Notes from the World Tour
Over the past month I’ve visited our partners around the world and talked to at least half the countries that we do business in. In case you’re curious, the mood worldwide is the same – from Chicago to Dubai, London to Sydney – business is hard but everyone is optimistic and working hard. We have some of the best IT Solution Providers in the world and I have no fear that everyone will triumph over the regional issues – my primary concern and point of all the trips was to understand what we can do to help our partners move faster.
My primary talking point was our new migration service: Why waste time on administrative and detailed work when we will do it under your name, your brand and process? It’s always thrilling to watch the reaction go from “that’s sounds nice but I think we have it under control” to “oh my god, I had no idea how much time we’re wasting” – so it was the profitable trip to say the least.
Here are some notes on my commitment for the rest of the year.
Partner communications – things have changed: If I had a penny for every time I heard “I didn’t know you guys did that” I probably would have brought more staff along with me and just left them there. I understand our portfolio is extremely broad but the change we are undertaking – from being a partner focused software company to being a service business – will be involving you a lot more in our process. One part that was particularly disappointing were questions about the issues that have been addressed years ago that still seemed like a problem. We will do our best to help drive partner involvement more in the coming year.
Product marketing – support goes beyond the product breaking: Last year was the record year for partner training and blog posts focused on business building. Pat on the back for all the praise I got for that. Partner feedback was quite clear that selling and positioning our services was quite easy, marketing and differentiating them requires more collateral. I hear you – while we have some comparative marketing collateral it is neither as organized nor easy to find. Most of it was put together for specific deals our partners worked on with us directly and honestly we can do a lot better. Next quarter you’ll see a major refresh in our marketing collateral as well as our process workflows that we’ve started sharing with our migration partners. Everything we do makes us better – except consolidating that information for mass distribution; we’ll get right on that.
User education – value beyond the essentials: The age old problem of users getting the solution and then severely underutilizing it is still there but it’s more prevalent these days because of the economy and general expectation for IT costs to be minimal. Almost everyone I spoke to said their clients have pushed for lower rates and even questioned why they were paying for certain services at all that they seemingly never used. Clients that use more than one feature, or are engaged with the product web services (think more web site visits, less email reports) have 9 times more stickiness to the product! Obviously we all have a vested interest in educating our clients about the solution they are paying for – and as we transition to a more service oriented business I expect we’ll help solve the real problem of why users aren’t relying on more of the solution: Someone has to do the work of rolling this stuff out and training everyone how to do it. We’ve got a plan for this as well and I look forward to sharing it with you.
In summary, this was an incredible trip. It was a pleasure and an honor to be invited to so many businesses and spend some fun time with so many of you as well. I got to bring my son along for the trip so he can see what daddy does, and particular shout out to Greg Lipschitz from Summit IT for taking us around to hang out with the local wildlife. Everywhere I go I am always told “things are different here” but in the end there are just nuances in business preferences – we all share the same annoyances, challenges, difficulties and also the same opportunities.
I appreciate the hospitality and look forward to sharing significant progress on the three points above on my next trip around the world. We certainly have our work cut out for us and the major global initiative as well as the service oriented business model will go a long way towards getting that done.
ExchangeDefender World Tour
Our world tour kicked off in Chicago in January and I’m about to leave Australia for Dubai. It’s simply amazing to see how well our solutions are received worldwide and how the migration product message resonates with solution providers worldwide.
Australia (Sydney & Melbourne) – February 3-8
Dubai – February 9 – 11
UK (London & nearby) – February 12-16
USA – All day every day
While we are primarily promoting our migrations service, the second most discussed solution concerns Compliance Archiving and helping companies deal with compliance and locating what is becoming a growing problem in businesses small and big: information overflow. I’ve been sitting down with partners and discussing common challenges they face in helping small businesses not only operate better but also manage the mountain of information they have built up. As one partner noted: “Years ago they had one filing cabinet for the whole company and a single person could locate any contract or agreement. Now each employee has dozens of cabinets of their own and discovering who said what and when is turning into a logistical nightmare”; I can personally relate to this a lot and I’m very happy to go over how we can help businesses manage this better and have a private Google of their own for the business intelligence they have collected.
The 365 Elephants In The Room
Technologically, I have nothing against Office 365. Exchange is Exchange no matter where it is. Even business-wise, I think their plan selection effectively separates big business from consumer levels.
My main message to partners and my biggest point of differentiation is that our solution is built for a business. From the ground up everything is designed, supported and documented in a way to facilitate business critical operations where one minor issue immediately becomes an emergency as the whole business runs on it. This is where our differentiation and our people and our process and our LiveArchive make an enormous difference and where we ultimately build our solution.
Unfortunately, many discover this differentiation once the consumer solution fails them. When they have to spend time on the phone waiting for support, or a random outage takes hours or days to resolve. At that point they realized they are running business critical systems on a consumer platform with the customer service and support that explains the low end pricing. Everything is great until you need something and then realize that what you have doesn’t fit your needs.
That said, the entry level Exchange and low pricing is not a compromise we will be pursuing. In all of my discussions with service providers these cloud services are already included in the managed services cost. How do more sophisticated partners handle inquiries about Office 365 or Google Apps?
We have a solution that uses exactly the same technology on the backend but it’s build for business by the partners that we have worked for years and we trust. In addition to what you see with Office 365 you also get 1 year of business continuity so when there is a service interruption you can continue to send and receive email. There is also encryption in the product as well as advanced junk mail management so you never miss important messages. And we should also discuss compliance.
Need a desktop version of Office? We can either get you a subscription for $99/year or buy one outright that you own.
It’s that simple.
Migrations = Revenues
It’s a thrill to hear how my message in the presentations across the globe resonates with partners. Everyone sees a different value in ExchangeDefender handling the mail moving portion of the job. Some see additional revenues. Some see decreased costs. Some see more customers faster.
Everyone sees the opportunity to grow. Which is why we chose to dedicate so much of our effort to it.
As I like to mention in my presentations, the secret to success and profits is two fold: “Either find a way to make your revenues by doing less, or find a way to sell more at a higher cost.” With pricing being the eternal argument, the only way we can make our partners grow consistently and quickly is by helping do more of your work. Migrations are just the start and we are doing remarkably well with it worldwide. With each project we get better and learn to manage expectations better and improve our process – something that our partners hopefully never have to go through again. With us handling Outlook/Exchange and partners managed offerings taking care of the user/desktop, the ability to move to the cloud quickly and grow your client base as fast as you can reach/sell them is simply a recipe to follow in 2014.
We are simply making it impossible for you to turn this down in 2014.
I’m happy to say that I’m hearing that loud and clear on two continents so far 
Now off to Dubai and Europe.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek