Vol 01 | Issue 06 | 2020 e
Th
Best
PERFORMING
CRM SOLUTION PROVIDERS
2020
Editor’s Choice 3 Remarkable Innovations in the field of Printing Bussiness
Franchise Ecosystem Is Franchise A Profitable Stroke Of Business?
COOL LIFE
David Cummings Founder & CEO
CRM HELPING CLIENTS TO MAKE BETTER BUSINESS DECISIONS
Editor’s Desk
CRM: A Software, Helping Companies to Increase Profitability CRM will improve the company’s knowledge, operation, interaction, and impact it’s profitability.
W
ould you rather have an average business or a successful one? It is no surprise everyone would choose a successful business. How can you achieve that goal? Implementation of new ideas and customer communication can aid any business in improving customer experience & building enduring relationships with clients. A handy CRM solution offers business process automation capabilities that will aid them in improving the efficiency and performance of the companies. CRM is a long-term strategy, when it comes to the field of communication, with the primary focus on customers. The main goal of CRM is to primarily focus on a better understanding of the customer needs and identifying their specific needs. CRM can have several positive long-term effects like improving business relationships, progress tracking, improvement in sales, and lasting cost savings. Implementing the right CRM gives an edge over other competitors. CRM is evolving quickly and is changing the way we work and how we live. In addition to it, CRM is learning to play a bigger role in social media. CRM enabled Chatbot will guide sales and marketing departments towards the right demographics and predictive behaviors that will only increase the value of the CRM system. With the increase in valuable productive time, teams spend less time manually compiling business relationship data and integrating complex information with other lines of communication. Contact management software allows you to track customer interaction giving a more enjoyable, personalized customer experience to the clients. Implementing CRM can help track all leads and marketing campaigns to increase profits.
CRM is now the biggest and fastest-growing software market, companies are adopting CRM across all industries. CRM software worldwide grew 15.6% to reach $48.2 billion in 2018, according to research from Gartner, Inc. CRM remains both the largest and the fastest-growing enterprise application in the software category. Companies that aren’t adopting the most influential software or thinking about how to add to their customer experience are putting themselves at serious risk of falling behind. On this leading edge of responsive technology Insights, Success enables The 10 Best Performing CRM Solution Providers 2020 to improve the effectiveness in communication. This platform is especially useful for businesses that have long or complex sales cycles requiring continual customer connection. Featuring our Cover Story- Cool Life CRM’s standard platform allows clients to go beyond traditional CRM and into the realm of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), integrating with other systems and service providers while improving the client’s workflow experience. It is a collaborative system that enables management to assess the status of customer prospects without disrupting those interfacing with prospects, promoting these end-users working together toward common goals of customer acquisition. Also, make sure to scroll through the articles written by our in-house editorial team and CXO standpoints of some of the leading industry experts to have a brief taste knowledge of the sector.
Sourabh More
ARTICLES
22 Editor’s Choice 3 Remarkable Innovations in the field of Printing Bussiness
34 Franchise Ecosystem Is Franchise A Profitable Stroke Of Business?
08 Cover Story
COOL LIFE CRM HELPING Clients to Make BETTER BUSINESS Decisions
Commence Corporation
24
18
Imparting Customizable CRM Solutions to Improve Business Performance
eWay-CRM
Helping Clients in Increase ProďŹ tability
32
38
When Effectiveness is the Key
16
EspoCRM
Optimove The Science-First Relationship Marketing Hub
Leadership Column
Tech-Know Insights
Is the Single Brand Dead in MPS?
What a tech CEO can teach your business about digital
28
Editor-in-Chief Pooja M. Bansal Managing Editor Anish Miller
Executive Editor
Assistant Editors
Kaustav Roy
Jenny Fernandes Rohit Chaturvedi
Visualizer
Art & Design Director
Associate Designer
David King
Amol Kamble
Kartik Balapurkar
Senior Sales Manager Co-designer
Co-designer Asha Bange
Business Development Manager
Kshitij S
Peter Collins
Marketing Manager
Sales Executives
John Matthew
David, Kevin, Martin, Avinash
Technical Head
Business Development Executives
Jacob Smile
Steve, Joe, Alan, Vishal
Technical Specialist Aditya
Digital Marketing Manager Marry D'Souza
SME-SMO Executive Prashant Chevale
Research Analyst Frank Adams
Database Management Stella Andrew
Circulation Manager Robert Brown
Technology Consultant David Stokes
sales@insightssuccess.com January , 2020
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David Cummings Founder & CEO
The
PERFORMING
Best Solution Providers 2020
COOL LIFE
CRM HELPING Clients to Make BETTER BUSINESS Decisions
Cool Life CRM will improve your knowledge of your operation, giving insight into areas that need improvement and impact proďŹ tability.
C
ool Life CRM was founded with the mission to make a low- cost customer relationship management (CRM) system, easy to implement and maintain. Such a system enables business owners to streamline processes, allowing for swift intelligent decisions to drive any business, regardless of size and industry. The organization is a full-service business e-suite that enables clients to configure their customer database without the use of third-party consultants or programmers, unlike SalesForce and other leading large-scale CRM platforms.
Ÿ
Cool Life’s standard platform allows clients to go beyond traditional CRM and into the realm of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), integrating with other systems and service providers while improving the client’s workflow experience. Among the features Cool Life CRM offers are;
Catering Diverse Set of Verticals Cool Life caters to a diverse set of verticals, from small businesses to enterprise-sized companies with several subsidiaries. The organization's strategy for building its customer base is a targeted outbound strategy to generate inbound leads, combined with a high-quality, informative and attractive website, as well as social media, blogging, and expos.
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) compliant Ÿ Client-specific unique database Ÿ Buy-Side Sell-Side functionality Ÿ Business valuation process Ÿ
Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ
Advanced valuation process Project Management Customer relationship management CRM eMarketing suite Tasks and Action Management Email integration – (outlook, Gmail, etc.) Ability to implement articles and blogs Reporting (canned, custom, user-generated) Secure client-facing portal Screen manager Expanded API integration.
Cool Life’s system was created with versatility and architecture based on a ‘no assumptions’ philosophy. As an
Cover Story
Reach your audience directly with a properly optimized website, Hoovers & LinkedIn connection, and a call to action to use on whitepapers and published articles.
organization, Cool Life doesn’t anticipate knowing everything a vertical or an individual may need. The architecture is extremely flexible in adding or enhancing features and functionality to accommodate any requirements. The company’s mission is to significantly streamline and organize its clients’ business processes, improving on analysis of data via quality reporting, leading to better marketing execution, instead of juggling one-off, disconnected tasks. Integrating Everyday Business Processes across Several Divisions Cool Life is a more advanced system, providing features and functions that can integrate everyday business processes across a company with several divisions. The platform is especially useful for businesses that have long or complex sales cycles requiring continual customer connection. It also offers collaborative project management tools, document management and archives, event management, a Content Management System (CMS), email campaign management, and more. It is a collaborative system that enables management to assess the status of customer prospects without disrupting those interfacing with prospects, promoting these end-users working together toward common goals of customer acquisition. Like its competition, Cool Life can be scaled globally as a network, but what sets Cool Life apart is the ease of
scalability that it offers to modify or augment the system, according to changing needs of the business. This brings an immediate benefit, and avoids the time and expense associated with the drudgery of hiring consultants, writing business rules and modifying and testing code, as is so prevalent with other CRM systems. The Secret of a Happy and Committed Workforce Workplace culture is a critical element in the company’s success, and management strives for a happy and committed workforce. Cool Life Several people began working remotely when the organization moved to North Carolina from New York. Cool Life’s user base enjoy collaboration and communication across departmental groups as each employee has the same access to the core platform, whether it is sales, customer service or programming, and the same is true at Cool Life – they practice what they preach. Cool Life offers reimbursement for education related to job or industry education. Senior executives of the company have plans to roll out an options plan to all employees shortly after the current fundraising is complete. The Dependable Skipper As the Founder and CEO of Cool Life CRM, Inc., David Cummings provided the leadership experience to assemble a team of professionals who successfully launched the company in 2003. Under David’s leadership, the Cool Life team has developed a cutting edge “Cloud”-based product
that will rival any existing CRM based platform. From there, the company evolved, with a carefully implemented strategic plan, and with a design and development team that created Cool Life’s subscription-based platform in 2016. It now serves a market that has become much more demanding, with more and more data and an everincreasing mix of media channels. On-demand Software-asa-Service offers real-time data, functionality, and reporting that facilitates effective management of companies, with quality customer information always available and reporting that allows for good use of that data. Cool Life’s approach keeps data integrity consistent throughout a company’s user base, a critical advantage in today’s communication-heavy world. Staying Ahead of the Competition Being a SaaS-based platform, Cool Life is now on the leading edge of responsive technologies so that clients can access their account from any device with an Internet connection. The organization is currently in the final test stages of a Cool Life app that will enable users to access and manage their accounts without any Internet connection.
All the features and modifications on the app will be updated automatically when the device reconnects to WIFI or cellular service. The Leader in Real-Time Effective Data There are significant differences that separate Cool Life CRM as a leader in real-time customer data. Every customer has a unique database -no shared databases. Each customer’s data remain exclusively owned by the client, guaranteed, unlike most of the larger competitors in the industry. Ÿ Cool Life’s customer cost of entry and ongoing subscription offers exceptional value. At no time is the customer in need of third-party programmers or consultants for modifications or augmentation of needs – unlike the leading providers within the industry. Ÿ The platform allows the customer to establish a process that fits their specific business model, needs, and workflow. Cool Life’s competitors have a more inflexible ‘template’ approach that lacks flexibility. Ÿ
Cover Story
Cool Life CRM will improve your knowledge of your operation, giving insight into areas that need improvement and impact profitability.
With these critical elements, the instant real-time data and its reporting give business leaders accurate answers about their customer base that result in effective decision-making. In every business, time is money, and remaining competitive in the CRM space requires on-point data for swift decision making. The Mantra of ‘No Assumptions’ According to the company, the experiences and requests across several diverse verticals brought the company to its mantra of ‘no assumptions.’ The platform architecture is modular and object-oriented programming, making it easy to execute new features, functions, or enhancements to the base attributes of the system. This versatility is especially vital to permissions implemented for access by for users, where the data is controlled but also available across the enterprise. Unlike the competition, Cool Life CRM enables the client to modify their data structure on their own and avoid excessive time and cost when hiring a certified thirdparty consultant to complete the discovery on the existing structure and process flows to determine the necessary changes. When it comes to versatility and flexibility, Cool Life CRM responds to new requirements or integration better than anyone. As a SaaS platform, the organization is continuously enhancing the system and publishing the latest enhancements regularly. Cool Life CRM often rolls out
improvements well before its clients even recognize the need. Client Testimonials “We have been able to improve our effectiveness and become more organized in our communication.” Walker Morgan – Morgan Linen, Inc. “By far, the best CRM value in the market. Ease of use and customization makes it perfect for our firm.” Andrew Smith, Houlihan Capital “Keeps us organized, provides transparency to our leadership on the sales team, drives revenue, a great depository for all our data too!” Michael Yardley – Dowling Hales Investment Banking “The system has been easy to use with no problems.” Fr Erik, Embrace Life Chiropractic
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Choose E xc e l l e n t, Choose Insights
IS THE
SINGLE BRAND Dead in MPS?
I
f you are an MPS provider, you may have realized the “single brand from a single vendor” solution is falling out of favor with end customers. So, what has changed and is MPS a sustainable offering? As of 2018, we are 20-years into the bell curve for MPS. For many years, prospects were first time buyers who viewed their environments as messy. Printers and copiers were everywhere from different manufacturers and vendors. Control was distributed among departments, Facilities, and IT. Acquisitions methods were just as diverse and included purchases, leases, contracts from local dealers and national supplies resellers. Print was a big mystery to customers. They had no idea how many devices they had, how many pages they were producing or how much they were spending. They needed a clear picture of what they had and potential solutions. Then they struggled with satisfying all stakeholders and gaining consensus on a final solution. Projects were time consuming, political and even risky for the project lead. You played a valuable role as an MPS vendor. In the customer’s eyes, you were the expert who taught them something new and showed them a path forward. You offered expertise and people to find out what they have today and were able to develop a complex solution. The journey took many months from concept to assessment to proposal. You earned the role of trusted advisor so it was only natural that the customer would see a “single brand from a single vendor” as the best available solution. Pricing changed. You wrapped up the solution into bundled pricing that simplified costs for the end customer and
16 | January 2020
enabled you to shield pricing for hardware, maintenance and supplies. After all, there were managed services wrapped around all products so the customer agreed with the bundled pricing format. Bundled pricing enabled you to work with margins behind the curtain. Come decision time, the customer realized that Implementation would affect every user and the potential cost savings put it near the top for cost-savings initiatives. These two factors elevated the project to the most senior management levels for approval and executive sponsorship. The sales cycle got longer but the project became more important to more people. The final result was often a case study of successful transformation from a messy environment to a lean, managed print environment. So, what changed in recent years? The MPS market had certainly matured. Customers had lived through the transformation from unmanaged to managed. With the end of their first MPS contract came a new perspective and different buyer attitude. The customer was no longer sick and in dire need of expertise. Their fleet was no longer messy. Devices had been consolidated and processes streamlined. Customers had clear visibility to what they devices they had, how many pages they produced, and the total cost of ownership. The mystery was solved. Your role changed. In many cases, the customer was more experienced in real-world MPS than your sales team. Sales people struggled to teach customers something new, something of significant potential value. Talk of potential cost savings by switching vendors was no longer compelling – the big savings had already been taken. The MPS story from one vendor sounded the same as the other
www.insightssuccess.com
Leadership Column
vendor – in fact, the story sounded exactly the same as the one told years earlier by their current MPS vendor. Now the end customer was asking about your ability to support their existing fleet, to do repairs and provide consumables. The potential for placing your new hardware was not clear. These new MPS opportunities felt like they belonged more to the vendor service and inside sales teams than to the account sales department. The customer was now clearly in control and driving the sales process. In the past few years, many dealers have exited the MPS market and refocused on their traditional selling motions. They found MPS operations different and costly. Sales reps were harder to train and it took longer to get them hitting quota numbers. So, like a rubber band, dealers re-focused on their core competency. So, what does the future look like for those dealers wishing to stay relevant in the MPS market?
Ben Harris Founder
Harris Technologies
It is time to look inward to tackle five key obstacles to growth and profitability in MPS: • Redefine your value and how you will educate the customer • Define a strategy for pricing and supporting both OEM and compatible supplies • Justify managed services independent of products • Learn how to participate in an open sourcing model • Decide if a fragmented customer environment and sourcing model is good business The days of single brand and single vendor are gone. Sourcing methods have changed dramatically for everything – including print – and the pace of change is accelerating. Vendors must rethink the value provided and how to educate the customer. MPS vendors will still spend months doing assessments and proposals only to be faced with the purchasing process that would unbundle pricing and force transparency to price by product category. The decision then is can you re-invent your practice to enable you to participate in this new arena and win – profitably.
www.insightssuccess.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ben Harris is the Founder of Harris Technologies, Inc. Ben Harris enjoyed a 15 year career in corporate sales, selling and implementing large contracts to Fortune 500 companies around the country. In 2006, he decided to begin a new journey, leaving the big office and tie to start up his own firm. After years of perseverance and dedication, Harris Technologies has become a recognized leader in their space.
January 2020 | 17
The
PERFORMING
Best Solution Providers 2020
Imparting Customizable CRM Solutions to Improve Business Performance
C
RM software can have a significant impact on the performance of a business, by automating and streamlining the internal business processes that impact how the company markets, sells and provides services to customers. However, in order to realize the maximum value from any CRM solution one needs to complement the software with experienced sales, marketing and service personnel. The challenge is that many small to mid-size business cannot afford to hire these professionals and struggle to implement the internal policies and procedures to improve business performance. Commence Corporation, a leading CRM software provider company, has addressed this situation by coupling the software with a highly experienced team of sales, marketing and service professionals that help customers implement best practices for improving the performance of their business. Below are highlights of the interview conducted between Commence and Insights Success: Kindly take us through a detailed overview of the company. Founded in 1990, Commence Corporation has a rich history of proving Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) and business process automation tools to the small and mid-size business community. The company’s success over the past two decades has been driven by its ability to deliver top rated business software coupled with best practices that ensure that customers realize the maximum value from its products. The coupling of a best in class product with an array of sales and marketing enablement services places Commence CRM head and shoulders above the competition. One of the key differentiators for Commence has been the high degree of customization that its solution offers. Unlike traditional cookie cutter CRM offerings that offer basic functionality, and limited customization, Commence CRM offers a comprehensive solution that rivals many higher end
18 | January 2020
products costing much more and it can be easily tailored to meet unique business requirements. This has enabled the product to be utilized in more than 35 different industries and more than a dozen countries around the world. In addition, Commence has an extensive support network. Business partners and value-added resellers support customers outside the United States while an experienced team of sales, marketing and service professionals employed directly by Commence Corporation support customers in the USA. How do you diversify your company’s offerings to appeal the target audience? Customers today are looking for more than most basic CRM offerings can provide, but not the cost and complexity associated with higher end products designed for large organizations. Commence offers a robust CRM solution that rivals higher end products costing much more but its flexibility enables the solution to be tailored to address industry specific requirements. Few companies can match the functionality and flexibility of Commence CRM. Give a detailed description of the CEO’s contribution over the company and the industry. Larry Caretsky, CEO of Commence Corporation, is known as a passionate outspoken and highly competitive chief with strong leadership skills. According to his biggest assets—employees—he has instilled the philosophy that Commence cannot be all things to all people, but that the company has the knowledge and expertise to do one to two things better than everyone else. “Let’s be an inch wide but a mile deep,” says the steadfast leader. His leadership has made Commence a formable competitor in the CRM sector. From an industry perspective he is considered an expert in the CRM sector and has written numerous articles about how businesses can use CRM technology to improve how www.insightssuccess.com
Larry Caretsky CEO
Why manage customer relationships when you can MASTER them with Commence CRM.
they market, sell and provide services to their customers. He has been nominated as one of the 40 Most Inspiring Leaders in Sales Lead Management, written numerous articles on the use of CRM software and is the author of an e-book, Practices That Pay” Leveraging Information to Achieve Selling Results. Being a leading CRM solution provider, what has been the company’s contribution in this ever-evolving sector? For more than two decades Commence Corporation has continued to introduce products and services that have traditionally only been available and affordable to larger corporations. By reducing the complexity of new technology and providing the maintenance and support of our products we have enabled small to mid-size businesses to take advantage of state-of-the-art business solutions and compete with the same technology larger corporations have been using for years. The services component of Commence Corporation’s offering has been a significant win for the SMB community as well. Providing business solutions alone does not ensure that customers can take advantage of newer technology. Commence provides the IT, sales and marketing services these businesses require so that they can focus 100% of their time growing their business and leaving the management and maintainability of their CRM system to the Commence experts.
implementations to cloud computing has opened the door to a number of challenges and new product and service offerings. Customers today are move driven by the needs of the user community then in the past where IT decisions were traditionally made by the IT department. This has caused Commence Corporation to restructure how our product and services are delivered, supported and maintained. It required a new set of skills for cloud computing, different business partnerships and a restructure of how our products are sold and implemented. The company has successfully made this transition and is highly touted for the quality of the products and services it provides. Kindly highlight company’s future endeavours and how it is planning to expand globally? Going forward, Commence will be introducing several new services to the market in 2020. One will be a Sales Enablement process whereby we assist customers in putting together articles, case studies, customer testimonials and competitive analysis so that their sales team is fully prepared to immediately respond to questions, prospect inquiries and competitive battles. It’s a new service targeted at sales organizations that do not have this collateral in place or sales management that needs assistance with this process. We are also talking with companies that offer artificial intelligence and we hope to integrate this technology with our future product offerings.
Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learnt that has shaped the journey of the company. The software industry has changed radically over the past decade and the migration from on premise software www.insightssuccess.com
January 2020 | 19
3
Innovations
in the Field of
Printing
Business I
n the year 1450, when Blacksmith Johannes Gutenberg ďŹ rst introduced a movable type press in the German city of Mainz, a printing revolution had got erupted. This invention encouraged more people to proliferate and distribute their creative/informative ideas though printed texts. Sooner, plethora of work related to literature, religious scriptures, scientiďŹ c papers, ontological treaties, law texts among other started publishing out in the European region which later got adopted globally at large scale and helped individuals and others to promote/sell their ideas. This printing revolution still considered as one of the most important event in the history of printing and for the humankind as a whole. With the passage of time many other inventions have been taken places that have boosted the printing business at large. Here we have enlisted some of the recent developments that are worth mentioning, and which are also considered as a turning point for the arena of printing business.
22 | January 2020
www.insightssuccess.com
Editor’s Choice Nano Printing: 3D printing has witnessed many remarkable breakthroughs in recent years, Nano printing is one such innovation. Due to this cutting-edge printing technology it is now possible to print and integrate tiny components directly on to the integrated circuits include micro-lenses onto photonic circuits and deformable structures on MEMS actuators.
environment friendly. In this technology, the ink is not made of plastic and other damaging petroleum or fossil fuels; instead ‘water’ here is act as the main solvent and thus makes it an environment friendly printing technology. Moreover, what are making this technology scalable and popular are its other fascinating features famously includes its fine print quality and affordability over the other prevailing printing technologies.
Interestingly, what was a dream some decades ago has become a reality with this technology as it is now possible to print microscopic objects with complex geometry and sizes of nanometres to several millimetres. Such things can be printed on a single printing step and that too on a scale which was not possible before. Such innovative change of on-printing brings new perspectives for developing nano and microscopic 3D component in a hassle free manner.
Its solvents decrease the time and heat necessary to absorb the ink film on fabric and instead of just spreading on the outer layer of the fabric, its ink flow deep into the fabric and create a much better look and ultimately a much better end-user experience. Further, water based inks are thinner and you can actually print with higher precision to give a good texture as compared to thicker inks like plastisol.
Moreover, its application has significance in many vital areas including Artificial Organs, Tissue Engineering, Stem cell-based Regenerative Medicine and Therapy, Fabrication of Nano Scale Devices among other. Customers also reap huge benefit by utilizing this technology as it provides great precision, stability, and support 3D custom design at large scale.
Moreover, the increased softness and flexibility of waterbased prints have the potential to win customers heart every time when they touch a fabric printed using this technology. Many leading organization are considering this technology over plastisol and it is just the matter of time before this technology becomes an industry standard in the printing business.
How this Technology Works? In this printing technology, Nanoscribe’s Photonic Professional GT system uses the technique of two-photon polymerization. In this process a laser gets expose to a photosensitive resin by a high-numerical aperture objective that too in a controlled trajectory following CAD design. The interesting thing here is that the material gets solidified only in the laser focused spot and thus allows printing the exact 3D structure with submicron features. Such advancements have expanded the use of this technique for printing pre-manufactured circuits and opens new ways for executing on-chip printing as well. Nanotechnology for printing – is truly innovative as it alters materials at the atomic and molecular level.
Conductive Ink: Invention of conductive ink is one the greatest milestones in the business of printing and it has the potential to change thefuture of printing business as well.
Water-based Printing: Many printing technologies use inks made from harmful chemical substances which creates negative impact on the printer, wearer and the environment at large. Usage of harsh chemicals and toxic waste also always keep various regulatory agencies on vigil. Therefore, there was a dire need of a technique which can do a fine printing by minimizing the bad effects on environment at large. The birth of water-based printing fulfilled that need.
What’s unique in this technology is its ‘ink’ which contains conductive materials like silver nanoparticles or conductive polymers which gives them the ability to conduct electricity. This conductive (Silver) ink has multiple uses today including printing RFID tags as used in modern transit tickets, they can be used to improvise or repair circuits on printed circuit boards as well. Although, this technology is in early stage and its mainstream adoption may probably takes several years but it is a promising technique which can be effectively used in many different applications including the creation of interactive posters, billboards, and other advertising materials. Interestingly, this technology also holds promise to play sound just by touching a paper or connect you to your phone app just by interacting with a poster on the wall that is linked to the app. Moreover, it has the same capacitive sensing technology that is present in modern day electronic devices like tablets, smartphones among others.
The innovation of water-based printing has started a new era in printing space which is hugely considered as
www.insightssuccess.com
January 2020 | 23
The
PERFORMING
Best Solution Providers 2020
Helping Clients in Increase Profitability
W
ith the growing usage of internet, every business nowadays is looking to automate their business processes and operations. So, born Ukraine based open source web application EspoCRM. The company’s cloud-hosted solution provides its clients with pre-installed and configured server software. In an interview with Insights Success, the spokesperson of EspoCRM has shared few valuable insights, which has helped to shape the company’s path breaking CRM solution. Below are the highlights of the interview between Insights Success and the EspoCRM’s spokesperson: Kindly take us through a detailed overview of the company. Founded in 2014, EspoCRM is an open-source web application that offers a wide range of various functionalities to small and medium-size businesses. Being currently utilized by more than 50 000 satisfied companies and organizations throughout the globe, the platform is one of the most intuitive, easy-to-use and affordable solutions in the modern market. The ultimate aim of the software is empowering your sales and support teams with features that help to boost business performance and efficacy. It assists companies in systematizing customer data, provides powerful tools for analytics and reporting, and substantially automates business processes they deal with. Could you throw some light on your mission and vision statement? When the company was founded right back in 2011, we had a simple though revolutionary idea. We wanted to create CRM software that will be flexible and adaptable to the requirements of any business without the need for coding. Having analyzed the trends and demands of the market, we have started a complicated development process and after
24 | January 2020
years of hard work, we released the first version of EspoCRM. Nowadays, we are proud to acknowledge that our software is a perfect, cost-effective and fully adjustable solution for the company of any type, size or budget. How do you diversify your company’s offerings to appeal the target audience? EspoCRM can satisfy the requirements of both small and large companies. Start-ups with a limited budget can start with a free version encompassing all the necessary functions, while large-scale enterprises may extend the standard set of features by purchasing additional extensions. Apart from that, any company can customize the system to fit its specific needs by configuring layouts for different views, changing application labels and message templates, creating new and modifying the existing fields or entities. Furthermore, the software can also be easily integrated with third-party solutions via open API, which helps to automate the data sync process and eliminates the risks of data loss. What innovative measures has EspoCRM undertaken to stay ahead of its competition? EspoCRM can make boast of plenitude and variety of features developed both for ordinary users and developers. It offers a lot of effective extensions including BPM and Workflows, advanced reporting, Google, Outlook and MailChimp integrations, etc. However, we understand how crucial it is to respond quickly to the needs of the business environment. Believing that perfection knows no limits, we are constantly monitoring trends and tendencies of the modern business market in order to incorporate them into our product. How EspoCRM is upgrading itself with the volatile technological advancement in order to offer disruptive products or services? Taking into consideration the demands of the ever-changing marketplace, we invest a lot of time and resources into www.insightssuccess.com
Taras Machyshyn CEO and Co-founder
EspoCRM can satisfy the requirements of both small and large companies. Start-ups with a limited budget can start with a free version encompassing all the necessary functions, while large-scale enterprises may extend the standard set of features by purchasing additional extensions. upgrading and developing features for EspoCRM. In the modern fast-paced world, the performance of the software often takes precedence over the other factors. Due to this, we have implemented the leading technologies to increase the system’s performance by several times. Another point that we take pride in is our simple and intuitive interface that allows a new user to start utilizing the software without previous training once the installation is over. Being a leading CRM solution provider, what has been the company’s contribution in this ever-evolving sector? EspoCRM provides small and medium-size businesses with the opportunity to build a strong company with a sound investment. For large companies, the software can serve as a powerful tool for managing company’s business processes. Having created an advanced solution, we make complex functionality more accessible and provide a premium product either at an affordable price or free of charge. Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learn that has shaped the journey of the company.
Only having all these “ingredients” mixed, you will succeed. Kindly highlight the company’s future endeavours. And how it is planning to expand globally? In the long run, our principal goal is to evolve the system to meet its extensive roadmap and support the industry needs. We are planning to offer our customers more business process automation capabilities that will aid them in improving the efficiency and performance of their companies. About the Leader The platform is being continuously developed under the leadership and guidance of Taras Machyshyn, the company’s CEO and Co-founder. He has worked for over 11 years as a software developer. Possessing an enormous amount of invaluable experience in the field of business software, Taras is actively involved in the process of code development, implementation of new ideas and customer communication. He believes that a handy CRM solution can aid any business in improving customer experience and building enduring relationships with clients.
Possessing almost ten-year experience, we have understood that in order to build a strong and successful company, one requires plenty of components: hard work, experience, knowledge and the courage of risk-taking. Another, perhaps the most essential, constituent is the cohesiveness of the team, the bonds that pull people towards the common aim. www.insightssuccess.com
January 2020 | 25
What a tech CEO can teach your business about digital About the Author Pam Bateson is an expert coach and mentor in business, training others to Masters level qualiďŹ cations and supervising coaches. She has worked within the healthcare, retail, hotels, construction, media, agencies, education and public sector. She specialises in Coaching, Mentoring, Employee Engagement, Change Management, Learning and Development and Organisational Design. She has worked with all levels in organisations from graduates to the CEO. She has designed change programmes that connect projects, outcomes, training and coaching. The performance outcomes have been outstanding. She is CEO and Co-founder at Thrive Partners.
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www.insightssuccess.com
Tech-Know Insights
Pam Bateson CEO & Co-founder
Thrive Partners
P
am Bateson set up Thrive Partners, an on-demand coaching company, three years ago. In this article, she shares her point of view on how important humans are in a more digital world, what she’s learned as a tech CEO, and what this means when you’re looking to use tech in a way that’s both disruptive and works for customers. www.insightssuccess.com
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In October 2015, I gave up a successful career as a management consultant and coach to set up Thrive Partners. Lots of people thought I was crazy. I was approaching 50, with two children still at home. But for the decade running up to that decision, I’d been thinking about a better way to deliver coaching – supported by digital, to share more widely the coaching tools I’d used to help clients for many years. This was the business I set out to build three years ago. Today, we’re working with 25 clients on five continents – delivering our own brand of on-demand coaching, backed with insights for the whole business. The learning curve has been steep – particularly for someone who, by their own confession, didn’t have a lot of experience in learning technology. So here, I wanted to share some of the things we’ve learned – and what it might mean for your business. Dream big I didn’t really set out to build a business that would be considered disruptive, but my background as a lean engineer and coach did mean that we ripped up the rulebook when it came to the coaching industry. We scrapped the idea that you needed to meet face to face, and that sessions had to last an hour, or even two hours. And we made it a lot easier for people to access a coach to answer the questions they had there and then – increasing access so people could chat to an expert within an hour. Working with my co-founder, we then rebuilt the industry by asking the biggest questions we could imaging. What if we could make coaching available to whole organisations? What if we could get listening as valued as speaking? And what if we could help organisations learn as quickly as individuals? I found these questions irresistible: I wanted to do for coaching what Uber had done for getting a taxi, Netflix had done for home entertainment, and Tinder had done for dating. It’s these
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big dreams that have galvanised our success in the last few years – and which has set us in the right direction for the future. Build for modern users Despite big dreams, we’ve also made our fair share of mistakes! A lot of them mistakes happened when we took our attention away from our end customers. It sounds obvious to see it there on the page. But it can be easy to lose sight of the customers that matter most, especially when, as a tech CEO, sometime we get preoccupied with a shiny piece of new technology. So, what to consider first when it comes to users? The main thing to bear in mind is that they expect experiences that are easy and fast to access – a shift brought about by what we call the ‘Amazon Prime Mindset.’ In this era, clunky user experiences reduce the chances of uptake of services. In short, if your technology can’t match or exceed the quality of digital experience people get in their everyday lives, then you’ll need to go back to the drawing board. Create wins for the many So, if users come first – who else can we harness the power of technology for? Our answer? Everyone else in the system. Early on in the development of our MyThrive platform, we realised that delivering digitally would enable us to do more than just scale and facilitate coaching in global organisations; it would also mean we could spot trends and patterns within communities of users, in organisations or society at large. Just as carefully listening has a powerful and transformative role in one-to-one coaching conversations, carefully listening to and analysing anonymised version of the conversations we host has a powerful and transformative role within whole organisations.
The whole-system insights we produced has helped to make sales processes smoother, improved communications and created more opportunities for people to learn. Keep it human With suicide being the biggest killer of men under 45, loneliness sweeping through developed economies in epidemic proportions and a third of all young people suffering from anxiety, I strongly believe that we have a duty to keep talking to each other as a society. We believe that keeping the art of conversation alive in this digital age is essential; only humans can master creativity, empathy, humour and imagination in a way that’s compelling. Information is everywhere, so we’re using technology differently – to offer real human experiences at scale, at any time of the day, whenever our clients need a conversation, for everything you can’t Google. And what of the future? Curiously, even the structures of artificial intelligence and machine learning look set to mimic human patterns. It’s still early days, but leaders in this space talk of ‘deep learning’ with AI – by layering up different tools that connect in the same way as our brain’s neural networks. And so, the next three years? My recent experiences have led us to ask even bigger questions than we did to begin with – which I suspect will lead to our next irresistible set of adventures! What if we could transform learning management systems into learning ecosystems? What if any community of learners could connect with any community of teachers? And what if a better understanding of outcomes from learning could help both individuals, organisations and society to thrive? I for one believe there are exciting times ahead.
www.insightssuccess.com
The
PERFORMING
Best Solution Providers 2020
When Effectiveness is the Key
C
RM is a quite long-term strategy, when it comes to the field of communication, with the primary focus on customers. The main goal of CRM is to primarily focus on better understanding of the customer needs and identifying their specific needs. Taking this significance of CRM into consideration, eWay-CRM was incepted to provide the best in class CRM solutions. In an interview with Insights Success, Jan Lalinsky the CEO and Co-founder & Roman Stefko, CTO and Cofounder share valuable insights which eventually paved the way of success for the organization. Below are the highlights of the interview. Kindly take us through a detailed overview of eWayCRM. We are a team of determined professionals from all around the world sitting in Prague and Kansas City. We focus only on eWay-CRM, a CRM tool for Microsoft Outlook. For more than 10 years, we have been helping companies in managing their sales, projects and customers. Our strong focus gives us the opportunity to do one thing and do it well. We have thousands of users from individuals to multinational corporations. We are not industry oriented and such a broad range of various kinds of clients helps us get the best from different areas and offer a flexible product. Our customers come from different parts of the world. Mainly from the United States and Canada, but also from European countries such as United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Germany, Slovakia, etc. We have clients in Asia and Australia too, but we tend to keep our focus on the North American and European market.
matters under control and sort all communication history. As they work with Outlook, they insisted to keep the software as an Outlook addin. This is how eWay-CRM 1.0 was born. Soon, our parent company realized the potential of such a product and they turned it into a complex CRM software. Could you throw some light on your mission and vision statement? eWay-CRM® helps companies worldwide be truly effective. We have been determined in following this mission for more than 10 years. That is also why eWay-CRM® is embedded straight into Microsoft Outlook. This way, we are able to transform the well-known Outlook environment into a full-featured CRM tool for managing clients, sales, and projects. Moreover, you can create professional bulk e-mails. How do you diversify your company’s offerings to target the audience? Our product is integrated right within Microsoft Outlook. There are plenty of great web-based competitors, but we believe, that people need one great and effective tool. Since most companies use Microsoft Outlook, we decided to embed eWay-CRM right into it. What innovative measures has eWay-CRM undertaken to stay ahead of its competition? We understand that every business is unique. Often, two CEOs of different companies from the same industry run their businesses differently. We believe that a software should adjust to company needs and not the opposite. This is why we made eWay-CRM extremely flexible.
This orientation forces us to work in different time zones in order to make sure that all customer requests are being properly handled.
With the level of customizations, we are able to compete biggest players at a reasonable price. We provide large database of tutorials and if customers don’t have time to set up eWay-CRM by themselves, we provide a team of highly experienced consultants who do it for them.
Our product was originally created in our parent company MEMOS Software as a custom-made software for an international team of lawyers. They needed to keep their
How is eWay-CRM upgrading itself with the volatile technological advancement in order to offer disruptive products or services?
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www.insightssuccess.com
Jan Lalinsky
eWay-CRM is an Outlook integrated CRM software that helps customers manage their customers, sales and projects.
CEO & Co-founder
We focus on customers who want a CRM that works and not the most modern geeky gadget. If somebody wants a shiny nice-looking product, they go somewhere else. We are chosen by professionals who know what they want and look for, i.e. something that will help them keep their agenda under control. Therefore, we carefully consider what new features we implement and what technologies we use.
Roman Stefko
CTO & Co-founder
At the same time, we listen to our customers, to their needs, and try to stay on top of new challenges. We understand these days sales reps and project managers work differently, they need to work from anywhere and from any device that is by hand. This is why eWay-CRM comes with mobile apps for Androids and iOS. Also, we are working hard on a web-based interface. We want to deliver a user friendly and accessible platform. Being a leading CRM solution provider, what has been the company’s contribution in this ever-evolving sector? The market is full of single purpose web CRMs that are easy to use but can’t grow with you. eWay-CRM is different. eWay-CRM can grow with you. Since we have experience with individuals along with multinational corporations, we know what challenges a company faces when growing. We decided to make a product that is simple to use if you are a small business, yet complex when you need it. This is what makes us unique. Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learned that have shaped the journey of the company. The biggest lesson learned is that your time is limited, and we can’t meet everyone’s requirements. As a small start-up, we very often used to build customized features one or two customers could benefit from. We got the deal, but our developers got stuck with – let’s be honest – not that great features. As a result, we couldn’t focus on something that everybody could benefit. One day, we woke up 10 years later and realized that we spent too much time working on useless things and working with not the right people. We got out of our way. We had to take a couple of unpleasant steps and make painful decisions, but we were able to get back to our track. The lesson learned is – keep your vision, trust yourself and don’t step aside. Your time is limited. Every second matters. About the Leaders Jan Lalinsky is the company CEO and co-founder. His role is to form the vision and overall direction along with making it come true. He focusses on the business development, marketing and people management. He makes sure that heads of all departments are on the same page and on track in order to deliver healthy and sustainable company growth. Roman Stefko is the company CTO and co-founder. He is responsible for the product development and all other technical challenges (incl. eWay-Cloud, security, internal infrastructure and much more). As a former developer, he has deep knowledge of IT which helps him challenge anything.
www.insightssuccess.com
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Franchise Ecosystem
IS
FRANCHISE A PROFITABLE STROKE OF BUSINESS?
T
echnology, technique—name it, the world has bestowed some remarkably adaptive implications and stimulated them into becoming a global brand. Yet, many organizations are striving to attain the full benefits of being a globally recognized brand. To stretch out confinements, various organizations often offer franchise licenses to franchise owners in potentially profitable regions for acquiring a better customer approach. Instead of starting from a scratch, an individual can purchase a franchise and start with a proven business model that has a more probability of achieving success. With adequate management and guidance, one can easily flourish in the business world. Franchise business strikes down certain hardships and struggles that might be faced in the start-ups. Choosing franchise
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businesses over a start-up could prove as a better idea, as it has more fruitful benefits that of any initial-staged businesses. An Established Open System Unlike any start-ups, a franchise business allows an individual to carry out the operation directly from the established foundation. From brand cultivation and marketing to future plans and customer base, a new franchise owner is blessed with almost everything. An outlet of a franchise ensures the idea of following the similar business modules and operational methods can be more effective. And, implementing some new tweaks in such absolute aspects makes the task easier for a distributor. In addition, it also allows professionals to overview the business reports and key performance indicators which aid www.insightssuccess.com
one to adapt and make appropriate business decisions. Besides, a strong support system is often a necessity rather than a want. It supports an individual in maintaining balance between both independent ideologies and the brand’s business modules. The support mostly includes the vast knowledge about the franchise and an expertise outlook on products. With such system, many new business personalities can perpetually sustain in the massive markets. Less risk factor and Higher Success Rate One of the primary concern factor and the misconception in franchise business lies within the limitation of autonomy. Unlike individual enterprises, a franchise business might be facing some problems regarding receiving a full scale autonomy which can be overruled thereafter. It requires
compassion over choosing a franchise which is more suitable with a purchaser’s business ethics. This reduces the risk of being dominated by franchisors and other investor entities and helps in drafting own rules to follow on. Though a franchise comes with a wellestablished platform, it does require consistent efforts on bringing the organization upwards. According to various reports and facts, it has been also stated that the success rate of franchise business is quite higher than an independent entrepreneurial venture. As franchisees operate under a systematic business model, they get an indirect training in marketing as well as staff handling. With a large-scale marketing, the franchisees can promptly attain more customer attraction resulting into a higher growth rate. January 2020 | 35
Instant Customer Access Customer engagement is one of the most crucial and difficult processes in a business to bear. To gain more number of customers, an organization has to invest their time and efforts on processing various marketing aspects. In case of franchise business, the odds are quite similar but with fewer efforts. As most of franchise brands have a national or a global recognition, franchisees are required to contribute into a “marketing budget” through which the parent companies could process out an extensive promotion campaigns. Meanwhile, franchisee can also start an independent campaign in order to gain instant customer engagement.
Below are some methods through which franchisees can uplift the business, independently. Focusing on target audiences—instead of exaggerating over customer approaches, one can narrow down the target audiences to highly qualified prospects. It allows business owners to concentrate and come up with best prospects to deliver. Return-policy—being the most traditional and effective way to attract customers, utilizing return-policies in franchise business will aid the franchisees to get better customer approach. Providing something in return and offering various schemes helps in creating an adverse marketing network.
How Franchise Business works? Quite a few requirements are needed to be fulfilled by a prospective franchisee owner in order to get qualified for licensing the brand’s name. The qualification requirements significantly vary from one franchisor to other. It often includes maintaining a higher net worth and a good credit score for a larger initial investment. In addition, a franchisee must be having another source of income also an industry/management experience for guiding business effectively. Subsequently considering all the factors, the franchisor determines whether the prospective owner is worthy enough to be qualified for the business or not. A Franchise agreement includes certain sets of terms which are required to be followed by the franchisees. After being qualified, an individual signs an agreement where he/she has to pay a franchise-fee in order to acquire the license to use the brands name and its business processes. Simultaneously, the franchisor assists franchisees with allocation, supplier connections, storemanagement and staff training. However, it also bestows various facets like specific tested operating system, with creative marketing strategies. Initially, the opportunities of implanting reinvention in franchise business are narrowed down as the focus of a franchiser is on delivering a consistent experience across all the locations. A multiple franchised locations, a franchisee can easily attain increased purchasing power. Also, Franchise business allows business persons to be flexible to try new products or services in order to test in the real-time market scenario. Thus by considering above aspects, it can be concluded that the franchise business is most secure and best option to invest in.
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www.insightssuccess.com
The
PERFORMING
Best Solution Providers 2020
The Science-First Relationship Marketing Hub
Pini Yakuel Founder & CEO
O
ptimove’s mission is to help marketers drive measurable growth by autonomously transforming customer data into actionable insights. The company’s unique technology suite enables the smart orchestration, measurement and optimization of highly personalized multi-channel campaigns, at scale, resulting in improved customer experience, retention and lifetime value. Optimove is used by hundreds of leading brands of all sizes, including Staples, Deezer, GVC, Family Dollar, Groupe Dynamite, Paper Source and Sweaty Betty. Optimove employs over 250 people in its United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, and Israel offices. The company was founded and operated as a bootstrap company from 2009 to 2016, when it received 20M in
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growth funding. Optimove generated growth and profit from the day of its inception to present day, thanks to its smart and talented employees who continuously raise the bar on innovation and solutions. As a company, Optimove is proud to have been included in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the past few years, and in the Forrester’s Wave for the first time in 2019. Helping Clients Gain Insight Optimove aims to help its clients understand their customers, while using advanced predictive analytics models to foresee trends and behavior. As a company, Optimove practices what it preaches. The organization is constantly evolving and developing in order to offer its clients the best technological solutions for their marketing needs. Optimove is a company that thrives on www.insightssuccess.com
With a CDP at its core, the Optimove solution is built on the notion that every customer’s behavior is different, dynamic and multi-faceted.
learning and perceives every employee to be both a teacher and a student. That part of Optimove’s DNA is translated into its constant quest for better, faster solutions, developing stronger relationships, and creating new products to assist its clients. The Knight Pini Yakuel- founded Optimove in 2009 and has led the company, as its CEO, since its inception. With two decades of experience in analytics-driven customer marketing, business consulting and sales, he is the driving force behind Optimove. His passion for innovative and empowering technologies is what keeps Optimove ahead of the curve. He holds an MSc in Industrial Engineering and Management from Tel Aviv University. Always Ahead of the Curve Optimove prides itself on innovation. A most obvious example would be the Self-Optimizing Journeys that maximize customer lifetime value by autonomously identifying all the campaigns a customer is eligible for, evaluating all journey possibilities, probabilities and potential gains, and serving the next-best-action for each. Another example is Optimove’s database infrastructure, enabling brands to access their always up-to-date unified customer data, share it with internal systems and teams, include it in proprietary models, and use it to create bespoke customer attributes. Aiming to Innovate Optimove constantly aims to upgrade its own technology and products, as well as its own service. In that respect, the company harnesses the power of AI and Machine Learning for Self-Optimizing Journeys, in which the customer’s journey is virtually managed. This means that www.insightssuccess.com
prioritizing campaigns in marketing is no longer a complex issue. It’s a non-issue. In terms of upgrading Optimove’s level of service, it has initiated migration of its data integration, transformation and sharing processes to Snowflake’s Cloud Data Warehouse. Combining Optimove’s sophisticated data calculations and transformations with Snowflake’s scalable cloud-based infrastructure, will provide Optimove users with faster, direct access to their singlecustomer-views and predictive analytics. Empowering Clients The Optimove software orchestrates the automated execution of all pre-scheduled and activity-triggered customer communications, over a wide range of marketing channels, putting a true multi-channel personalization powerhouse at the tips of marketers’ fingers. The Optimove relationship marketing hub empowers marketers to target, manage and refine hundreds of granular, homogeneous customer segments, increasing customer satisfaction and engagement – and maximizing customer lifetime value. When Global Expansion is Just a Matter of Time In recent months, Optimove has penetrated APAC, opening a Singapore office and employing representatives in India. Optimove has multiple clients in the region, for whom it aims to provide fast and effective means to increase their growth. The company is also strengthening support for additional verticals.
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