The Savvy CIO

Deez provides high performing auto racing parts and specialized racing fuels. Recently, the company was looking to take their online marketing and e-commerce presence to a higher performing level.

Highland delivered an e-commerce site to help Deez stand out in a competitive automotive market. The site layout allows customers to browse multiple channels whether by brand, category, or through digital copies of Deez’s catalogs. Catalogs are still big in the auto parts world, so Deez included them as a digital link between catalog browsers and online purchases.

The home page highlights current specials and featured brands along with new and best-selling products. Our extensive experience with auto parts e-commerce sites coupled with marketing research done by Winsby, Inc. informed the layout, matching customer expectations and targeting buying trends.

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Bad website design comes in several forms.

There’s bad design. In it’s extreme form (now more rarely seen in the wild), this is garish fonts and graphics, scrolling banners, and a home page that is about 15 screens long. I’m gone from these sites in under 5 seconds.

There’s bad layout, where you can’t find what you want, get lost quickly, and can’t see how to get back. If the site looks nice, I can put up with this for 4 to 5 clicks, and then I’m gone.

These mistakes are easy to see and, with the right skills, easy to fix. But there is another type of bad design that is more difficult to recognize and much more difficult to fix.

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Cloud computing has been generating a lot of buzz and by all accounts looks to increase in 2010. But even with all the hype (or perhaps because of it), we regularly get asked, “What is cloud computing?”

That’s a great question. There isn’t a broad consensus on exactly what cloud computing is and is not. I don’t think a valuable answer can be found in the technical discussion of what services are and are not cloud computing. Instead, the real definition is in how cloud computing meets a business need.

Eric Knorr and Galen Gruman at InfoWorld have put their finger on it:

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Highland isn’t a software reseller shop. We do custom solutions.

So when we advocate a piece of software that we didn’t create, we feel a bit of obligation to justify our preference.

Any CRM worth its salt offers similar benefits to an organization. Why do we think SugarCRM is currently the best CRM to offer our clients? Here’s a peek into a bit of Highland history and our thoughts on the matter.

Five years ago, it became obvious to us that CRM was a recurring need among our development clients. We had built a few custom CRMs from scratch, but were looking for a solid building block we could use in our solutions so we could stop re-inventing the wheel.

We prefer open, flexible, low cost solutions, and those preferences drove our search process. After extensive research and getting our hands on several possible solutions, we began working with SugarCRM in 2005 as part of Sugar’s open source community. Since that time we’ve deployed Community and Professional Editions of SugarCRM for our clients, both as a stand-alone CRM solution and integrated into a larger web application deployment.

So why do we use SugarCRM instead of other offerings like Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics? Without a full competitive breakdown, here are four quick reasons we’ve come to strongly prefer SugarCRM. read more »

Every business wants to sell more. The most common use for a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is just that: to help sales.

This usage is so central that many systems and vendors have a unique name for it: Sales Force Automation system, or SFA for short. (Because technology always needs more acronyms.)

Here are five key ways a CRM (or SFA) can aid your sales staff in identifying, responding to and closing sales opportunities.

Gain Customer Insight

A CRM centralizes key customer information that helps sales identify when to act. Vehicle Specialties uses their CRM to show sales reps account revenue history for the past 24 months. With visibility into buying patterns, reps know when a particular account is becoming less active and can then reach out to identify and respond to a developing issue. read more »

There’s a logic often employed when launching a CRM: If you build it, they will use it. If you build it with a lot of features, they will use it a lot. If you build it capable of everything they could ever want or imagine, they will use it for everything they could ever want or imagine.

But it’s not true. Increasing the capabilities of your CRM at launch actually decreases the chances your staff will use the CRM.

So the one thing we tell every CRM client, whether they want to hear it or not, is less is more.

A CRM can do a lot of great things for your business, but only if people use it. Want to make sure no one uses your CRM? Load it up with so many expectations and features that everyone is completely overwhelmed.

Here’s a snippet of a CRM request we received a few months back: read more »

We recently programmed a client’s business-to-business e-commerce site to display competitor pricing alongside their own pricing.

Sound crazy?

We don’t think showing your competitor’s pricing is smart for everyone. But the idea behind it is embracing the truth that you can’t hide information from shoppers. Most visitors already know the lowest prices for the items they’re buying, or can double-check in under 10 seconds. There’s no hiding anymore.

Last week I found myself at an enormous, local mall hunting for a pair of shoes. Like most shoppers, I had a set of assumptions in my mind about what was important to me in my purchasing decision. In my case my criteria were, in order:

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I’ve spoken before about Mr. IT Fix It. Mr. IT Fix It is an outsourced technology consultant who gets paid for fixing your technology when it breaks.

Hiring a Mr. IT Fix It appears to be a good way to keep costs down as you only pay when you need his assistance. But this relationship can actually end up increasing your technology costs because no one is tending to the regular maintenance of your technology to prevent problems and reduce costs.

Which is cheaper: installing a new battery in a smoke detector or dealing with a house fire?

I know, an extreme example, but it illustrates the point.

Mr. IT Fix It makes almost nothing for installing a battery but can make a lot for putting out a fire. In contrast, a Managed IT team–paid a flat monthly fee–will gladly spend a lot less time and energy performing this kind of necessary, low-profile work because it means they (like you) won’t have to deal with a time-consuming crisis (during which, like you, they will not make any money).

In short, you want your outsourced IT to care for your technology as if they own it.

The key question: is your relationship (and compensation structure) with your outsourced IT treating them like Mr. IT Fix It or like Managed IT?

Here are five lessons learned from homeowners about how business leaders want their outsourced IT to behave.

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So says Forrester’s Research Chairman and Chief Executive Officer George Colony. (HT The Magic Software Blog)

Business leaders need to know finance. They need to know the pulse of marketing and sales and operations. But too often when it comes to technology, leaders can be content to let “that guy” handle it.

Such an approach made some sense 10+ years ago, when technology was on the periphery of many businesses. But today technology is so closely intertwined with business goals that it has become mission critical.

This underlines Colony’s main point, that technology has ceased to be primarily about information and is now about business.

Colony stresses that business technology:

1. Increases revenue
2. Reduces overhead
3. Expands market share

These are core concerns of a business leader, and in today’s business world they require familiarity with business technology.

You don’t need to be a techie. Frankly, it’s probably best not to be, so there is no temptation to get into the details of the technology itself. There’s no need to be able to parse SaaS or LAMP. But there is a need to know what relevant business technology is out there for your company, so you can drive innovation.

Where do you start?

Get an educator.

Someone who can explain technology in business terms instead of technology terms. Yes, they need to speak the language of technology, but they also have to speak business and plain English.

Technology is mission critical, and it’s not OK to be ignorant anymore.

A video of Colony’s presentation is below. read more »

Suppose your sales staff write really bad proposals. What do you do?

Track down advance copies of Word 2010 to solve the problem?

Of course not. The writing will still be bad!

Yet business leaders are often tempted to think new technology can fundamentally improve sales or customer service or operations or fulfillment, when the root problem is a shortage of quality skills and processes.

Sales are down? Bring in a Sales Force Automation system!

Customer satisfaction is low? Deploy a Customer Relationship Management database!

Online revenue is slipping? Upgrade the e-commerce site with improved business intelligence metrics!

These businesses will fail. Why? read more »