Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Monkey time. Today at 9:00 AM EST we will be launching Shockey Monkey 3. This means that even those of you in the Asia/Pacific region will get to enjoy better business productivity for at least a few hours before the world ends. This blog post will self-destruct in a day and I will claim that my “Princess!” password was hacked so enjoy.

Here is the game plan:

Beta testing has been completed, databases have been extended and upgraded to Shockey Monkey 3 schema.

At 9:00 AM EST we will be starting the rsync process. Updating thousands of portals is expected to take a moment. You’ll know when you’re on 3.

At 9:01 AM EST we will be opening this bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue. Yes, seriously… I know, I know, I know, I can’t believe it either. I admit it. I have a problem. I am seeking counseling over it. It has caused me to really mess up at work, my emails and chats sound like that of a drunk neanderthal, I have been missing deadlines and the quality of my work has gone straight to crap. It’s a problem and the first step is admitting it. So I admit it. Yes, that is a Microsoft Surface type touch keyboard that you see behind the scotch. I’m sorry. I know it has hurt many people in my life and I hope we can focus on the positives – that so few of them were sold.

At 1 PM EST we will be holding an obviously drunken webinar to talk you through the launch, what works, what doesn’t work, when things will be fixed, the thickness of the rope used to tie down dev monkeys to their desks fixing bugs through Christmas and New Years if need be.

Launch Webinar: Drunky Monkey (NSFW)

1PM EST Today

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/566871544

At 3 PM we have an EOY meeting, 4 PM Staff meeting, 5 PM Texas de Brazil meeting.

At Midnight…. well, Mayans.

In the meantime, should you encounter any issues please just do what Spungebob tells you. Click here.

Last week we held the launch webinar for our ExchangeDefender partners and existing Shockey Monkey clients. If you’d like to take a look at it the recording is here. If I had to sum it up, SM3 is above and beyond what you need to manage an SMB company. Not just an IT business but any business – which is a huge area of opportunity for our IT partners – you can now sell the entire business system complete with the cloud services, management platform and your IT solution management under your brand, your price, your model and deliver a true end-to-end experience. I think that is something that will separate IT businesses that will survive from those that do not as they chase one fad after another and eventually get consumerized. But enough of my babbling, let me introduce you to some features. I have covered Marketing, Sales, Opportunities, Agreements and Proposals.. and now let’s talk about managing the company itself.

Corporation

The first thing about starting a business is a dream.

Everything you do after that – incorporation, bank accounts, employees, HR policies, hiring employees, issuing equipment, managing open positions, documenting accomplishments and reprimands, managing vendors, managing solutions, managing – is rolling the dice and hoping you’re doing your best given the limited insight and time you have. We’re not reckless but small business is that of limited resources and sometimes you make mistakes.

Shockey Monkey Corporate tab was designed with one goal in mind: deliver consistency and fairness in management over time. It’s simple, most small businesses that succeed initially do so because of a small, talented team that takes great care of it’s clients – but as that business grows making sure that everyone is on the same page all of the time becomes difficult because there are only so many jobs one person can do. While one person can manage things effectively in a startup and everyone can fill out a 1020S or 1140, things change a few million later when you need to be a part time IRS ninja at the same time as trying to motivate your employees to do what you want them to do.

Fair warning: This section of Shockey Monkey is GIANT. I cannot do it justice in one blog post and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. But even this 10% effort we’ve made here will make you 90% better off than most other small businesses out there.

We’ve read tons of business, management, leadership, communications, HR, etc books through the years and we’ve also made enough mistakes over the 15 years in business that we’re probably better off writing a book about about them than software.

That’s the catch – anyone can give you a list of steps and procedures and standards to follow when you hire a new employee – but if there is nothing to keep you accountable then there is no real penalty for not doing your job. And if you can ignore your responsibilities without penalty then the likelyhood that you will “remember to do it” at some point in future “when you have some time” will almost certainly be “never” and that’s something Shockey Monkey makes sure you don’t get the chance to do.

Business.. everyone is involved

Corporate management is much like corporate leadership – someone has to set an example and everyone is expected to document what is going on. I don’t have to ramble on about what happens when employees leave or when new employees come into roles that have never existed before – if you do it, write it down. End of conversation.

Problem is that nobody has a really sophisticated area to write things down when it comes to business process, only techies are good at maintaining somewhat-referenced knowledge bases. Now all SMBs do too – thanks to Shockey Monkey… and it can’t be easier, as a matter of fact it’s the very first tab:

All of my critical stuff is there. My business, my profile, my projects, my schedule (which now syncs both ways with Exchange w/o software installation of any kind and works in the XD cloud with all ActiveSync devices for free – you’re welcome!) – everything I need to get the job done is here.

But what happens when I get my first (or eighty first) employee? How much will I have to manage them? Far less than you would have to without Shockey Monkey. Just add them in:

Then assign the system to manage them for you. Let Shockey Monkey know when to expect them to show up for work, who they report to (and who will be approving their time sheets), their job description, benefits, perks..

Just tell them to punch in and out when they show up for work and when they leave.. couldn’t be simpler, you’re ready to work when you’re in front of your PC with it powered on and you can type in your username and password. Check in!

This is so that every week or every two weeks when their time sheets are due they can document when they showed up and what they did – which they are required to every time they come to work every single day – because Shockey Monkey is also a time punchclock. Oh, you were supposed to be here at 8:00 but showed up at 8:28, go ahead and explain why…

System keeps employees accountable.

Employers and managers as well. Want some time off? Go ahead and make a simple request:

Got equipment or doctor notes or parking violations or other items that we need to track as a part of your career? Fine, let’s upload them to Shockey Monkey, not stick into piles on my desk:

Managers have responsibilities too… track laptops, smartphones, tablets, cars, gym memberships and everything else we’re giving to our employees:

Finally… self management and self motivation.

If I could get away with running the Own Web Now empire by myself in my PJs I totally would. Over the years I’ve become accustomed to certain millionaire luxuries as a small business owner such as 6 hours of sleep almost every day, more than one calendar day per year when I’m not involved in putting out a fire, not being woken up at 2AM in the morning because something blew up in Austrlia.. Just kidding, you’ll never get to sleep before 3AM if you own your own SMB.

So you need employees. But can you only hire and retain the best of the best, or do you just need a few really competent accountable people surrounded by a bunch of assistants? Even better, what is your hit/miss ration when it comes to thinking you hired a go getter and ended up with someone with expectation of bankers hours?

Shockey Monkey let’s you set goals and let people live and die by their effort. If you want to do the bare minimum for your job then you’re quite welcome to keep it so long as you don’t cause problems. Minimum effort = minimum incentives and raises. But show me that you’re capable of doing more and you’ll be rewarded.

How do you manage that? Well, not effectively… but with Shockey Monkey 3 you get to. Set milestones and goals for your employees and write them down in the monkey. Let the employees know what they can have in 6-12-18 months if they become more valuable to you and let them earn it.

As they do – they can document their new experience, education, certifications, etc. Show me.

It’s that simple. I cannot do this system justice in one blog post but I hope that the screenshot onslaught is proving the fact that: It’s there, it’s simple and you have no excuse not to use it!!!

It’s also something that applies to any SMB and all SMBs.. and if you only buy Shockey Monkey for this one thing it will more than pay for itself many times over if it just helps get one employee from riffraff to a star. It’s also something that’s dead simple to present and sell to a client that needs Shockey Monkey because if you can find me a business that has this all figured out you’re either looking at a liar (or maybe HR consultant is less offensive of a term) or someone that’s outright delusional.

Point is, as a small business owner or manager you need to focus on the business but you also need to keep an eye on the operations. You cannot do both effectively without Shockey Monkey and that’s why we’ve built it.

Corporate Summary

Small business owners, managers and stakeholders largely feel like they need to get a better grip on the accountability of their employees – all while spending more time and money trying to keep the house in order. Overworked, underappreciated and distracted company with poor communication cannot go forward effectively.

We spent more time and money on research and development of the Corporate features in Shockey Monkey because for the past 15 years in business we haven’t had a system or a software solution to manage us all. We had dozens of applications, portal, sites, packages, consulting engagements and audits all of which addressed one limited area of the business while the communications overall suffered… we felt great about every single one of these investments heading into them (because the premise is great) but without a framework to keep the entire company organized the effort is usually a waste.

With Shockey Monkey we have built a system to help you avoid every single management mistake and miscommunication we have made ourselves. We’re giving it to you for free. If there is a legacy to Own Web Now, ExchangeDefender and Shockey Monkey it’s not just that we’ve learned from our mistakes but that we’ve done the one honorable thing in business – helped other businesses avoid mistakes.

We don’t want you to be more successful by putting in more effort, we want you to be more effective at managing your business by simply enjoying your job.

Note: Shockey Monkey 3 will be automatically rolled out to all existing Shockey Monkey portals on Thursday, December 20th, 2012.

We will be holding a Shockey Monkey 3 launch webinar tomorrow at 1PM EST.. Watch us drink Johnnie Walker Blue Label while we walk you through our new product and give you an idea of all the areas we’ll be attacking next:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/566871544

Last week we held the launch webinar for our ExchangeDefender partners and existing Shockey Monkey clients. If you’d like to take a look at it the recording is here. If I had to sum it up, SM3 is above and beyond what you need to manage an SMB company. Not just an IT business but any business – which is a huge area of opportunity for our IT partners – you can now sell the entire business system complete with the cloud services, management platform and your IT solution management under your brand, your price, your model and deliver a true end-to-end experience. I think that is something that will separate IT businesses that will survive from those that do not as they chase one fad after another and eventually get consumerized. But enough of my babbling, let me introduce you to some features. Yesterday I talked about Marketing, today it’s Sales.

Brief Reality About Sales

There are tons of books about sales. Most of them try to teach people how to be real human beings and how to guide a conversation in a way that will lead the prospect to hand over the money. They do nothing in terms of sales personnel accountability, focus areas, bonus structures, incentives and so on – to a sales person those items are secondary and to poor & mediocre sales people in SMB (99.92% of them) there is seemingly 0 connection between getting the deal and seeing the deal deliver value to the client.

Sales directive is “Get them to sign on the line which is dotted, collect commission” and small business owners quickly get disillusioned by this attitude because they care about the company, quality of service, etc.

Shockey Monkey sales components were written with two objectives in mind:

1. Keep sales personnel accountable.

2. Turn everyone into an effective sales person.

SMB sales methodology is different from employment in big business, namely: We all sell. All the time. Every client interaction can lead to a sale (or loss of future business) and the better we serve our clients, the more responsive we are to their demands, the more they will look to do business with us. It’s just common sense, just hard to execute… until Shockey Monkey.

Shockey Monkey Opportunities

Shockey Monkey opportunities are the first step in the sales process – Someone wants something from us, let’s figure out how to track the interaction. Think of it like a support request for the business side of the house. We’ve made is both simple and quick to register an opportunity, yet powerful enough to break down further information that will give the management better insight into where money is potentially coming from and sales folks an idea of how much they could make. Let’s focus on the speed first:

It’s hard to tell from the screenshot but this interface flows with the use. Our goal was to have the opportunity documented in less than 60 seconds from logging into Shockey Monkey. New > Opportunity > Company (if it’s already in the system it prefills all their data) and then just fill in the details if you want to – but remember it’s optional.

Why? Why let people halfass it? I will explain this in greater detail later based on all the interviews we made during the SM3 development in 2012 but the goal of the opportunity is to get the ball rolling. It can be revised, adjusted, tweaked, managed and adjusted. Opportunity is the start of the sales process in SMB.

But if you have the time, why not enter a lot more? Well, you’re going to have to eventually. Same story as before – no clutter, no endless tabs, no cockpit navigational control complexity. Just provide the info – all of which is customizable for your own business!

The idea here is to see how much is this opportunity worth it to me – so it a pile of orders come in at the same time we act the fastest on the most profitable ones (or not, depending on your strategy, circumstances, etc)

After it’s in the system, working the opportunity is just a part of the job. And it’s easy and it’s tracked:

You can instantly tell as a manager what is going to cover the next payroll run – it’s all just a matter of tracking what you do!

I hate to keep on saying “quickly and easily” but in all my years in business I’ve never been able to get people to do anything unless I made it more convenient for them to do it my way – regardless of bonuses, incentives, promotions on the table, if it’s not easy it doesn’t get done consistently.

Whenever we talk to people about Sales it’s the same story – Oh, we don’t use that – and rightfully so. If it’s too complex, too convoluted, too time consuming and you don’t see the point you shouldn’t use it. You should spend the time on the phone or with clients which is what you get paid to do, not to do data entry. But make it easy and seamless as a part of the conversation and soon you have the level of accountability from your sales that you have from your technicians. It’s all about insight.

Why is it valuable? Because part of the Opportunity naturally leads to a Quote – which is dead simple:

That’s what it looks like blank. But if you choose to create a Quote from the open Opportunity, all the data is prefilled. Just Add products and services and hit create quote. You’ll know when the client views it and they’ll have the option to approve it right there in the web browser. When they do it creates agreements, support tickets, projects, etc.

Most importantly, it connects all of your personnel. It tells you who is dropping the ball. If there are tons of opportunities but no proposals, we’re not doing our best are we? What about it taking days to get a Quote out? If the same person isn’t doing both tasks, you won’t have to count on them both to “connect” – the software will alert them when they need to do something and if you incentivize them to get their job done you’ll see both sales, quotes, support and project people talking together without your “managing” because they are linked together (and it’s very easy to see when someone isn’t doing their job… and best of all, you won’t have to say it – the software will say it to them for you.. SHOCKEY monkey)

Again, unlinked and processless sales CRM sucks, and it shows clearly when it seems like it was just thrown together one project manager after another. With Shockey Monkey you get the system that was designed from the ground up to be simple and connected. Here is what it looks like blank:

Not effective, huh? But imagine this prefilled from your Quote that was automatically generated when the client viewed and accepted the Quote on the web. All you have to do is Create the Agreement.

Half of small business management is figuring out who isn’t doing their job and the other half is constantly repeating how you expect people to do their job. Use the right solution and provide fair reporting and integration among the components and you won’t have to do a thing – employees will keep each other accountable and if their incentives are based on what’s in the system they will enter the data – trust me!

Think about it.

Sales Summary

There are many, many, many CRM packages out there. All of which we’ve used at one point or another, all of which suck and don’t apply to our business or are too complex or or or. Eventually I had my come to Jesus talk and realized that sales people are just like all the other employees – they don’t want to be blamed for stuff that goes wrong and they want all the credit for everything that goes right. So we sat down with all the people that weren’t using their tools to their fullest potential and we realized that we all share the common pain – sales guys are not often logically connected to the rest of the team. Small business cannot survive with fragmented responsibilities, we all get paid when we all do a good job. Sales guys aren’t training wheels as the company starts driving from one man shops to the midmarket, they are a part of the team and they need to understand their responsibilities in the context of the team that fulfills all their promises which are based on the market-tested marketing message the management puts forward. 

We don’t want you to be more successful by putting in more effort, we want you to be more effective at managing your business by simply enjoying your job.

Note: Shockey Monkey 3 will be automatically rolled out to all existing Shockey Monkey portals on Thursday, December 20th, 2012.

Last week we held the launch webinar for our ExchangeDefender partners and existing Shockey Monkey clients. If you’d like to take a look at it the recording is here. If I had to sum it up, SM3 is above and beyond what you need to manage an SMB company. Not just an IT business but any business – which is a huge area of opportunity for our IT partners – you can now sell the entire business system complete with the cloud services, management platform and your IT solution management under your brand, your price, your model and deliver a true end-to-end experience. I think that is something that will separate IT businesses that will survive from those that do not as they chase one fad after another and eventually get consumerized. But enough of my babbling, let me introduce you to some features. First up, Marketing.

Shockey Monkey Marketing

Shockey Monkey Marketing is actually a subset of the new Sales section of Shockey Monkey. With this specific feature set we looked more at an organizational investment area that needed to be managed, specifically:

Where is my new business going to come from?

If you need to answer that question you need a process and a backend that can keep everyone in check. Sales do not happen without a marketing effort, marketing effort isn’t sustained unless sales doesn’t properly credit the campaign that triggered the lead and nothing happens consistently unless it’s properly linked and related to each other.

As you will hear me say a lot – we didn’t sit down to try and automate an IT guy or a sales guy or a marketing guy – we looked at the entire business and we designed the system that would keep everyone in it accountable. Simply.

That may sound like it was ripped right out of Dilbert but here is what it means in English:

To document a new marketing campaign it needs to be quick and easy – in the modern social media world where a marketing campaign might consist out of a simple $7 promoted posting on Facebook, tracking it should be as simple as creating it. When we talk to our business partners and our employees (when they fail) about why something didn’t get done the answer is always the same: I was too busy. What they really meant to say is: It takes too long to do it and requires my undivided attention that I pushed it off until I forgot about it and I’m sorry you caught me. Ouch!

To start a new campaign all you need is a name, type, when it starts, ends, description and a group of leads that were targeted. Done.

From there it will show up under every new opportunity as a way to attribute a lead to a particular campaign. It’s simple, it’s easy, it’s inexcusable to avoid.

But is it a lightweight? Quite the opposite. One of the benefits of designing this from the ground up is that you get a lightning fast interface that isn’t cluttered with tabs or an experience that makes you feel like you just walked into an airplane cockpit. For example, do you want to track financial terms of the campaign like Design costs, Collateral costs, Postal fees or other user defined fields that you configure for your own campaigns? Just click on the Financial bar and the new section slides into view to document your costs. It’s that simple because if it wasn’t it wouldn’t get done.

Email and HTML Campaigns & Tracking

But what about email campaigns, do I need to document it here after I start something with Constant Contact or MailChimp? You could.

Or you could just use Shockey Monkey to send the email in the first place. If you select the email campaign you can just type up the email to send right then and there. Here is how simple it is:

Sending email campaigns out of Shockey Monkey isn’t any more difficult than sending them out of Outlook – in fact, you can import existing HTML into a campaign and with preconfigured Marketing Groups you don’t have to deal with mail merges or anything else.

It’s not simply about reducing excuses for something not getting done – it’s about making it more convenient for employees to get their jobs done!

Reoccuring Messages

Not all marketing is the same. Not all customer outreach activity is spamming or marketing. Yet, every customer interaction is a marketing opportunity.

In the many, many, many, many, many, many failures we’ve had at ExchangeDefender in the 15 years of doing business we’ve only been commended and punished for one thing completely unrelated to the services we provide: communication. How well do we work with our customers and how well informed we keep them is what keeps them our customers.

Throughout the month there are many events that we are responsible for that we need to keep our customers informed about… but sometimes it’s hard to find the time and it’s hard to be disciplined. This is something that Shockey Monkey will fix for a small business through reoccuring messages:

Instead of focusing on time intensive campaigns, automate a part of your communication. If you know that your clients PCs will blow up every 2nd Tuesday of the month, why not schedule a notification to go out a day before to give them a heads up. Or if you have a deadline for orders that need to be shipped and delivered in time for Christmas, why not send a reminder a few days ahead of time?

Now you have no excuse. This form takes seconds to complete and the actual message is typed in the same way it is in Outlook so just do it!!

Marketing Summary

Every customer interaction is an opportunity to show how well you can take care of your customers.

It’s not an “IT Company” thing, it’s a business thing. People like to talk about how it’s easier to keep existing clients than get new ones but everything takes effort – and with Shockey Monkey we’re going to help you minimize that effort.

We wanted to design the most powerful business management platform out there… but not in a typical way of taking every crackheaded idea, giving it a tab and making the user figure it all out through hours of wasted training and failed efforts. We wanted to take everyday tasks that we are all responsible for and make it more convenient and easy to do. Instead of forcing people to do something we are making it faster. Instead of requiring, we’re making it easier.

We don’t want you to be more successful by putting in more effort, we want you to be more effective at managing your business by simply enjoying your job.

Note: Shockey Monkey 3 will be automatically rolled out to all existing Shockey Monkey portals on Thursday, December 20th, 2012.