Month: June 2014

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Service Notification ROI – Accurate Warranty Dates

Well, I’ve realized that all too often, I talk about the nitty gritty, the details.  What i don’t really talk often enough about is “Why?”.  So I thought I’d start a series to talk about the service Notifications ROI, or return on investment.  All too often, I hear business’ complain about the number of transactions within the service management module.  While, I agree, for small businesses, there can be a lot of transactions, but what is often overlooked, or perhaps unused, is the beneficial data in all of those transactions.  This first series will focus on the information you can use to get real return on investment.

This first piece, to me is one of the most valuable, and most overlooked benefits of the service notification.  That is the ability to offer the most cost effective warranty to your customer that you can.  Now, all too often, everyone is concerned with if the product is under warranty.  But in your customer’s mind, the best products have the longest warranties.  Well, what if you could offer your customers an additional 3 months of warranty, without it costing you any more?

Well, if you pay attention to your service notifications, you can determine by product, how many issues do you encounter within 3 months?  6 months? 1 year?  Let’s say you offer a 3 month warranty on a particular product.  If you analyze your data, and find that 90% of your issues occur after 4 months, you could suddenly extend your warranty to 4 months, and you won’t experience any more service notifications.  This now gives your customers an additional month of “piece of mind”.  Perhaps, this gives you the edge against your competition that only offers a 3 month warranty.

Best of all, you’ve just gave your customers a nice little bonus and it costs you nothing but updating your literature =)  I’ll be throwing out more little pieces of ROI in future posts.

thanks for reading,

Are you Thinking or are you Working?

I recently read an email from my new marketing guru, Perry Marshall, and he put out a very simple question.  This question really made me stop and think.  The question was are you thinking or are you working?  Initially, it seemed like a pretty simple answer, I’m problem solving, I’m answering questions, I’m typing a blog…  of course I’m thinking…  Right???  But he then went on to explain that thinking…  real thinking, isn’t the day to day minutia that I get bogged down on.  Just because I’m using my brain, doesn’t mean I’m thinking…

Thinking is when you’re really coming up great ideas.  it could be next big application, or a way to find really qualified prospects that I never figured out before.  So, this is the real magic of the business.  Now, don’t get me wrong, the day to day thinking is required, but the more time you can spend doing the important thinking, the better your business can succeed.

Perry’s example was the great ideas he comes up with when he’s not thinking about working.  Vacation, taking a bike ride, etc…  Now what hit me is the power of this.  And it really is true.  All of my best ideas have hit me when I’m not thinking about work.  i’ve had some great ideas sitting on the airplane, or reading a book on the beach.  The problem is that I don’t spend much time away from work.  So, the blinding truth that struck me is that I don’t spend enough time away from work.  Thus, I’m spending all my brain power doing the $10/hr work, instead of the $1000/hr work that i need to be doing.

So, with all of this, are you thinking or are you working???

I’d love to hear your thoughts,
thanks for reading,

Time Management – Focus on your Skills

I’ve lately had a few weekends, where I’ve played solo dad with 2 kids for 3 to 4 days a stretch.  Now, this has actually reminded me of a valuable lesson.  If you want to do your best, stick with what you’re best at.  Don’t see the connection?  well, stay with me.  I used to have an infinite amount of patience.  I could deal with any person, hang out for too long in any situation, even awkward social situations, just because I saw the “potential” benefit.  When I was younger, that usually revolved around women 🙂  After a full weekend with the kids on my own, I’ve discovered, those patience have disappeared.

Now, how does this tie into business?  Very simply, taking care of the kids is not what I’m best at.  My wife on the other hand, does an incredible job.  She understand how to keep the kids occupied… me on the other hand, I’m trying, but it’s always a struggle.  when I finally get the kids to sleep, I’m exhausted.  This is no different than business situation.  When you’re doing what you’re good at, it energizes you, rather than drains you.  While you can’t stop doing everything that drains you (at least not right away), the more time you can spend doing what you’re good at, the better off your business will be.  Perry Marshall calls this doing $1000/hr work, rather than $10/hr work.  when you focus on doing what you do best, you get closer to that $1000/hr.  Anything else, is better to let someone else do, if you can…

While this obviously won’t work in homelife, you can utilize this in your professional life.  So take it from me…  stick to what you’re best as much as you can.

Thanks for reading,

Time Management – The Art of Unsubscribing

I recently got a great trip from my marketing guru, and that is to “ruthlessly unsubscribe” from every email you don’t read.  You know, this is great advise.  If you’re like me, you pay way too close attention to your inbox.  Whenever I see an email come in, I compulsively have to check and see what it is.  Now, rationally, I look at this and say I shouldn’t do it…  but I can’t seem to help myself.  This makes the advise even more valuable.  Who really cares about the latest Home Depot advertisement, or what HP laptop is coming to store.  The problem is that an email is an email.  Even if I look at it for 3 seconds, then press the delete, I still burned 3 seconds, plus the time I lost taking my attention off of important tasks.

Now, even unsubscribing takes times, but happily it’s a one time event.  The idea is to get rid of every email you don’t read anyway.  This could be the coupons from Gap, or the latest blog from someone you read 6 months ago.  If you don’t read it, don’t get it.  Save yourself the effort of deleting it.  I started doing this 3 days ago, and it’s amazing how many junk emails I get that I’ve just tuned out.  So, it’s still taking some of my time, but now it’s a one time thing, rather than deleting the emails on a daily basis.  There are still some that I’ve kept…  mostly because I’m not sure if it’s worth it.  But the idea of is, if I don’t see the email, it won’t burn my time.  I consider you take this advise.  Remember, in this hectic life, every little bit helps.

Thanks for reading,

Service Management – Cost Element Groups

Now this is one of the few tricks that I’ve picked up when it comes to the finance portion of the world 🙂  And the only reason I care about this is because it simplifies my configuration for service order costing and also resource related billing.  The concept is called Cost Element Groups.  And they are exactly what they sound like, a group of cost elements.  Now, why do I care?  in both service order cost display and resource related billing, I can enter each cost element into the configuration, transport it, and call it good.  Now, when a new cost element is suddenly introduced, I now need to go back to my dev environment, make sure the cost element exists, then add it to my configuration again, and transport everything.  Cost Element Groups let this all be controlled through master data.  I connect the cost element group one time, and I’m covered for life.  so, let me show you how easy they are, and you can be the judge.

Everything starts with transaction KAH1/KAH2/KAH3.  Below, I’m showing you KAH2 for an existing cost element group, but it’s basically the same for any of the create/change/display transactions.

kah2-01

Enter in the name of the group and hit enter, or the hierarchy button.

kah2-02

This will bring you to the above screen.  You can add or change the name of the group, then press the Cost Element button.

kah2-03

Once you press the button, you will see some new blanks show up.  You can either enter in individual cost elements (just enter the number in the left column) or you can do a range, by entering the start in the left and finish in the right.  Then it will show you all the cost elements that were located within the range.

Simply save, and you’re ready to go.  Now, you do need to remember to create this master data in every system you want to use it, but the flexibility is worth the master data effort.

Thanks for reading,

Remember what you accomplished…

In today’s fast paced world, and constant deadlines, it can be very easy to get lost in everything you need to do.  This quickly becomes a very depressing environment to be stuck in.  I’m guilty of this quite a bit.  So, it’s important to remember how far you’ve come.  I don’t care if it’s a project, a business, or a marriage.  It can be very easy to focus on what you haven’t accomplished.  Whenever this mindset starts to get you down, I encourage you to try the following…

Write down everything you are proud of.  Pull out a notebook, and just start writing.  Enter as many things as you can.  Don’t confine it to any one area of your life.  This simple exercise forces you to look back at all of the good things you’ve done or accomplished.  For example, you can proud of overcoming your fear of heights by going up into a skyscraper, or you can be proud that you fixed those shelves in the garage on your own.  It doesn’t matter…  the whole idea is to shift your mindset to what you’ve done, because it will help remind you that you are capable of accomplishing all the things left on your list.

I encourage you to make this a regular habit.  Either just re-reading your list, or adding to it for everything you accomplished recently.  It’s important to remember that you can be just as proud of little things, as big things, and often the little things are more valuable to the people in your life.

Take it from me, I often get hung up on all the things I want/need to accomplish, so i really need to look back.  It’s a quick refreshing exercise to shift you into a positive mindset.

thanks for reading,

Marketing – The power of the survey

Well, I confess, this is all new to me, so I’m again in learning mode.  I’m just about to try my first experiment.  So I went over to Surveymonkey and created a free survey, and sent it off to a list I had in mailchimp (apparently, I have a thing for monkeys).  Now, the idea behind this isn’t to know every detail about my users, but to help me get that rough pass of who I should even be talking to.  Now, I have a decent list of people that I email from time to time, but I know very little about them, including if they might just be marketers.

The idea behind the survey is that if I can at least gage who is willing to answer the answer the survey, I can at least judge for those people if I should even leave them on the list, or if they sign up by accident.  In my mind, the best thing I can do is to cut out all the “prospects” that don’t even use SM or PP.  Why even bother sending them emails?

Now, if you’re curious, this is the survey.  As you can see, it’s pretty elementary, but it gives me that machete pass to see if I’m even talking to the right people.  If someone answers the survey and say we don’t use SM or PP or VC, well, I probably don’t have much to offer them.  On the other hand, if someone responds to me, and gives me a big laundry list of things they hate about SAP, I know they are passionate…  so, let’s see if anyone answers.  If you’re bored, take my survey 🙂  I can at least feel better if I get one answer 🙂

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9BD39BB

Thanks for reading,