When I worked in the cable industry, I especially enjoyed the perk of free cable. We’re talking the works - all of the movie channels and digital channels - not just basic cable. The logic behind giving cable company employees free cable was that we could fully experience what our customers experienced. For example, we could be the first to report outages, or even offer suggestions for improving the customer experience. In reality, it was the customer service representatives who took customer feedback (usually in the form of complaints), and, unless it was a forward-thinking cable company, customer feedback rarely turned into service improvements.

It’s quite the opposite at Envysion. I have the pleasure of sitting amidst our Sales team, and I often hear sales people on the phone with customers. If a customer is experiencing a problem with cameras or reports, the salesperson simply logs onto the application so they can see exactly what the customer is looking at. Not only can the salesperson help diagnose problems, but they can also discuss improvements to the service or the application. Because this is Envysion, and because our service is built upon the Managed Video as a Service platform, customer feedback doesn’t stop there. The feedback triggers an internal conversation with the development team, and sometimes the development team gets on the phone with the customer to fully understand their input. Thus, conversations with our customers often catalyze a feature enhancement or refinement of the application. Through the MVaaS platform, the new or upgraded feature can be quickly incorporated into the application and seamlessly pushed to all of our customers, not just the customer who initiated the idea.

At Envysion, we can literally see what our customers are saying, and our customers see the results of our conversations.

We all have heard of the saying “When the cat is away the mice will play” and it is a good reflection of human nature as well.  Once the boss leaves many people have a tendancy of letting up a little and maybe playing around a little more than they normally would and less work gets done.  Or if the boss is out of town maybe they will show up a little late for work or leave a little early and less work gets done.  I could go on with examples but I think you see where I am going with this. 

Many business owners and managers have no idea of what the employees are doing once they leave and they just hope that they will continue to do what they are supposed to be doing. The business owner is making a large invesment in labor cost and the business could suffer if the employees get less work done while they are away. 

Managed Video as a Service with Envysion is the perfect tool for the business owner and manager to actually be able to see the employees at work once they leave or before they arrive.  The business owner has the ability to login to the application remotely from a Laptop with wireless access and actually see what is going on live while they are out.  This gives them the ability to make a call and change something in real time if they don’t like what they are seeing. 

Catching something on video after the fact can prove what was going on but actually preventing it from happening in the first place is much better. Once an emplyee knows the capabilities of the Envysion Video System and the fact that the boss could be watching at anytime it tends to keep them on their toes and prevents the undesirebale behavior from ever happening in the first place.  More work gets done which can lead to larger revenues. 

So with MVaaS like Envysion provides the next time “The cat is away” the mice might actually be working instead of playing.

I continue to focus on how to more simply communicate what it is that we do and what it is that MVaaS solutions provide.

Tonight was another opportunity to experiment for me as I was at an awards ceremony mingling with the leading technology companies in the Boulder/Denver corridor at the Boulder County Business Reports’ Innovation Quotient (IQ) Awards.  We were up for the most innovative award in the Business Services category.  The reason that this was a great chance to experiment for me was the diversity of the group that was at the event.  There were companies there that provide waste management services, a ton of social media internet companies, and even a company that “has created and patented a process for manufacturing agglutinate, a material that makes up 40 percent of the moon’s surface”.  How cool is that?

I had a group of highly charged and diverse entreprenuers at my disposal all of whom were politely asking what every person that they met did as we awaited the actual awards ceremony. None of them had any idea about the state of the video surveillance market and what the challenges are and why one solution would be better than others. I abandoned any use of the term MVaaS, I tried to use only language that the average person (although these people were certainly more technical than the average bear) would understand. I would occasionally sprinkle in the Software as a Service buzzword as most of them got that, although probably had no idea how it related to video in this context and why that is a big deal.

When I started the evening and there weren’t as many folks (they had a pre-event for award nominees) I tended to give what I call the extended elevator pitch. It is the 2 minute description of our business that I usually give after I try my one sentence version to provide more context if they are either interested or didn’t get it at first. As the night went on and the conversations increased in frequency and shortened in length I reverted to the single sentence version.

I probably used more than one variation of this, but it usually went something like “we let businesses with multiple locations easily and remotely access live and recorded video of their sites so they can understand what’s happening and run their businesses better without crushing their IT infrastructure or people” I know that I’ve written about this on more than one occasion, but it is still something that I keep thinking I could do a better job on. I want a short, punchy description that both communicates what we do to pretty much anyone and is clear enough about why we are different that we don’t sound just like every other video company to people that know the video segment. Not sure I got there tonight but I’m getting closer.

The one thing I can say is that the bar has definitely been raised based on one of the elevator pitches I heard at the ceremony. No it wasn’t the “fake plastic moon dust” guys (that is my elevator pitch for them, so they don’t get credit for it) The winner in simplest elevator pitch goes to Tensegrity Prosthetics. Their official blurb (probably akin to my second level elevator pitch) is “[We make] a prosthetic foot that closely matches the function of the human foot and ankle, designed to relieve an amputee’s metabolic stress associated with most other foot prosthetics, allowing them to be more efficient and subsequently more energetic.” Not just a great product (they won the Medical Innovations Category award) but a very well articulated product description. It communicates what it is, how it is different from the competition, and how it benefits the customer. Good stuff. Even better was how the CEO boiled their company down - “Better fake feet”. While he said it rather tongue in cheek. It pretty much communicates exactly what they are all about. 3 words. That will be hard to top. I’ll have to keep working on it…

By the way, Envysion won our category and received an IQ award for most innovative business service. Congrats to the whole Envysion team on another recognitition of the power of our MVaaS service.

The restaurant vertical is one of the bread and butter verticals for Envysion.  New concepts are popping up all over.  Attached are some growing chains to watch, where new takes on established brands are gaining traction.  Most I have not seen, but would venture to guess many will gain traction in the short term, while others will stumble and fall.  Who will the winners be, love to hear from those who know these brands well.

It is great to see Maid-Rite on this list, my only alternative for “fast food” growing up in Grinnell, Iowa.  It shows that even an established brand can re-invent itself and grow.  Oh yeah, they have deployed MVaaS, coincidence?

http://www.monkeydish.com/2008062324845/searchable/the-future-50-2008.html

No one ever said sales was easy. In fact, most people who have ever taken a stab at sales have bowed out of the role as fast as they stepped into it. So what makes a good sales person? A lot of things, including personality and style. But it doesn’t matter what your product or how you sell it, it all boils down to one question: Can you get the sale?

Over the last 48 hours we hosted an internal Sales Rally with an 8 hour agenda to cover a week’s worth of material. Time is short when you’re a start-up, you don’t have the luxury of taking 15 – 25% of your monthly selling hours to stop and re-group. 5% was pushing it, but with a new website, new logo and tagline, new strategy and an overall new feel, it was time to stop and collect our team so we could unify our message.

So what did we gain from this exercise? Quite a bit more than we expected, actually. To start, having a room full of clever minds sharing anecdotes, successes and struggles is not only a great team building experience, but it provides real and valid feedback to the messaging efforts of a marketing department. Beyond that, as we’ve stopped to transform ourselves from an internal/product focused entity to a customer focused enterprise solution provider, it’s beneficial to reflect on the individual approach as well.

As a final exercise for the rally, the salespeople were split into two teams of three and given a case study to present back to Marketing and Senior Management, acting as a potential customer. The two approaches were night and day. The six styles were black and white. Each had their strengths and weaknesses, though at the end of the day only one team could win. At the end of it though, I wasn’t reflecting on which team won and who had the best presentation style. What I walked away wondering was how did the team perceive each other? How did each individual feel they stacked up compared to others, and more importantly what did they learn from each other?

Again, there is no right or wrong answer. Sales is as individual a style as mullets and rat tails. But one message really stuck with me about our product and what we offer. You can buy a vacuum, but the vacuum won’t clean your house. We can’t fix your shrinkage issues or train your employees for you, but we can give you the tools and training to do so. MVaaS through Envysion Video provides a tool to make your job easier and your company more profitable. If you don’t use it, nothing changes. If you don’t use the vacuum, your house isn’t any cleaner.

Back to training… Sales team – we’ve given you tools and trained you on how to use them. Now get to vacuuming!

If you agree that every department in the organization - especially marekting - should have the customer needs as its primary driver of activity, then what does that have to do with MVaaS?

Quite simply, marketers can leverage video as a window into the behavior of customers, without the contrived environment of a focus group or phone survey. For example, using the MVaaS technololgy, a marketing manager can remotely view video of point of sale displays in several locations at one time. They can observe factors such as the traffic around the display, how often people stop to look at it, how much time they spend reading it and what type of customers are spending the most time at the display. Further, they can ensure that the display is assembled and positioned properly within the store. For any marketer who has spent countless hours behind a two-way mirror observing focus groups, MVaaS is a valuable time-saving tool that captures actual customer behavior.

I recently read an e-book, “The Strategic Role of Product Management. How a Market-Driven Focus Leads Companies to Build Products People Want to Buy,” by Steve Johnson. Note the use of Market-Driven, not Marketing-Driven in the title. Johnson does a great job describing why this is an important distinction, as his premise is that successful companies dedicate resources to understanding, anticipating and responding to what the Market demands. He describes what marketing is NOT as a way to build his case for a strong Product Management expertise within an organization. Product Management “is the messenger of the market.” According to Johnson, Marketing is NOT:

• Promotion
• Sales
• Advertising and PR
• The Marketing Mix (i.e. The 4Ps)

If Marketing is NOT, the above mentioned, then what is it? The definition of Marketing is so important to the American Marketing Association, that they re-write it every five years. They published their latest definition of Marketing in January of this year:

“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

 

Phil Kotler, the Kellogg professor who literally wrote “Marketing 101,” defines marketing this way:

“Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value.”

 

In his book, Johnson uses Peter Drucker’s definition of marketing: 

“to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him.”

 

Regardless of the definition, David Packard, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, had this to say about marketing:

“Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.”

I could not agree more. To be genuinely market-driven, the entire organization must orient around what the customer wants now, and - as importantly - what they will want in 6 months, 1 year or 5 years from now. The needs of the market must be the primary driver of every activity of every department of the company… including the marketing department.

On Friday, a friend forwarded an email to me from her fitness trainer, inviting her to join in a “boot camp” workout at Red Rocks Park on Saturday. In typical viral fashion, the email encouraged my friend to bring her like-minded (read: crazy) friends along. Being a fitness junkie, I signed up. At the time, it seemed like fun to get up at 6:00 on Saturday morning to arrive at Red Rocks for 7:30 am boot camp. The Park is located 6,400 feet above sea level, adding a dimension of oxygen deprivation that gives a boost to your workout. At the appointed time, armed with one bottle of water and one of Gatordade, I cheerfully jumped into my friend’s car with another friend, who was equally naive about what lay ahead.

Stairs. Lots and lots of stairs. And lots of really fit people with very little body fat. There were no fewer than 200 people, split among about 15 trainers who inflicted varying degrees of pain upon their willing participants. I even saw two women wearing weighted vests. I guess that was to give them a bit more of a challenge than the altitude, the heat, the screaming traininer and the stairs didn’t provide. For the next 90 minutes, we did countless sets of stairs: single step at a time, two at a time, alternating between left and right leg leading, jumping up one step at a time, and then we moved to the bleachers and did sets of push-ups, dips and crunches, alternating with climbing the bleachers. After that, we ran (to use the term loosely, in my case) all the way around Red Rocks park (1.4 miles) - twice. We ended one loop by running (actually, shuffling) backward up a ramp. A really long, steep ramp. The only thing that tempered my pain was that other trainers seemed to be much tougher than ours. On a water break, we observed one trainer who was demonstrating a drill that involved carrying a 15 pound rock up the bleachers while a partner provided resistance using an elastic resistance band. I did everything I could to distract our group’s trainer; I didn’t want her to get any bright ideas.

Today, I was tempted to use the elevator to get to the second floor where our offices are located.

Did I mention that I paid $10 to participate in this “fun and invigorating workout,” as the viral email described it? Oh, and I plan to go again next week. Let me know if you want to join.

This week we unveiled Envysion’s new tag line, which may not seem like a big deal to everyone, but to me, it’s a symbol of where we’re taking our positioning. 

I believe this tag line works well to underscore our mission to go beyond loss prevention and help our customers “see” improved operations, profitability, marketing and training. What clinched the decision for our CEO, Matt Steinfort, to go with this tag line is that it’s relevant for customers in numerous segments, beyond those that we have already penetrated.

For those of you who are linguistics wonks like me, “See” is an imperative verb that not only plays off of vision and video, but it also tells the reader what they will do/can aspire to with Envysion. Therefore, it’s exciting and intriguing. It also sounds simple, which mirrors the simplicity of using our application. This is about as close as you can get to playing on emotions with a B2B service.

While I recognize that a new tag line in and of itself won’t close more business, I am confident that it can rally to team around our mission.

“Shrek” is one of my favorite movies. I especially like the exchange between Shrek and Donkey, when Shrek compares Ogres with onions. If you don’t remember the exact dialog, you can get the transcript from The Internet Movie Database imdb.com, a fabulous source for all you movie buffs out there (warning: it’s pretty fun to explore, so only go there if you have time!). Here’s the clip:

Donkey, of course, doesn’t get it and responds with his own example of a layered thing, “Parfaits have layers, why can’t you be more like a parfait?”

Like Ogres, onions - and parfaits - good marketing programs have layers, too. Marketing tactics, taken individually in one shot will not drive sales. Rather, the layered approach works best. Direct mail, layered with a follow up e-mail push, followed by a trade show appearance, layered with a relevant press release, will hit prospects in several places in a short period of time. Layered together, these tactics create an overall impression and raise awareness, which sets the stage for a sales person to engage with the prospect.

Not quite the kind of layers Shrek had in mind, but, like Donkey, I enjoy taking a metaphor in my own direction!