Search results matching tag 'marketing'

Why open is the new green (in technology)

AceProject — Wed, 20 May 2009 11:32:00 GMT

Last week at the Webcom conference, the big buzzword was open: open networking, open mesh, open social, open products, etc.

The era of the Web 2.0 is over. It's now the Web ME.0. ME.0 is about the individual. Not the products. Not the technologies. Not the businesses.

The people.

And those people are not interested in remembering 15 different passwords, or recreating 15 diffierent profiles on 15 different sites and products. Already, we're seeing most sites using the email address as the username to log in. We're seeing initiatives like OpenSocial getting attention from the likes of Google and Yahoo. We're seeing more and more products opening their databases via APIs. We're seeing more products designed to centralize social network updating.

Businesses are making their products easier to use, instead of locking their customers in.

Everyone wants an open product, an open platform and an open relationship with their suppliers and clients.

Open is THE online business and technology trend this year, just like green is THE brick-and-mortar business trend this year.

The discipline of producing new, fresh content

AceProject — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:24:00 GMT

Go Ahead, Manage is over one year old. I know, it's young compared to most of the blogs out there. I've been writing the majority of Go Ahead, Manage's content. After a year, I find that the greatest challenge is to have something to say.

This blog is not about my personal life, but about the life of the whole team here, the life of our product, AceProject, and the life of our field, project management.

When we began this blog, I had a lot of things to say, I even had a backlog! As time passed, I got through that backlog and now I find my inspiration a few minutes before I start typing the new post away.

The biggest lesson I've learned about blogging is that it requires discipline to produce new, fresh content three times a week. In the last few months, with Twitter taking the world of project management by storm, there is even more content out there about project management, project managers, and managing a business. It becomes a challenge to create content that is remarkable and unique, amid all the other great blogs out there!

However, keeping up with all those blogs and Twitter hashtags is keeping me and the whole team here at Websystems on our toes. It is also a great source of inspiration, both for the blog and for the future of AceProject.

About buying mailing lists: permission marketing is getting refined

AceProject — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:14:00 GMT

Everyday I receive unsolicited emails selling my 'high-quality" email lists to market AceProject. All those emails promise me that the lists are 100% opt-in, qualified buyers who just can't wait to learn about my product. I also see the same offers from magazines and online community sites. Magazines and community sites will often have nice colorful graphics about their audience.

And the price is interesting too. For a few hundred bucks, I can bug thousands of project managers and try to convince them that AceProject is the tool for their needs.

The problem is they don't know me

Those people whose email addresses are on those lists may have accepted to be contacted, but they did not agree for me to email them. This is a problem. They did not give me permission to market to them. Furthermore, what really is the probability that someone on this list goes "Wow! This is exactly the product I was looking for! I must purchase it right this instant!"

Slim to none. Because my email is just one of may spam messages she'll receive today. Because she probably won't read it. Because she did not ask for me to email her.

I would rather put a banner ad on that community site or the magazine newsletter. Then, I give those readers the choice to know more about my product. I am not forcing it down their throats.

Moreover, if I didn't give those marketers permission to email me to sell me their mailing lists, what guarantee do I have that these lists are really legitimate?

I would rather not wager AceProject's reputation on that.

Sales and marketing in the same person is good

AceProject — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:48:00 GMT

I'm in charge of both sales and marketing at Websystems. This is highly irregular: at most companies, sales and marketing are kept separate.

However, in a small company like us, it makes more sense to have one person do both sales and marketing. Since our business is online, I can do live demos and write a press release in the same day. I like to keep contact with our potential customers, because it keeps me connected to what people are looking for in a project management system.

It's very important for marketers to know what their audience is looking for. And it's very important for the sales team to understand well how marketing wants to present the product.

At Websystems, having both sales and marketing in the same person is beneficial. I get good contact with the market, and I can align my campaigns with current and upcoming trends.

How to prevent your clients from breaking up with you

AceProject — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:45:00 GMT

Yesterday I wrote about my heart-breaking separation from my beloved Xobni. So how can we keep this from happening at our company? How do we keep our clients happy?

1. Close mouth, open ears

It's the most basic part. Listen to your clients. REALLY listen to them, don't just hear them talk while imagining reasons why they're wrong. If you really pay attention to what your product's users are saying, you'll know exactly where the pain points are in the product and you'll have your priority list all drawn up for you.

A few days after people create an account with AceProject, we send them an email and ask them what they think of the product, if they can suggest improvements or missing feature. The response we get is a very good source of inspiration for us.

2. Aggravation is really bad

An exasperated client should never be ignored or dismissed. If you let aggravation at your product go unchecked, it only grows and never brings anything good to you, your product or your users. When someone is angry at your product, it should by your duty to get some one-on-one time with them and try to understand what's making them so unhappy.

In my experience, frustrated clients often start by stating something like "your product sucks!" When I call them for details about the suckiness, I realize the true source of the frustration is something different: it might be that they feel they didn't get good service, or they don't understand a part of AceProject, or that there was a misunderstanding. 90% of the time, their aggravation is defused by having a real human call them, listen to them vent their emotions, and be willing to work with them to fix what makes them unhappy.

3. The personal touch works

Customer service should be answered by a human, not a machine. It's just better.

In our business, most of our clients do business with us without ever talking or emailing us here at customer service. They do it all online. When they need help, it always makes them really happy to hear a real human's voice on the line.

4. Test, test, test

Of course, the basics of keeping customers happy is to deliver a functioning product. The key to this is not just to build a good product, but also to test like a gang of madmen.

At AceProject, we test on 5 different browsers in two languages. We'd rather keep AceProject in beta longer than deliver something that's full bugs - there's nothing like a buggy system to make your users aggravated, and we've established that was bad.

5. Check your pride at the door

That's the hardest one. You've worked on our new product for so long. In your eyes, it's perfect. You've spent a significant amount of time and effort in making flawless. How could someone find fault with it? Surely they must be wrong.

Actually, you've been working with our nose so close to the tree, you don't see the forest anymore. You don't see the big picture. The product may be perfect for you, but you're not the ones who will buy it. The thing is humans hate to be wrong. With a vengeance. So when a client pipes up and says "you product sucks!" our first reaction is disbelief.

I have so many times heard people in marketing and development say thing like "oh, this client doesn't know what she's doing, how can she criticize our product?"

We must remember that we are building products that people will want to buy. If no one likes our product but us, there is no point trying to sell it.

So we have to let go of our pride and be willing to admit we're not the only ones who can bring good suggestions to the table.

The best brands are not brands at all

AceProject — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:33:00 GMT

Websystems is located in Quebec City. This year, it's the 400th anniversary of the city's foundation. While technically, Quebec City is not the oldest city in North America, it is the only one that is still there, in its original location.

To celebrate the event, we've been having a big party since the summer began. Yesterday, we had one of the biggest events so far: the event organizers invited Paul McCartney (yes, THE Paul McCartney). The show was free. You can imagine the crowd that showed up to see this living legend. People slept in front of the gates before the park opened. about 1 person out of 3 that lives in Quebec City went to the event.

That's how much pull Paul McCartney has. How powerful his brand is.

What I found interesting about him is that he seems to have built his brand on just being himself. People like him because he is a legend in the musical realm. But he's likeable because he seems to be such a nice guy.

That can't be faked or built.

Honesty: if the shoe won't fit, why sell it?

AceProject — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:04:00 GMT

Sometimes we are so bent on closing a sale that we are tempted to ignore the needs to the clients and push our product. We are focused on the short term (closing the sale), instead of the much more profitable long-term (having a happy client).

AceProject is a great project management system. Unfortunately, it does not contain any feature ever required by a project manager. For example: AceProject does not include any financial data like hourly rates and cost-tracking. While we do plan to include a cost-tracking module in the mid-term, the current version has no dollar signs in it.

Hence, when a prospective client emails us with a requirement to track costs, we have two choices: sell AceProject with a vague promise of implementing those features at some point, or tell the client upfront that AceProject does not fulfill his requirements for cost tracking. We prefer the second option.

Who knows what the future has in store for us? The fact that we plan to implement a feature today does not mean it will be implement within the expected timeframe. If the client buys AceProject, he also buys the promise of the future feature. If we don't deliver - even for the best reasons - we've failed that client.

I would rather turn away a client that we can't help than see a disappointed client leave us.

Forget pressure: Great products sell themselves

AceProject — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:23:00 GMT

Do you remember the last time you shopped for a car? As you get in the dealership, you start looking at cars in the showroom. A salesperson helps you out, answering your questions and guiding your choice for a new car. Once you've decided what you wanted, the pressure is applied. As you are sitting at the salesman's desk, you hear the fatal question: "What would it take for you to buy this car today?"

Why? Why would I need to buy the car today? If the car is so great, and the deal I'm offered is so good, why can't I sleep on it? Or shop around some more?

The answer is in how much confidence the salesperson has in the product. If the sales person has enough confidence in their product and the deal they have for you, they will have no problem wishing you a good day and waiting for you to return to buy the car. If the confidence isn't there, they will want to seal the deal as soon as possible, before you have the time to change you mind.

You will see these two types of sales online: the hard sell (buy now!) and the soft sell (take your time).

At Websystems, we prefer the soft sell approach.

We know we have a great product. And we prefer to have customers that took the time to make sure AceProject was right for them before committing their money. This is why we have a free trial of the AceProject available online. People don't need to call us or email us to setup their free AceProject account. They don't need to give us a credit card number. No one will bother them while they try the new system.

When they are ready to get a paying subscription, we are more than happy to count them among our customers.

In fact, we encourage our clients to purchase a package that fits their needs now, and upgrade as they grow. There is no sense in buying more licenses than required, since upgrading later is not more expensive than purchasing the full licenses now.

Our results?

Happy clients, with more money in their pockets. Clients that don't feel ripped off.

And the feeling of doing business right. :-)

Marketing and journalism: one and the same

AceProject — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:00:00 GMT

I have a bachelor's degree in journalism. If I met my former classmates, they would frown at my career in marketing, thinking that I had gone on the dark side of force, so to speak.

I think they're wrong. In my mind, journalism and marketing are not quite different. What changes is the audience and the product. Let's face it, the more papers a story sells - or the more viewers a TV newscast gets - the more successful the journalist seems to be. And if a newspaper does not have enough readers, the content is the first to be blamed.

Marketing and journalism are about reaching out to people

For the marketer, the audience is the clients, actual, and future, for the product we are selling. We want our clients to know about our company and our product, or at least interest them enough so that they will check it out.

Journalists want to reach their market as well, except they call it an audience. They're still the same humans, and what they provide is information and opinion. Journalists want to reach people so that they will read the next paragraph or stay on the TV channel during the commercial break.

Good marketing and good journalism have strong ethics

Both in journalism and marketing, there are dishonest people who will manipulate their audience into a specific frame of mind, to form the desired opinion.

However, both good journalists and good marketers will achieve this without hiding the truth or presenting opinions as facts. A marketer who believes in her product doesn’t need to fabricate facts to convince her clients to buy her product. The same way, a journalist who believes in fair and balanced reporting is not out to promote an agenda and will publish her article, even if the facts are not how she expected them to be.

Marketing and journalism are about selling

It's pretty obvious that marketing is about selling: selling a product, selling sympathy to orphans in the third world, selling an idea. If there is nothing to sell, there would be no marketing. Now, not everything is bought with money. In politics, marketers are trying to get people's votes, not their money.

On the other end, it's not always obvious that journalists are also selling something: their media. Let's face it, without newspapers sales and advertisement sales, there would be no news.

Marketing and making sense

AceProject — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It seems to me marketing is about convincing people to buy a product. In so doing, should it not tell people something that makes sense?

Especially in business-to-business marketing, I don't want to insult my reader's intelligence by telling them a bunch of nonsense. Do they really care about how great I think my product is? Maybe they do.

I think what they care about is what my product can do for them, for real. How much time will they save? How much more money could they make? How much easier will their life be with the product?

I understand that it may be difficult to make precise statements in reply to those questions. But in the end, that's what most of us want: more time, more money, less difficulty. Which translates in more happiness.

I firmly believe we can market products concisely, clearly, without resorting to complicated statements.

Marketing should make sense.