Time after time I read business books talking about how to revolutionise certain aspects of your business and I am always struck by how much of the underlying message of what is being proposed is “common sense”. Now, before you say that I am missing the point of these books, let me say that I think where all of these authors (the good ones anyway) really hit home, is in encouraging us to stop for a second and re-evaluate what we are doing.

To pull back the clouds that obscure our vision of what we should be doing in our businesses that gather because we are focused on the day to day grind of “getting stuff done”.

Speaking from experience, as a small business owner for 15 years I can absolutely subscribe to this notion – I spent thousands of dollars (funded by a second mortgage) on campaigns and activities that totally missed their mark because I was looking to try to be too clever in my process and approach and forgot about the basic issues that my customers were trying to solve and addressing those easily and simply in the way they wanted.

Take marketing for example.

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing in Kansas City, a well known speaker, writer of books and advocate for small businesses says that marketing is getting those people that have a need to know, like and trust you so they can try, buy from and refer others to your business, which when you stop and think about it, encapsulates exactly what we all do everytime we engage with companies out there in the market.

The whole idea of building a brand centres around the concept of know, like and trust – although many agencies can wrap it all up in a package of jargon designed to make themselves look like they deserve to have you spend huge amounts of your hard earned cash with them.

So I am going to spend some time in my next couple of blog entries delving down in to some practical ways you can put the concepts of know, like and trust in to your marketing plans or better still start building marketing plans that are based on this common sense approach.

So, in my next blog entry we’ll talk about how you can get potential customers to know that you are out there and that you have a solution to their problem.

Talk to you again shortly.

Richard

This is an initiative started in the United States in 2009 by John Jantsch, the founder and small business marketing brain behind the Duct Tape Marketing System and is about stimulating small business by encouraging people to work towards a simple goal – to provide 1,000 referrals to 1,000 deserving small businesses across the country – here’s an article on Inc. Magazine where John talks about the initiative.

No doubt you are all aware that referrals are one of the best ways of generating new business and this is a great initiative to help remind people about the power of referral marketing.

The interesting question though, is that if everyone recognises that referrals are such a great way of generating business, why don’t more businesses actually make this a part of their marketing system?

Chances are that if you are like many small businesses today, you don’t actually have a marketing system – a structured approach to executing your marketing tactics, based on a clearly defined strategy. So how do you build a marketing system for your small business, where do you start?

Heres a great introduction to the approach – a report entitled the Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success - that explains the basic concepts and steps behind building a small business marketing system that works – and of course – utilising the power of referrals is a key component of that system.

Whilst its true that we spend significant focus on developing additional ways for our customers in the Large Enterprise space to take advantage of the technologies available to them, in the small enterprise space we are also focused on helping customers to reduce their total cost of ownership.

A great example of this is the Remote Support Platform which is a solution available to our customers who are leveraging our maintenance offerings and running on SAP Business One 2007 and is a standard component of our 8.8 release which is due out in the next couple of months.

What makes the Remote Support Platform so unique and helpful for partners and the customers that they support is that it allows a customer, their partner and SAP to work in concert to keep the installed SAP Business One system running at its best.

Not only can the RSP monitor the customers system and look for potential issues in the database as well as the infrastructure but it can also be used to deliver support packages to a customer to address system maintenance requests, patches and remote diagnostic packages with minimal interruption to the customers operations.

To learn more about how the Remote Support Platform works, check out this session -  http://www.screencast.com/t/MTQ4Yjlh – that was built by the team behind this really nice piece of code and thinking – again based on the feedback that we received from our 25000+ SAP Business One customers and thousands of partners and consultants working in the small business ecosystem around SAP Business One.

These sessions are provided as an extension to our Virtual Partner Kickoff Meeting and this year we have 25 sessions across a wide range of streams – from Consulting topics through to Marketing and Development, all of the disciplines that matter to our partners are covered.

Here’s just a few to whet your appetite.

Jay Xiong from the SAP Labs Team in China is delivering a detailed session on the new Crystal Reports Integration for SAP Business One 8.8, Winfried Berger from the Solution management team will take you through the roadmap for SAP Business One – the areas we are focusing on and why and give you a sneak preview of  the thinking around whats coming in Version 9 and beyond.

Luca Granzotto has some hints and tips on building and managing your own Extended Business Member Network plus Joel Harris from the SAP UK team will explain how you can extend the Start and Grow approach with a series of industry specific templates to speed up your Business One implementations and increase the repeatability – and we’ll provide the templates as well.

You’ll hear from Maciej Fuchs and the Installed Base Development team about the Remote Support Platform and how you can use it to make your customers support experience even better and reduce your customers support costs (and yours). And there are 2 detailed sessions on the SAP Business One Integration for SAP Netweaver (B1iSN) from Eddy Neveaux and Nicolas Fuchs, with detailed stepo by step demos of how easy it is to set up B1 to B1 integrations and B1 to Business Suite integrations.

Add to that sessions dealing with new features in Version 8.8, Performance Tuning your Implementations, our Marketing plans for 2010 as well as the latest approach in presenting SAP Business One to your prospective customers and implementing a Social Media Strategy for your business and all in all, you have a great collection of sessions designed to help you be even more effective as an SAP Business One Partner in 2010.

Keep your eyes open and watch the SAP Channel Partner Portal around the 15th of this month – thats when the site will go live and you can access all the sessions.

I will also let you know if you are following me on Twitter – richardaduffy –  and I would love to get your feedback on the sessions.

And BI , SOA, XML and a list of other acronyms we throw around in every day conversation like we were discussing the latest news or last nights episode of TV. But the fact is that many small business customers still don’t know what ERP software is or how it can help them, not to mention the fact that SAP has a solution built for the small business space – often they don’t have any brand recognition of SAP at all. So once you get in front of a potential small business customer who doesn’t really quite understand what you do you can understand that they have difficulty determining the difference between one vendor and another and one solution vs. another.

Even when you are in the unfortunate position of bidding for the same customer against another SAP partner, how does your prospective customer make that decision between the two of you? So your role is to make it easy for them to see and understand why they should choose you and that is by differentiating what you do from everyone else.

I was in a discussion with a partner yesterday and we were discussing the fact that they had built a significant number of small add-ons, let’s call them applets for the sake of the discussion. As a result of doing more than 50+ implementations they had built up a library of little code pieces for performing small tasks in SAP Business One which were kind of like a “get out of jail free” card for their consultants on projects.

What if, I suggested, you take those code snippets, build them together in to a single application, call it the Partner X Solution Pack and offer it to customers as part of the purchase of their SAP Business One solution from you?

Better still offer them via a software subscription model that includes any additional applets that they built in the future and increase their annuity revenue stream from their customer base – and think about the profitability on that revenue stream!

Now they have something that the competitors can’t offer and as the cost of building that solution has already been incurred, they can use this additional solution pack as part of their negotiating position on the deal.

As you consider running the Start and Grow campaign, think about the ways that you can package your services and the little value add things that you do, explain why you do it and how you have helped your customers deliver improvements to their business. You’ll be surprised at the impact it will have.

Here’s a suggestion.

If you run regular team meetings, each meeting ask your consultants or pre-sales people to think about the clients they have worked with in the time since the last meeting and explain what they did and how it helped the customer. Often we do things that have a major impact on our customers but we take it for granted because it’s just what we do. But imagine the power of taking that and articulating what it meant to the customer. Can you attach a financial value to that?

Suddenly you are on your way to building another example of the return on investments your customers have experienced as a result of working with you. Better still put it in a short article and use that content in a blog, a newsletter or a case study and next time someone asks ‘why should I purchase my solution from you?’, you’ll have a library of great reasons…with dollar savings achieved by other customers ready to quote.

I guarantee that you will see an impact in how your prospective customers perceive you – do it regularly and it will become a standard part of the way you do things….another key differentiator.

PS. Do you have a way of doing things that is different to your competitors? Maybe it’s your pre-sales discovery approach, your 6 step implementation program or your existing customer follow-up program. Package it, write about what it is, how it helps your customers and give it a name. For example the Partner X NewStarter Program which includes a free 3 hour introduction to SAP Business One for any new employee that joins your customers company. Even better, build it and deliver it as an eLearning module and reduce your cost of delivery.

Write to me at richard.duffy@sap.com and tell me about your unique approach! I would be more than happy to write you a promotional piece describing that approach that you can use on your web site or as part of your sales kit.

Another point of differentiation?

Well, its no different for me and I am currently helping out a couple of medical practices to modernise their IT infrastructure and they are putting in Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 as well as Terminal Services under Windows Server 2008 amd I have to say that after years of watching Microsofts Small Business Server platform evolve, this release is an absolute champion.

The ease of setup as well as managing the administrative tasks in the day to day running of the network is awesome.

Add in the new functionality of setting up remote access to the entire infrastructure by using the Remote Web Workplace and I think Microsoft have a winner on their hands.

Any IT organisation that works with Small Businesses should take a look at Windows Small Business Server 2008as soon as they can – and start recommending it to clients to build their infrastructure on.

SAP Business One partners should also start familiarising themselves with the solution – I recommend the Premium Edition which includes the licenses for a second Windows Server 2008 machine as well as SQL Server 2008 – which can be downgraded to SQL Server 2005 to use with SAP Business One – until SQL 2008 is a supported platform for Business One.

Also take a look at the Hyper-V virtualisation stack – a great solution for multi country/multi-version deployments of SAP Business One. You can install multiple instances of SQL Server to handle the need for different SBO-COMMON databases when running A and B cluster versions of SAP Business One and then deploy separate virtual servers with Terminal Services running on each with the A and B cluster clients installed on separate virtual servers. Put the license server on the SQL box and you have a great platform to deliver SAP Business One on top of.

Pushing the Business One app out to the clients is as easy as point and click in the TS Remote App Manager and adding it in to the TS Web Access Group to publsih it out via the web. And with the new TS Gateway functionality, the clients can connect using the RDP protocol over a tunnel on port 443 to save opening the RDP ports on the firewall.

Overall, an easy solution to what used to be a complex issue.

Brett shares what they are doing to drive success for them as an SAP Business One partner.

The thing that really sets Leverage apart is that they have implemented systems in their business to manage their prospect nurturing and follow up as well as having an up to the minute understanding of the key metrics that drive the business.

During our business planning discussions Brett immediately could tell me the key metrics in the business like cost per lead, cost per opportunity, consultant utilisation rate and average time to close a new opportunity just to mention a few.

I got the impression that it wasn’t just having this knowledge that mattered but also using it every day to make decisions in the business that really set the organisation up for success.

PS They use SAP Business One themselves as well!