There is a short-sited view in business that over servicing customers is bad business. Service is a cost is often the cry from management. Some of the behaviours around optimising customer service even aimed at sending customers away to your competitors that fell below your cost of servicing hurdle. Other strategies included forcing people to self serve as much as possible to the point where humans only got involved if anger was imminent. Even the training of staff in customer service roles was about minimum necessary customer assistance in the hope that less customer service head count would be needed for businesses over all.

I have never believed in that philosophy. My late mother, Robyn Lehmann, taught me the lessons as a teenager about customer service. She ran a bakery/newsagency (interesting business model for another post) and I have a photo which I keep close to me of her in a business suit behind the counter serving customers. She raised the service bar beyond most people I have met in business and that bakery was a screaming success. She spent time with her customers and it was authentic time, not time to get sales. A genuine interest, the sales just followed accordingly. Her influence extends deep into the Saasu service ethic.

1. The net has had a huge leverage effect on the power of word of mouth

In the old world if you upset a customer they might tell a handful of people. This new world can result in them telling 100’s or 1000’s as they post their upset on a forum, blog or comment section of an online article. The reverse good word leverage also applies. Happy customers will tell the world through email, blogs, forums and the old fashioned way in person. In essence they have more leverage to spread the word than ever. Good and bad. They are your new age sales team.

2. Service is a Sales Channel

I have written about this before but in summary service allows you to have conversations. These conversations are an opportunity to learn about your customers experience in dealing with your business, it’s people and it’s products. Companies spend lots of money trying to find this information out through market research, surveys, focus groups and the like. You have the power to turn what is often thought of as a cost into a learning experience and a sales channel.

3. If business is about problem solving where do your find out what problems exist?

Customers will tell you their problems, they hold the keys to your business success. Just one little idea or problem can highlight a big business opportunity that can be used across your customer base. Your customers are smart and savvy. They operate under a commercial survival strategy. They see the world through a different set of glasses, from the other side of the counter. Their problems are often different to what you perceive them to be. Customer service is a channel into ideas and problems that you can solve for one customer which then could be leveraged and used for many.

4. Keeping it fresh

Continual contact keeps your business relationships alive. Much like calling a relative every now and then. People love to be loved. People are more likely to think of you and your products or services when you keep in contact at that next point of referral that comes along.

5. Just because you should

Life isn’t just about the money, it’s also about doing the right thing. Money is a bi-product of doing the right thing. Sometimes it isn’t, but mostly it is.

Let the frenzy of marketing lessons begin.

Sydney finally has her own Apple flagship store. It is enormous. Right on one of the city central intersections it looks like a lighthouse at night. You can’t miss it.

Sydney is the world’s best city by brand (2 years in a row on ABC), lifestyle (8 years out of 10 on CNN) and especially so now for geeks and business owners since it is also home to Saasu HQ.

The lessons here for marketing any business are fascinating. Focus. Quality. Clarity. Consistency.

Only days after 5,200 Apple geeks meet in San Fran for their WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) when Steve Jobs announced the new iPhone 3G (watch video) will be 36% faster than the latest Nokia and half the price of iPhone today ($199 from $399), Jobs also confirmed that 98% of iPhone users use it for the web, as predicted in this blog ages ago the iPhone platform is a major structural change to the world of web access.

In case you didn’t already know Saasu works on the iPhone and the iTouch, it is the full web application, not a cut down one. So you can do everything on the iPhone that you can do on any desktop or laptop.

Jobs also announced that iPhone 3G will be in 22 countries on July 11 and a total of 70 by year end. We wouldn’t be surprised to see the current 6m iPhone users go up to circa 100m+ by end 2009 (another blog on why another time).

If you go to the Apple Sydney store opening it is 5pm tomorrow (less than 36 hours ago the construction boards were up, now there are loads of apple geniuses running around and customers sleeping outside in line so they are first in tomorrow. TV and other media are already circling. The saasu team will be there of course to answer questions and do the odd demo. While I was there recently the kind apple crew gave umbrellas to those waiting in impending rain outside - well done gang.

Saasu.com is the best value accounting SaaS on the Mac in the world, we love the Apple iPhone too.

So we are offering 3 months bonus FREE to anyone signing up to a paid saasu netaccounts subscription for this week only. Just type APPLEROCKSSYDNEY when you sign up.

Note to Apple environmentally aware staff, please lobby your light house marketing guys to use efficient bulbs (if you don’t already) or turn off those lights when you go home pretty please.

Oh, and a bit of gossip to finish, something else is happening at 5pm tomorrow too. BRW the esteemed business review weekly magazine is launching their special Web 100 edition. Saasu might get a mention…

Just a quick note to say thanks to all our blog readers!

The saasu blog is now in the top 0.32% of all blogs on the planet.

Our site is in the top 1.84% by traffic globally.

We have also popped into the first page on Google globally for some search terms.

In return, please accept our humble ‘video link gift’ below in addition to our earlier free CeBIT tickets.

Google strategy insights

It’s definitely worth watching this little gem. A unique bit of insight about how the gurus at Google are thinking on business strategy, product and customers. It came out some time ago but it’s still completely relevant for nearly all business owners today. It’s not just a tech thing.

It’s a video of Seth Godin speaking to a bunch of Google insiders on some strategic topics close to our heart. Seth is one of our favourite bloggers. We have written about his other important work previously.

Thanks again for your support. You are helping us build a truly global product that makes lives better. We can always do better though, so help us by giving feedback on what you want us to do.

Only one month to go! It is that time of year again, Cebit is coming to Sydney 35,000 wild business and technology people from around 60 countries in a frenzy of new and cool stuff in one place.

CeBIT is THE International Trade Show for Information Technology, Telecommunications, Software and Services. In other words, if you want to geek-out or get a real competitive advantage for your business you will love it.

Last year was good

Last year Saasu won the one and only highly prized ‘excellence in innovation platinum award’ for our flagship product NetAccounts. We were going to insert lots of other blatant boasting and superlatives here but thought that was probably more than you can take already.

This year will be even better

This year there will be something like 750 exhibitors from 20+ countries.

This year we will be speaking at the conference in the Transaction 2.0 section, chairing a session and of course exhibiting.

Best of all, as part of the Saasu foundation work we do, Saasu will be the sole green sponsor for the event, we are making the venue carbon neutral for the event for EVERY EXHIBITOR just so we can say we did our bit. Gold standard of course.

Special Bonus (or two)

As a special bonus you can register free as a friend of Saasu just quote code SAASUCA08 and you will get in free which is a fairly substantial saving off the normal door price of $40.

If you visit us at the show you will receive an extra month on your subscription for new and current customers! We will be asking all our visitors two questions - what do they like most about saasu today and what would they like to see in our coming releases?

You will also be able to see our latest release demonstrated and talk to the experts about your needs, wants, desires and passions in the field of financial management success.

Finding Saasu at CeBIT

So do drop by stand S45, on the main aisle right next to our mates from salesforce.com (in case you have been living in a cave and hadn’t already heard, saasu integrates instantly with salesforce).

We are smack bang in the middle of the main business-software/e-finance/CRM section which takes up most of halls 4 and 5.

Want to know more?

We thought you might so here is a taste of what you will see, watch the videos or read some more
from the CeBIT marketers -

CeBIT Australia 2008 is the largest and most important business-to-business technology event in the region. Join 35,000 business professionals at CeBIT Australia this year to understand, analyse, sample and select the right technology solutions for your business’s future success.

Finding the right solutions has never been easier, CeBIT Australia is organised into 30 show floor categories – ranging from CRM, VoIP, e-Marketing & Search Engine Optimisation, Web Applications to Open Source – making it the number one stop for business professionals seeking the competitive advantage.

* 150 FREE show-floor Seminars
* International Keynote Speakers
* Business Networking
* Interactive Panel Sessions
* 6 High-Level Conferences
* 750+ Solution Providers
* 5000+ Technology Experts
* 30 Show Floor Categories

Visiting CeBIT Australia 2008 will teach you how to make your ICT investment work for you

* Get more out of your website
* Unleash the power 2.0
* Retain your top talent
* Discover online trading
* Slash your communications costs
* See next-gen CRM systems
* Learn about Green IT

And much, much more… most importantly you will arm yourself with knowledge that will give you the power to take your business to next level!

See you @ CeBIT Australia,
20 – 22 May 2008
Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre,
Darling Harbour

Saasu is connecting to Professional and Social Networks (PSN) including; LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook, Bebo and Orkut. The beauty of SaaS is it enables these types of advantages.

In the contact screen you will see new icons you can click to check out your contact in various social networks covering over 200 million people already.

I’ll concentrate on LinkedIn today since it is the most professional centric network. Professional and Social Networking really is a far too simplistic simplistic way of describing LinkedIn.

Here are some observations we’ve made in recent times. We would love comment on these points as we believe this has ramifications for product development in Saasu applications. A lot of them relate to the fact your research can be anonymous but connections are permissioned.

If you need to know more about permission, start with Seth Godin because he wrote about it early and well. Permission marketing is changing the world.

Keep track of people you know and like

The simple and best reason to use LinkedIn. You know where people are as they move from one job or city to another. It can be everything from an online business intelligence assistant to an international (or local) research tool to an online CV/resume or yet another contact database. Best of all is it doesn’t stop there, you see who knows who.

Research accelerates the ‘getting to know you’ process for new contacts

LinkedIn closes the knowledge gap you have about candidates, employees, prospects, partners, suppliers and customers. This enhances the legitimacy of the contact. It accelerates you along the getting to know you curve. It can help move you a bit further ahead at your first face to face meeting because you already know more things you have in common, locations, employers, clubs, education, sport and more.

Get personal by de-institutionalising contacts

For a long time companies have not wanted to share ownership of customer and prospect relationships with their employees. These relationships have been owned by the company. LinkedIn allows employees (especially professionals with an eye to having their own business eventually) to de-institutionalise their contacts, taking back some of the dollar value from their employees balance sheet back to their own. A two edged sword of course. Transparency is the biggest winner.

Stay fresh reduce your contact half life

Keeping loose contact fresh is quite difficult. When systematised in a social network the expectation of freshness of permission is enhanced. When you hear from someone through LinkedIn your little shoulder devil says “this person is ok, because you permissioned them”. That same communication via phone would sometimes have the shoulder devil saying “Who is this person? How did they get my number?”. Permissioning extends credibility of contact.

Degree’s of separation permissioning

Linked in creates a new type of commercial relationship legitimacy. Invited recipients will tend to accept being network beneficiaries themselves. The established connection has value, an unrealised dollar value. It costs us anywhere from $0.10 to $100 to get a permissioned contact in most businesses so connections in social tools are real permissioned assets. Let’s be honest about this, it’s just good business. Participants in the LinkedIn community can monetise their connections via sales and marketing activities. This is the conversion of unrealised value into realised value because a certain percentage of those interactions result in sale and thus revenue. You are converting your virtual inventory of permissioned contacts into your revenue line. The beauty being that virtual inventory can be resold to, it doesn’t require a cost of goods sold entry to re-acquire another permissioned contact. Don’t think of it just as product sales. It could be a better career, some venture capital, a new partner, and of course selling your product.

Channel Degradation - BACN

If you plan to use LinkedIn for sales bear in mind that there is a direct relationship between frequency and value of the permissioned contact set you have. Your behaviour could become known as a commercial version of spam called BACN. Equally, as more participants use the medium for sales and marketing activities the value of the connections will diminish. You only have to look at the C2C social networks to see how this can happen. Permissioned spammers (BACN) looking for love from your wallet wears thin real quick.

New ways of looking at non-so-new information

Check out the company profile pages on any major company on LinkedIn. You can see who is who and any changes. Recently LinkedIn moved to formalise companies and organisations in their network for the benefit of data rigour, their members and themselves. It was a good move, it cleans up the problem where many users add they workplace to their profile resulting in 100’s of version of that work place where picking it from a list would be better. In short companies and organisations are now centrally managed. A great benefit of this is that the tracking of organisations over their lifecycle will be very accurate versus some of the rubbish you get from old style directory providers Yellowpages and Whitepages.

Another new Software as a Service (SaaS) idea that might work for some of our business customers is Avatars.

Avatars are a digital representation of people. You find them all over the internet these days, in virtual worlds and increasingly in commercial use for customer support.

A more recent innovation however is the use of these Avatars to sell your products. In pre-sales not post-sales, as it is a very different area because people are less tolerant of poor quality voice or images.

We set one up recently to welcome new visitors to saasu. If you have any feedback let us know. It’s easy to get one for your own site.

The downside of course is (more…)

Another great software as a service area that crosses over into tangible products is the garment printing industry. Particularly for quality branded corporate clothing.

We started looking for a decent virtual store provider last year and were very impressed with cafepress.com, so much so that we set up the Saasu.com Store with them.

Have a look. If you buy something and send us a photo of yourself wearing it we will give you an extra month’s free subscription or an extra user or file on your saasu.com paid subscription.

Too often we all get caught up with business and forget to make time for the important things. Spontaneously spending time out on the water recently (see nifty professional looking video that anyone can make) was a worthwhile endeavour and prompted some of the big questions in life -

• Why did it take so long for Captain Cook in his ship ‘The Endeavour; so long to find the world’s best harbour in Sydney?
• Why are yachts always ladies?
• Why don’t we do this more often ?
• Why is it so hot?
• How does animoto let you make such great videos in under 10 minutes? Why don’t we use it more often? Why doesn’t every small business use it on their website when it is sooo easy?

Seth Goddin has a great quote in the opening page of his new e-book which launched today. It is the simplest way to describe the problem at hand. “The web is a haystack, the biggest haystack the world has ever known. The reason that Yahoo and Google are so important is that they help us find what we want in the stack. And your lens or blog or page or store is just a tiny little needle.”

(more…)

Industry terminology is like a verbal business card for all the players in the industry. Terms define who we are and how clients and prospects recognise us collectively. They are important because they are a key marketing channel.

For example - Do you recognise these terms and know what they mean?

• SaaS
• On-Demand
• CaaS
• S+S
• SasS
• Live
• PaaS
• UIaaS

Here at Saasu.com we are amazed at the word games other players in our industry are using to try and confuse the market.

SaaS means Software-as-a-Service. It is our preferred term and the one the industry uses mainly. Lets stick to it!

Particularly at a time when SaaS is still growing so we have a collective responsibility and need as providers to you our clients and prospects to educate you and (at least we believe) to not confuse the issues.

At Saasu.com want to make things clear not complicated. (more…)

Bacn is simply spam you asked for. It’s the dozens of emails you get that you would like to get (sometimes) but they still annoy you and more importantly they chew up your precious time.
(more…)

Everyone has heard of speed dating - but the new new thing is using it for business. I experienced it in Sydney but it seems to be a global phenomenon…. and a great idea.

Last week was a good example - a crowd of SaaS trendies gathered to hear about a bunch of business solutions at the upmarket Establishment Hotel chaired by our good friends and premier partner - sqwarepeg and was billed as ‘like speed dating for business solutions’.

So how does it work? The format is simple.

Prospective clients register online and get to spend a few minutes with each vendor. Just like real speed dating the convener rings a bell at the end of the allotted time (3 minutes for singles meeting at traditional speed dating or in this case 10 minutes for prospects meeting vendors) and everyone moves on to the next ‘date’. In this case the date was held at a ‘pod’ complete with plasma and internet connectivity with demo SaaS application up and running.

If you are interested in continuing the ‘relationship’ you exchange cards or in true speed dating style write your details on the sheets provided.

Now repeat for each vendor until every prospect has seen every product once.

The great thing about this format is for clients they see a broad section of offerings quickly without risking getting stuck with a boring geek (just like speed dating). For vendors they get to meet a variety of clients and tailor the pitch just a little to stress the client specific needs just enough to follow up later.

Vendors showing at this session were Saasu.com showing our web finance engine (of course), Google showed Adwords, Omniture.com showed their rather cool web analytics (for higher end clients who outgrown Google Analytics), Eloqua, salesforce.com and Sqwarepeg also showed their own products.

The amount of cross-over between vendors was interesting, a good number were using each other’s products.

This event was called the ‘On Demand Circuit’ which is a face to face version of our own nascent online SaaSbay.com - both of which are trying to build the local SaaS ecosystem.

Next time we aim to show the applications interacting and really demonstrate the power of the SaaS ecosystem in action. This will be great e.g. Saasu already talks to salesforce.com and so do other products.

In all the excitement last month, we forgot to put a blog posting up for our recent CeBIT award which we received at the end of the show. This was a big deal for us. It is a Platinum award which is the highest level and one of only two Platinum awards they hand out.

We beat about 700 companies to get it so not a bad effort. Read the buzz if you like detail.

Cheers, Peter.

We don’t think of ourselves as a Web 2.0 company but somehow we keep getting tagged as one and I suppose a lot of our thinking tries to be contemporary so we consider it a compliment to be named on a ‘Leading Web 2.0 Companies List‘ issued recently on Read/Write Web by Ross Dawson and Richard McManus along with some other fairly cool companies. It might not be as global as the Platinum Excellence in Innovation Award we also won recently but it makes us just as proud! We would have liked to see a bunch of others on the list too (like Campaign Monitor for example which we use here at Saasu). The comments on that list are closed for now so feel free to make some comments on the other links above or comment here and we will pass them on. Cheers, Peter.

I’ve been a big fan of the Campaign Monitor email list management tool for some time. I can thoroughly recommend it - it’s a great product and the service from the guys at Freshview is fantastic.

So far I’m yet to find another service that is comparable on a price/features basis. Well worth checking out…

A new contender popped up on my radar the other day: Emma [via Seth Godin].

It looks interesting - but I haven’t had a chance to check it out in detail yet. Has anyone out there given it a go yet? If you have, drop us a comment and let us know what you think…

Hugh Macleod just posted an excellent overview of blogging for business in preparation for a talk he gave to PR firm Edelman.

The piece is an excellent primer for anyone that’s trying to get their head around blogging and social media for business. The advice comes from someone who has first hand experience building what he calls “global microbrands” for Stormhoek wine and Saville Row tailor Thomas Mahon.

One of the key pieces of advice, in my view, that he offers is point 5:

The growth will come, I believe, not by yet more increased efficiencies, but by humanification.

It’s an interesting dichotomy - one that I’m just starting to grapple with. I’ve been involved with the successful Earth Hour campaign, and one of the key challenges was “humanifying” what is in essence a large organisation - through both email responses and a MySpace profile.

The dichotomy is: how do you humanify and grow a company, especially when you have limited resources? How do you grow the resources to support the (when successful, ever growing) responses you get from a successful product or campaign?

I recently attended one of our clients events called MediaConnect Kickstart. About 150 IT journalists, PR companies and presenting vendors got together for 3 days at the Hyatt Coolum in Queensland. The event covered future directions in the IT Industry. One of the sessions had some very interesting PR tips from the IT journalists on the panel. I’m sure some of these would translate well into blogging and other social and new media approaches. Here’s my notes:

1. Stories/articles seem to work better when you write for the mass audience and then finish the content with more advanced tips to give advanced users something.
2. Online components and multi-media components for stories/releases are really important. So consider providing content to journalists in light of this.
3. Readers often use the journalists article as a 3rd party check on a product before buying so it’s critical to get your message across properly to the journalists.
4. Look for an entertaining take on a product or service particularly if it’s a bit boring. This could mean the difference between getting a 3 paragraph versus 3 page of writeup.
5. Never send a journalist a large image file via email. They hate this! Load them to a server and link to the image in your email.
6. Good images will get prominence and are more likely to lead to coverage.
7. Products/Services won’t get into page content if there isn’t a “fun” or “better” element.
8. Don’t dumb down press releases. More is better, let the journalist filter. They never know when their editor will say “add another 80 words” to an article. If your press release isn’t detailed enough then the 80 words will go to another article.
9. Don’t waste journalists time on the phone, get to the point. Don’t take it personally if you get rushed as they may have deadlines.
10. Make your press releases easy to get. They can easily lose them given the quantity of inbound email they receive.
11. A deadline is a deadline. When a journalist says to get something to them quickly they really do mean right now!
12. Make sure you communicate price changes before they go to print if any. Magazines/websites can get lots of negative consumer feedback and inquiry if it’s wrong. That doesn’t help you and it really annoys them.
13. Editors will often hold back printing something if it’s not yet available to consumers except where reporting on a technology in a “future” type of article.
14. Exclusive and value add content will tend to get to the online version better than the print version.

Back when I was at Deutsche Bank I used to help write a Credit Daily with my colleagues. We had to knock it up quickly and get it out before 9:00am however it had to be very high quality, no verbatim reporting. i.e. you couldn’t just say things like “the stock market went up 120 points over night because the Federal Reserve didn’t raise interest rates”. It had to more, it had to be ideas, theories and insights. The people reading it probably manage your pension fund so the tolerance for verbatim information was zero. This is how we got it to be the number one ranked research piece of its type in Australia for many years, we literally gave away IP to our Institutional Investor customers and they gave us back business in return.

Obviously this goes to the much talked about point of successful writing. This could be for blogs, websites or journalism. That is, it must have IP and you must give it away. This blog entry in itself isn’t original up to this point, plenty of people have written about the free IP “hook”.

Here’s some Free IP (I hope)

One observation I will make that is hopefully a little original is that IP is best thought of as something than cannot exist by itself. There are two other aspects to IP and they are the ‘medium’ (see Wikipedia definition) and ‘action’ (self explanatory). The later two can change the nature of the former. So therefore IP isn’t a stand alone concept. If you think it is then you would probably be better describing it as ‘Knowledge’.

The medium in this context is simply the thing, concept or material which is a part of your IP. You could liken it to an original idea of an artist. The idea manifests itself in a medium say clay. Equally that same IP could be applied to canvas a different medium. The choice of medium can have distinctly different results and thus IP then becomes more than just IP, it is an opportunity. If the artist had chosen canvas instead of clay she may have been the winner of an Archibald prize for art. So if this were two different artists, in theory the IP has different value based on the medium they used. By definition the IP is therefore different.

Here’s an example in the Saasu business

It relates to our future release of Enterprise Online Accounting. Some time ago we decided we wanted to get into the area of saving customers money on their expenses. As an example, they would be coding expense information into Saasu, say a phone bill, and we would offer them alternate Telco offerings for this service on a permission advertising basis. I haven’t seen any accounting systems doing this in a real time online environment. The PC gaming industry is doing it via displaying coke adds on billboards on the rendered background scenery. So while you drive your Ferrari around the virtual streets of a computer game you get pounded with interruption market on bill boards and the sides of other cars. It’s big, no sorry a huge business now but still probably not as big as we are about to get into for high value services bought buy accountants and business owners. I predict this will pervade the accounting software industry long term.

Some of you are saying, “but that’s like Google Adwords”. Well no, that’s a very different market (medium). Our market is users of an online accounting application who in most cases own their business or at a minimum are running a business (qualified buyers). They probably have a cheque book (purchasing power) and they usually make the expenditure calls for the business (decision power). There is light years of difference in this person, our customer, our demographic, when compared to a person from a general demographic surfing the net and being served display adds and banner advertising content.

So in this example a variation of IP when applied to a different market demographic had generated fresh IP. IP is more complex than just saying I have an idea and then jumping straight to calling it “my IP”.

For anyone considering buying online advertising (or currently running campaigns), Seth Godin posts a doozy: The 249% solution.

If you run banner ads, one study for Harris Direct shows that you can increase your brand awareness about 7% after a reasonable buy of banner ads. That’s just fine, though I’m on the record as saying that most banner campaigns are a waste of money. The kicker? In the study, Harris did the banner buy and watched the number of clicks to their contextual ad (you know, the text ads) go up by 249% over the next week.

Wow… I’m not a big fan of banner ads either (I’ve run a couple of campaigns on ninemsn and Yahoo!) - but that stat is pretty impressive. Of course, your mileage may vary - you still need a good product, and a good creative, and you need to test yourself - but it’s a different way to think about your banner ads.