Strategy + Solutions

Tech Spending

Article from CNNMoney.com discusses IDC and Gartner studies that indicate tech spending appears to be slowing down. 

Slideshare on Strategy and Enterprise 2.0

Check out Slideshare.  A great site for continuing education and research.  Check out the strategy and enterprise 2.0 slide shows.  If you are intrigued by the future of business and society check out this slide show. 

Freshbooks April 2007 Billing, Web, and Tech Stats for the SMB Market

FreshBooks, which recently surpassed 165,000 "happy" business users, announced its April 2007 billing, Web and tech statistics for media tracking the small to medium-sized business (SMB) market.  FreshBooks’ online invoicing and time-tracking service anonymously collects and aggregates data in real time, leveraging its Software as a Service (SaaS) model to deliver ongoing insight into trends in the SMB market.

FreshBooks sources these monthly online billing and technology statistics and trends from its online invoicing and time-tracking service.  Strategy + Solutions greatly appreciates this data since we love metric based decision making tools to help SMB's optimize their business performance. 

This company is making its mark in the Software as a Service (SaaS) community and continues to impress.  Again, if you are a SMB or professional service provider you need to consider Freshbooks because it is a winning solution that provides meaningful metrics for better business decision making and performance.  Now to the numbers:

April 2007 Trends

For companies who accept online payments:

- In March, 15.7% of payments were accepted online

- In April, 16.0% of payments were accepted online

"We had a slight increase in payments accepted online this month which is due to the large number of new businesses that signed up in March and have now been able to setup online payments," stated Levi Cooperman, CIO of FreshBooks.

Payment Methods:

- Visa: 14.4% March, 14.7% April

- MasterCard: 7.3% March, 7.7% April

- Amex: 4.2% March, 4.2% April

- PayPal:  7.6% March, 7.6% April

- Other (including check, cash, account credit, etc.): 66.5% March, 65.8% April

"Visa and MasterCard recovered slightly this month, while Amex and PayPal held steady," observed Cooperman.

For companies that send invoices by both email and ground mail:

- In March 96.0% of invoices were sent by email and 4.0% were sent by snail mail

- In April 95.3% of invoices were sent by email and 4.7% were sent by snail mail

"More businesses with traditional customers that prefer snail mail are starting to discover FreshBooks and are opting for paper versus electronic invoices," says Cooperman.

Browser Usage:

- Internet Explorer 7 - March 24.04%, April 26.12%

- IE 6 - March 34.23%, April 33.91%

- Firefox 2.0 - March 29.02%, 28.99%

- Firefox 1.5 - March 8.08%, 6.66%

"Since December 2006, Internet Explorer 7 has been gaining ground at the expense of FireFox," says Cooperman.

Operating System Usage:

-Windows - March 88.53%, April 89.44%

-Macintosh - March 9.14%, April 8.26%

-Linux - March 1.67%, April 1.56%

-Unix - March 0.05%, April 0.03%

"After Macintosh looked like it had rebounded, Microsoft has made another push in April," according to Cooperman.

BBC News Poll Regarding Leading Innovation Economies

The U.S. recently lost the top position in technology innovation globally according to an article in the BBC News.  According to the article:

"The Networked Readiness Index, the sixth of its kind published by the World Economic Forum with Insead, the Paris-based business school, scrutinised progress in 122 economies worldwide. Despite losing its top position, the US still maintained a strong focus on innovation, driven by one of the world's best tertiary education systems and its high degree of co-operation with industry, the report said."

NETWORKED READINESS INDEX RANKINGS 2006 (2005)

1: Denmark (3)

2: Sweden (8)

3: Singapore (2)

4: Finland (5)

5: Switzerland (9)

6: Netherlands (12)

7: US (1)

8: Iceland (4)

9: UK (10)

10: Norway (13)

Source: WEF

What are you thoughts about this poll and technology innovation in the U.S.?

Putting Your Customer To Work for You (Part 2)

Customers ask me why market research based strategy and solution implementation?  The challenge facing traditional market research firms is that they only conduct market research and usually provide you with a report that collects dust.  Ultimately, a pure research firm has no skin in the game in terms of implementation.

This can happen especially with surveys since the questions you help them generate to ask usually reflect the current thinking of your company.  Your company should never ask your customers what they want, your team should use customers (put them to work) to understand what the problem is with your brand, product or service.

Customers are not going to provide the solutions; solutions need to be built by a skilled team that has a deep understanding of the problem. 

What is the best feedback you received from a customer and how did you implement a solution?

Alexa.Com

If you are curious about the the number of visitors or traffic ranking for sites on the Internet around the globe or by country check out Alexa.  The site is fascinating because it enables you to see where the well known Internet brands rank in terms of usage and it also might provide you new sites/tools to use to market, sell, and conduct competitive intelligence research for your business.

Putting Your Customers to Work for You

How is your organization using traditional or new marketing tools and technologies to put your customers to work for you and your organizations bottom line success?

Focus groups, on line customer satisfaction surveys, blogs, win/loss surveys, webinars with a Q&A session for feedback are all examples of attempts to extract information from customers on how to improve your product or service and put them to work for you.

The value of your customer goes beyond the point of sale.  Perhaps the most valuable and least appreciated aspect of having a customer is the ability to utilize their feedback to grow your brand, to improve your product or service, enhance pricing or packaging of bundled services, and many many more opportunities if you take a strategic look at your customer and business model.

Please share something you have done to extract value and "put your customers to work" to increase your sales and marketing effectiveness.