So one of my customers needed me to listen to a recorded audio conference the other day so that I could take notes on an elearning project we are building for them. I get an email with a toll free number I need to call and then a confirmation code I need to enter. I asked if I could download the recording as an mp3 or listen to it offline in anyway to which he replied "no". I said "so, I've got to sit tethered to my phone or burn cell phone minutes in order to listen to this meeting"? Yes, he said. What if I need to play certain sections back or what if I can't finish in one sitting and need to come back to it another time? How do I navigate effectively around so that I'm sure to get everything? "I don't know", he said.
As I was having this back and forth with him, it occurred to me that conferencing providers are basically still providing services the same way they did back in the 1980's. I mean, who doesn't have an iPod or some other mobile audio device these days? At a bare minimum, most people in business at least have a laptop, right? This piqued my interest so I did some digging around and what I found out was astonishing.
It seems that most conferencing service providers are making quite the profit these days delivering basic recorded content at a premium cost. I'm not going to pick on anyone in particular (besides, I secretly hope they continue to do business the way they are so that we can keep our own competition to a minimum) but what I discovered was pretty eye opening. For starters, most of the well known providers I researched charge a setup fee of anywhere from $3 to $10. Keep in mind, this is just for pushing the record button on your call and has nothing to do with length. Next, they charge an additional line fee to create the recording. This is basically an extra line that joins the call just like any other participant and is billed at the same rate as every other line in the call. You are essentially paying for another person even though there is no other person. Finally, they charge a playback fee each time someone calls in to listen to the replay which is billed on a per minute basis, just like the live call. The real kicker is if you do want to get your recording in a format that allows you to take it offline like an mp3 file. These same companies charge anywhere from $20 to $50 for the CD and then additional charges for shipping. One company actually told me that I could avoid the shipping fees by downloading the file from an ftp site, but it still cost $5 for that privilege.
Now cost is one thing, but you can't put a price tag on something that helps you be more productive so I started thinking about the issue from a users perspective. "Does accessing my recorded conference from a tethered phone connection make me more productive that having an offline file"? If it does, then the cost is worth it. I could think of a number of scenarios besides my own experience outlined above that would warrant the need for a recorded conference. If I was a team leader in a company and held an all hands call, I might want to record the meeting for those who could not attend such as for folks on vacation. If I was in marketing, I might want to record customer testimonials or interviews and make them available on my web site. Public companies typically record their earnings calls so that analysts can listen at a later time. Get the picture?
Lets look at each of these examples and the impact of current recording options. If I have employees, particularly sales people, that miss a meeting that I need them to hear, am I making them more productive by being tethered to a phone line or would they be better served having a file they could take with them and listen to offline. If I have sales people, I want them to be focused on one thing - growing revenue. This happens by having new conversations with customers or prospects and not sitting at a desk listening to recorded meetings. So, the last thing I would want is for them to get back from vacation and then sit around catching up on missed meeetings. It seems to make more sense to give them an offline file where they could listen to the meetings in their car or on an airplane as they were traveling to and from their appointments. Score one for offline recordings.
Lets look at the marketing example of conducting a remote interview to add testimonials or case studies to my web site. With a traditional conferencing set up, I would have to create pages with instructions for accessing our dial in number so that folks could navigate to and then access the recordings. On top of that, I would be paying for each minute of each access, which in an ideal world would be a lot. This is good for exposure, but how do you budget it?
Do I need to go on? Quite frankly, its pretty hard to come up with a scenario where it's more convenient to dial into a recording rather than have it reside on your mobile device. We live in a world where technology continues to improve the way we communicate, yet we can't seem to get out of the 1980's with one of our most basic business tools.
Envisiontel launched a new conferencing service this year that includes the ability to create recordings free of charge. Furthermore, users can log in to their accounts from our home page using their conference ID's and PIN's. Once logged in, list filters help them find and then download their conferences as mp3 files. These files can now be distributed anyway the company likes and can even be loaded into a podcast system and published to a number of podcast aggregators including iTunes.
Companies like Apple have changed the landscape of how we receive and interact with on-demand content. I think it's time that our live communication vehicles catch up and finally leave that ugly decade called the 80's in the past.
Matt Lee is the founder and president of Envisiontel.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Introducing Enlighten CRM
I've been wanting to start a blog for some time now. Of course, I hear everyone say this as we are all trying to take advantage of the inherent benefits that social media can provide us as business leaders. It seems that you just need two things to pull it off, time and something to say. Those who know me know that I'm never short on the latter, but having the former in the world of start up innovation is quite the parlor trick. So, it is with giddy excitement that I introduce the first of what I hope will be a long running series of blog posts to discuss the world of dynamic media and elearning.
My main motivation for writing this is very self serving as we have a new product offering that we want to share, well, with everyone. About two years ago we were approached by an organization looking to integrate Moodle, an open source learning management system, with Salesforce.com, the worlds leading CRM as a service. At the time, we were using both platforms and had already done a little integration as far as synchronizing the Moodle registration form with the "web-to-leads" function of Salesforce.com. Essentially, we were deploying training and just wanting to map any new users we were seeing into Salesforce so that we could do like everyone else and provide some kind of organized follow up to grow our business.
Apparently this was the most extensive LMS to Salesforce integration that this customer had found in their research. In fact, we were one of the only Learning Management providers that had even heard of Salesforce.com, which I guess makes sense considering traditional LMS platforms are typically an HR function and therefore tend to be integrated with systems such as Peoplesoft or some other type of ERP system. Long story short, after a few meetings to scope out their exact needs, we began work on a six month project to integrate Moodle and Salesforce.com.
Now the intended purpose for this integration at the start was two fold. The customer needed a way to flag customers in Salesforce.com based on the level of training they were qualified for. Meaning, did they purchase some type of premium content or did they simply qualify for their free training curriculum. Second, they wanted to be able to report on training completion status, grades and viewed content from within Salesforce.com so that they could create dashboards for executives just like the pipeline and closed deal dashboards that were already being used.
The system does all of this and more, but I want to focus this article on one item that was not really intended from the get go, lead generation! The system has been in a production environment for about a year now and apart from the usual deployment hiccups and training issues, has been a huge success. The most satisfying feedback we have received was from the Marketing Executives who told us that the system is helping them not only generate a greater number of leads at virtually no additional cost but the system is giving them unheard of visibility into the needs and interests of their biggest customers.
You see, when companies sell products and services to an organization like a Microsoft, an Amazon or a Yahoo, the typical sales process usually only involves a handful of key decision makers and influencers within the customer. Many times companies will negotiate six figure deals and really only establish relationships with these few key individuals. Over time, these people leave or companies restructure which can place folks in new roles, so maintaining a strong customer service relationship can be a real challenge. We are finding that our new product, Enlighten CRM, can help companies establish and grow new relationships within their customers. It can give them incredible visibility into which aspects of their products are garnering the most attention and demand, opening the door for future communications that are targeted and relevant to what the end users of these customers really want.
Most importantly, remember how we discussed the handful of contacts that drive a purchase? Well these few individuals are not the only users of a product or service within a company. They made the decision, yes, but a true enterprise service will be used by hundreds if not thousands of users within a company. By deploying your training content through Enlighten CRM and gaining visibility within Salesforce.com, it opens up the door for countless leads to be populated in your CRM from the most valuable resource any company has, its own customers. At the end of the day, isn't it easier to up sell and grow existing customers rather than have to spend money to acquire new ones?
My main motivation for writing this is very self serving as we have a new product offering that we want to share, well, with everyone. About two years ago we were approached by an organization looking to integrate Moodle, an open source learning management system, with Salesforce.com, the worlds leading CRM as a service. At the time, we were using both platforms and had already done a little integration as far as synchronizing the Moodle registration form with the "web-to-leads" function of Salesforce.com. Essentially, we were deploying training and just wanting to map any new users we were seeing into Salesforce so that we could do like everyone else and provide some kind of organized follow up to grow our business.
Apparently this was the most extensive LMS to Salesforce integration that this customer had found in their research. In fact, we were one of the only Learning Management providers that had even heard of Salesforce.com, which I guess makes sense considering traditional LMS platforms are typically an HR function and therefore tend to be integrated with systems such as Peoplesoft or some other type of ERP system. Long story short, after a few meetings to scope out their exact needs, we began work on a six month project to integrate Moodle and Salesforce.com.
Now the intended purpose for this integration at the start was two fold. The customer needed a way to flag customers in Salesforce.com based on the level of training they were qualified for. Meaning, did they purchase some type of premium content or did they simply qualify for their free training curriculum. Second, they wanted to be able to report on training completion status, grades and viewed content from within Salesforce.com so that they could create dashboards for executives just like the pipeline and closed deal dashboards that were already being used.
The system does all of this and more, but I want to focus this article on one item that was not really intended from the get go, lead generation! The system has been in a production environment for about a year now and apart from the usual deployment hiccups and training issues, has been a huge success. The most satisfying feedback we have received was from the Marketing Executives who told us that the system is helping them not only generate a greater number of leads at virtually no additional cost but the system is giving them unheard of visibility into the needs and interests of their biggest customers.
You see, when companies sell products and services to an organization like a Microsoft, an Amazon or a Yahoo, the typical sales process usually only involves a handful of key decision makers and influencers within the customer. Many times companies will negotiate six figure deals and really only establish relationships with these few key individuals. Over time, these people leave or companies restructure which can place folks in new roles, so maintaining a strong customer service relationship can be a real challenge. We are finding that our new product, Enlighten CRM, can help companies establish and grow new relationships within their customers. It can give them incredible visibility into which aspects of their products are garnering the most attention and demand, opening the door for future communications that are targeted and relevant to what the end users of these customers really want.
Most importantly, remember how we discussed the handful of contacts that drive a purchase? Well these few individuals are not the only users of a product or service within a company. They made the decision, yes, but a true enterprise service will be used by hundreds if not thousands of users within a company. By deploying your training content through Enlighten CRM and gaining visibility within Salesforce.com, it opens up the door for countless leads to be populated in your CRM from the most valuable resource any company has, its own customers. At the end of the day, isn't it easier to up sell and grow existing customers rather than have to spend money to acquire new ones?
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