Lucky Promotion!
We hope that everyone had a great St. Patrick’s Day!!! Don’t forget about our St. Patrick’s promotion!
Until the end of March we are running a promotion for Compliance Archiving for 50% off! Please take advantage of this! The promotion will be valid on any new account that is signed up within the promotional period.
Simply use the coupon code that is located on the postcard that you will receive in the mail or email me, stephanie@ownwebnow.com to receive the code. If you have any questions just let us know!
Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
2007 End of Life, Almost…
Exchange 2007 is beyond the Standard support life cycle of Microsoft. With that in mind, we have to ensure that we continue to support the most redundant and supported platform(s) we can. Continuing to provide Exchange 2007 has been more of a courtesy to not put the burden of migrations on our partners because that’s something we always pride ourselves in. If we can avoid costing you time, we will, every time.
However, as we saw with Australia the 2007 technology just does not offer the level of redundancy we like to provide to our clients, so we have to make some changes to ensure that we’re providing the redundancy you and your clients deserve. As such, we’ll be migrating all users off of Scrooge, Huey, Dewey, and Europe. We will be providing an opportunity to remain on 2007 on Dewey in an as is format. We’ll support it, but the recovery process due to an outage is not going to resemble what we can offer on the 2010 clusters.
If you have clients that need to remain on 2007 please reach out to me or my team within the support portal so we can start keeping a record of exclusions. Unless you’re on DEWEY and want 2007 you’ll be migrating.
We are going to make the migration process as easy as we can. So far we have have it down to (if you have an autodiscover record) all you have to do is click “Repair” within outlook and run a tool we’ll provide and that’s it so this shouldn’t be an earth shattering process cost producing process.
Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737
Customer Service & Loyalty
If you own a business, I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the objective of your company is to make money. To do so, you must focus in on a majority of factors. One of which, is providing customers with satisfaction. Creating customer satisfaction with your base is the first step to making those customers loyal to your company. If you browse a bookstore long enough, you can find no less than hundred “how-to” books on customer satisfaction. This is because the authors of these books understand one key foundation in every business: Without customers, you have no business! With that said, there are simple pieces of advice that may seem trivial, but nevertheless, are the keystones to providing great customer satisfaction:
Be Nice
Listen to the Customer
Be Empathic to Customer Issues
Present Solutions to the Customer
This list may sound like common sense to you, but most of these items are neglected and are the top four complaints of customers. Good customer service is essentially a variation on the golden rule: Treat others as you want to be treated. If people believe that they’re being remembered and are recognized by the business, this will have a positive impact on the way they feel toward your business.
So why is this important to marketing? Because it is well known that it is five times more profitable to spend your marketing dollars to retain the customers that you have than to use the dollars to beat the bushes for new customers. Marketing to loyal customers makes selling your new ideas, services, and products much easier than if you had to obtain new business. This is one of the main reasons we closed down our Partner Program to new business. We wanted to concentrate of our partners who have been with us for a very long time. This is not to say that you should never expand your customer base, just remember who brought you to the dance in the first place.
The way companies can cultivate a strong customer relationship is simple: Keep in touch with the customer! Too many times, businesses do not take advantage of information provided by their customer base. This information can consist of email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, etc. These are customers who have had a great experience in the past shopping with your business, and no one ever contacts them again. One of the most common phrases around our office is: ‘Pick up the phone and give the guy a call.’ Maintain a strong communication with your customer base. Let them know what your company is planning for the future. Let customers in on special sneak peak offers, future products, or ideas that are in the pipeline. Get them excited!
Michael D. Alligood
Partner Sales & Support, ExchangeDefender & Shockey Monkey
michael@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x707
Becoming Your Own Financing Engine
As a pioneer and proponent in the hardware as a Service (HaaS) game for many years, one thing that was very apparent to me was the sheer profitability and revenue that can be generated from financing. In HaaS, the biggest problem is the amount of capitol it takes to provide that financing and the risks can be quite high.
The expectation in the model is to have a high enough percentage of interest to offset any potential failures, while still providing a hefty amount of profit. This model worked well as the HaaS vendor, but sometimes left very little, if any profit for the MSP if a deal went south. This could often times leave MSP’s holding the bag and responsible for the debt created.
Since the peak and slow decline of hardware sales, the MSP landscape has changed quite a bit. With cloud, services, installation, and support becoming more prevalent, the opportunity to revisit in-house financing has never been more apparent.
No different than the way we sold solutions in the HaaS game, the real value for the customer is bundling all needed components into a single payment option. This should include needed cloud products, services, all installation, as well as future support. By bundling the entire solution into a manageable payment, customers are more willing to sign termed or multiyear contracts, providing you a stream of recurring revenue to the business.
Most cloud solutions are subscription models, which takes much of the burden off the solution provider where financing is concerned. This leaves installation and support as the responsibility of the MSP. A good rule of thumb in calculating what to add to your bundled price is to take any costs you have a dividing them by a number. First determine your term, 12 months, 24months, or 36 months. Once you have this determine your comfortable payback, this can be anywhere between 6 and 24months depending on your contract term and comfort level. The equation should look something like this…
Add this determined number to any marked up subscriptions to determine your total customer monthly payment. In the above example you will break even at month 10. From there it is all profit. The same equation can be used for any hardware needs such as firewalls or BDR devices. It is a good idea to get a down payment at the time of signing a deal. Many MSP’s ask for a down payment equal to one month’s total payment but this can be anything you would like.
Becoming your own financing engine can be highly profitable and can help you close more deals. Make sure to consult with your accountant about any tax implications or requirements before providing any in-house financing.
Frank Gurnee
VP, Channel Services, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x4777
frank@ownwebnow.com
Breaking Business Rules
By definition, behavior is the actions or reactions of a person or animal in response to external or internal stimuli. Behavior is both innate and learned. This is why individuals can function is a civilized society while remain unique at the same time. Learned behavior comes as a result of experience. When an individual encounters an external or internal stimulus; the innate behavior is many times trumped by learned behavior—such as following rules.
The behavior that controls whether or not we follow or break rules greatly depends on the stimuli. If the stimulus is greater than the rule, we break the rule. There are times when rules outlived their usefulness. Or it may be that the end result outweighs the need to follow a rule that stifles progress. Although the majority may frown upon rule breaking, without such behavior the business environment (and humanity) would not progress.
Recently, I read an article titled, “Breaking the Rules” by Paul Sloane, author and founder of Destination-Innovation. In this article, he describes how businesses operate with boundaries and restrictions that are self-imposed and accepted without questioning. He further describes that often it is the newcomer to an industry who can ask the question, “What would happen if we broke the rules?” Mr. Sloane gives examples of companies such as Swatch, Virgin Atlantic, and Oticon who rewrote the rules of their respected industries to gain a competitive edge over their competition. Furthermore, Sloane touches on how Picasso broke the rules on what a face should look like and how Gaudi broke the rules on what buildings should look like.
In many ways, rule breaking allows companies to stand out from the competition, and innovate products and services, and make themselves endearing. Think Apple—pun intended. However, companies need to have its share of balance. Too much rule breaking can be worse than complete obedience to the norms. Let me be clear, I am not referring to moral, ethical, or legal rules; but to business rules only. You may need to examine your own business rules to determine if such rules are slowing productivity or halting it altogether.
Michael D. Alligood
Partner Sales & Support, ExchangeDefender & Shockey Monkey
michael@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x707
Spring Forward: Shockey Monkey
Yesterday we held our huge ExchangeDefender Spring webinar – thank you for the record attendance. If you missed it don’t worry, the recording is available here and all our webinars are available at the ExchangeDefender Social site.
But let’s talk about one of the highlights from our presentation yesterday.. Shockey Monkey.
We have spent an insane amount of time improving the product and have completely rewritten certain sections that have the “web app” behave like an actual desktop application. First of all, we have a lot of new eye candy and new themes that elegantly blend in all the elements of the UI.
As far as the UI goes, things are several times faster than they were before.
Additionally, we have some really cool transitions in place when you go from one module to another that give the browser a chance to catch up and render the page before displaying elements. As stuff gets loaded it fades into view and removes the old-school jumbled look.
We have redesigned the dashboard to focus on what is important. Your announcements on the left and your agenda, schedule, tickets and tasks on the right. Instead of crowding the dashboard and making you dizzy with charts, you start with what is important and everything is just a click away. All the elements can be quickly touched, modified and updated – allowing you to slice through your daily agenda without having to go back and forth just to get started with your day.
Speaking of your day.. we have a beautiful and powerful new calendar function that is in my humble opinion better than anything else out there – spanking even Outlook. My whole team is right there, all the appointments are dynamic and everything integrates with Exchange on the backend so all our iPhones, iPads, Outlook and even Android are completely in sync no matter where we are.
The dispatch center has taken a massive step forward while remaining simple and easy to use. Just assign the ticket to someone and then drop it on their calendar. Done.
Speaking of support, we are helping you organize that better. As we get more and more different businesses powering their operations with Shockey Monkey, the need to keep multiple service boards is there. As an IT company we used to only handle support tickets but then as other departments joined in the fun we started breaking out product boards, service boards, project boards.. even an internal service board just for staff to deal with me.
We have had a lot of customization requests to the look and feel of the service board ticket listing. Ton of it. But most of it is difficult to categorize and keep the level of simplicity in our setup… so everything you wish is being added and we are putting some more quirky features under the Experimental / Custom Features section of the setup and you can tweak the portal to your own content without making it complex at all.
For example, our advanced settings now allow you to highlight tickets that are assigned to you, stop your clients from being able to close tickets (if you keep them open for review or billing purposes) include ticket number in the ticket listing as well as who the ticket is assigned to.
Speaking of better organization… the key is to keep everything in Shockey Monkey. But what is the point of keeping it all in one place if you can’t find it? Well, Shockey Monkey now centralizes and filters your search results. So if you search for Vlad it will show you all the tickets, services, subscriptions, knowledge base articles – everything – in an easy to categorize and locate way. Not a huge meaningless list of contacts jumbled with companies and services if you know that you’re just looking for a knowledge base article.
Of course, ExchangeDefender Unicorn is now live and embedded into the product for all our partners. Yes, still free!
It’s gotten more powerful as well, supporting event templates, alert templates, escalation, workflows and remote desktop access.
Now while these features are great and tons of you have been asking for them… they are nothing compared to the biggest enhancement we have – a brand new Business/Corporate module.
It solves a need that no other solution out there has and it is uniquely small business.
Our employee portal allows employees and employers to manage goals, expectations, time off, time sheets, education, hardware that is being issued and far more.
For example, instead of dealing with employee reviews as an annual chore, you now have a way to create an ongoing automated way to set goals, track accomplishments and make career progress a part of the game.
You can also track all of employees education, certifications, licenses, titles or degrees.
Your employees can easily submit for time off and automatically land on the calendar upon approval.
Likewise, timesheets are automated and accountable – we tie in our checkin punchclock to keep the employees accountable for when they show up and when they leave and assure they report accurate time. Employers also have a way to see who is putting in more than they are expected to and that leads to rewards 
Finally..
The biggest pain that nobody seems to manage well is the people we pay – our vendors.
We all do a great job of helping our clients and tracking our interaction with them because that is what we are paid to do. But shouldn’t we be doing an even better job – providing a more prudent process – making sure we get the most out of the $ we pay our vendors? Without tracking, notes and an audit process you just don’t know.
Say hello to Shockey Monkey’s vendor section.
Track passwords, resources, notes, vendor personnel, web sites, youtube training videos, howto documents, forum threads with fixes and workarounds, links to download sites, training collateral login information. You name it.. then track it. In a centralized environment.
Shockey Monkey is all about small business. From IT to far and beyond IT, the product we have designed and delivered is running our partners businesses and is now branching out to provide reporting, recording and accountability to new industries. If you’d like to partner with us and deploy Shockey Monkey for businesses we would love to talk to you!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender
vlad@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x500
Chasing a Sale…
One of the hardest things for some people to do, especially tech minded individuals in the IT industry, is chase a sale. This single action can define an organization as a sales oriented company or tech oriented company.
Not that the two can not co-exist but the nature of chasing a sale brings an advantage that pure tech minded companies don’t possess. In the sales world chasers are called hunters, and account managers or people who wait for sales to come to them are called gatherers or farmers.
Generally tech companies without sales staff fall in the gatherer or farmer category. The phone rings an appointment is made, someone walks in with a problem a sale is made; you get the picture. Hunters or better yet chasers find opportunities and then chase the sale until either they close the deal or are told no. Even then a good chaser will make sure to reach out to a “no” client periodically to see if there is a change in status.
This is the major difference. Chasers are defined by the relentless nature to never give up, to never take no for an answer, and to continually follow up. It would be a lot for me to ask tech minded individuals or non-sales people to try to adopt these traits. The reality is that this can’t be expected as it is not in the majority of tech individual’s personalities to work this way. Of course that’s ok because without the techs there would be nothing to sell.
However, there are things that can be applied to a non-sales organization that can create that advantage that we talked about. The biggest one being follow up. You may be surprised to learn that most sales are lost immediately following the initial meeting. This is completely based on the inability or lack of immediacy and follow up.
Now you may think this sounds funny but think about a time in your past where you just did not get back to a potential client, you never provided a proposal, or you simply forgot. Don’t worry it has happened to all of us, and even seasoned sales professionals miss opportunities based on the lack of follow up.
One way to “keep it tech” while creating immediacy and follow up is to provide a simple thank you email when you get back to the office from an appointment. This lets the potential client know that you are diligently working on their proposal and provides you an open line of communication.
Once you have sent this initial email set a number of reminders in your calendar to reach out and follow up with the potential client. Though these reminders are easy to dismiss or overlook at least they will be keeping you on track. The better you can become at follow up the more sales you will close.
Chasing a sale doesn’t mean you are annoying the potential client and actually can be a very positive experience for both you and the client. Potential clients appreciate the communication, just don’t overdo it, and always provide them with anything you have promised, on time.
Frank Gurnee
VP, Channel Services, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x4777
frank@ownwebnow.com
ExchangeDefender & Shockey Monkey Spring Webinar
Remember all the doom and gloom predictions about how the cloud was going to put all the IT people out of work? Boy did it! The carnage brought on by cloud services has taken names like Dell and HP to all time lows, and has sparked rumors and reality of privatization. Yet, every partner I talk to is posting their best year ever, and is more excited about their opportunities going forward, even with the lackluster economy.
Success is not by accident. In our fast paced industry, success is a factor of the right tools, the right timing and the right partnerships – please read this newsletter, study it and call us. We want to help. The days of “selling” and thick gear margins are largely gone – clients are smarter, better informed, and more selective, but like all of us they are also busier and they want someone to handle the explosion of vendors they rely on for the modern workplace. Yes the technology is easier to consume but there is more of it and more ways to profit from managing it so the client doesn’t have to.
With that in mind, I would like to invite you to our Roadmap webinar next week. In this webinar we will discuss everything that we are working on and the things we see happening over the next 12-16 months.
Thursday, March 7th 2-3 PM EST
As with all our webinars this one will be recorded and available for download in the Webinar section of our web site.
Growth Continues
As some of you may remember, our hardware upgrade cycle began around Thanksgiving last year, and is scheduled to be complete in March. During that time, we have completely eliminated RAID from our Exchange environments, improved backup and redundancy worldwide, and bulked up our ExchangeDefender infrastructure for the growth we anticipate this year.
It has not been all good news (we had a Dell RAID failure in the middle of a migration affecting nearly 400 mailboxes), and our antispam detection efficiency slipped slightly due to the overtime put in on network management and growth. The good news though has been better than I ever expected. We now feature data center redundancy in all geographies we provide Exchange in, all of our Exchange 2010 systems feature 3-way redundancy through local copies/DAG, we provide clustered failover infrastructure with a lagged copy of all databases, as well we also provide a copy of those databases in a different data center. Our compliance products and LocalCloud have grown exponentially in 2012 allowing us to invest even more in gear and reduce your storage pricing. The scale and reliability that we are now able to offer is frankly unparalleled in the industry.
I know that maintenance, migrations, updates and upgrades are not fun nor easy to explain that it can take longer than a month to complete – those are the challenges of complexity and the massive scale that we work on. However, that scale is precisely why our platform is so reliable and why so many of you can leverage it to win competitively in the marketplace and not worry about servers, RAID controllers, patches and backups.
Specifically, our ExchangeDefender inbound nodes have 60% more capacity today than they did at Thanksgiving. Europe and Australia Exchange clusters now have data center redundancy. Louie, our Exchange cluster, is now on the same spec as our Rockerduck cluster – both with 3 layers of protection, both with data center redundancy. It’s not cheap but it’s cheaper than downtime and losing business – something I hope you remind your clients of when they get price sensitive about the solutions you provide.
New Stuff
Shockey Monkey is getting an upgrade next week, this update includes the new business management section, upgraded support area with private boards, new calendar / scheduling / dispatch center and an upgraded UI that is a few times faster than it was in the past. We are thrilled about this product and hope you consider joining over 100 partners that are currently selling Shockey Monkey to their small businesses clients.
Looks Cloudy, a site we sponsor and contribute to, is accepting nominations for the Channel Choice Awards in an attempt to recognize people that have helped advance our SMB tech industry. If you have a colleague, boss, partner that you would like to nominate please take a moment to get them the recognition they deserve.
We have a brand new billing system. This addition to Shockey Monkey has allowed us to automate the whole ordering, billing and collections system and consolidate entire months worth of billing updates and adjustments into a half day review process.
Finally, the most important development at ExchangeDefender that I need to let you know about: We hear you when it comes to training. Next month we will announce a new training program offered exclusively by us, over the web, live. The cost of travel, hotels, conference fees and most importantly – time away from the office – is leaving many of you and your staff away from the information that you need to succeed. I don’t mean training in a sense of a half-wailed sales presentation with minor educational content but a full schedule that you or your employees can sit down and benefit from immediately. Tune in to the webinar next week to learn more about this, we are very excited to be able to help you grow beyond our services.
Promotions
Feeling Lucky???? We are currently running a St. Patrick’s Day promotion!! For the entire month of March we will be offering Compliance Archiving for 50% off! Please take advantage of this great promotion. The promotion will be valid on any new account that is signed up within the promotional period. The promotional period for this offering will be March 1st – March 31st. So don’t hesitate! Simply use the coupon code that is located on the postcard that you will receive in the mail or email stephanie@ownwebnow.com to receive the code. If you have any questions just let us know!
Events
In the month of March we will be attending 3 events! Join us in our hometown of Orlando, FL for the XChange Solution Providers event! Then we will be headed up to Chicago, IL for the CompTIA Annual Member Meeting. Then we will be headed to Tampa, FL for the ASCII Success Summit! Stop by, visit us, and say hello, we will be giving away lots of prizes and promotions! We hope to see you on the road!
Feeling Lucky?
Feeling Lucky????
We are currently running a St. Patrick’s Day promotion!! For the entire month of March we will be offering Compliance Archiving for 50% off! Please take advantage of this great promotion. The promotion will be valid on any new account that is signed up within the promotional period. The promotional period for this offering will be March 1st – March 31st. So don’t hesitate! Simply use the coupon code that is located on the postcard that you will receive in the mail or email me to receive the code. If you have any questions just let us know!
Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
How to Build a Sales Team
Hiring salespeople can be one of the toughest endeavors for IT company owners, though a necessary part of growing a business. The process of hiring and the ultimate firing of salespeople can leave owners jaded and hold them back from investing or taking a chance on future salespeople. It is important to look for certain characteristics and demands that will provide red flags as well as look for indicators that speak to a good salesperson investment.
Homegrown Salespeople
The easiest way to hire a salesperson is to promote from within. There are a number of indicators that can speak to a natural talent within your organization. You may notice a person on your team that fits certain characteristics. 
Customer-Oriented
Commanding Personality
Task Driven
Less Detail-Oriented
These tend to be good indicators of the type of personality that fits a good salesperson. The best thing about promoting from within is that you tend to have the potential for a longer-term employee. It is important to take the proper steps to verify the chosen candidate is a good fit by utilizing several tests.
The first test is the TTI DISC Behaviors Test. DISC stands for Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance. This test will show the basic behavior types of the candidates that you choose. These behaviors are important to know as the basic fundamentals of personality come in to play when hiring the right person. An example is a person that is more dominant and influential is a better fit in a sales role than a person that is more steady and compliant.
The second test, also by TTI is the Sales Skills Index. This test, though more advanced, gives an overall indication of how a salesperson stacks up against other top performing salespeople. This should be used in scenarios where you are looking at outside candidates for the position. If you are interviewing candidates and have chosen some to move to the next stage of potential hiring, this test can weed out the ones who are truly performers, and the ones that are just good at performing in an interview.
If you find a good internal candidate, the next step is to get them trained. Start by gathering a couple books for them to read and master. Start with “The Little Red Book of Selling” by Jeffery Gitomer, “Questions Based Selling” by Thomas Freese, and just about anything by Zig Ziglar. These will be good introductions into the ins and outs of selling.
Books only go so far though and generally will not convert someone into a salesperson. For that you will need off or onsite training from a professional group, organization, or consultant. This is where the real investment comes in, but it is an absolute requirement to take an employee to the next level. These groups will help provide the basic fundamentals, deep dive into techniques, and provide role-play scenarios that can help mold a person into a sales role. Most good sales book companies have training workshops and certain IT conferences provide sales-based training at their events. The key is researching each of these, contacting peers to find success stories, and evaluating each to find the best type of training for your budget.
Another one of the tough parts for business owners is structuring a salesperson’s compensation plan. Overcomplicating a commission and compensation plan can mean lots of work for you as the owner or for accounting personnel, as well leaves lots of room for costly mistakes. Obviously each structure is based around your companies product and service set and will reflect your margins and revenues.
Most training organizations can help with compensation plans and this is another area to reach out to your peers. Look for other successful industry business owners and ask if they will share their compensation plan with you. Most non-competing business owners would be happy to share their information.
Hiring a salesperson is a difficult and time consuming endeavor but it is a necessary part of growing your business. Take the time and do it right and you will be building a foundation for a great and profitable team. Know ahead of time that there will be failures and those failures will have costs. Do not let these discourage you as it only takes one great salesperson to help springboard your revenues. Do your best to recognize talent from within your organization. Some of the best salespeople I have seen were plucked out of other roles internally, trained, and found new life long careers. Most of all don’t wait! The longer you wait to grow your business through sales, the more opportunity you are giving competitors to grow their businesses.
Frank Gurnee
VP, Channel Services, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x4777
frank@ownwebnow.com