A sales management process and the right tools for small business selling will increase your chances of succeeding as an entrepreneur.

We’ve talked about a number of philosophies and concepts to help small business owners make the most of their opportunities in this blog. But there are 3 which stand out as simple to understand, and implement.

Sales Strategy

Defining who will buy what from you and why is the cornerstone of any business. In What Is Your Sales Strategy we’ve described the process and offered a template you can use to work out exactly what your value proposition should be. You’ll refine your ideas as the business grows but its important to start off with as much as you can figure out, today. This strategy gives you your executive summary for presentations, proposals and even those chance meetings in the elevator.

Prospect List

Your prospects don’t exist in only one dimension, and neither should your Prospect List. In Solving My Prospect List Puzzle we’ve explained the complexity involved in every sale and offered a template for how to value each deal. Managing your prospect list is fundamental to making the most of your opportunities.

Plan, Act, Review

Planning what’s supposed to happen, executing the plan and reviewing the results to find ways of improving the plan next time around is the basis of most management science. It’s a simple concept first described nearly a hundred years ago and now the premier tool in the Management Consultant’s bag. In Plan, Act, Review we’ve explained the history of the philosophy and how you can use it, without the help of those consultants

3 Simple Tools

Use these 3 simple concepts in your small business and you’ll have the jump on 95% of your competitors, and almost as many of your customers.

And if you’d like some tools to help you do this while you get on with winning and servicing clients, check out Front Office Box. You can find out why its special at Front Office Box Secret Sauce.

On the other hand, if you’d like to just get on with getting on, register your Front Office Box today and get started. We’ll look after the mundane while you get on with the heavy lifting.

Why is it smart people find it hard to use smart software. If that sounds a dumb question, please stay with me here. Trust me it’s true. The smarter people are, the less likely they’ll use really clever software – software which is designed to do the heavy lifting, so they don’t have to.

Maybe they aren’t that smart after all?   That would explain the continued popularity of Microsoft amongst business users, at least. Have you seen engineers compete on their skills with Excel, or sales people with Power Point?   They celebrate harnessing complicated software to achieve meaningless complexity.  It’s like reading the entire user manual for a new car, just to bore the neighbours in bragging about pointless features.

Dumb people like me use smart software. I don’t mean dumb as a derogatory term. I’m clever enough about other things, but don’t see the point in being smart with dumb software. I’d rather be dumb with smart software, so there’s time and energy to be smart at stuff which gets results.

My friend Paul’s a smart guy. He knows nothing about Excel macros or Sharepoint. He would’t spend more than 10 minutes on a presentation and refuses to discuss browsers, and cookies, and synchronisation. He won’t back up his computer and couldn’t explain what anti-virus does. He’s just not interested.

Meanwhile, he happens to dominate the entire USA market for liability insurance, in his chosen sector.

He also uses some really smart software to stay on top of sales and service opportunities and his cash pipeline. He’s used Front Office Box for more than 2 years, because he’s dumb enough to use smart software.

The reason Front Office Box is so smart?  We built it that way because we wanted to use it ourselves, and we wanted tools to do the heavy lifting for us.  Just like Paul, we’re too busy looking after our customers and business operations to get smart about using dumb software.

Is business simply a process, or is there more to it than that?   Can software be a series of templates to suit any process? Does that work for small business?

It seems to me any activity which starts one place and ends up somewhere else is a process, and certainly the management gurus push the idea all the time.

Unfortunately small business guys like us are more interested in customers, and less interested in management consultants, and their ideas to make us spend hard earned money on stuff we don’t need.

For small businesses of all types the very thought of process implies rigidity, conformity and discipline. That’s not what we’re about. We’re into anything which makes the world go round for customers, because that’s when we make our money.

But funnily enough we all use processes even though that’s not how we think of what we do. We all have found ways of achieving our goals, trying different ideas and finding what works, and what doesn’t. And the way we do our thing becomes a process – our process. It just works our way.

Our process is a distillation of our resources, skills and interests. We dip into our kit bag and, for each individual customer, come up with a way of winning deals and delivering to satisfied partners – customers, partners, vendors, associates, employees.

In fact the smaller business only has one Unique Selling Point and it’s that ability to be flexible with what it has.

That very flexibility is a nightmare for software vendors, because no two small businesses will use the same process. In which case they can’t build software to suit. Whatever they build will only fit a tiny minority of the market.

That’s why we built Front Office Box to work the way it does, with business process templates. Our templates include ways to:

• Plan what we want to achieve, with milestones and actions
• Assign and schedule tasks to people
• Monitor progress, comparing it with the plan
• Review our relationship with external parties and internal resources
• File relevant information where we need to find it.

We built a framework anybody could use to manage their business activities without forcing anything other than the basic principles.

Our user interface is a series of templates – for addresses, plans, actions, schedules and for reviewing the current situation.

We built it that way because our users told us quite plainly – they didn’t want CRM. They wanted something like CRM but which helped them manage their entire business.

That’s why Front Office Box is a set of templates for best practice business process.

What you do with it is up to you.

Managing a small business involves solving a constant stream of information problems we didn’t know existed, or at least didn’t expect. It does for me, and probably does for you?

One problem we don’t need is organising our information so we can find it when we need it. So we don’t forget important tasks, so we keep focused on executing our plans, so we can sleep nights – because everything we can control is under control.

But that’s a problem small business owner managers like us fight every day.

We keep relationship records in our email, plans in spreadsheets, documents in our filing system and reminders on pieces of paper. Quite naturally there are times when we forget stuff, or at least forget where we put it. Remembering where everything is, and finding it when we forget, is the problem we don’t need. It gets in the way of us winning business, servicing our clients and executing our strategy.

The more successful we get, the less effective we become, because there’s more to remember and more we forget.

Karl Marx described this law of diminishing returns as the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall, but others had recognised the problem before him. It’s one of the basic laws of economics. Everybody suffers from the same problem but in business we use processes and systems to minimise its impact.

Big businesses embed those processes in ERP software. Small businesses don’t have that option.

That’s why we built Front Office Box. It isn’t rocket science – just an elegant way of storing our business information in context. We also made it easy to use, flexible to cope with most people’s needs and very low cost, both to build and maintain. But that’s the intellectual argument.

What We Can Do For You

Most business people will just want to know how they can solve their own problems with it. So we’ve demonstrated how we solve our business information problems in a series of short videos – keep reading.

Front Office Box doesn’t do anything new. It just does what you would do with an Address Book, spreadsheets, task checklists, and stickies. And by the way it does it in ways which make it easier for you to stay on top of what’s supposed to happen, because we’ve built in the business context. It SIMPLY MAKES SENSE.

Here’s a list of the problems we solve and examples showing how we do it.

Managing My Business Mashup

Like most people these days our business exists in more external relationships than internal – government, banks, business services, social networks, our own sites. These are all web sites of course and our problem starts when we need to find them when we need them. We use External Links to build these connections into our Dashboard, our portal for the Internet.

Watch the Demo

Email drives my workflow

Email is just the most destructive of systems, interrupting our workflow every few minutes. We forward Emails requiring action to our Dashboard where they sit in a queue until we get around to handling them.

Watch the Demo

My Problem with Sales Plans

We have a consistent process for planning sales campaigns which is visible to everybody. Its flexible so we can fit the plan to the deal but still keeps everybody on the same page.

Watch the Demo

Business Planning with Road Maps

For us business planning is a moveable feast. Our markets, opportunities and challenges change every day. We can’t spend months finding out everything before we start planning. Planning with road maps keeps us moving forward in the right direction even though we probably don’t know all the information we need.

Watch the Demo

Planning and Task Management

Assigning staff to partners, associates, customers or vendors is easy. Remembering who is supposed to do what and when is a lot more difficult. But with milestones, actions, assignments and schedules we have a real time view of what’s supposed to be happening in the business. Nobody needs to remember because the software doesn’t forget.

Watch the Demo

Seamless Business Process

When a sales deal turns into a customer we don’t have to create another record for delivery or customer service. We just change the category of the plan and the customer history goes along with it. With our setup sales, delivery and customer service are all part of the same system.

Watch the Demo

Relationships

We can never keep all our relationship information in simple contact lists or email systems. They only do part of the job. So we use Front Office Box to keep all customer, vendor, partner, people records in the one place, complete with addresses, documents, correspondence and notes. And we have Tags to create context for categories and groups.

Watch the Demo

Prospect List

Spreadsheets are OK for prospect lists, provided all you want to do is add up the numbers, but that’s about where their use ends. Our prospect list is simpler to use, does more for us, and links to our CRM, Sales Plans, Sales Pipeline and our peoples schedules.

Watch the Demo

CRM

We really don’t need all that complexity and control you get with typical CRM systems. We don’t need to constrain what people do and reports only tell us what we already know. For our CRM we just need relationships, plans, assignments and schedules – sort of CRM lite and that’s what we get with Front Office Box.

Watch the Demo

ToDo Lists

Checklists on Stickie notes or in spreadsheets, or in Tasks only get us so far. They don’t tie in to our planning. We can’t easily share them and they’re always out of date. We keep our ToDo and other Checklists in Front Office Box because that way we can solve those problems.

Watch the Demo

Sales Pipeline Management

There’s no effective way of managing sales pipelines without a specialist tool. Forget spreadsheets – they’re not meant for this job, and don’t work at all effectively. We want to manage our sales pipelines, so we need a system – flexible yet consistent, comprehensive yet simple – that just works, and stays out of our way.

Watch the Demo

Do You Have Other Information Problems?

Let us know and we’ll make videos of how we solve them. There are lots more we solve for ourselves with Front Office Box but we’ve forgotten what they are, because they aren’t problems anymore.

Do you have a sales plan for every deal? I do, but more of that later.

OK I know some deals you can take to the bank, and others are just punts. There’s no need to plan the certainties and no point in planning the ones you don’t expect to get. Or that’s the way it seems when you don’t have the tools to fit the job.

But there is a point to a sales plan for every deal. That plan helps us figure out, ahead of time, whether we’re likely to win, how we’ll win and more importantly when we’ll win. A clear perspective on every deal helps us make the most of our sales pipeline. We’ll know when to stay with the deal when the going gets tough, and when to walk away.

With 10 or more deals in the pipeline, a clear plan helps us keep a clear head – focused on what we can do now to make the most of our opportunities.  Plans also help us make more accurate sales forecasts.

In my sales plan I like to have milestones – markers to tell me how I’m doing. And I like to assign actions to each milestone – the steps I need to execute in order to reach them. Better still I like to have reminders of those actions so my success isn’t dependent on my memory.

The problem, as you’ll know, is recording all the information about every deal in the pipeline. Spreadsheets and calendar reminders are one way of doing it but that’s hard work, and mostly doesn’t work. What we sales guys need is some process for planning what should happen and reviewing whether it did. We need reminders we can rely on, so we can get on with other stuff and maybe a little time for some fun.

That’s why we built Front Office Box. It allows us to plan each deal individually but still fits in with our business process.

It SIMPLY MAKES SENSE when we’re struggling with multiple clients, multiple deals and our need to make the most of the opportunities we’ve got.

Watch the video to see how we plan each deal individually within a process which helps us stay on top.

Email drives my workflow, instead of interrupting it, so I save time and get more things done. We solved the problem with it hurting our productivity and saved hours every day.

Is Email a problem for you? Is it constantly interrupting you with incoming messages which need something done, but not necessarily right now. Do you feel you have to handle it immediately before it drops off the bottom of the first page.

After a day with a client, or even a few hours, do you find your Email inbox completely jammed with messages you really ought to look at, but can’t spare the time?

Do you find Emails more than a few months old impossible to find, because they’re buried in a folder but you can’t remember which. You know what it’s about, and you need it now, but can’t find it because there’s no context to your filing system.

Most people do, including us of course, and so did Paul. He’s the user who defined the ideal workflow. We liked it so much we built it into Front Office Box. It was his idea, but we’ll take the credit

Here’s how it works.

Every Front Office Box user has a dropbox address (you can choose your own @frontofficebox.com. Email sent to that address shows up at the top of the user’s Dashboard where it sits waiting to handled when the user has time.

We provide all the functionality for this to be the starting point of our workflow, including:

• Delete the messages
• Assign it to Company/Plan/Action
• Create new Company/Plan/Action and assign
• Create new Plan/Action and assign
• Create new Action and assign

Emails assigned to Actions in this way are stored right there where it makes sense. Users can find them easily because they’re filed in the context of company and plan.

It SIMPLY MAKES SENSE

Watch the video to see how we save hours every day by using Email to drive our workflow rather than having it interrupting what we’re doing.

How do you manage your business software and services on the Internet? With applications and connections spread across tens of sites it’s easy to get lost in a muddle.

We manage our business combination of software and services using a front page in Front Office Box. What’s in it?

• Planning and operations management (in FOB of course).
• Office systems, email, documents, etc. (Google Apps)
• Business and social networks. (Linked In, Twitter, Facebook, plus quite a few more).
• Publishing sites. (Our WordPress and Posterous sites).
• External services e.g. Web Analytics, Banking, etc.

We could organise bookmarks in folders, and use the browser software to open all the pages at once. That’s just the way we used to do the job, but it grew out of control. We now have more than 15 sites we’ll work with on a daily basis. That number could be a lot higher if we wanted to destroy our productivity, but we don’t. We want to spend as little time as possible managing our systems, so we have more time for clients, or golf, or having fun.

That’s why we added customisable external links to the Dashboard. Now all Front Office Box users can have their own window on the Internet -their own business systems mash up, and change it as their combination of software and services develops. It’s just a small thing, but important enough. It saves time and confusion, and that’s a double win as far as we’re concerned.

Here’s a short video showing how I use external links in my own Front Office Box. It’s not a demonstration. It’s a real business system managing a real business.

My Front Office Box Dashboard is the first place I go when starting work. That’s where I find all my reminders, can access my plans and relationships – and the front page to my Business Internet Mash Up of software and services.

Free business software seemed a good idea at the time. We had all these clever ideas about the cost of software dropping close to zero, and knew that would change the market for enterprise software. We wrote about our strategy and its experiment, finding out what the new business model would be for software.

At the heart of the strategy was an assumption. You would use our software (for free), and we would make money (not from you) because you were using it. We could make this work with an innovative approach to building and managing Front Office Box, keeping costs as close to zero as possible. You would want to use it because it does a great job, elegantly and simply. In fact you’d like it so much you’d tell all your friends about it, so we wouldn’t have any marketing costs either.

We were anticipating business software would follow the same path as social software (we’ll include Gmail in that bracket), and that’s where we made our mistake.

We managed to attract you from all over the world to our site, and persuade you to want a Front Office Box. We managed to get you to sign up for our free software.

But we didn’t manage to persuade you to use it.

Adoption was always going to be the problem – that’s been the case with software since the beginning of time. Every vendor has the same difficulty – thats why Microsoft software is so complicated. Its trying to do everything for everybody.

We have now definitively proved, to ourselves at least that the concept of free business software doesn’t work and never will. Social media marketing doesn’t work for business software, and never will.

Serious business people would rather pay for software (but not much of course). Tyre kickers sign up for free software, but they don’t have a need for it or the motivation to make the most of the opportunity.

Serious business people don’t hang out on Facebook, Twitter or Linked In all the time either, so they aren’t going to reached there. The people who do are looking for entertainment not ways to solve business problems.

So you didn’t take us seriously, because our business software was free. It seemed a good idea at the time but you just didn’t have a problem you needed to solve. That’s OK with us. We’ve learned a lot in the process. And from now on we’ll be charging for our services.

Front Office Box users will get:

• Multi user accounts they can administer themselves
• Great content offering our experience in sales, marketing, and small business management
• Our discoveries as we explore the business internet finding better ways to use it for business
• Access to our network of friends and other business associates

They’ll have to pay a modest fee for it of course, because you didn’t take us seriously when it was free.

Front Office is rapidly becoming a modern generic term. Everybody seems to be recognising the need to have a Front Office, but I wonder if they’ve done the extra thinking about processes and systems. Without the right philosophy and tools any Front Office is nothing more than a new name for the typical call centre, or service counter. And that’s quite often what happens when large organisations adopt new ideas. The only things that change are the words they use. Everything else remains business as usual.

Last week I came across the best example yet – a union official. He claimed the budget cuts being imposed on a particular government department wouldn’t only affect the notorious for waste Back Office. They would also mean reductions in the Front Office – the part of the organisation dealing with the public, providing those services we apparently need so badly. So now we have it – unions and governments recognise they have Front Offices too.

The term originally started in the hotel industry with the concept of the front desk. The theatre business adopted the concept with its Box Office morphing into the Front Office. Subsequently the idea spread through service industries into manufacturing, and finally into government.

Now we have the full picture. Organisations of all types recognise they have back offices where the internal processes are performed, and front offices where they interact with people outside their business, or department – where the external processes enable different interests to meet and collaborate.

The type of organisation doesn’t matter. Those external interests can be the public, customers, followers, partners and even supply chain. What does matter is those all have their own interests, processes and organisations. In the Front Office our systems have to allow us to interact with other people’s ways of doing things. That means they need to be flexible, and empower (not control) our sales and customer service staff.

In The Difference Between Back Office and Front Office we commented on an article written by CRM expert Denis Pombriant. In this blog you’ll find lots more comment about the need for flexible, enabling software in that space where customers run into bureaucrats who can only see the world from their own perspective.

We believe this stuff, and that’s why Front Office Box works the way it does. Not the way the accountants or IT guys want, but the way sales and customer service people need. It’s enabling technology – not a mechanism for management reporting.

One day the world’s going to realise the Business Process Re-Engineering movement got it wrong, at least as far as customer service is concerned. It’s impossible for any provider to decide which is the best process for customer service, because the customers are in control of that.