Got GoldMine? Bad Old News, Good News and the “Catches”

If you are still using GoldMine Standard Edition, this blog definitely is for you.

Front Range, the manufacturer of all  GoldMine in its various versions, stopped distributing GoldMine Standard Edition some years back.  Users of GoldMine Standard Edition cannot receive technical support for that version directly from FrontRange.

It’s not the GoldMine you started out with on your laptop years ago.  The only officially-supported GoldMine now lives on a corporate server.  Sorry, a local workstation does not count as a GoldMine server.

That’s the bad old—very old—news.

Now the good news—and the catches.

Until December 18th 2009, GoldMine Standard  Edition users can upgrade to GoldMine Premium Edition at $355 per seat.  Additional seats for the same price are available if the additional seats are included on the same order.

If you place your order after December 18 but by January 29th 2010 you can upgrade from GoldMine Standard Edition to GoldMine Premium Edition for $405.

Longtime loyalists from Standard Edition days, GoldMine Premium Edition has a very different “look and feel” from what you are accustomed to working with.  And there are many more new features.  I recommend going to the test drive to check it out.  The Pequod Systems order desk is at 301.445-6206.

The Catches: You must order a minumum of five (5) GMPE licenses with maintenance required on all seats. Orders—which go through a GoldMine partner such as Pequod Systems—must be received by the FrontRange GoldMine partner in time to reach FrontRange by the deadline.

P.S. Not sure which version of GoldMine you are using right now? Launch GoldMine and look at the splash screen. It’s written right there.  If you are already in GoldMine, click on HELP. Then click on ABOUT.

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“If It Ain’t Broke, don’t Fix It.” Here’s a BETTER idea for Business IT

Unless yours is a one or two person business and you conduct most—if not all—business on a personally-owned laptop and/or your cell phone, managed IT services should be a standard part of your present and future business plans. Why? What’s wrong with “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”?

On average, companies lose thousands of dollars a year to network downtime—in the incremental minutes and hours of lost productivity and lost opportunities as people wait for problems to be resolved. Furthermore, on average, 70% of IT management budgets are spent on systems maintenance, leaving only 30% to invest in new technologies

Consider  IT support that significantly reduces your downtime by identifying and solving issues before you and your staff have identifiable problems—and solving the problems took minutes instead of hours to resolve the remaining issues that were not anticipated.

Now consider  shifting funding from administrative tasks to more strategic infrastructure investments that would keep your network more secure and save money in the long run.

Managed IT services generally include

• Remote support for rapid problem resolution
• Detailed site inventories of hardware and software
• 24 x 7 x 365 proactive network and security monitoring
• Scheduled maintenance and upgrades in consultation with the customer

Those who offer these services successfully generally

• hold  standard industry certifications
• are experienced partners of major,  leading hardware and/or software solutions
• are experienced partners of major hardware and software vendors
• regularly receive product updates and notices about special offers from those vendors

Transparency Tip #2 Hardware today comes with internal code that identifies its manufacturer, its version number, and its serial number. Reading that information and knowing how long that hardware has been in service and paying attention to special offers not advertised to end users can give the managed services provider some insights as to cost-savings for upgrades.

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Managed IT Services in Plain English

One of our Pequod Systems core values is to speak the language of business. No geek speak here. Since an offer of managed IT Services will soon be one of our offerings,  it’s time to talk about what “managed IT services” means in plain business English.

What I have said before is worth repeating: IT managed services allows a non-IT business with serious investments in computer technology to get on with its own efforts without worrying about backups or cash flow unpredictability due to a sudden hardware breakdown or unplanned, software incompatibility as a result of an inappropriate upgrade.

While some people have no interest in knowing how the technology behind managed services works, we believe that offering some simple, easy-to-understand basics is an important factor in developing successful working relationships. Transparency works for us.

The next blog will talk in detail about inventory of computer hardware, the use of hardware vendor-supplied information about your hardware and what this information can do for you. You will read about how a system can read your hardware serial numbers and what good that does for you. After that, look for some detail about printers and, possibly, other devices on your network. Next will be a blog about software. After that, some notes about customer meetings on the subject of preventive maintenance based not on our recommendations, but on manufacturer recommendations.

Transparency Tip #1 We work with your favorite IT support person to make that support person even more efficient and effective than you might have experienced before.

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Your CRM: Return on Investment at the Speed of Trust

The more I read Stephen M.R. Covey’s The Speed of Trust, the more I am convinced that a major contributor to failure of Customer Relationship Management implementations is a lack of trust within the company that invested in the CRM.

When Pequod first entered the CRM business, one of the major anxieties we frequently heard was “You mean that anyone in this company could read my eMail?  Do they have to?” The look on the speaker’s face was usually one of anxiety and fear.

eMail is  territory that many employees  still regard as personal, despite the fact that it is sent using corporate computers and corporate software.  Courts rulings in favor of the employer rather than the employee have the effect of creating anxiety, fear and serious corporate headaches among all of us who may have sent eMail  while using corporate resources.  I recently heard of an eMail policy that actually includes chastising any innocent recipient of eMail deemed inappropriate for the workplace. What happens?  Even more anxiety and fear. Not exactly an environment for trust.

All of this fear and anxiety can lead naturally to messaging outside the CRM.  Texting, Tweeting and messaging in other social networks may help one employee build one social relationships with one potential customer while creating the illusion that one’s employer cannot see those messages. However, even if these messages seem to the employee to be totally harmless, using alternative message channels contributes nothing to help others in the same company to learn appropriate, business-building strategies from each other.

In some cases, alternative messaging reflects a desire for acceptance among friends and potential customers who mostly use these messages as chat—not necessarily the messaging that would help others in the same corporate setting. In others, it’s a sometimes futile attempt to avoid being monitored by one’s boss—or one’s employees. And in still others, it’s an effort to avoid a law suit, such as that brought by an employee’s union against an employer that enforced its policy about the use of eMail inconsistently, as in Guard Publishing Co. v. National Labor Relations Board.

In any case, failure to incorporate appropriate business-related messaging as part of a CRM effort reduces the effectiveness and return on investment made in the CRM. So what is an employer to do?

Develop a company-wide culture of genuine trust in sending, receiving and recording business-related messaging in your CRM. That will help companies recapture return on investment in CRM at the speed of trust.

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The Social Networking Experts’ Marketing

There is something truly strange in the land of Social Networking. Have you noticed the rapidly-increasing numbers of social networking experts who want to tell you all about how to make best use of social networking in your business? How to make social networking profitable? Their numbers seem to increase as our economy struggles to get back on its feet.

What’s really strange is not that these experts are suddenly coming out of the walls. Or even that a mathematical statistician friend at the U.S. Census Bureau attended a professional conference of the American Statistical Association where social networking was the focus of one of the meetings. (Evidently some rather interesting statistical conclusions are being drawn based in part on preferences one selects in FaceBook and other social networking sites. But I digress..)

What’s really strange is that these social networking experts are NOT using social networking to get my attention—and, they hope, my business. What ARE they using to get my attention? Would you believe plain old-fashioned eMail? Virtually every single piece of promotion I have received to attend this or that free  webinar has arrived in my spam-defended eMail stack. Talk about mixed messages.

So why aren’t these social networking experts using social networking to connect with me, instead of adding unto my already overflowing eMail stack? If I just spent a little more of my already overspent time in FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo or the other S/N applications, would I find myself befriending or being followed by someone who ultimately wants me to buy his or her paid seminars on social networking? Is there something about Return On Investment missing here? If I raise that issue, will I be shouted down by the Social Networkers because I am asking a suddenly social marketing incorrect question?

It beats me.

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Serendipity: Toastmasters and Managed Services

Serendipity. Yes, this edition of the Pertinent Pequod Posts is the result of serendipity. First, it was a software engineer and fellow Toastmaster writing about the process of considering “not just the ideal or expected way to input and interface with the code but also look at how the code handles an error or an improper input so the program would not crash or cause problems.”* In other words, this software engineer PLANS AHEAD before simply wasting time writing code. It’s a best practice used not only by software engineers but also by systems integrators and successful professionals in many different fields.

Then a Pequod corporate opportunity came up to offer IT managed services to business customers. One we just could not refuse. More detail is forthcoming soon!

The basic delivery of IT managed services is fairly straightforward. It allows a non-IT business with serious investments in computer technology to get on with its own efforts without worrying about backups or cash flow unpredictability due to a sudden hardware breakdown or unplanned, software incompatibility as a result of an inappropriate upgrade. It includes an automated survey of computing assets and infrastructure, which will form a basis for planned updates. All the business has to pay attention to is an agreed-upon Service Level Agreement by your managed services provider. Staff in businesses with a Service Level Agreement for Managed Services are now completely engaged in doing and managing those tasks for which they were hired to do.

At the same time, a high quality provider of managed services makes a point of having status conversations with the customer on a regular basis. Hardware assets purchased five years ago may or may not be on their way to final failure. Hardware assets purchased five years ago may not provide the performance needed for today’s software applications. Regardless of the economy, no customer should discover these facts because a piece of hardware fails.

Similarly, no organization or company should proceed down a course without total front end analysis of what happens if Plan A (or perhaps no plan at all!) does not serve well, or starts to crash and ultimately fail. Large organization (think 225,000 members) or small business (think 50 employees), every enterprise will have greater opportunities to succeed when its focus is on its primary mission rather than on the details of the infrastructure that gets it there. Toastmasters International should have consulted with professional change management experts before it went down its current path. A businesses that thinks it cannot afford managed services really needs to reconsider its corporate mission and what infrastructure services it depends on to achieve that mission.

*Thanks, Will Hsiung, for your blog about Proposal A.

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You Just Can’t Fake It

With thanks to Bruce Temkin for The 6 Laws of Customer Experience: The Fundamental Truths that Define How Organizations Treat Customers , this essay looks at telling the truth to all your Toastmasters club members and prospective members all the time. In a word, it’s about transparency.

You can fool some people for some of the time, but most people can eventually tell what’s real and what’s not. Club members can sense if their happiness is not really a top priority with the executive team (Sergeant at Arms, Secretary, Treasurer, VP/Public Relations, VP/Membership, VP/Education, President. )

Second, no matter how much money, time and effort you spend on advertising, you can’t convince potential members that you provide better experiences for them than you do. They will discover exactly what your club is like on their first visit.

Here are some suggestions.

Don’t hide behind a 4th priority. While it’s possible to come up with a long list of priorities, there’s no way that many will get a great deal of attention. Anything below your 3rd priority is absolutely not a priority at all.  Make your club members’  experiences one of your top three priorities.

Sometimes it’s better not to start. If you’re not committed to excellence in member experience, then don’t start a major initiative; it’s a lot of hard work. And if member experience isn’t a top priority, then your club will likely fail. Frustrated club members will be increasingly reluctant to re-engage in membership retention and building in the future.

Advertise to reinforce, not to create positioning.  Since members ultimately know how you treat them, the best you can do with marketing is to reinforce the truth. If you want to change how you are perceived, then start by treating your members better. Then use advertising to reinforce the new way that they’re being treated. Talk about how individual members succeed and how they perceive those successes.

IF YOU ARE  NOT COMMITTED TO EXCELLENCE IN MEMBER EXPERIENCE, YOU CAN ONLY FOOL YOURSELF.

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Members Do What Is Measured, Incented, and Celebrated

With gratitude to Bruce Temkin for The 6 Laws of Customer Experience: The Fundamental Truths that Define How Organizations Treat Customers , this fifth of six essays now looks at the importance of measuring, incenting and celebrating positive actions that lead to healthy Toastmasters clubs.

Soclub officers and/or Area Governors struggle to understand why  clubs don’t deliver better experiences to each other and to potential members. But it shouldn’t be such a big mystery. It’s all about how club officers deal with members and with each other.  Members tend to conform to the environment that they’re in. What are the key elements to the club environs? The metrics that are tracked, the activities that are rewarded, and the actions that are celebrated. These three items collectively drive how members behave and how they ultimately treat each other —- and potential members.

Here are some suggestions:

Don’t expect members to do the “right thing.” While members may want to treat each other and potential members well, you can’t just expect them to do it. Why not? Because club officers and, very often District officers  want club members to do a lot of things. But they often fail to link behaviors to  measurements, incentives, and celebrations . So without any explicit intervention on behalf of new members — or even longer-term member experience, the environment will push members to focus on just about anything except member experience.

Clearly define good behavior. To do that, define and describe the types of behavior that you want from members. Do you want  members to strive earnestly to meet the written requirements of the manual(s) they are working in? Or do you want them simply to get through exercises so they can contribute to Distinguished Club Plan goals? Measurements, incentives, and celebrations should be adjusted to reinforce those behaviors.

Watch out for mixed messages. You can only get consistent behaviors from members when all three levers (measurements, incentives, and celebrations) are working together. If you celebrate things that are different than what you measure, for instance, then members aren’t sure which signals to follow.

DON’T BLAME MEMBERS. FIX THE ENVIRONMENT.

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Unengaged Members don’t Help keep or Bring in more Engaged Members

With gratitude to Bruce Temkin for The 6 Laws of Customer Experience: The Fundamental Truths that Define How Organizations Treat Customers , this fourth of six essays now looks at the importance of keeping members engaged in their Toastmasters experience.

If you want to improve member experience, then it might seem obvious that you should focus on both current and prospective members.   You cannot sustain great members experience unless everyone else is bought in to what you’re doing and are aligned with the effort. If members have low morale, then getting them to “wow” potential members will be nearly impossible.

As Walt Disney said, “You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.”

Don’t under-estimate the value of training both in your club and beyond.  You can’t just change some club conventions and processes and hope that members will be treated better. Just about any change to the experience a prospective member has requires some members to change what they do and how they do it.

Make it easy to do the right thing. If it’s hard for members to do something, then they are less likely to do it — and more likely to get frustrated.  Encourage the use of enabling technologies, such as posting partially-completed membership applications on your website.  Include your club name and number, your District number and city your club is in on the membership application form.  It’s a rare guest who knows your District number.

Communicate, communicate, communicate. If you want to have members feel like they’re a part of something, then you need to tell them what’s going on. So develop a robust communications plan that not only tells members what your club is doing, but also explains why you’re doing it. (This is a vital part of making the Distinguished Club Program work.)  Look for opportunities to catch people doing the right thing.

Find ways to celebrate. If members do things that helpother members and bring in more members, then celebrate those actions. Thank that special helpful member in front of the club—if the person is comfortable with such attention. With some people, a simple one-on-one “Thanks!” is all that is needed or wanted.

Measure member engagement. Clubs need to put the same rigor in monitoring member relationships that they do in monitoring members performance.  Progress in the Distinguished Club Plan is an excellent tool not only to measure overall club performance; it is also a rough guide to member satisfaction.

THE BOTTOM LINE: MEMBERSHIP RETENTION AND GROWTH  TOTALLY DEPENDS ON THE EXPERIENCE AND SATISFACTION OF CURRENT MEMBERS .

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Member Familiarity Breeds Alignment: Vice Presidents Membership, Take Note

Today’s blog continues my earlier  Toastmasters view on Bruce Temkins’ Six Laws of Customer Experience — The Fundamental Truths that Define How Organizations Treat Customers. While Temkins wrote about commercial interactions with paying customers, much of what he said relates directly to the Toastmasters experience and the success of our organization.

Not many Toastmasters wake up in the morning and say “Today, I want to make life miserable for my fellow Toastmasters.” Yet every day,  members — from Plain Ordinary Toastmasters to club officers to District officers—make decisions or take actions that end up frustrating, annoying, or downright upsetting their fellow members. It can even be a decision or an action by an International officer. But it’s often not individual actions that cause the problems. Often times, the issues come down to a lack of cooperation or coordination across people and organizations.

Given that most club officers want their clubs to better serve each other and fellow members, a clear view of what members need, want, and dislike can align decisions and actions. If everyone shared a vivid view of the target members and had visibility into members feedback, then there would be less disagreement about what to do to keep the whole club happy and productive. While it may be difficult to agree on overall priorities and strategies, it’s much easier to agree on the best way to treat our fellow members.

So here are some suggestions:

Don’t wait for your club as a whole to solve individual member problems. No organizational structure is perfect; they all have some flaws. And it takes a long time to make major organizational changes. So rather than waiting for a structural change to create alignment, use a clear focus on members needs as a way to align the decisions and actions of individuals — even if your club as a whole remains out of alignment with the needs of a fellow member. Vice Presidents Membership, heads up! Don’t wait for your club Treasurer to “collect dues.” Your club mission is to keep members happy and wanting to renew and renew and renew. To do that, you have got to connect one on one with each of your fellow members to discover his or her special wants, hopes, desires and dreams. Even if those wants, hopes, desires and dreams “have nothing to do with Toastmasters.” There is always some way to connect seemingly “non-Toastmasters-like” desires with our program….and it’s your job to find a way.

Broadly share member insight. While we all know that club officers affect members experience, almost everyone in the club also has some impact on how fellow members are treated. Think of your club as a large production crew making the stars (your fellow members) shine on stage. Since many of the decisions that impact members aren’t debated or discussed, they just happen.  It helps for as many members as possible to understand our fellow members. Think of this as a silent alignment process.

Talk about member needs, not personal preferences. Disagreements are somewhat natural when people debate things from their own points of view. Instead of discussing what you like or think, re-frame discussions to be about overall member needs. If you find that you don’t really know enough about other members to solve the disagreement, then stop arguing and go get more information about your members.

THE BOTTOM LINE: FOCUS ON YOUR FELLOW MEMBERS’ NEEDS. What goes around comes around.

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