David Crow

Connector of dots. Maker of lines. Rider of slopes.

davidcrow

Reinventing Email

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I was just struck by how similar my GMail experience was to the ReMail work that the CUE team at IBM Research published in 2003.

ReMail by Collaborative User Experience (CUE) team in IBM Research

The experiences are different. But the integration of the GCalendar, live names (think GTalk status), thread size and threaded messages, thread visualization (reminds me of Rapportive), collection categorization (a combination of tags and priority). It’s amazing how prescient this work was almost 10 years ago. Amazing.

The best part is being able to track the researchers on LinkedIn:

Marketing Technology Landscape

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Marketing Technology Landscape by Scott Brinker @chiefmartec http://chiefmartec.com/

Scott Brinker provides a must read summary of the 5 meta-trends that underly most modern marketing.

  1. The great digital migration of marketing (and business).
  2. The convergence of paid, earned, and owned media.
  3. Customer experience as the core of marketing.
  4. Rise of the creative/marketing technologist.
  5. Agile marketing management.

The post lays forth a strong foundation for marketers and investors looking at understanding the competitive landscape of different offerings. Interestingly as a practitioner it also provides a great summary of the tools available to enable potential tactics. There are a few logos and companies I think are missing in the landscape, for example, Calls section is missing Twilio and Voxeo/Tropo. And the diagram is missing the entire SMS marketing enablement which are both part of the breakdown of VoIP and SMS through programmatic APIs. I am also trying to figure out where in the list to put Influitive, Custora, Totango, Spinnakr, Bloom Reach and a few others. It is an amazing list. There are a few new companies that I need to check out and learn more about.

Thanks Scott!

Mesh Marketing

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The Mesh Conference team continually amazes me. You can read my bromance piece on the big brother Mesh Conference. But Mark, Rob, Mathew, Stuart, Mike and Sheri continue to do a fantastic job bringing together leading thinkers with the Toronto community. I have hosted my share of local events and I recognize balance of cost and accessibility, but the quality of the mesh speakers and the ticket price is fantastic. I’m always impressed with the spread of speakers from startup to agency to larger company. This event is no different. It has a great group of founders, executives and thought leaders.

The current event is happening in the middle of the fall startup event storm, but it is significantly differentiated from the regular startup event. This is an event for marketers. It is focused on content strategies, mobile tactics, social media tools and features some great folks like:

Jennifer LumHicham RatnaniKristina Halvorson

It’s a great group. I’ve personally seen the amazing work of Jennifer and Hicham (I sit on the advisory board of TribeHR where Jennifer is an investor, and I’m a semi-loyal customer of the Frank and Oak – only semi-loyal because they keep selling out of stuff to fast). It’s a great event and it would be a shame for Toronto marketers to miss the event in their own backyard.

Halifax Pop Explosion

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I had a great time at NxNE. It wasn’t representative of the time I’ve spent at SxSW. But this is probably a good thing. I was on a panel hosted by Dave Senior of Playground Inc. with Michael Litt (@michaellitt) of Vidyard and Raja Bhatia (@raja) of Confluence Labs. Great fun talking about startups, traction, funding, teams, marketing, etc. It’s funny, it was a great panel, I spent a lot of time heckling Mike. But I guess the reviews were positive. Because my friend Meghan Warby (@withoutayard) invited to Halifax to attend Halifax Pop Explosion.

I have a few confessions:

  1. I have never been to Halifax.
  2. I am going because I get to see my friends Jevon (@jevon) and Ben (@byosko)
  3. I am putting together new material

I’m in Halifax from Tuesday, Oct 16 until Friday, Oct 19. It’s a short stay, but I am choosing to be home for dinner on Friday with the kidlets. I’m looking for food recommendations, a place to have a pint, and some sights. Any suggestions on where to eat?

I’m also putting together a new presentation. The program description for my talk, titled How to Start a Startup, is:

Everyday more and more web startups are getting founded by entrepreneurs tenured and new. However, most abandon basic business pillars when building a venture in the digital economy. Not every start-up requires the same advice, but there a similar threads that apply to almost every company attempting to build a new digital product. We will be discussing the 5 things every startup must have to succeed.

I need to build a new talk and slide deck. I was thinking I could do something fun, like try to only build a presentation using quotes from The Social Network. Which in looking through the IMDB quotes could be surprisingly difficult.  I need to make this presentation a little more fun. Otherwise it’s going to feel like a “how to” guide for the basics of a startup. Which isn’t a bad plan, but I’m not sure I would sit through an hour long talk. Maybe I can use Paul Graham’s Want to Start a Startup:

  • The Idea
  • People
  • What Customers Want
  • Raising Money
  • Not Spending It

And just intersperse stories I have from Influitive, Maintenance Assistant and the startups I’ve worked with. I think coupled with Thomas Tunguz’s Your startups top 3 priorities

  • Distribution
  • Monetization
  • Engagement
I guess I can talk about my experiences along The Startup Curve. And since I’ve never seen the Acquisition fo Liquidity or Upside  of Buyer, my experience will be limited.
Paul Graham's Startup Curve

Strangely I haven’t given a presentation in what feels like a long time. It’s a good time to build a new deck that is engaging and fun. Maybe I need to start with a simple hypothesis and build out the supporting materials.

Featured Image: AttributionNoncommercialShare Alike Some rights reserved by Steve Dinn

Scotch tape, safety pins and spaghetti – SMB marketing automation

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CC-BY-20 Some rights reserved by gotosira
Image courtesy of gotosira Attribution some rights reserved

I was talking to a friend who runs a >10 person distributed professional services firm. He was looking for better tooling to automate his customer processes. He had recently dropped Salesforce, not because it was too much or too expensive, but because the configuration and usage was too complicated for his non-enterprise sales staff. We’ve been talking about his constraints and what he’d like the software to do.

It is part CRM, part project management, part marketing automation. Similar to the “Poor Man’s CRM“.

Constraints

  • Must access the FreshBooks API – All client billing is done in FreshBooks. It works. His staff is familiar. It is easy enough to send, track and account for with FreshBooks. They are not replacing this.
  • Preferably cloud based.
  • Must work with Microsoft Exchange email.
  • Costs <$150/person/month – this is an all in cost. However a preferred cost is $6000-12,000/year.
  • 20,000 contacts
  • 5,00 active clients
  • Prefer commercial offerings to custom development, and modify workflow to fit new processes.

Work Flow

It’s a pretty standard workflow. From lead capture to opportunity identification. The opportunity is defined by multiple stages, each stage has a series of tasks that usually result in an email being sent or a web form needing to be completed or a signed document. The workflow is pretty linear with clearly defined actions that move a opportunity through each stage of the engagement.

The majority of the business is referrals and business developers sourcing leads (50%). New business from existing clients (30%). And the remaining 20% is from web contact forms.

Possible Solutions

We’ve been talking about both CRM and marketing automation solutions, particularly those that are able to match both an organization or a person to their FreshBooks contact information. The goal is to be able to show outstanding invoices before a new project kicks off.

CRM/Project

Web Forms & Electronic Signatures

Email Automation

Scotch Tape, Safety Pins & Spaghetti

I keep leaning towards solutions I have used in the past. But I think they are not the right fit, given that I’m going to have to automate a number of webhooks using Zapier or itDuzzit, which are amazing, but the complexity scares me given the friend. It’s starting to feel like my advice is going to end up with scotch tape and safety pins holding together a spaghetti of web services.

I have no idea if it is the professional services aspect, or the hand off from lead generation to sales to project management. Maybe it is because of the FreshBooks integration (which I have never done). But I’m unclear about what the best options are. I keep finding more interesting solutions. Maybe it is that the past 3 years I’ve been deeply immersed in inbound activities for SaaS offerings that makes me drool over HubSpot and Performable. But I’m just not sure where to go from here.

Thoughts? Guidance on where to look next? I’m stuck.