Modern Enterprise – Process – Support

Support comes in the form of various flavors. In my opinion it’s any thing to do with servicing customers or prospective customers.

Pre-Sales Support – If someone wants to buy a complex product or service, Pre-sales support may convince them that your company is the right one. This may be in the form of sales engineering or
consultation to help them find out if your solution is the right one.

Customer Service – After they ate your customer, how are you taking care of them? Is there an account executive always looking to talk to them? Are there ways for them to contact you and get help with their billing issues? Can they voice concern regarding the product?

Technical Support – Like most Internet companies there will be a part of the product or solution that needs to be supported with a technical team. Support can be delivered at Tier 1, 2, 3, 4. Tier 1 is the initial support that can be possibly answered by someone who had access to a knowledge base. Tier 2 is a level above and can help people trouble shoot problems with some experience with the product. Tier 3 is the best support a company can offer from within. Tier 4 is support from outside the company.

Each of these different types of support can be supported with software and systems.

CRM

Trouble Ticket System

Wiki/ Knowledge base / Blog

Call Center

Support keeps customers happy. Don’t forget to make sure they have a way to get to you. Today’s world now mandates that you see what they maybe saying about you on the social web.

Rahul Singh | Internet Architect

To empower people through the Internet to create a better world.

Anant | http://anant.us
1010 Wisconsin Ave NW, Suite 250
Washington, D.C. 20007

o 202.390.9200 | m 202.390.9200
s mr.rahul.singh

Modern Enterprise – Process – Distribution

How is it that you can go to the grocery store and pick up bananas 365 days a year without being in tropical climates or having a green house in your back yard? Distribution. Product distribution is how “things” we buy are delivered to us. Digital products are delivered over the Internet but it was not always this way. We used to go to the store to buy CDs for software because the Internet was at that time too slow to handle the delivery. Nowadays we don’t even download the software, but rather run it off of the “cloud.”

Product distribution has many possibilities on the internet. Due to the nature of digital goods, there are almost infinite ways that they can be taken from the source and delivered to the destination.

1. Direct
- Sold directly on the site of the producer, this is the best way to make money on the Internet. He producer sells the product for their price without any transaction costs other than credit card fees.

2. Indirect
- Through a market place such as Amazon, EBay , or Etsy

Although these are middlemen, they facilitate distribution. They put the product on a network where many people are coming to.

- Through another value added reseller who takes the product and sells it as part of another product.

If the digital product helps others achieve their goals in delivering their products or services, the third party reseller can sell on your behalf over and over again.

Rahul Singh | Internet Architect

To empower people through the Internet to create a better world.

Anant | http://anant.us
1010 Wisconsin Ave NW, Suite 250
Washington, D.C. 20007

o 202.390.9200 | m 202.390.9200
s mr.rahul.singh

Modern Enterprise – Process – Production – Making something that people want.

Products can be digital or physical. The production of either is a Multi step process. I personally only know how to create digital products having worked with the Internet for well over a decade.

Today’s Internet products are getting to be more and more complex. Whole books are published about the production process.

I can’t even begin to expand on a “simple” process. Here is a thought I had a while ago.

Making something that people want.

What is business? Quite simply, a business is an entity that produces goods or provides services that other people or businesses want enough that they are willing to pay money for those goods or services. This describes every business in the world.

Knowing this, when you start creating a business, you must ask yours “what is the value proposition” of my company and “which customer segment wants my value proposition.” If your “customer
segment” doesn’t want your “value proposition” why are you in business? Why are you wasting their time or yours?

A value proposition could be something that makes someone’s life easier. It could make a business more
efficient. The customer segment could be the masses, or alternatively a very small part of the population. A focused value proposition that satisfies a need or a want for a specific customer segment has a better chance at succeeding than one that doesn’t. Im not saying that an unfocused product meant for the masses is going to be impossible to sell. I’m just saying that the product better be amazing or you better have a ton of money to market it.

It is easier to sell one solution that solves a problem for specific group of a 100 people than it is to sell 5 solutions to 500. The first thing you do as a business and who you do it for is the first thing you MUST figure out before anything else.

Rahul Singh | Internet Architect

To empower people through the Internet to create a better world.

Anant | http://anant.us
1010 Wisconsin Ave NW, Suite 250
Washington, D.C. 20007

o 202.390.9200 | m 202.390.9200
s mr.rahul.singh

Modern Enterprise – Process – Aggregating and Curating

Aggregating and Curating is a process which adds a lot of value to people within and outside your company. I call it aggcurating. I made up the word because i was explaining the process to more than one person repeatedly over the course of the last 3 years.

The process is simple.

1. Aggregating – This process can be done properly with the help of many tools such as Yahoo Pipes, Google News Reader, WP Feed, or Managing News. The goal is to collect news using RSS feeds or other standardized data formats that are relevant to your business and can educate your business social graph.

2. Curating – Curation is what differentiates a museum from a warehouse (see Rework). I like this comparison because even though there is unlimited information out there that your social graph can distracted with, you want to provide a museum like place which is the best and most applicable to them.

2. Co/Create – Use the create and publish process defined before to create something new.

3. Broadcasting – After you have a great mix of new and aggcurated items, broadcast using all means.

Rahul Singh | Internet Architect

To empower people through the Internet to create a better world.

Anant | http://anant.us
1010 Wisconsin Ave NW, Suite 250
Washington, D.C. 20007

o 202.390.9200 | m 202.390.9200
s mr.rahul.singh

Modern Enterprise – Process – Converting a Visitor to a Web Lead

The process for converting visitors to a web lead is one if not the primary purpose of a company’s web site. Marketing is sales in mass. Hence the design of a website is a sales and marketing process. The process is not simple, but it can be broken up.

1. Create distinct calls to action that are on the front page in a major way and on every page in a minor way.

2. Design wireframes and test them with people. Ask them to comment on whether the calls to action are clear.

3. Create specific landing pages that target people that are looking for specific terms on search engines or are the landing pages for an email marrying campaign.

4. Integrate the lead form with your CRM and kick off a sales process that gets someone to pay attention to that lead immediately.

5. Follow through with the sales process for web leads. If you are selling something that is not purchased on the site, it’s crucial to follow up. If they bought something, call them to say thank you.

This is way oversimplified, but the goal is to give people actions that they can take.

Rahul Singh | Internet Architect

To empower people through the Internet to create a better world.

Anant | http://anant.us
1010 Wisconsin Ave NW, Suite 250
Washington, D.C. 20007

o 202.390.9200 | m 202.390.9200
s mr.rahul.singh

Modern Enterprise – Process – Publishing and Broadcasting an Article

One of the best ways to market a service or a product is to publish and broadcast an article that helps people by educating on a subject and also showing that the writer knows what they are talking about. Writing and publishing builds authority for a person and a company.

Here’s a simple process

1. Create an outline for what the firm does. This outline gives you a topic list of subjects that you can potentially write about.

2. Create a schedule that you will execute on. Whether you are writing a landmark article that will be published in the Harvard Business Review, or a series of blog articles that you are publishing on your site, you must create an keep the schedule.

3. Draft posts on all your topics and subjects. They don’t need to be perfect. You just need see what you know about and compare it with what other people have published.

4. Differentiate each post or article with better research, ideas, or a new idea. Being different is what gets you noticed.

5. Edit the article for the media that you are publishing for. Different methods work for different media. Blogs are better drafted in short pieces vs. printed articles.

6. Publish and broadcast. Use Email, Social Media, blogs, etc. Don’t underestimate social media and the power of viral marketing.

Keep repeating the process. Make sure that people give you feedback and that your articles help people
In addition to showing off your talent.

Rahul Singh | Internet Architect

To empower people through the Internet to create a better world.

Anant | http://anant.us
1010 Wisconsin Ave NW, Suite 250
Washington, D.C. 20007

o 202.390.9200 | m 202.390.9200
s mr.rahul.singh

Modern Enterprise – Process – Conversion of Prospect to Client

Rainmaking is the king of all processes in business. If you can’t sell, it won’t matter how good the product or service is. How can you convince your prospect to buy? How can you get them to say yes? There are several great books that talk about Sales, and closing the deal is the hardest but most sought after goal in business.

If we’ve done our other Pre-sales processes well, our preparation will have placed us at the right time and the right place to make our move to close the deal.

1. Believe in your solution – If you don’t believe that your solution can actually help the person either solve a pain or gain a pleasure, you need to walk out. Trying to sell them for the sake of selling them, is not going to make them a first time return customer or a recurring customer.

2. Convey the message earnestly – You dont need a tablet pc, a projector, amazing slick folders, and a Mont Blanc pen to convey your message. Your message should be simple. Your message should resonate from the mission of the company. Your message should be a simple promise that you can actually deliver with the help of your product or service team. If you can’t, then leave immediately. The tablet, projector, and slick collateral can help, but if you can’t sell using your own words, no amount of lipstick will make a pig look pretty.

3. Create a sense of urgency – People buy when there is a sense of urgency. This doesn’t mean that you tell the client the world is going to end, or that they are lost without you. It just means that you have to show in some way that the offer will expire. Not all offers can stick around to perpetuity. It’s not in the best interest to leave an open ended offer. This can be done differently for different types of sales. E.g. A discount now, vs a higher price later; Availability to deliver the service based; Availaibility of product.

4. Close the deal – Make it easy to close the deal. This means that whatever they have to do after saying yes has to be simple. Using e-Signatures helps. Complicated contracts don’t help, but having standard ones for every client means that you don’t have to waste time after agreement to buy. Keeping a simple contract process will make you and the client better off.

Rahul Singh | Internet Architect

To empower people through the Internet to create a better world.

Anant | http://anant.us
1010 Wisconsin Ave NW, Suite 250
Washington, D.C. 20007

o 202.390.9200 | m 202.390.9200
s mr.rahul.singh

Modern Enterprise – Process -Conversion of Lead to Prospect

There are plenty of contacts that will never become a lead in your CRM. They have potential, but potential is nothing without momentum. There are plenty of leads that will never become a prospect because there is no momentum from your side or theirs.

If a lead is someone who has is a potential client, vendor, or partner, then what is a prospect? A prospect in my opinion is a lead that we have invested some time in getting to know them and
potentially helped to define and refine the opportunity that we can work on.

How do we decide if a lead becomes a prospect? Here’s a simple process.

1. Determine the ultimate decision maker – if you cant figure out who is making the decision on cutting that check, your lead is not a prospect. Even if they have an opportunity, it can’t go anywhere unless you know who you are trying to persuade to buy your service.

2. Refine the opportunity -
If the opportunity is already defined, refining it may mean asking true right questions, meeting more people to get institutional buy-in by showing that you care about their opinion.

3. Create and deliver a proposal – This could be as simple as a one page estimate with line items and a total or a full fledged proposal which spans 10-100 pages depending on complexity.

Once delivered, the next process starts to close a deal – to convert a prospect into a client, vendor or partner.

Rahul Singh | Internet Architect

To empower people through the Internet to create a better world.

Anant | http://anant.us
1010 Wisconsin Ave NW, Suite 250
Washington, D.C. 20007

o 202.390.9200 | m 202.390.9200
s mr.rahul.singh

Modern Enterprise – Process – Sales – Converting Contact to Lead

One of the people I share the office suite is self-employed and works with another person in a partnership. This two person company survives because they come to work everyday and make sure that they
continuously look for opportunities to close into deals. We chat every now and then and Jake has a saying which I’ve adopted : “We eat what we kill.” In business, we are hunters. The opportunities don’t come knocking on our door. We have to seek them out.

One of the true and tried methods for starting the process is to use ones personal and professional contacts to start the sales process. Each contact has the potential to be a lead. What is a lead?

A lead is a contact with an opportunity which has a monetary value attached to it. If they don’t have an opportunity, the person is just a person in your rolodex or address book. What gives them reason to on a lead list is simply the fact that there is a remote possibility of them spending money on something you have to offer.

How do we decide if a contact becomes a lead? Here’s a simple process.

1. Initial contact – Request a conversation face to face, phone call, web meeting, etc. Its important to get this conversation. By talking to them and understanding what the person has been up to, you might be able to put together what their company is up to.

2. Initial conversation – Utilize this conversation to ask questions. We have a script that can be changed around to get the same result. We’re determining what category they fall into. Are they client, partner, or vendor leads? Not all contacts need be client leads. If they are not client material, maybe they can help in the future.

3. Defining the opportunity – If the lead is willing to entertain a collaboration where money may change hands, they are a lead. This is when they go in the CRM of your choice.

There are different CRMs for different people. If you can’t afford to pay 10-20/month for a price of software that helps your business, use Google Spreadsheets which is free until you can. If you think that a recurring cost of software is too much, you’re living in the wrong times.

The lesson here is that you need to know who your leads are and what makes them your leads. Even if you have a list contacts in your target market, they are not a real lead until they have an opportunity value.

Rahul Singh | Internet Architect

To empower people through the Internet to create a better world.

Anant | http://anant.us
1010 Wisconsin Ave NW, Suite 250
Washington, D.C. 20007

o 202.390.9200 | m 202.390.9200
s mr.rahul.singh

Modern Enterprise – Process – Research & Development

I could write a book just on research and development. How to do it, why to do it, and who to do it with. In no small part, R&D is the differentiator between mediocre companies and those that excel. For me R&D is Inclusive of Human Capital Development.

Here are a few of many processes. What makes these different from other work is that it costs money but is an investment into the future of the company.

Research

1. Market Research

2. Technology Research

3. Operations Efficiency Research

Development

1. Human Capital Development

2. New Product Development

3. Business Process Design

Each company’s research and development efforts will be different but is equally important for all. Without a new set of products and services for the future in the lab, a company is digging it’s own grave.

Rahul Singh | Internet Architect

To empower people through the Internet to create a better world.

Anant | http://anant.us
1010 Wisconsin Ave NW, Suite 250
Washington, D.C. 20007

o 202.390.9200 | m 202.390.9200
s mr.rahul.singh