Sunday, March 11, 2007

Into the Blogosphere

Over the past year, I have been updating a few blogs whenever the spark hit me to write something. I have made it a goal as an eWarrior to find some of the top bloggers in the world and connect with them. Although I am an eWarrior, there are only so many hours in the day, so collaboration and sharing of ideas is one of the best ways to learn.

Through my network on LinkedIn, I began to find some of the bloggers. One of the nice things about blogging is that most of us, use many of the same services to write and maintain our blogs such as blogger and WordPress.

The most asked question bloggers have who want to be noticed is "How do you build an audience". Sometimes it may be a best selling author, public speaker and industry expert. In other cases the blog is focussed of a specific industry or company.

Some of the other techniques are to find well known blogs in your category and comment on them and link back to your own blog. Search engines such as Technorati.com can help with this. Also many bloggers are now featured in many major newspapers and magazines.

As of mid February this journey has begun. I will be interested to see where this journey ends.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Netsuite is a sweet deal

As one of the earliest consultants in CRM, I have been following the evolution of sales automation area and believe that there are a few products which create an "evolutionary" or some might conclude "revolutionary" change.

Having been caught up as a consultant in CRM, over the past few years, I found myself being caught up in trying to keep up technically as an expert in areas that don't really impact my clients bottom line such as the back end of the product. (how to install and configure products, what server/hardware is needed, etc.)

When I first came up with eWarrior in 1997, I envisioned web based CRM system to replace the complicated and convluted setups for data synchronization and management reporting.

At the same time in Silicon Valley, from what I have read, Larry Ellison, the CEO and founder of Oracle Software was hatching his idea. Well he had the capital and the resources to bring in some of the top oracle developers in the world to work on this product. The product ended up being netsuite.

Imagine this, it is now almost a decade later and you can have a system that cost millions of dollars to develop for less than 1% of the cost of that sytem. Not only will this system track your customers, but it will do accounting, resource planning and integrate with a website. The icing on the cake is that is provides a powerful, yet easy to use executive "dashboard".

Just like you have a dashboard on your car that shows how your car is running, your business can create custom indicators (which look like the "meters and qauges" to see how your company is performing.

The best part is that this is live up to date data. You may view revenues this day,month or year, leads generated and deals closed. Also you can see accounting information such as your receivables and payables. In computer and business jargon, we call these (KPI's) -- Key performance indicators.

Imagine now that not only that this product exists and can be deployed within your company in weeks, both locally, nationally and/or globally, but you don't have to have anything but a browser and highspeed internet.

Also, from my experience companies such as Sage (ACT!) and Microsoft did not even use there own product throughout their company. ACT! salespeople used SalesLogix and from what I was told Microsoft was running on Siebel (I am not sure if they now run on Microsoft CRM). Netsuites' executives including CEO Zach Nelson run their very successful business on Netsuite.

Not only does netsuite work for companies with products to sell, but they also have modules for service professionals that do time and billing.

So if you are a CEO, company founder, board member or employee who has some vision, you need to at least go to www.netsuite.com and sign up for a free live demo.