July 5, 2007
What We Don't Do Well
As part of a just completed executive team meeting we've identified several things we're not doing well as a management team and an organization. I'll use this blog post to share our findings with the hope that clients and readers may suggest further omissions, comment on our shortfalls or even offer improvement suggestions.
While I’m pleased we’re achieving most of the strategic and G2M (go to market) business plan goals, I’ve got a few disappointment areas where we must implement measures to do better. These areas include brand recognition, shorter stabilization periods for customized software, decreased latency for certain areas of global coverage and insufficient capture of VOC (voice of the customer) data.
Brand recognition is something we wrestle with. Our competitors use advertising and PR (public relations) as their primary brand building vehicles. However, as one of competitors (SugarCRM) also noted "In an industry dedicated to improving customer relationships (CRM), it is interesting that software vendors spend between 50-70% of revenues convincing customers to buy their product (sales and marketing) and less than 10% of revenues actually making better products (engineering)." Our cost structure is opposite the norm - we invest 55-65% of revenues directly into R&D/product development and about 10% into promotional activities. Being a profitable company, we have the ability to alter cost structures and investment allocations, however, we believe our product-heavy investment allocation actually brings us competitive advantage with regard to product advantages and retaining customers - two measures which we believe have staying power. No question about it - our brand building strategy is a steady but slow growth strategy which leverages customer feedback (case studies, referrals, etc), partner programs, media opportunities (we love the product shoot-out competitions) and legitimate analyst coverage to tell and grow a consistent story which we hope illustrates our brand. Maybe this is a turtle and hare race (we hope so as the turtle always wins) or maybe our naivety will keep us from achieving the success we would otherwise achieve. We're in this for the long term so we'll carefully monitor our progress and make adjustments as necessary.
Another problem we've not solved is the high Internet latency for certain clients in less populous global regions. This of course affects the users online system performance and the overall user experience. Aplicor now has clients in over 90 countries and users operating in every time zone except two. Unfortunately, comparison points for this issue are difficult as our SaaS and CRM software competitors only deliver their CRM software from the US and seem to ignore latency experienced in other parts of the world. While this has been a monkey on our back for a long time, I feel we are making progress and I'm optimistic we will have a good solution within the next quarter. Stand by for a future blog post on this topic.
Another company weakness is capturing actionable VOC information. While I know we have outstanding relationships with our clients and do an admirable job of growing those relationship over time, we don't do a good job of capturing VOC data in a way that the data can be measured, analyzed and acted upon for improved client experiences. We're four months into our new client communication and social media objectives and frankly not yet showing measurable progress with regard to acquiring customer input and achieving client engagement. However, it's still early and with some additional focus I hope and expect to remedy this. Stand by. Know of other weaknesses - that maybe I don't? I'd like to hear them.
Technorati: crm, customer relationship management
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Posted by Chuck Schaeffer on July 5, 2007 in Organizational Framework, SaaS
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