If you're like most small business owners, technological advances will leave you bewildered. From back-end infrastructure to customer relationship management, from cloud computing to hardware solutions, your head is probably spinning trying to decide what tools and technologies are best for your organization.
When selecting one or more business software, particularly if it is the first time you will make such a decision, it is often overwhelming. In this video, we will help you understand the basics of business software selection.
Head here and learn why a CRM should be the heart of your business.
Did you find this video helpful? Let us know by dropping a comment below!
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Transcription:
If you're thinking about implementing a brand new technology system in your business, or you're just choosing some different online software to use, there is an important point for me to make to you. And that is to stop. And let's have a think about things before you jump right into a new, bright, shiny object. Now, why is it so important for you to make sure you make effective decisions when choosing business technology? Well, because it's so disruptive to change further down the line. And it can also be quite expensive as well. And I don't want you to make a bad choice now that you're going to pay for later. Now. My name is Pete Moriarty, I help small and medium sized business owners with their technology strategy. I've been running a small business consultancy for over 10 years. And we've helped 10s of 1000s of employees across 1000s of businesses all over the world with their business tech. Now, we've grown and scaled the successful business by helping other business owners with its technology, but we also eat our own dog food. And we've had to help grow and scale our business as well. Now my reason for being here on YouTube is to give back to the community that has worked with us. And I love helping business owners, I'm semi retired in my business. And now for me, I get to do things I love, which right now is sharing this good stuff with you. Now, if you've not already seen our videos on our growth roadmap that takes you through the different stages of business, and how your technology strategy needs to move and shift as your business grows. And we take you through what are the important steps to make sure you get right at each stage of your business growth, if you haven't already checked out those and check out that video on how to grow your business. And also the video playlists on our YouTube channel. So you know, based on what stage of business you're at, where you should be focusing your attention. So let's talk about choosing business technology. And for most entrepreneurs, they hear something from a friend and they go ahead and dive straight into something new. And that's all the thought they put into it. Yes, this is new. And this is exciting. But I want you to kind of like, ease off the gas a little bit. And let's rewind and say okay, we have a business problem that we're looking to solve. Let's make some considered thought decisions here, before we jump straight into actually implementing a piece of technology. And before we find the perfect solution, which is going to solve all of our problems, I want to ask you a curious question or invite you to ask that question to yourself, what would version 1.0 of this technology look like? Now many business gurus will tell you that when it comes to technology and business, you need this, and you need that and you need everything, you need a CRM system, you need an amazing autoresponder, you need this thing on your website, you need this thing in your back office operations. And I don't always believe that we will take businesses through the growth roadmap. And we know that if you're a two person business, you probably don't need a big TV on the wall with your KPIs and live dashboards and statistics. Because you didn't even know what your KPIs are yet. And so different stages of businesses have different needs. And I want you to think about that with technology as well. And so if you've chosen to implement a piece of technology to solve a business problem, my question is always, Hey, could this be done on a spreadsheet? Could this be done as a version 1.0, just to get us out of trouble? While we make a really great technology decision, let's come into the part about actually making a decision, then, once we've got an idea of Okay, let's get really clear on what business problem we're trying to solve. And maybe we've attempted to solve it with a spreadsheet solution or the version 1.0. And that's been helping us go along for a while, we're going to get a bit of an idea of like, well, what are the processes surrounding this piece of technology? What are the inputs? What are the outputs? Which team members are involved in this? What do I really need to get as a result of this piece of tech, then we can start to think about the different criteria in which we would evaluate a solution. And so when we're really clear on a problem, we can then be really clear on how to solve that problem with a great solution. And this is kind of like consulting one on one, right? So decide on our criteria, I'm going to take you through some of the criteria that I use to decide on a piece of technology so that I know I can make really great decisions. And yes, this is a matter of just putting all of these options down on a spreadsheet, and then putting your different software solutions or your different proposed solutions there. And then working things out or maybe even point scoring your different solutions based on a set of criteria. Number one criteria for me is always betting on the right horse. And what I mean by that is if I'm choosing a CRM software vendor, or if I'm choosing an email platform, if I'm choosing a virtual phone system, I want to know that that company is going to be around because once I've implemented this piece of software, I want to make sure it gets updates, I want to make sure it just doesn't disappear. Because they run out of funding. I want to make sure that it's got great people behind it, and they're actually going to move the company in a great direction. And you know, the piece of software where it is now may be very different to where that piece of software goes in four or five or 10 years from now. And so, for me back in the right horse is really about Okay, well what kind of company is this? Where is it headquartered? Is it in Silicon Valley? Are they funded? Are they profitable? Who are the founders, what are the successes they had? And yes, I will literally looked at that level inside a company and a piece of software to see whether or not I think this is something worth putting my time into number two, I look at backing. And what I mean by that is one of the companies are involved in the periphery of this piece of software. Are they deeply integrated with Google? You know, some of the software that we work with commonly is actually on Google's recommended for workspace program, which means that it's been given the big tick by Google. And Google has vetted that software to be partnered closely with Google, and therefore giving a lot more credibility than something else that's not a part of that program. What kind of financial backing is behind this company? Have they got heaps of money in the bank so that they can actually effectively grow the business? Or are they a bootstrap startup that might run out of money and have to send a sorry, email to everyone were closing up or even worse, disappear out of the blue, potentially losing valuable data of yours in that process? Number three, I look at the future potential and the future potential is okay, where is this business going? Has it reached its product maturity? Or are they still ambitiously building new features, and able to excitingly take the product in new directions, that's the kind of business that you want to look for. But you probably want a balance in that if you're starting off with a piece of software, and it's superduper. Early days, well, there might be risks associated with that, even if they've got a great team there, they might take the product in a direction that you're really not wanting where you want it to go somewhere else. And so I try and find a product in the middle band of its actual development in terms of the product lifecycle, next up is competition and alternatives. And that's looking at what other options are out there in the marketplace. For many of us, when we stumble across a new application, like zoom, or we log into something like slack.com, and we go, wow, this is a great app, we never even think if there's potentially other options out there, that might be good to consider. They might have different features, they might have different pricing, they might have a different way of working with the app that just works better for our workflows. But if we're only ever having the tunnel vision of looking at one solution, then we don't really get a rounded perspective of what else is out there. Number five, is integrations and integrations for me are really about how well is this going to gel with the rest of my tech ecosystem? And my God, this is my probably my number one criteria, does it have an API? So we can have our tech team actually connect to it and extract data? And then visualize that in Google Data Studio? Will it allow me to have a shared database with our other systems so that if we have a new customer record created in our customer database, we can have that automatically flow into this system? Do they talk to each other? And do they make my team's life easier? Or are we gonna get stuck with data entry, double handling between two different systems, integrations are super important. And one of the easiest metrics to check for integrations is does it connect to zapier.com. If it connects to Zapier, then you've got a pretty good chance that they're open in their policy and open in their desire to connect with other applications. Now, the next one, and this is one to watch for is vendor lock in, can you get your data out? Now, this is not always the case of the business, you know, going bust or something going wrong with the platform. But this is just what's the ease of getting your data extracted from the program. We're a customer of zero.com. And it's an amazing platform for online accounting. But there's no easy way for me to extract all of my data, it doesn't come out in a database that I can manipulate and put into another system, I would have to run reports and recreate my accounting in another system, if I chose to move to something else. Now, that's got me locked right into that system, which means I'm pretty much stuck in one place, unless there was an amazingly compelling reason for me to move. Now, that's not the kind of thing that you want to have happen two or three years down the line with something like a CRM system where you're tracking all of your customer directions, and all of a sudden, you need to move to a different platform, because all of that data will need to somehow be extracted. And that might have to be by hand. And so vendor lock in is really important to make sure that you manage that. And you take a look at what is it going to look like if in some future time I need to pull this data out and actually change how I'm working with moving to another app. So remember that, that pain of removal is really great if you're a software vendor, and we want to work against that and go, Okay, what options do I need to take to be prepared to move my data if I need to, or just make a better decision at the start, so you don't get stuck with that in the first place. Now, lastly, it comes down to price. And this is not the only factor but a very important factor. What's the price market of this application right now? But also, how will it be priced as we scale? as we add more team members as we add more features as we have our needs grow? Do we need to bump up to a higher tier plan which is going to cost us more? or How much is it going to cost per employee that I hire and hopefully you've done some kind of basic financial modeling and you get a bit of an idea of how many people you will need to employ in your business with that apply the pricing model of the software that you're looking at and decide okay, well what's this going to look at as we scale. So for you to bring all of this together with betting on the right horse, making sure they've got good backing, making sure there's future potential in the product. Looking at competitions, checking for integrations, making sure the vendor lock in isn't too crazy, or at least it's palatable. And finally looking at price, including your scale pricing, how do we then make a great decision on choosing a piece of business tech? Well, it's pretty simple, we put it all on a spreadsheet. And we turn that into a decision matrix. And we take all of the different solutions that we have available. Remember, we're doing our competition and alternative search. So you should have lots of different solutions that you're evaluating. And from there, we rank and rate each one of those on the criteria that we're looking for, you can give them a score out of 10, if you want, and you can maybe even make some notes on where they're great and where they maybe fall down. And from there, we can make a great decision on technology. Remember that the reason we want to make a great decision now is because a stitch in time saves nine. And what that means is when we make the right decision, now we don't have to get stuck with the disruptive energy of change later down the line. hope that's been helpful for you. And I hope that's triggered some thinking. If you're someone who suffers from bright shiny object syndrome, which is myself being an entrepreneur, I absolutely understand the challenge. And so this is your way of making great decisions when you're choosing a piece of tech. And if you need support with that, and you may be interested in a consult with our team, jump on the link below. If you're a business owner, and you qualify, you're gonna have a chat to our team about a piece of technology that you're interested in implementing whether that's Google workspace, or a CRM system, or maybe an online phone system, or maybe you're looking for a shared inbox to deliver great customer service to your customers, our team can help. We've seen it all with small business owners, anything to do with the technology landscape, we will be able to help you out and you can jump on that link below. Now if you're a user of Google workspace, we also have an amazing free offer where you can transfer your billing to us cost you nothing extra and you get an amazing bunch of benefits. You get access to our Google Classroom, which has free videos on workspace and getting the most out of your investment, as well as other exclusive videos like getting your inbox down to zero. Learning how we run a multinational multimillion dollar remote, remote business or working from home. It's multiple millions of dollars of revenue and 50 people and how do we make it all work? Well, it's all in our eight week remote work playbook. And that is inside our portal. So if you're interested in getting access to that, click on the link below for the transcript in offer and all the details are on that page. catch you in the next one and remember to LIKE subscribe, and drop any comments down below this video and I'll do my best to answer them. Take care.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
