Disqus - Latest Comments for frontofficebox

Re: Interested in Parkinson”s Disease – Follow Bill

stevensreeves — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:26:33 -0000

Richly deserved Bill.

I'm hoping it won't be long before there's something I can share about our project - we're stuck in the paper work at the moment.

Meantime I'm collecting content as a research resource for when we start the exploitation planning.

Re: Birthday thank-yous

stevensreeves — Fri, 28 May 2010 15:34:14 -0000

Many Happy Returns and thanks for a truely awesome contribution to my understanding of the state of the art - great contribution generously donated

Re: Baby, You AutoComplete Me

stevensreeves — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 07:34:01 -0000

Why does Google have 2 Ls is the funniest thing I've seen in a while. There really are people that stupid out there, and lots of them

Re: Build Ecosystems for Your Content

stevensreeves — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:53:18 -0000

I've been struggling with the issues addressed here, but now have a much clearer picture - thanks, as always.

Now if I can only find ways to get others thinking the same way?

Re: Questions to Qualify the Sale

stevensreeves — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:40:33 -0000

Hi Michel thanks for taking the time to read my post and comment. I'm very familiar with the problem you describe. To my mind price is the one thing we should spend time training people to cope with, and from what I see, the coaches and authors never do.

I have written a couple of pieces on price here, but you've inspired to make a bigger project out of it. f you'd like to help me focus my pricing articles on some real life challenges please suggest some. Direction is always more useful than inspiration when it comes to writing stuff others might want to read :-)

In the software business price gets to be enormously complex, because there's no marginal cost so the answer gets to be whatever the customer will pay is acceptable. But of course the professional will always get a better price than the amateur, from the same customer and for the same deal.

I've always encouraged sales guys to talk money as early as possible in the sales process, if possible establishing at the first call what the cost expectations are, where the money's coming from, and what will justify the spend e.g ROI.

Re: SalesForce.Com’s New Tagline – How to Build Benefits, Big Promises and Complex Ideas into Three Words

stevensreeves — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 06:23:54 -0000

Yep I know all about contacts. How do they do with your stuff from Twitter, Facebook, Linked In etc?

Far be it from me to support competitors but the truth is this contacts stuff is very difficult, not because of technology, although that's bad enough.

Google and Outlook seem to do OK but Google to Apple Mail and vice versa is just awful. Guess this is a technology issue with the difference between .csv and vCard.

I'm sure this doesn't apply in your case but the main problem actually comes from the way people use their email address book - not as an information resource but a fast way of filling in the address in an email message. Half of its out of date, most of it's incomplete and inconsistent through the file. On top of that there's a bunch of stuff not needed, or wanted in a business application.

That makes proper transfer of relevant and accurate data across to a business app really tough. But it gets much worse when trying to consolidate several people's address books into a single business database. The problem grows exponentially with every additional address book.

We used to have a very sensible approach, using a .cvs template users could copy/paste to from Excel files. It only took a few minutes and guaranteed consistent data across the app. The problem was users didn't want to spend the time cleaning their own data.

Email has just about no concept of context or process, so users can be as sloppy as they like - but that's not the case with a proper business app where you link data in context, so users don't have to go looking for it.

Re: SalesForce.Com’s New Tagline – How to Build Benefits, Big Promises and Complex Ideas into Three Words

stevensreeves — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:21:35 -0000

Hi Phil

I would be a big fan of the cloud of course, and recognise the leadership Salesforce.com has brought to software of all descriptions, particularly in reducing enterprise software costs.

However, I'd also like to suggest they missed a word in the tag line - it would more appropriately read Success - Not Simple Software.

Re: Living In Google Wave

stevensreeves — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:14:04 -0000

I'm trying to do exactly the same with Wave. To my mind this is by far the best way for group collaboration available. Unfortunately I can't get anybody else to agree - they won't use it.

Two reasons I think 1) no notifications so it relies on people logging in and 2) poor user experience - how to use it isn't obvious and it looks messy.

My colleagues, admittedly late adopters, prefer email :-(

Re: Brand Identity for Entrepreneurs; Your Mother Lied to You

stevensreeves — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:19:41 -0000

Interesting perspective that's definitely got me thinking. Unfortunately I agree with you, and that means decisions to be made and money to be spent:-(

Nice job clearly explained and well written, Thanks

Re: Chart: The Truth About Twitter’s Traffic

stevensreeves — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:55:35 -0000

Reading this is definitely the best fun I've had today - picking up your feed and looking forward to more of the same.

Re: Email – What Do You Think

stevensreeves — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:07:26 -0000

Thanks for your input guys. We have Jaska in Finland with a view on this subject, and a view very similar to your own I expect.

I need to do some thinking on this subject and that will be at the top of my agenda for the rest of the week.

Meanwhile I'll really appreciate some real life examples of incoming, the need to keep records and associated plans and actions. Can you help me with that in any way.

I'll layout some of my own in the meantime.

Where do you think is the best place to share ideas on this? We can do it here, or in the new Pro-Zone now it's ready to go, or even Wave if you'd like to try that.

Re: Proving that content is mine | Front Office Box Users

stevensreeves — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:52 -0000

Hi Andraz

http://www.digiprove.com/ is the company providing the service and the Wordpress Plugin is called Copyright Proof

Re: Setting the Direction for CRM

stevensreeves — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:49:09 -0000

I guess that's why everybody's using Salesnet then!

But that wasn't the point.

Anybody can say they do sales process management. The point of competition is how they do sales process management. My point in this post wasn't that FOB does sales process management - there's plenty of that elsewhere. The point was we started talking about sales process management and created some interest in what was then blue water. Somebody else spots our success and imitates us.

I've been in and around selling software, and getting it implemented for thirty years. I've been using software to manage sales and sales process for most of that time, which is how I know the vast majority of CRM stuff out there is garbage, for our market at least - almost as much garbage as all this bullshit we're getting about Social CRM.

If you don't like what I write don't read it and please keep your advertising to your own pages.

Re: Turning Out The Lights: ProQuo – Venture Capital Dispatch – WSJ

stevensreeves — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:58:59 -0000

HI Patrick

thanks for taking the trouble to comment.

I'm more than a little confused about how this process of VC funding happens but, from what I've seen, those guys don't get involved unless they're guaranteed a winner. And then I came across this list of failures.

From what you've said this is natural fall out caused by both the trading environment deteriorating and VC's change to appetite for risk.

Presumably we'll go back around the cycle in a few years time.

The one thing I was interested to see was the fire sale of assets. Presumably the big companies pick up some interesting and inexpensive IPR this way?

Re: Overnight Success 2- A Call to Arms

stevensreeves — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:04:29 -0000

Working my rear end off trying to drag several communities into the new age. Not a lot of luck so far, and trying to understand why.

I figure the answer is they don't see the benefit.

My biggest challenge is a bunch of brain surgeons (seriously). With these guys life is different. They spend their days cutting out pieces of people's grey matter and networking seems inconsequential.

The goal is getting them to engage with other brain surgeons :-)

Re: BT Shuts Down BT Workspace

stevensreeves — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 08:09:04 -0000

Hi Heather, I absolutely agree with you. BT has been a pet hate of mine for years, mostly because of the way it keeps changing its price plans with sole objective of confusing people. It's a typical infrastructure business trying to exploit a near monopoly.

The worst thing of all is not providing users with a transition path. It really couldn't be that difficult to provide an export to any number of free services.

I had a workspace account but never used it so don't know anything about the tools if offers or what you've been using it for.

Have you looked at Evernote? that might offer an alternative, and maybe even Posterous?

Best of luck - Steve

Re: Is This What They Call Key Word Stuffiing?

stevensreeves — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 06:58:52 -0000

Perry thanks for stopping by and taking the trouble to comment. I thought the article was hilarious. Whoever wrote it didn't bother to anticipate what the reader might think, exactly as you've pointed out.

Re: How I Manage Facebook

stevensreeves — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:08:26 -0000

I'd really like to see Facebook improve the software. There are things that too often don't work - today it's adding links to pages. So much of the valuable stuff is hidden, or at least hard to find.

The other thing I'd like to see is a proper section for business, maybe more like LinkedIn. If I could have one site to replace Twitter, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Facebook profile, Facebook Page, Tumblr, Posterous and Google Reader I'd get a lot more work done.

Re: Does SEO Work Anymore

stevensreeves — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:57:12 -0000

Hi Andy

thanks for stopping by and taking the trouble to comment.

I understand the issues about site design of course, but my question remains the same - how can anybody SEO for 400+ different questions?

I've been all over this for pretty much the last year. At least in our field only the very longest of long tail words don't have overwhelming levels of competition. I have number one ranking on several long tail keywords but that accounts for only around 5% of my search traffic.

If you have a secret sauce for this I'l be pleased to here about it.

Steve

Re: How Accurate Is Your Sales Forecast

stevensreeves — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 08:15:14 -0000

Thanks for stopping by and taking the trouble to comment.

Of course you're right and to be honest I wasn't thinking of inventory management when I wrote the post, just revenue as you've pointed out.

Anybody who's selling from inventory rather than make to order will need a different mechanism for inventory planning.

Re: What Makes a Story Work

stevensreeves — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:20:30 -0000

Treat the readers like intelligent grown ups, challenge them to think for themselves with some brief pointers and ask them to contribute to the picture.

As a reader (rather than a writer in this instance) I couldn't agree with you more.

And as a writer I now have a set of very succinct rules to direct measure my own performance against.

Thanks :-)

Re: Two Words Made a Millionaire

stevensreeves — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:41:16 -0000

Hi Steve, thanks for stopping by and taking the trouble to comment.

I just love these stories but can't for the life of me remember where I heard this one. It obviously has the same root as yours.

It probably came up on one of those sales training courses so many years ago, but seems more apposite today, I think, because some people make things complicated.

I'll have to dredge my brain to see if I can't remember some more. They surely help in the search for engaging content that's fun to read and easy to write.

Steve

Re: John Jantsch is right on target with the Changing Face of SEO

stevensreeves — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:34:31 -0000

Absolutely Right Joe

at least from our perspective. We've spent months trying to understand the dynamics of content and search for it.

Through trial and error we've ended up exactly where you're described.

BTW I came to your post here because Zemanta included a link to it on one of my posts :-) which I guess proves the point.

Re: Whatâ€™s Your Signature Response to Problems?

stevensreeves — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:11:57 -0000

Couldn't agree with you more. Thirty years in sales and account management has taught me over and over again the critical feature of successful businesses is the way that handle customer dissatisfaction.

Those who do it well win friends and references for life.

Those who don't get commoditized and churned at the earliest opportunity.

My two main bug bears recently have been the cellphone companies and credit card companies.

Both spend fortunes trying to control churn.

Re: Go Ex-directory With Your UK Mobile Number

stevensreeves — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 13:54:35 -0000

Hi triley

this isn't a great deal to do with me I'm afraid.

I only posted the article because one of our users sent me the link to the Mail article. I thought it would be interesting for our users.

As it is we've had a lot of traffic, which is something I need to learn from :-) but I can't help with getting your number XD.

Sorry - Steve