Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ GS:JAVA) President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz posted to his blog an e-mail that he shared with Sun leaders.  The e-mail was written in response to frequent questions that Mr. Schwartz has received regarding the current banking crisis in the U.S., and how this might impact Sun.

Mr. Schwartz turns the question around.  It is not how the crisis impacts Sun, but rather how it impacts Sun’s customers, both current and prospective.  In this he sees tremendous opportunity.

The statement that was most impactful for me was this:

“You’re not going to hear from any of our customers: ‘Let’s stop buying technology and hire more people to do the work.’  They’re going to default to the opposite – automating work, and finding answers and opportunities with technology, not headcount.”

Will customers be impacted?  Certainly.  This has already started.  But this stressful environment will also create opportunities for companies with technology that adds value for its customers.

Across the country, municipalities ranging in size from Pompano Beach, FL. to Dallas, TX. are passing ordinances requiring the installation of surveillance cameras in certain retail environments. This growing movement lends credibility to our industry’s ability to not only deter crime, but assist law enforcement in the prosecution of criminals. This has a direct impact on the safety of employees and customers, ultimately leading to lower turnover and increased customer visits. Following are just a few examples of these proposals:

Dallas, TX – Ordinance requires all 950 C-Stores to install high-res cameras, silent alarms and drop-down safes by May 2010.

Milwaukee, WI – Proposal requires taverns with three or more reported crimes in one year to install video surveillance.

Pompano Beach, FL – Shopping centers and drug stores greater than 25K sq. ft. required to install cameras covering the entire parking lot. Cameras must be installed within 180 days and video archived for at least one month.

Too cool, check out David Spark’s Security Dreamer Unconference coverage of ASIS.  Great coverage for those of us who couldn’t make it!

Great post by the “CEO Strategist”, Dr. Rick Johnson. Good straight talk about selling in today’s environment.

The Pygmalion Effect

What does “customer-focused” really mean? To me, it is a foundational pillar of a successful business strategy. The challenge is carrying the intention to be customer-focused throughout every aspect of the business. Every member of the organization must have the customer at the center of his or her priorities. Even those who may not see themselves as having an impact on the customer experience must have a line of sight to the customer experience and a clear understanding of how their role ultimately impacts customers.

Easier said than done. The most customer-focused companies are easy to spot when it comes to consumer products and services. The top performers are familiar brands, such as Nordstrom and Apple. Can we apply best practices from these top consumer brands to business-to-business marketing? I think so. I believe it comes down to clarity of focus on the customer experience:

1. Make it easy to understand your product or service, and be clear about what problem it will solve for the customer.
2. Set expectations up front – how long will it take to deliver/install/build? What are the system requirements to ensure seamless integration?
3. Deliver on what you commit to, within the time frame you commit.
4. Reinforce the good decision your customer made to buy from you by providing outstanding follow up during the post-purchase window (within ~30 days of purchase/install/delivery).
5. Monitor ongoing customer satisfaction through client care, follow up communication, and surveys.
6. Act on customer feedback. If you’re not going to do anything about feedback, then don’t ask for it.

To deliver consistently on all 6 facets, everyone from Product Development, to Service Delivery, to Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Accounts Payable is involved. Organizations that successfully focus their entire team on the customer not only have satisfied customers, but they also give their employees a sense of making a difference and doing a job that matters to the customer – and to the company’s bottom line.

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!