Here I am in the beautiful city of Abu Dhabi and all I can think of is bidets. Sitting in the loo is this large white thing that just stumps me. No, I don’t need Mick Dundee’s help in figuring out what it is, but I do wonder why it is there. I can see that the product is inconvenient, space-consuming, silly-looking and expensive. So I’m wondering: “What does a bidet salesman say to his prospect?” I mean, what kinds of arguments can someone come up with for installing a fancy bidet instead of something as simple as a health-faucet?

• “It’ll look classy, showing you have great taste. And that means your job is secure in the 5-star hotel industry.”
• “You’ll be the first in your <choose your segment> to install these things; that makes you a visionary among your peers.”
• “This needs lots of people to work on, so you’ll have a big team and thus be a big manager.”
• “You’ll have big budgets (since these things cost a bomb) and that’ll look great on your resume.”
• “My boss will send you to conferences in exotic locales where you can hobnob with great plumbers cleverly disguised as topless dancers.”

I know, I know: I’m pushing it here (maybe plumbers can’t look good as topless dancers), but I really couldn’t come up with a whole lot of good reasons why someone would actually install these things in a hotel bathroom. But then it hit me (Epiphanies In The Bathroom – that’s a book I want to write one day…): this is just like companies buying $oftware. As against software (the stuff we make), $oftware, to my mind, is the likes of $AP, $FDC and M$FT – lots of money for stuff that does more for the vendor and the buying manager than for the customer or its users. If you are stockholder or CxO in the hotel, imagine the implications for you:

• You’ll have to build bigger, more expensive bathrooms for your users
• You’ll pay to train everyone into a whole new way of doing things, since the bidet angle is designed based on “best practices”
• You’ll need to organize more labour, water and cleaning materials to maintain these things
• You’ll need to pay for expensive plumber-dancers speaking down to you in jargon you don’t need
• You’ll have to hire a new manager because the bidet manufacturer got him a job at one his prospects…

I can go on. Not pretty. Instead, here’s a mantra (correcting a well-known competitor’s slogan): No $oftware!

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Leads to Collections and everything in between

Imagine a marketing solution that lets you segment your data in any way that you wish, that lets you craft and deliver a high-class message simply and easily, that lets you track all the responses to your campaign both at an individual and at campaign level, where you can track the response down to the actual sale. Sound like a dream?

Welcome to Impel CRM’s integrated Email Marketing solution. It works with the contact and lead data that you have collected from various sources. With the ability to analyze and segment your data in various ways, you can be sure that the right message gets through to the right prospect. And do it without the hassles of having to import and export data back and forth between your CRM and your E-mail marketing solution. Impel CRM’s interactive Email Marketing module is designed to integrate everything from your lead lists to your campaigns to responses to sales – all in one integrated CRM solution. Now you can do more than just send out marketing messages. Track and analyze how each offer actually converts in terms of sales.

Click here to see how Impel CRM let your track everything from lead to collections, easily and quickly.

Write to us today or visit our Website to know more on Impel CRM. Sign up for a Free Trial of Impel CRM and look at the future of managing your customer relationships

In a recent conversation with a journalist covering the tech space, we were talking about some of the stuff we’re building for customers and she came back with this question: “Why can’t they do that on their own?” Meaning, why do they need Impel for, say, SMS-based coupon management? Why can’t customers build such functionality on their own? This was not a naïve question; she’s covered tech deeply and sees that Indian companies have produced some terrific technology already. The question, in her mind, is this: “OK, so you’re building some neat tech; that’s good ‘n’ all. But why can’t your customers build this stuff on their own anyway?” Basically, she was asking why we were in business. So let me answer that with at least one reason.

First, let’s look at the two realities of our lives at Impel: on the one hand, we are a “high-tech company”. We work with the best of technologies. We work in a domain that evokes images of air-conditioned offices, company-paid lunches and parties every Friday night (we have a reality of working our butts off 24/7, but that’s another matter). On the other hand, our customers run all kinds businesses from basement offices to no offices at all. They deal with everything from greased motor-shafts to dialysis bags, manufactured in baking-earth locations like Faridabad (45ºC in summer).

Between these realities, there are a number of differences that make for a good product vs. something one company can put together for itself. I am not going to talk about the huge functionality of our product. I am not going to wax eloquent on the differences between building a product and a one-company solution. I am not going to tell you about the challenges of dealing with new technology every day. I am not going to refer to the prima-donna attitudes that you need to deal with in some software people. I am only going to talk about this one very large difference – a difference that has largely been driven by the tremendous success of the Indian software industry. That is: our customers can’t hire programmers. The Indian software industry continues to hire like crazy, pays much-higher-than-elsewhere salaries, everyone works in nice offices and foreign travel (no longer “relocation”, thanks to the new economy!) is a very real possibility. While our customers can only promise things like helping farmers in grimy conditions grow better cotton or deal with a fever and cold. And travel is to exotic places like Medak and Motihari. Not the stuff of software engineers’ dreams.

Even in the larger companies – companies that have sales of a thousand crores, for example – this is a challenge. I’ve seen customers spend millions (of Dollars, not Rupees) on high-end solutions like SAP and then be unable to extract simple trends and analyses from the data they are gathering. Having blown a fortune on this white-elephant they now do their best to keep new data out of it. We have customers who want salespeople to enter orders into Impel and have us deliver parts of those orders into their SAP instance, not only because we’re cheaper than SAP (who isn’t?) but because the skills needed to configure Impel don’t include four-letter words like ABAP. So they can have “normal” people deal with us, leaving the experts for that thing that saps their budget…

For now, I am happy that customers are not considering building stuff on their own. After all, that’s a market made in heaven for software product companies. But it worries me that this is not a scalable model for the country. Five years from now, as Indian software companies go from strength to strength delivering services to Western customers, what will growing non-software companies do for their short-term software needs? What impact will that have on the overall economy, if non-software companies continue to be hampered by limited tech resources?

Gotta stop writing – there’s a prospect selling beedis that I need to talk to…

This past Saturday, I anchored a session at the Mysore 2.0 conference – a session about Value Propositions (hereintofore referred to as VPs). The session was about how to build a company’s VP and what its implications can be. N R K Raman and Sunil Kunte, both of whom have built large organizations from small beginnings, talked with terrific knowledge and depth about the various implications of a defined VP. For my part, I did my usual Keshto Mukherjee act (hmm… wonder why he never set up a LinkedIn profile; here’s one on Wikipedia, though! ) and kept everyone from thinking too deeply about VPs.

The thing is, the discussion at Mysore 2.0 reminded me of some deep debates that I was part of nearly twenty years ago, relating to a Services company that I co-founded. We were putting together the VP of that company and we came up with four different domains we wanted to address – the Customer, the Employee, Community and our Investors. We called it the CECI Principle (you can guess I used to be an IBM CICS programmer!) and built this fairly clear set of statements describing what our VP was to each of those domains. We started with one statement as the overall Corporate VP and then drilled down into each of these four domains, revising or restating the Corporate statement in each context. Being young and foolish then (OK, OK, the latter part has not changed yet…), we did not do what Raman and Sunil unequivocally stated: that you BEGIN with the Customer VP. Add to that Samir Kumar’s amendment that the VP must be unique in the customer’s mind and that’s where it all begins. Raman’s iFlex was all about an integrated, secure and advanced banking solution; Sunil’s Fidelity VP, to their consumer customers, is Trust.

Coming as we do from mostly a Services background, the next big domain we worry about is the Employee. Raman had an interesting thought on that aspect: beginning as an unknown company (Citibank Software) pitted against companies like the then-already-famous Infosys in hiring IIT grads, Raman’s team pitched the idea of Specialization. They pointed out that, as a banking software vendor, their employees would have the opportunity to master a significant but specialized business domain: Banking. And that worked: some of the brightest people they met saw that specialization as being very important. Sunil, on the other hand, has a different problem: being a captive Services provider, specialization is not an option. His VP, then, is very different: Employability. Fidelity regularly invests into employees’ skills so they remain eminently employable anytime, anywhere. Counter-intuitively, that actually reduces employee turn-over: as long as you know you can always find a good job and you’re enjoying your current one, you’re not looking for another. I could personally relate to these two factors – specialization and employability – from our own experience. We’re not the best paymasters (strike that!), we have fairly loose processes and we use daunting technical abstractions. But certain kinds of people revel in the idea of such an ever-changing work environment, unlike in a well-oiled MNC. They’re the ones that wind up working with us.

At the session, we could not spend any time on the Community VP, mostly because we had very tight schedule. On the Investor side, Raman very clearly defined the VP (stock-price appreciation; is there anything else? ). But one domain that I wish we had had time to talk about is that of the Stakeholder – Partners, for example, who could contribute to a company significantly. In my Services avatar, I rarely worried about this domain; with Impel, Partners make a huge difference. Restating the Customer VP for Partners and adding the specific value to the Partner himself/herself, you have the potential to bring your solution a much larger set of customers than you could on your own. We have relationships with systems integrators, hardware manufacturers, software companies that build a related but non-competing product  We’ve seen some very results ourselves and I’d have liked to spend some time hearing Raman and Sunil talk about that.

At the beginning of the session, we listed some audience-stated VPs and went back to analyze them. What struck me the most was the number of words people used in their VPs. Sunil’s, for example, was Trust for customers and Employability for employees. We had people saying things like “Delivering value with well-trained technical people from premier educational institutions”. I think the country bias shows here: Sunil comes from years of dealing with Americans, the masters of pithy marketing statements. As Indians, we need to get there still.

In the light of that discussion, I found myself reviewing our own stated VP: Simply effective. It is short for sure, clearly focused on the Customer, but possibly too vague unless you saw it on our website. Tell us what you think.

OK, OK, before some of you are nodding saying “I know that feeling” , let me point out that I’m talking purely about business relationships, nothing else! I am specifically talking about a recent deal we saw in the Indian CRM space. One of our best-known competitors has signed up to be a white-labeled product from a well-known telecom provider in India. OK, OK, I might as well name names here – Zoho CRM is white-labeled as Tata Indicom’s CRM offering. This has very interesting connotations for CRM vendors and customers. Here are some of them.

To begin with, this is validation of something we’ve seen before: Open Source works only if you know what you’re doing and are willing to do that for a long time. Tata Indicom played with Sugar CRM for over two years now, offering it to customers on their “cloud”. That went nowhere, probably because using Open Source software requires significant in-house software skills (or, at least, regularly-available outsourced resources) to ensure the thing runs as needed, is tweaked periodically and is upgraded (if at all). Open Source is a terrific resource, as we know ourselves. We use a lot of Open Source components and I’ve taareef-ed it before. But we are a software company with the skills and patience needed to search, install, configure and maintain software. We are a software provider with the drive to handle other people’s code, something programmers really don’t want to do, no matter how well it’s written. That software-related patience and drive are hard to maintain in a telecom company or an outsourced team. To us, using Open Source is a strategic choice integral to our business; that’s not so for someone selling SIMs or billing by the hour. It is no wonder, then, that the Sugar date went tata quickly (I crack myself up with these things ).

Even as a software provider, doing Open stuff on the side is difficult – ask Zoho: they put together – and then walked away from – vTiger (a variant of the then-Sugar CRM, nothing less!).

More important in the Tata Indicom-Zoho relationship, though, is what the future looks like. As an India-focused CRM provider, we have been approached, too, by various telecom operators. The objective is very clear: use Impel as a way to draw SMEs to use their data network. There have been cases like that before, the most celebrated being the Telefonica SaaS offering with NEC’s infrastructure. The model is very exciting: here’s this telecom provider with millions of users willing to bring your SaaS app to every one of them. The devil, like always, is in the details IMH. While the partners have the same ultimate objective, their business models are too far apart to run together easily. There are at least two big challenges to deal with: the SaaS provider’s continuing business and the telecom provider’s sales focus.

Trying to use the Tata Indicom-Zoho offering highlights both of these issues very clearly. To begin with, you can’t register – not even for a trial! – without a Tata Indicom customer ID. And the user experience if you do is unnecessarily painful. The reason’s obvious: as an independent SaaS vendor, Zoho does not want to cannibalize its online sales with people signing up via Tata Indicom. Zoho would get a much lesser price, since Tata Indicom will have negotiated lower prices AND will probably take a cut off the sales. Also, Tata Indicom wants to ensure that its network customers have some real incentive to use this white-labeled offering instead of the native Zoho offering that’s just a click away. Right there begins the conflict: we want to work together, but not step on each other. And stepping on each other is as easy as the click of a button.

The sales issue is even bigger: telecom salespeople are tuned to sell telecom connections, not CRM subscriptions. That means they have neither the interest nor the knowledge to connect with people who want to solve SALES challenges, not COST issues. As I am sure you know, buying CRM is hard enough – we speak Tech while you speak English, Hindi, Kannada or whatever it is that humans speak. Now bring along a sales guy who speaks Communication Tech and that becomes like an Abbot-and-Costello conversation. Even the telecom guys agree – here’s an interview that underscores the issue (scroll to the question on key difficulties working with carriers).

Following a sale, Support is a mare’s nest. When a Tata Indicom customer has a problem, whom are they going to call? Zoho? Or Tata Indicom? Zoho is known to believe that customer support means self-driven online forums and, where critical, email support. Will that work for Tata Indicom’s network customers? Will they not expect to pick up their Tata Indicom phones and yell at someone when they have trouble? Our customers do! (It’s another matter that we don’t have disgruntled customers. Really! Honest!)

I’m not saying these issues can’t be sorted out. Like in every marriage, commitment on both vendors’ parts (and patience on the customer’s) can solve everything given time. But till then, meri maano, yahaan click karo.

Here’s a secret: if you sign up for an Impel trial using an Infosys email ID, our salespeople may not call you as quickly as they would if you used a lesser-known domain. I assure you, we have nothing against my former employer, may their tribe increase. But we do look at things in our own special way, tainted as it is by the statistic of Seats. As a SaaS CRM provider, we obviously do well when we get a “large” deal. But “large” for us is not about how big the customer is; it is about how many seats they buy from us as a percentage of their employee-count. This is critical for us: our best fit is with companies that use us in various ways, across the enterprise, not just for sales automation or support. We call this “prevalence” – the percentage of employees who use Impel. We have a customer with 500-odd employees, over 390 of them using Impel. That’s significant prevalence of Impel in the customer organization. A number of our customers look to Impel to be the “great integrator” across various parts of their company.

The most obvious reason for such an integrated system is the traditional one of being a customer-focused company. Companies want to structure themselves in line with what their customers want. Driving Production, say, based on actual opportunities for sale in the next quarter; shipping goods to distributors based on sales reports by dealers; these are all cases where the company decides how much it should produce, instead of how much it can produce. And it does that via a common CRM system that collects and distributes data across the company. A system that, for example, where:

• Salespeople can track leads, opportunities and quotes in
• Agents can figure out who a prospect is and what s/he’s interested in before they pick up the phone
• Accountants can track orders, bill closed deals and collect payments against
• Ops people can manage the inventory that goes to fill those orders
• Delivery people know exactly what inventory lies in which warehouse

– you get the idea.

Impel is obviously a great fit for companies that are looking for such an “outside-in” perspective of their business, where their customers and prospects drive the business.

My point about prevalence, though, is that managers must take a different position about systems: that of being “greedy” about data. My own approach, for example, is to get everyone from our salespeople and support people to our Admin and our Engineers to use Impel. That’s not only because we want to be customer-focused: it is because I believe that ALL data must be collected and, preferably, at the point where it appears in front of my company. When one of our sales people sees a prospect’s email that includes his phone number in the signature, we want to add that into the prospect’s profile. When an Engineer starts work on a task, we want to tie that to a roll-out or to work for a specific customer. When someone sends us a reference, we want to add that as a Prospect in one click. When someone plans to visit our office, we want to send them driving directions via SMS, with Impel’s name as the sender. And so on – basically, make every contact with the outside world an opportunity to collect data about customers and prospects. And we can only do that by using Impel across the organization, just like we suggest to our customers.

This is one of the key reasons why we structure Impel licenses in multiple Editions, ensuring that different people in the same company get access to the specific set of functions that they need, making for company-wide use of a common solution. So while field personnel in a consumer goods company can use the Impel SMS Edition, their managers can use Corporate and senior management Enterprise. We even structure an Email-only edition for Admin people who only need the automatically-distributed reports that Impel can send out.

Come talk to us – we’ll help you identify the many points at which data can be collected in your company. And we’ll give you a solution that won’t break the bank!

Identifying, developing and retaining high-value customers, in an increasingly competitive Travel Industry are a problem for most businesses today. Continually refining insights into customer needs, habits and developing tailored value propositions is the only strategic move for your business in the marketplace.

But how would you get information on your customer’s needs, economics and contextual data to deliver the right offer to the right person at the right time? And without spending a huge amount of money?

Impel CRM Solution Brief.

We are very pleased to introduce to you, the most simple, reliable and cost effective, Impel CRM for Travel Industry. Impel CRM delivers integrated performance across all travel network channels from call center to sales and marketing to dealer networks. We bring to you up-to-date information on your customers needs history and economics.

Intelligently engage, track and analyze customer information.

• Automatically capture website leads into Impel CRM, with all the information you want to track using Web-2-Lead mechanism.
• Automatically capture leads from e-mails, website, Just Dial or any other lead generation mechanism that you use.
• With the exhaustive Sales Force Automation module in Impel, we can help you streamline and automate your sales cycle with up-to-date customer information.
• Our Marketing Automation module helps you segment contacts and execute targeted e-mail/sms marketing campaigns.
• With the powerful reporting features in Impel’s Adhoc Reporting Engine, we can help you get exactly the reports that your management team need to make strategic decisions.
• Track your customer satisfaction with Impel survey forms to gain deeper insights into customer needs, expectations and experience levels.

If you would like to know how you can improve and scale your travel business, call us at +91-80-3008-0000 now and we would be happy to show you what’s possible with the Impel CRM. Or e-mail us at info@impelcrm.in and we will organize a demo of the system for you at a time that’s convenient for you.

Major milestone for Care Foundation and PK4 Software, with the launch of CHIPS  Biometric Cards. PK4 Software is the technical force driving the Micro-Insurance project CHIPS – bringing health and financial stability to rural India. PK4 drove an initiative to implement and integrated the Biometric smart cards with the hand held device which leverages technological innovation to provide high-quality health-care services to patients in remote villages, simultaneously keeping costs low.

Please visit our FaceBook page for more pictures from the field and CHIPS for more information.

Tracking secondary sales and inventory positions across channels is a problem for most businesses today. Secondary and tertiary sales from the retailer / dealer are the true measure of demand for your products in the marketplace. But how do you get information from 3-4 levels down the channel? And without spending a huge amount of money to do that?

We are very pleased to introduce to you Impel CRM’s simple, reliable and cost-effective Field Reporting System. Combining simple formatted SMSs from your field sales force with Impel’s powerful Ad-hoc Reporting engine, we bring you up-to-date secondary sales information.

Track sales and inventory through the complete distribution channel.

• Your salespeople need to send only a simple formatted SMS from the field with the sales / inventory information that you want to track.
• With the exhaustive reporting features in Impel’s Adhoc Reporting Engine, we can help you get exactly the reports that your management team needs.
• Our Automated E-mail Alerts mechanism gets those reports in to your management teams’ mailboxes at the frequency that you desire.
• Integration with your ERP system allows you to cross verify secondary sales data against your primary sales.
• End-to-end visibility of sales and inventory across the channel including primary, secondary and tertiary channel levels.

Get the information that you need to make strategic decisions, simply and reliably and in your Inbox every morning. See how our customer Hindware is using the Impel Field Reporting System to track field sales information effectively.

If you would like to know how you can improve your field sales tracking, call us at +91-80-3008-0000 now and we would be happy to show you what’s possible with the Impel CRM Field Reporting System.

Yes, that was part of the question I asked the audience at a Cloud Computing seminar yesterday. I was on a panel discussing Cloud Computing issues at a seminar of electronics hardware manufacturers. To begin my own introductory comments, I first asked how many in the audience had bought cars. After they realized that yes, this fellow HAD asked about Cars and not about Cloud, a number of hands went up. That’s when I asked this question: “So how many of you attended a seminar on metal-formation issues in engine-block casting before you went out and bought that car?” I’m sure you can imagine the incredulity on people’s faces – everything from “What kind of a dork is this idiot?” to “Metal-what?” and “God, I’m wasting time listening to this moron.” But there was a very specific reason for my question. Let me explain.

First of all, this was a conclave of CEOs (mostly) running SMEs in the electronics manufacturing business. There’s my first problem: in my opinion, none of these guys (or gals) would ever buy “Cloud Computing”. They will buy software apps running on the Cloud (read: SaaS), for sure, but that’s my point with the question: if you’re out to buy a car, would you worry about the way the engine was built or would you worry about the way it drives and how safe (or fast!) it is? Similarly, if you’re out to buy SaaS, why would you worry about the technology that’s at least two levels below it?

My questions were to some degree triggered by the presentations that went before our panel. Beginning at 1000 in the morning, there was a series of speakers about Cloud Computing. There was a Govt. official telling us how he envisages a – and I quote – “Cloud over Peenya Industrial Estate” working with a “National Cloud”. There was a minister endorsing Cloud Computing as a great mechanism to help SMEs grow to be as big as HP (one of the sponsors of the conference) and Infosys. And then there were speakers who described IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, server pods and transportable server farms – all in great detail, very accurately. But I suspect most people just sat there thinking: “So what?” The most telling point was this: halfway through our panel (and this shows how bad a job we did, too), a CEO who’s been running her own Electronics manufacturing business for years now asked a very simple question: “My business needs inventory management, order management, customer database management and so on – how does all this discussion help me?”

So there you have it: with some of the most vocal technologists on the stage, in three hours, we had not conveyed the most basic values of Cloud Computing to end-users. We used big phrases like “leverage technology” (why can’t we just say “USE technology”?), “high availability”, “sparking innovation” (is that fire-safe?) and so on. We had great-looking PPTs. We even had animated videos of trucks carrying servers. And we did nothing – NOTHING – to answer even the most basic questions that the audience had. That’s my long-running peeve with us software people: we do a great job at inventing technology, but when asked to explain it in reasonable terms, we’re terrible at it. So much so that people who could really and truly benefit from our work just walk away. I’m sure we can do better.

Now, about the issues of metal-forming in engine-casting…

Note:  I don’t mean to be disrespectful of the other speakers in any way. They were all very good speakers, very knowledgeable and successful and I’d love to work with them again elsewhere.