Flint's Blog

You Know It's Time To Quit When...

My wife and I watched the movie Michael Clayton last night starring George Clooney as a lawyer who is the resident fixer for his firm.  Reasonably good movie but you have to pay attention. 

One of the law firm's big clients is in hot water for "allegedly" killing some farmers with pesticides (or something like that).  Don't you hate that every legal accusation has allegedly in it, is the criminal really going to sue you if you don't say allegedly?

Anyway, at some point, the client decides that they need to start killing some people who are getting too close to the truth. So I pause the movie and say to my wife - "I love running my company but if I ever start needing to have people killed, maybe that would be a good time to quit."

How Well Do You Really Know Your Customers?

I like to think that I've got a pretty good grasp on how our customers feel about the job Billtrust does for them.   I'm a big believer in Management By Walking Around which keeps me reasonably in tune with what's going on.  Two things happened this week that made me question whether I'm really as in touch as I think.

Everytime our sales team gets a new customer we make a fairly big production about "Signing the Contract".  I like to sign all the contracts personally.  Tom Scott, our VP of Sales, sends out an email to the entire company congratulating the salesperson and others involved.  And occasionally we will play a celebratory game of foosball.   Anyway, back to my point.  One of our salespeople was talking about a customer the other day and for the first time I couldn't recall whether they were a customer or not.  As far as I knew they were still a prospect that we were trying to bring on board.  So I asked myself, "Self, how can you know what your customers think about you if you don't even know who your customers are?"

Coincidentally, this was the same week that Mitch Rose, our VP of Marketing, sends out our annual customer satisfaction survey.  I like to read each of the individual responses and while I look at the rankings in the different areas, I always find the most value in reading the customer comments.  While the majority of the comments are positive, I can't help but focus on the negative ones.  One negative comment on any area is always a concern for me. Two negative comments on the same area is a trend and causes Flint the Nice Boss to turn into Flint the Boss From Hell who everybody avoids. 

The customer survey this year had a couple of interesting comments that reminded me once again that maybe I'm not as in touch as I thought I was.  If you don't survey your customers regularly, go to SurveyMonkey and do it right now.  Make sure you ask open ended questions and ask about how you're doing in areas that you know are your weakest.  You never know, you might just learn something.

Raising Money

Earlier this year I got to thinking about the number of times I've been involved in raising money.  My last company Paytrust raised 6 rounds of angel/VC capital (which was probably 4 or 5 too many!).  Billtrust took in a small amount of venture funding in 2006 to help accelerate growth.  Not once, however, in either of these companies did I participate in raising money for anything other than my company.  Seems sort of selfish in hindsight. 

Most companies with any sort of size or stature do something to give back.  This year we decided that Billtrust should be one of those companies.

The Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America (BBBS) is an organization that can best be described as awesome.  They help at-risk children who are in the need of one-on-one mentoring by a responsible adult.  Kids who participate in BBBS are more likely to graduate high school, less likely to do drugs, and less likely to commit a crime.  Basically they are more likely to lead happy and productive lives thanks to this organization.  This is particularly near and dear to my heart.  I grew up in a single family household and there were two men who took me under the wing as I was growing up.  They helped me get jobs, helped me pick colleges, helped me pick out suits for my first job, helped me in a similar fashion as BBBS.

Billtrust is under way with a huge company wide fund raiser for this great cause.  We're encouraging all employees to participate, we're giving out some great prizes, we built a web donation site.  I don't say this to brag, it's more of an about time we did something.

How can you help?  The best way is to volunteer as a big brother or big sister.  There are always kids in  need.  If you don't have time, a donation to this great cause I'm sure would help as well. 

Surprisingly Great Sales Effort

I try to spend a large portion of my time on sales so like a lot of other salespeople, I'm always intrigued by how others sell. 

If I'm buying a car I'll tell the salesperson that I'm in sales and give him/her the approach that works best with me just so we can skip a lot of BS.  If you've ever had a car salesperson go into the back to "ask their manager" if they can do something special for you, you know what I'm talking about it.  I'm convinced that car salespeople are given a book of sales tricks to use.

I went to Lowes last week with my wife to get some deck furniture to replace a table that smashed into a million pieces (what a mess).  My wife and I were blown away by the level of service we got from one of their people.  I had to track someone down but ultimately found somebody on the top of a big ladder.  She came over, asked us how she could help, located the deck set we wanted, got us a cart, and muscled it on to the cart for us. (I did offer to help with the last part but she was too quick for me).  To top it off, she even checked us out at the register.  My wife and I got to talking in the car about this since it was so outside of a normal Lowes experience. I told my wife that she was the Assistant Store Manager which I saw on her name tag.  I tend to notice these things.

Today I get a call on my cell phone from an unknown number.  My first thought is oh great, my cell phone number is on some telemarketer list, what a hassle.  I answer the phone and it's a man who says in a very professional voice "Hi, I'm Steve from the XYZ Landscaping.  We did some work on your property last year and we're just calling to see if there are any landscaping projects you could use some help on."  Well I just finished spreading 7 yards of mulch and made my annual promise to never tackle any landscaping project more than pulling a weed so there are LOTS of projects they could help me with.  This call couldn't be more timely.  He asked me what kind of projects, I told him some details, he asked for my email, and promised he would email me a quote.

Keep in mind this wasn't some professional Oracle salesperson, this was my landscaper!

This is called Proactive Account Management and is probably the easiest and most effective sales technique.  A lot of companies, including Billtrust, don't do anywhere near enough of this.  The main reason is that sales teams have compensation packages typically geared towards driving new business.  The incremental revenue for add-on sales doesn't make sales people enough money so they don't focus on it. 

If your company doesn't do enough Proactive Account Management, what are you waiting for?