesforce.com environment. This is easily facilitated by salesforce.com. Having been developed as a cloud-based application, salesforcecom is architected to provide open APIs which allow interoperability with other web-based services.

We have written in the past about the integration of a web form on your website into the lead management process using salesforce.com. Using a similar philosophy, salesforce.com provides a web-based front end which may be used by your customer which provides direct access to the case management functionality of salesforce.com. This allows customers to create their own cases, check a standard solution library or the status of cases, and much more.

We implemented the salesforce.com Service Cloud Portal over 18 months ago. We were in a hurry to implement it so we took most of what was provided as the default setup and did very little customization. We essentially followed this approach:

1. Enabled the self-service portal.
2. Created our portal, selected font colors, tabs and fields we wanted to display (this can include custom fields). We also removed the salesforce.com logo so our portal only has our logo on it.
3. Created a portal profile (for salesforce.com knowledgeable users this is where you specify page layouts, list views and search layouts). We kept this very basic.
4. Enabled portal user access and login.
5. Setup users who could access the portal - contacts already in salesforce.com.

It took us less than half a day to set it up. We decided to run the salesforce.com Service Cloud Portal as an iFrame (perhaps kind of low tech) in a private customer area of our site. While all customers are given a login to the private customer area on our site, only client-nominated users have access to the Service Cloud Portal. salesforce.com generates the code you require to install the frame on your site to run the Portal. We have also since installed this code on sub domains (collaboration sites using Drupal) for some of our large clients and also on some internal pages for customers for whom we have developed new websites. Our philosophy is to provide access to the portal from where it is most convenient to the client.

I thought it would be instructive to show some of the Service Cloud Portal screens. In the example below we have a private member area on our site called "Subscribers". When authenticated users are given access to this area, the subscriber has a new menu item called "Subscribers". One of the sub-menu options within "Subscribers" is "Customer Service Portal". Once selected the user is presented with the login below as a frame within our website (Please note that the menus on the bottom left are expanded because they include options I have as a site administrator).

 
Once logged in, the user will see a list of current outstanding cases. We don't have any for this specific user at this point.

Let's add a new case.

Once the case is saved I can always check its current status by clicking on the "View Cases" tab.

We have complete control over which fields appear on these screens, in addition to which tabs are displayed. Additionally, there are several interesting options which we elected not to implement to save time; they are:

1. Salesforce Content - a library of information which may be shared with customers in various document formats.
2. Ideas - salesforce.com Idea sharing portal.
3. Answers - a library of answers to common customer problems which you populate based on your product and service offering.
4. Entitlement Knowledge - a system which tracks customer entitlements for service based on contracts.
5. Salesforce Knowledge - a salesforce.com specific knowledge database.

To close the loop on our demonstration, we will revert to the role of internal customer service representative. The customer service representative has the power of the salesforce.com customer service application at their fingertips. Once logged in the customer service representative will find the case created by the customer using the Customer Service Portal.

Clicking on the case will provide the same detail we saw earlier in the Customer Service Portal.

smartQ Visual Project Board for Ticket Tracking

Now I'll switch gears and show you a newly launched stand-alone option which is now available in the cloud. Introduced by the same provider who brought us 5pm Web, this new solution is called smartQ. smartQ uses the term tickets instead of cases. We were given access to a beta system for our testing.

The front-end is basic, but provides for the basic requirements of logging a ticket.

Once the call is logged, a customer service representative may view their list of outstanding problems according to their position in the internal service work flow. While it is cut off in the screen shot below, the open tickets will show up in the columns titled "Submitted", "Assigned", "Work Started", "Completed", and "Approved". More on this work flow concept later.

smartQ provides some very good levels of customization. You can add custom fields to the ticket layout using the Ticket Form Designer.

You may also customize the workflow itself to more closely match your customer service process.

Implications

We have demonstrated two viable approaches for implementing customer service for case management (or ticket tracking if you prefer). How do you choose which is right for you?

1. Integrated sales and service versus stand-alone service - If you are using salesforce.com you have either implemented the Service Cloud Portal, or will soon. The benefits of an integrated customer life cycle view in which all client information resides in one place can never be overstated. This provides your organization with a 360 degree view of the customer - all open cases, opportunities, contacts, account information - including contracts in a single repository, available at all times. About to pick up the phone to call a customer? Check the status of outstanding activities, events and cases from a single screen before you do. Our preference leans towards an integrated sales and service cloud where time and budget allow.
2. Legacy CRM - Perhaps you have an existing CRM system which does not provide a service component or customer portal? In your case it is simply too expensive to implement the customer portal component of the CRM system you have installed. Maybe you have already implemented a solution like Highrise and need to epxand with a standalone ticket tracking system which will not be integrated. In these cases it makes sense to implement a service like smartQ.
3. No solution installed -Where no solution is currently installed, I would recommend you proceed with caution. It might make sense to install smartQ as a temporary solution until you can make a CRM decision. For organizations with a heavy service component it is more important to have an online customer service portal than to wait for other decisions to be made. At any time you elect to migrate away from smartQ, the company will provide you with a download of your data which may be uploaded into your CRM solution. When selecting your solution for CRM, an integrated sales and service cloud with a fully enabled and customizable Customer Service Portal as we showed in this blog post is the gold standard.

Forrester Consulting conducted a research study in which they assessed the economic impact of Salesforce CRM Customer Service & Support, including the Customer Service Portal and Knowledge Management. Not surprisingly, they uncovered significant benefits. I will summarize them here, and if you want the details you can get a copy yourself:

1. Fast Time to Value - driven by faster deployment (a prevalent benefit delivered by the cloud), rapid customization, and add-ons from the AppExchange marketplace.
2. Empowering Agents - through fewer clicks, customer visibility,  and performance analytics
3. Self-service as a Preferred Destination - Customer self-service (your customers want this!) and integrating consumer wisdom (customers share challenges)
4. Knowledge Management - Time relevant knowledge

Our recommendation is to start down the path of enjoying some or all of these benefits by implementing customer service in the cloud.

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Disclosures:

1. My company is an ISV partner for salesforce.com. We have never received cash from salesforce.com for any of our business activities, including blogging.
2. My company is an affiliate partner for 5pm Web. As of this writing we are not an affiliate partner for smartQ.

LinkedIn Profiles in your CRM Cloud

Today started like every other day until I received an unexpected gift. It came in the form of a cloud service to integrate LinkedIn Profiles into my salesforce.com contacts. 

When reading my email today I received the AppExchange Digest, which is a regular update salesforce.com sends out to users to provide updates on new Apps. One of the small updates on the list was a hyperlink to the LinkedIn® Connector for Salesforce CRM from redkite. This looked interesting to me, so I read more about it. The basic idea is that when you pull up a contact in Salesforce CRM, you will also see the LinkedIn® Profile for the user.

I decided to install the software and followed the documentation from redkite, which basically involved:

1. Downloading the App into my salesforce.com instance
2. Registering for an API key in LinkedIn®
3. Entering the API key into my salesforce.com instance
4. Modifying the contact page layout in salesforce.com to move the new LinkedIn® display object into my standard contact page layout.

I completed the installation and setup in less time than it took me to drink a cup of coffee. The first time I used the newly saved contact screen it confirmed with me if it was okay to use my LinkedIn® account to access LinkedIn® Profiles. After this confirmation the LinkedIn® Profiles began to appear on the contact screen.

The integration works like a dream. It knows which contacts to which I am connected and those to whom I am not. If I want to view the contact's complete profile I simply click on the button which says "View Profile in LinkedIn". These has tremendous potential for those wanting instant access to more information about their buyer directly from within CRM. It is convenient and demonstrates excellent interoperability between cloud service providers. Here is what it looks like with the contact information from my account rep at salesforce.com.

It's easy to see how this will be a benefit for sales people in helping them to better understand the buyer - in one screen they can see key information from LinkedIn®:

1. Degree of Relationship Display 
2. Current and Previous Employers and Titles 
3. Summary Profile and Education 
4. View How You're Connected 
5. Seamless navigation to full LinkedIn® Profile 
6. Secure authentication directly to LinkedIn® 

This a super example of how applications working together in the cloud create tremendous value. If you use salesforce.com, have your administrator install this App today. If you are using another CRM system find out how to access it from your system. 

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Exploiting the Cloud to Sell Value

Adversarial selling approaches don't work, especially in our socially networked world. How can you use the Cloud to be customer centric, while collaborating with your buyer to progress the buying cycle?

We achieve this by following some simple approaches, which we also recommend to our clients:

1. Select a cloud-based collaboration tool which will be used by you and the buyer to structure the buying process. We call the implementation of this tool the Value Roadmap. The primary goal of the Value Roadmap is to develop a collaborative plan which is essentially the road map for the buyer to achieve value from your service.
2. Stop doing account planning without the buyer present. Two hours of planning without the buyer can likely be replaced with five minutes of interaction with the buyer. Account planning is a hypothetical exercise without direct input from the buyer. If you have developed a trusting rapport with the buyer and are creating value during the buying process, the buyer they will gladly share the information you require for success.
3. Develop a library of customer Top Challenges your solutions address to be used during the needs discovery process. These are worded in the customer's language and are used to keep the buying process focused on buyer needs and the relationship of your solutions to the buyer's needs.

I should state that while this approach may support the buying process for commodities, it works best for those selling services (either delivered by consultants or delivered through an online service such as an SaaS application).

The basic premise of the Value Roadmap is to build a plan which is built collaboratively with the buyer to document all of the necessary steps, starting with problem discovery and ending with the implementation of the services, which will both solve the buyer problems and provide the expected value. Depending on the scope of your services, this may include activities such as demonstrations and perhaps a business case. The most critical goal of the Value Roadmap is to focus the buying / evaluation activities on high value customer problems which drive a compelling business case. Rather than discussing endless lists of features or providing services which will be need to be priced lower because they solve low value customer problems, the Value Roadmap strives to keep our activities focused on higher value and can be used to challenge the addition of unrelated activities.

The Value Roadmap is an extremely powerful tool in its own right. When complemented by sales representatives who have been trained in customer centric selling techniques - either SPIN or Customer Centric Selling, it can improve opportunity close rates substantially.

But I started this discussion by presenting the need for a collaborative, cloud-based tool to drive the Value Roadmap process. This is mandatory because:

1. In the online world face-to-face meetings are no longer the primary method of contact. You need a tool which represents you professionally and demonstrates your understanding of how to conduct a sales process collaboratively. Email fails completely (even if you copy the emails into your internal CRM system).
2. Time zones and flexible work hours require a tool which is accessible from any device at any time, to allow the sales process to keep moving.
3. Personal preferences of your buyer dictate how they want to interact with you. Some will work directly in the cloud-based environment, while others will ask you to maintain the online plan on their behalf. Both approaches work - we end up with agreed upon next steps which are transparent to the buying and selling organization at all times. Without an online tool accessible by the buyer, your plan is no better than an account plan collecting dust on your shelf.
4. It forms the repository of all evaluation information, including RFPs, business cases, and presentations. Your client will appreciate the value of this repository and view you favorably as a result.

There are many options for providing a tool for delivering the Value Roadmap online. For companies with large budgets this can be done with the development of an online tool which supports some level of mass-customization. One company I worked with considered the development of a tool which would provide a customized web page for every buyer. Most clients, however, will likely implement Value Roadmaps using one of the readily available online project management / task collaboration tools.

We have used both Basecamp and 5pm Web. Our current preference is for 5pm Web because it is more oriented towards project time lines and our Value Roadmaps are designed as projects with specific delivery dates.

Below is a hypothetical sample of a Value Roadmap from our 5pm Web system. Our guided customer buying approach, which is deployed via the Value Roadmap, starts something like the picture below and is then customized for each client situation.

While we don't represent 5pm Web, we have found it to be a very useful cloud-based service which we use on our client projects (we have joined their affiliate network). Using it for our Value Roadmaps was a natural extension of our use of the tool. If you check their website you will find very competitive pricing plans.

Implementing Value Roadmaps using an online tool where you collaborate with your buyers has many benefits:

1. The buying process is "always-on" and fully transparent to all stakeholders within the selling and buying companies.
2. The seller is viewed as progressive, professional, and value-focused by the buyer.
3. Expensive proof activities, such as demos, are focused on high value customer problems. Low value activities can be negotiated out of the sales process.
4. The approach is customer centric and teaches sales people to make use of that expensive sales training you sent them on (SPIN or Customer Centric Selling). It provides the content that is required to make the sales methodologies work.
5. It accelerates the sales cycle with the buyer's approval.
6. Using the online tool as a central document store saves the buyer and seller time when looking for documents, notes, and next steps.

The Value Roadmap approach can be implemented with very little preparation. You can be executing them in less than a week with your buyers. Follow some simple steps - select a tool like 5pm Web, build your standard plan similar to the example above, and start experimenting with your sales team and selected buyers. The approach is made more powerful by using one of the sales methods described above, and is made most effective when you develop your Top Challenge library as a knowledge repository for your sales team to conduct the Value Roadmap exercise. I will end with a shameless plug - we work with clients to both develop their Top Challenge library and to implement a Value Roadmap selling approach.

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Do you know what your customers are thinking?

Right now your customers are experiencing your services or interacting with your company. Can they easily interact with you to provide feedback, or do they have to vent their frustration into other communities?

I am still surprised at the number of organizations that don't offer their customers the opportunity to provide real-time feedback about how things are going. Many companies rely on the age-old monthly, quarterly or (yikes) annual courtesy call initiated by a sales reps to touch base with the customer to see if they need to buy more stuff. Many companies also incorporate an annual or bi-annual survey (which are now mostly conducted online) into their customer feedback loop, and many others use automated surveys which are sent to a customer after closing each case (or problem ticket).

Do these approaches go far enough? Well, not really. Why?

1. Often the annual survey tries to do too much and in the end only a couple of questions really matter. The questions in the annual survey are broad in scope and typically everything hinges on the responses to two critical questions - "How are we doing overall?" and "Would you recommend us to others?". Usually team bonuses are linked to these two questions and the account team mobilizes (reacts) to focus resources on bringing these scores back in line. Usually at all costs.
2. The periodic survey also lacks any spontaneity. Usually good and bad experiences are not remembered and the general impression "today" is used to complete the survey. 
3. The people who generally complete the case-closed surveys and in some cases the periodic surveys are generally focused on day-to-day issues and may not have an awareness about other important questions (often never asked). They may not have a handle on the critical problems your solution is addressing and the resulting value it delivers. In short, there is no guarantee the person completing the survey understands the business impact of your service.

We believe there is a simple solution to this problem. We also believe cost effective cloud-based tools will ensure you appear caring and professional in the eyes of your customers.

Our recommendation for collecting immediate and relevant customer feedback is twofold:

1. Always-on Feedback - Provide an immediate feedback mechanism for customers on your website through which feedback may immediately and easily be submitted. In its most basic implementation this is an online form. In its most progressive usage this is a forum on your website where the issues are discussed amongst all customers. Using this approach, customers are allowed to post new forum threads and interact on any number of topics. Your organization assigns forum owners and ensures each thread is followed. For some of our larger projects we have also implemented private forums with specific customers using Drupal to create highly interactive communities for collaboration and content sharing across all issues of a major project implementation. Drupal also gives us the full power of a Content Management System to create private areas for specific sub-groups. In one implementation we created a private area for the CEO to document and discuss specific ideas, programs and measures.
2. Where's the Beef? - In the days before super-sized fast food this was the question asked by a fast food chain when it talked about its competitors' "more bun that burger approach". In the case of your customers the bottom line question is - "where's the value?" Companies grow their customer base by delivering value. We need to be continually confirming the value we are delivering to our customers. Recently, our company delivered a project for a client where we designed a value discovery survey using Survey Gizmo where we asked specific questions about the value received from their solutions. The potential respondents were selected in our salesforce.com database based on contact attributes we had assigned in salesforce.com. The list was exported to MailChimp, which is our email management tool of choice, due to its capabilities and direct integration to the salesforce.com API. Survey Gizmo has a direct integration to Mailchimp, which allowed us to use the capabilities of viewing email opens, click thrus, and ultimately responses, directly in MailChimp. While we used the survey dashboard and reports in Survey Gizmo to analyse the results, management at our client company simply used MailChimp to view all of the results. In this particular case the value of the solutions were validated through the survey responses and the information collected will be used to launch a very important new partnership and marketing program. We expect to drive even more value for customers and significant new revenues.

As usual, the cloud services we mentioned in this post are tools we use with customers all of the time. We are not paid to write about them, however, we have joined the affiliate programs of some of them.

The online value survey we developed will be made available through the corporate website for any customer to complete at any time. The information collected through these value surveys will have many purposes:

1. Add to our library of top challenges faced by our customers and how our solutions address them.
2. Influence our marketing collateral development and demonstration scenarios used during the buying process.
3. Validate our pricing strategies.
4. Enhance the conversation about customer challenges and value we are having both in sales and through our online presence.
5. Influence our product management function and determine the highly valued features and those which are not valued.
6. Train our customer service representatives on how our solutions create value for customers and how they should be assisting customers.

When you implement a program of soliciting Always on Feedback and Where's the Beef feedback from your customers, your customers will view their relationship with your organization more strategically. In it's simplest form of implementation using Survey Gizmo, you can be doing it in an afternoon. Don't start the program with endless internal meetings to get the questions just right. Just get started!

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