Ok, so I’ve been too busy…that’s a good thing isn’t it?

I’ve kept putting this blog on the back burner because I’m too busy.  I’ve found my rhythm on the sales side and am signing up many accounts per week.  I actually talked to a fellow with a new business focused on small shops at the Seattle Biznik Happy Hour on Tuesday and I realized just how much I now know about selling that market.  It’s scary.

I actually came back here to my blog, not to blog, but to remember which virtual pbx company caused me such pain.  I’ve now used Phone.com which is wonderful from all aspects except DTMF tones don’t get transmitted correctly over their lines so you can’t route callers by touch tones….kind of fundamental don’t you think?  They’ve been trying to fix it for over a month, have no ETA, and don’t ever give me any kind of updates.  That forced me to switch to RingCentral which actually does work with DTMF tones.  Things were going swimmingly until they ran out of 206 area code numbers.  Turns out that you can only talked to their Manila call center (they have no accessible San Jose CA phone lines!!).  These folks are useless.  They said they would have numbers shortly.  I asked what shortly meant (hours, days, weeks,…).  They didn’t know but they said when they found out what it meant they’d let me know.  When I asked how long it would take for them to find out, they said they didn’t know!  Ouch.

So now I am looking for a new vendor.  I saw a review that suggest GotVMail is good but I was thinking it was the original company I dumped and I needed to come back here and see.  Nope, that company was VoiceNation.  So, I’ll see if GotVMail is any good.  BTW, Kall8 is not price competitive.

I have a suggestion for an entrepreneur out there….start a Virtual PBX company and run it well.  There isn’t any credible competition, so you’ll make a fortune.

Taking my own medicine

It is a funny thing but because I was looking for a national play with my business I didn’t consider myself a local business.  To whit I didn’t bother creating a local ad for my own business.  Sometimes you just can’t see the forest for the trees.  My business has changed and I am rolling out city by city.  I am looking to saturate the Puget Sound (Seattle) and expand from their.  I have already added Portland to the mix but will stop there until I penetrate deeper in these two markets.

I should have stepped back, cleared my head and done a bottoms up assessment of what I was doing.  Advice to self: put a task on the calendar that is re-occurring once a month for 2 hours.  Do a bottom up review of activities and priorities from a macro perspective.  This is undoubtedly where a business advisor would come in as being very helpful.  Anybody out there want to be a business advisor?

Long Term Relationships

I’m finding that small business people are the salt of the earth, as it were.  This has been quite a surprise.  Not that I expected something else because I really didn’t expect anything in particular.  Interestingly, small business owners are like an entire sub-culture that I really never thought about.  These are truly an amazing set of people.

Ok, I’ve spent two weeks doing virtually nothing but selling through qualifying leads and cold calling.  I’ve been extremely successful and I’ve talked with a large number of super-charged individuals.

Entrepreneurs, every one of them, I have found these people extremely hard working, very open, ‘what you see is what you get’ people.  These people ARE the American dream in action.  I’m finding myself not only wanting to sell my services (because I believe in them) but I very much want to help these folks succeed in a big way.  They deserve it.

I trust in their dreams and in these tough economic times I’ve run into a few individuals who really need the leads I can serve up but they can’t pay for lack of leads.  I’ve made the decision on these few people to engage for the long term and help them succeed with a promise of payment.

Think I’m crazy?  I don’t.  Let me know your thoughts.

Sometimes it just doesn’t work

My Hawaiian partner and I just don’t see eye to eye on how to sell our services.  I don’t really care how they are sold as long as we get the results we are looking for.  His view has been that we have to build relationships with people that will get us connections.  My view is that in the small business market we have to work the market account by account and rely on cold calling.

I gave him rope to prove his approach but it is not yielding results.  We decided to break up the partnership so now I am a company of one.  He is going to continue to sell Hawaii market under a commission structure so we will see if his approach can work.

For me, I had to shift focus and dedicate myself to selling.  I’ve been doing it for a week and a half and am happy that my approach proves itself.  Last week I landed 6 accounts.  This week so far I’ve got commitments for an additional 2, one with 7 ads.  Even better is that the pipe is filling with high probability prospects.  The model works, the rewards are great.  It helps that my product is an extremely valuable tool to small businesses and well worth it’s price.

Now I am thinking about bringing on a sales person that can handle this, either a person that is a great cold caller or the same skills plus maturity and skills to build a department.  First hire is a tough choice to make.

One of the last web ad hurdles conquered

One of the last major hurdles in proving out the business was to be able to get a small business client in a highly competitive sector in a large city to the top of the list on Google Local.  This is the ultimate test of our skills and techniques for driving ranking.  I got a chance to test this when I signed on a bankruptcy attorney in Seattle.  Tremendous category competition.

I had registered this client a month and a half ago and after several weeks his business was nowhere to be seen.  I was beginning to strategize around large cities rather than in large cities.  That was until last week.  My client jumped from “not in the top 100″ to number 1 in the category.

I got further support for validating the service only a couple days later.  I built an ad for free for a fellow that had just moved into the area, moving his window washing business.  He had absolutely no presence anywhere in any form on the Net.  Like the attorney, this was a significant challenge.  And like the attorney, after several weeks his rank was only 23.  That was until last week when he jumped to #1 and is receiving leads daily.

One more hurdle knocked down!

Happy days – existing customer expansion

One more validation of the product over the last week.  Three of my customers have come back to me to expand their advertising.  This is momentous because making sure customers would not only sign up but stick was a big test for the business model.

Over the holidays I had a tax attorney expand their advertising to include ads in two more ad districts, a traffic attorney expand to another district, and a company that sells firewood expand by a district.  The firewood company also does excavating and they are also adding excavating advertising to the mix.

This also proves out the model of targting service companies with big foot prints.  These folks are ideal for direct local marketing through search.  I love the fact that we can not only be of service to these people but we are really helping them reach customers and be significantly more effective in a palpable way.  Great to feel really good about what you are doing for others.

Automating Ad rank tracking on Google and the like

With so many new accounts I’ve had to move to automated tracking of performance on our Web Ads.  I wrote a four routines to do this.  One routine looks for placement of one of our ads on Google Maps.  One runs against Google organic.  And another runs against the Google Local results on a Google Web search.

The other thing I did was create a javascript tracker to embed in our ads so that it pinged our servers each time an ad was opened.   It talks to PHP which talks to MySql to record the referring URL, date, IP address, and ad number.   I plan to extend it to do an automatic monthly run and kick out an email to the client with the results.

I’m doing all this because the key to what we are doing is automation.  It is the only way the business will be scalable and the prices kept affordable for a small business.

I’m having trouble with Google as they blocked my IP address because I look automated – which I am.   I knew they don’t like heavy automated traffic and I put in a one second delay between all page requests.  I don’t think they would have a problem with the load I am generating in general but I think I hit them too hard trying to do testing.  Now I’m stuck.  I’m hoping they’ll free it up and take me off their bad list.  Any ideas out there about fixing this or about avoiding it in general?

Long time, much happening

I haven’t posted for a little while and much is happening.  Last week my business partner flew over from Hawaii and we had good quality time to update each other.  As much as I’d like to think a virtual company is the wave of the future, I have to say there are many things that are much easier to accomplish face to face.  After this meeting I am thinking we should meet quarterly if possible.

We really honed our business proposition and has zero’d in on service businesses.  They have a hard time promoting themselves due to lack of store front presence and need cost effective means to reach prospects.  There businesses are also used infrequently (in most cases) and that means directed marketing is necessary for them and of course search IS directed marketing.  Finally, we bring tremendous value add that is hard for a single business to duplicate in this area.

I tested out this concept a week ago with a company that does landscape materials and firewood.  He has great presence on Google local in the City of Snohomish and a couple bordering cities but very low presence 10 to 20 miles out.  I extended his reach to southern Snohomish County and a big chunk of northern King County.  He is now getting hits at the rate of  4 or 5 a day or more from this expanded area.  These are great results.

I am still zeroing in on attorneys as the primary market.  Results look good so far but I need one more data point to validate everything.  I have a bankruptcy attorney that I have positioned in the heart of Seattle.  Competition is fierce with a couple hundred lawyers vying for rank.  If I can get him up to the top then I believe we can hit any category in any major metro with success.  If not then we’ll have to alter tactics a little.

Next time I may talk to the current state of affairs on the sales side.

Cheers

NWEN November

I went to the Northwest Entrepreneur’s Network Think Tank event last night.  I must say that NWEN does an extraordinary job and those folks are to be congratulated on their efforts.  Last night Nick Hanauer of 2nd Ave Partners fame spoke about transformational ideas.  What a great guy.  Very practical, humble and down to earth.  His presentation was great.  Simple, straightforward and insightful.

As always I met some nice people trying hard to create businesses.  I met the CEO of Grapevyn.  These guys are in stealth mode but going live soon.  Nice fellow and I wish them much success.  As for the influence on my business…

I’d have to say that what Nick spoke about was right on target for what my partner and I are trying to do.  Nick spoke about game changing transformational ideas that had a value to price ratio above 10.  I think we have that.  Yellow Pages are a multi-billion dollar business and YP display ads easily cost $15,000 to $50,000 per year depending on book reach, placement and ad size.  We are providing near top level placement of an Internet display ad for $300 per year with at least 25% of the reach of the YP (in terms of  households).  That puts our value to price ratio at a minimum of 13 to 1.  Pretty good!  And since the number of small businesses in the U.S. is around 25 million, the annual potential for our business at one ad per is around $7.5B and that doesn’t include the fact that there is an opportunity for multiple ads per business.

So, the goal is great.  Now we just have to execute, and execute, and execute…

Anybody know a stellar telemarketer (outbound, cold calling)?  I could really use one.  Let me know.

Application software that stands alone in ANY crowd

by Mark Waldin – I’ve always been impressed by Intuit’s personal tax package.  A few years ago I picked up Quickbooks Pro to do my financial accounting for my custom fly rod business (www.flycatcherinc.com) and it seemed equally well executed.  With the addition of our start up business (and the topic of this blog), Inside Edge, I have pushed the application a lot further and asked it to do a lot more things.

Now I know most people are familiar with both of these products and this is nothing too new, but I have to proclaim that Intuit has got to be the best software developer in the market from a usabiity point of view.  I am not a casual observer of this either.  I have run application software product management at a number of companies and I have a career of focusing on customer usability.  Quickbooks Pro is a package that surpasses anything I have seen in integration and ease of use.  These folks are easily on a level of their own when it comes to this.  And I have used in one way shape or form, 100′s of applications including 3d modelling, vector graphics, raster graphics, business intelligence, geo-mapping, CRM, finance, statistics, database, and on  and on.  With as much effort that Apple and Microsoft put into building intuitive operating systems they both could stand to read a chapter from Intuit.  This company is utterly amazing.

I would love to see these folks extend the application for small business ERP including a CRM, project management, and inventory control module with multi-user access and an SOA architecture.  They don’t do that do they?

What do you think?  Do you know of small business tools that rival this company for breadth and ease of use at a reasonable price?