Moving

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Customer Viewpoint

I am constantly surprised by the number of people and companies who make no effort to try and think about things from their customer's point of view. They seem to have a myopic view. The view is "this is the way that I think about something and so it's the way that you should too".

This happens in the physical world (brick and mortar stores), face to face meetings, and emails but the place that I see it the most is on the web. It becomes apparent in some very visible places and also in some very subtle ways.

Quite frequently I will have a conversation with a sales person and ask "What is it that they (the customer) is trying to accomplish?" and the salesperson will have no clue. Or you are trying to have a conversation with someone about how a website is designed and they will have looked at it but that's all. They haven't purchased anything and so don't understand the full experience.

The subtle nature of this came to me very early this morning. You see, over the last 2 months I have made 3 different reservations on Marriott.com that were non cancelable. I didn't intend to do this because my travel plans change more often than not. After this last one I was racking my brain to figure out what I did. This morning it hit me... I think in Days (Monday, Tuesday...) not Dates (17th, 18th...). I say I need to be in Seattle next Tuesday. Boom easy. I use the pop up calendar, select the day and away I go. But then when you select the rate and get your confirmation it gives you the date. I know it's next Tuesday that I want to be in Seattle but I have no idea what the date is, (heck, as I type this I don't even know today's date - 23rd? 24th? 25th? am I close?) so when it comes back with a date that is 24 or 48 hours earlier I don't recognize that. Is it my fault? Absolutely. But when I get frustrated at paying the cancellation fees, who do you think I take it out on? That's right, Marriott. So, it's in their best interest to see things from my point of view.

Spring Break

Two weeks ago I was heading off on Spring Break with my family and had the pleasure of sitting next to a very nice gentleman in his 60's. We got to talking and because I was with my high school age daughter we go to talking about his experience in High School.

He went to an exclusive private high school and recalled the trip from his family farm to the school and being dropped off in the family's battered old pick up truck. And as he said "this was before pick up trucks were cool." He was a scholarship student so was always a little different from the rich kids in the school.

In spite of this start or maybe because of it, this gentleman has been very successful. He has worked very hard and has managed to build a very successful company. So successful in fact that we weren't sitting on Southwest or Jet Blue but we were sitting on his personal G4.

The next time someone tells you that there are no opportunities in this country, think of this story and the hundreds and thousands like it. Is this a great country or what?

"Honey, I'm Home"

One big advantage that the Web has over Brick and Mortar retail is that typically when someone is in their web store, a retailer knows who it is, what they have purchased before, what they have looked at, and lots of other data about that customer. This allows the web guys to acknowledge their best customers, help them if necessary, and provide offers and recommendations. They can even customize the store, based on their customers’ preferences.

A challenge for retailers in 2012 is: How can we get customers to identify themselves when they come into our stores so we can do some of those same things?

Over a five day period, RetailWire, the retail news service has had stories about two retailers doing just that.

http://www.retailwire.com/discussion/15855/app-lets-neiman-marcus-know-when-best-customers-arrive

http://www.retailwire.com/discussion/15868/foursquare-members-check-in-for-savings-at-walgreens

Two very different retailers and two very different programs.

How are you getting your customers to let you know they are home?

Pinterest

After 15 years of working on the (or is it with) the Internet, it can still amaze me. About a week ago I joined Pinterest to learn a little about what it does, why people find it so interesting and what it can be used for.

So far I have pinned 4 things. About an hour ago I pinned a car that I thought was pretty cool and that I would consider for my next car. An hour passes and I get notification that 10 people have repinned it. The funny thing is I don't know any of them. Not one of them is following me, it just showed up on their screen and they thought it was cool! Amazing! With over 10,000,000 users how can this change your business model? What does it mean for your company? Your technology, your marketing team? If I knew I'd be rich.

Facebook Timeline

Because Facebook is run by a bunch of 20 somethings they didn't realize that when the over 50 crowd sees their timeline, they see the end of it coming at them one Status Update at a time. Not something you want to remind your customer of.

Carpe Status Update!

How well do you know your customers?

Mixergy - Kyle Weins - Invent The Life That You Love

Kyle Weins is someone that I would love to have speak to class. He started "I Fix It" from his dorm room. He started out selling parts for MacBooks to make some money to buy a projector. While doing that he listened to his customers who were telling him that they needed manuals, so he and his partner wrote the service manuals. But a funny thing happened, even though his customers said they wanted them only 45 bought them. You see the customers didn't think that they should have to pay for them. So Kyle made them PDF's and put them online for free. He then got over 10,000 hits over a few days and business took off.

He realized that he couldn't afford to write manuals for every product so they developed a Wiki tool that would allow their users to create and edit the manuals. This is an extremely elegant solution that they stumbled on accidentally. The internet is littered with companies that tried to create Wikis but no one ever came to them. I Fix It primed the pump by creating the first manuals and then as customers came to the site to buy parts they were able to enhance the Wikis, which makes them more valuable and gets more people to come to the site.

They have been in business about 8 years and are now doing over $4 million in sales. Andrew Walker, the host and founder of Mixergy, was asking Kyle in the interview about the early days and he used the phrase "Invent the life that you love" about Kyle and I Fix It. It resonated with me as it is what most Entrepreneurs are trying to do. It was inspiring to hear someone talk passionately about doing it.

Mixergy - Paul Berberian - Iteration as a Strategic Advantage

I listened to a great interview on Mixergy with a serial Entrepreneur, Paul Berberian. Paul is on his 7th company - Orbotix (you need to check out Sphero - I have 3, one for me and one for each of my daughters).

www.gosphero.com

Anyway, the main point of the interview was about how one of his earlier businesses went through a whole series of iterations. Each were drastic changes and allowed the company to live another day and then eventually sell for over $100,000,000.

First they tried to become a better TV Ratings system to compete with Nielson. Next they tried doing closed caption creation which then lead to Video Streaming over the internet. This is where they first started getting revenue distributing training content for companies. Finally they iterated to doing conference calls over the web. This is the company that was sold. Believe it or not each business built on the work done at previous steps. When you hear Paul describe it, it actually makes sense.

As Nemo would say "Just keep swimming". If you keep listening to what the customer wants, you never know what might happen.

Is Loyalty Dead?

In his new book "The New Expert" by Robert Bloom, US CEO Publicis Worldwide - Retired, the author states that loyalty is dead but that there are 4 Decisive Moments that you need to focus on and plan for to grow your business. Is this true? Is loyalty dead?

With smartphones and mobility and the new ways of shopping loyalty might be severely wounded but I don't think that it is dead.

Loyalty is given to the company that uses these same technologies to satisfy the customers wants and needs to create a competitive advantage or a barrier. If you are selling solely on price, you can't expect loyalty. But if you have another selling proposition that loyalty is within your reach.

Think about what happened to Netflix last summer. First they raised their prices by about 30%. Customers were very unhappy but they settled down and the defections were not that bad. Then, about 4 weeks later they announced that they were going to split into two companies - Netflix for streaming and Flixster for via the mail. This is what caused customers to abandon the service en mass. Customers walked because they didn't want to have to manage two sets of data. Part of the value that Netflix provided to them was to manage their queue and their history and even to provide ratings. If the customer now had to manage that on their own through two different sites it was no longer worth it to them. So they dropped the service.

Luckily for Netflix they realized the mistake they made and decided not to split into two companies (although prices still went up) and customers have now come back.

Loyalty isn't dead, but how are you competing on something other than price to earn it?

451 Marketing - AJ Gerritson

I was thinking about AJ's discussion with the class and had a few random thoughts that I wanted to share.

First AJ was not the presenter that I thought that he would be. Please don't think of this as criticism but here is a guy who works in marketing, is constantly speaking at conferences and schmoozing clients. I was expecting a loud and larger than life speaker. But he wasn't. To me, he came across as quiet and sincere. And it worked for him. It just goes to show that you have to be yourself and not someone's expectation of you.

The deeper reflection that I had was when AJ spoke about the number of decisions that you need to make to start a company. There are 1000's of them and most you don't need to sweat - what type of card stock do you want for your business cards. But the funny thing is that there will be dozens - not every day, but over the course of the company - that are make it or break it. Unfortunately, they don't come with a sign that says "this decision is a big one". Sometimes they are easy to recognize but it many cases you won't recognize their importance until months or years later when you reflect back on what happened. Good entrepreneurs can intuitively sort out the 95% of decisions into critical or garbage piles and then worry about the critical and the maybe critical ones. They also have a tremendous ability that once a decision is made they move on and don't look back.

It doesn't really matter whether or not you made the right call, you have to deal with what is in front of you and not obsess about the decisions that were made in the past.

Thuuz - Warren Packard at Stanford

The Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Series is one of my favorite podcasts on Entrepreneurship. They have great speakers speaking of very relevant topics.

Today, I am sitting in Southern California listening to Warren Packard speak about his experiences and how it lead him to his new startup Thuuz. Warren has a varied backgroud; Engineer, Business School, Venture Capitalist and now startup (he got the order wrong.)

There are two things that he mentioned that I take away from his talk. The first I have heard before and it is Team vs. Idea. He comes down strongly on the team side. You can improve an idea, but we are who we are so the team is the team.

The second I found more thought provoking. It was around Perfection vs. Imperfection. Where on the scale does your start up idea fall. If it is in the area of space travel or medical devices then you better be shooting for perfection. If it is an iPhone App than it doesn't need to be perfect, you need to get it out fast so that you can learn. Where is your idea?

Kellaway Class Presentation

Last night Ken Kellaway, CEO of RoadLink and Pura Vida H2O presented to class.

The thing that keeps rattling around in my brain is how a 23 year old new MBA takes over the family business and builds it into this huge enterprise over the course of 10 years in an industry like logistics. Logistics is generally a very stodgy industry with corruption and lots of union activity. To be working in this space with your first real job as young as he was I find incredible.

Interesting Thoughts from Fred Wilson

Last week I read this Blog from Fred Wilson. Fred is a VC with Union Square Ventures.

I found his thought about the changing structure of the application market particularly enlightening and thought provoking. And it makes me wonder where else we might see something like this happening.



Utilities vs Networks

It's interesting to see a network, Instagram, starting to replace the iPhone's native camera application in many users' daily usage of their phones. I see this in my kids' behavior all the time. When they want to take a photo, they open Instagram, not the camera application.

In the PC era, when applications got bundled into the operating system, they became instoppable. All the competitive apps got left in the dust. But in the mobile era, it seems that a different dynamic is at play. The native applications are getting beat by networks. And these networks will eventually go cross platform which means that the native applications will be at an even greater disadvantage.

I expect we will see this happen not only with the camera application, but also with the calendar app, the contacts app, the to do list, etc, etc. Clean, simple, networked, social, cross platform mobile apps will be the winning model in the mobile ecosystem and the OS vendors will not be able to maintain dominance with the default apps they ship with the OS.

Networks beat utilities in the age when everyone is connected to everyone else. This is a big opportunity for startups. We've already got a few bets in this area and are looking to make more.

Dustin Maher (Mama Tone) - Mixergy

I just listened to an interview with Dustin Maher on Mixergy. Dustin has done a great job creating a business from scratch. He has created a business that is doing over $500,000 in sales with profit margins in excess of 50% by creating a business that caters to the fitness needs of moms. He has done it brick by brick by totally focusing on his customers. By delivering exceptional customer service he has created a passionate following. Mom's tell other mom's, he has a blog, and does public speaking all focused on mom's. Everytime he meets someone he asks if he can add them to his email list and he now has over 5,000 people on it. These are the people that buy his DVD's.

The incredible thing is that he isn't a mom (obviously) or a dad, he is a single guy but he has done such a good job empathizing with his customer that he has created an incredible connection. It is a very inspiring story.

Steve Case

Watching Steve Case's presentation at Stanford I come away with two thoughts.

First I find it amazing that he had this fuzzy vision from the time that he was in college about this network of connected computers. He knew that it would happen and that he wanted to be a part of it. It wasn't his first job or even his second, but by the time that he got his third job he was part of this new thing. That is amazing to me.

The second set of thoughts that I have are around his 3 P's. The more I think of them the more powerful the message is to me. People, Passion and Perseverance: Three things that concisely sum up the Entrepreneurial experience. As in the article this week ("Questions every Entrepreneur must answer") you have to have the right people, the right mix of skills and the right team to make something work. Passion - Every one has to have the passion to make it happen. We used to have a saying at Streamline: "We can't have people that want to debate whether or not there is gold in them thar hills, we need people who believe that their is gold and spend all their time finding it." That is passion. Believing in the vision and doing everything possible to make it happen. Lastly Persistence. No entrepreneurs journey is a straight line. There are roadblocks around every turn and the entrepreneurs job is to get around them (or knock them down or go thru them). To hear a guy who built a company with a market cap of $350 Billion talk about his roadblocks was inspiring.

Money Ball

I loved this Blog posting from the On Startups Blog. It gives you 17 lessons from the movie Money Ball that apply to startups. Very thought provoking.


http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/76799/Startup-Lessons-From-17-Hard-Hitting-Quotes-In-Moneyball.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+onstartups+%28OnStartups%29

Mixergy and Yodle

I recently started listening to the Mixergy podcast. Mixergy is website that supports entrepreneurs in the startup process by sharing stories and lessons from people who have successfully started businesses.

This week's podcast was with Court Cunningham of Yodle. His description of the startup process and how to build a business by learning from your customers is something that every entrepreneur should listen to.

Understanding the Customer – Advanced Analytics

For centuries retailers have been trying to understand what the customer wants (product and price) so that they could win their business. We have used Category Management tools, RFM Models, Customer Segmentation and Customer Personas amongst other efforts. Unfortunately we have been handicapped by imperfect and incomplete data due to limitations in the technology available at the time.

Now, because of advancements in storage and analytics we can read all of the signals that the customer is leaving for us, across all channels and social networks.

Turning these signals into action is a 3 step process:
1 – Gather - We need to gather and clean all of the data. It may be determined that there is additional data that we currently don’t gather that may be useful so we need a strategy for gathering that also.
2 – Analyze - The data needs to be analyzed for trends and actions to understand what influences the customer to take action. We need to understand the customers triggers whether it is product, price, promotion, pacing, peer pressure or some combination.
3 – Deliver - Deliver the results back in an actionable way so that we can influence the purchase decision. This can be on line, in the store or in a call center. This is the most important part yet the hardest to execute.