New Lost and Found Service Helps Companies Track Valuables |  |
- New Lost and Found Service Helps Companies Track Valuables
- Funding For a Small Project or Product with Kickstarter
- Chris Cabrera of Xactly: Making Sales Compensation Easy for Small Businesses
- Stamp Of . . Err, Let’s Wait And See
- Facebook Barely Meets Income Goals
| New Lost and Found Service Helps Companies Track Valuables Posted: 27 Jul 2012 01:00 PM PDT People and businesses can be hurt greatly by the loss of valuables. Whether it be equipment, expensive items, or irreplaceable data, a new online service is now aiming to help both individuals and businesses recover lost possessions and feel more confident about owning and using valuable items. Belongs, Inc has just launched the next generation of global lost and found services for both web and smartphone users, Belon.gs. Allowing users to remain anonymous, post and collect rewards for lost items, and easily tag their items with QR codes, Belon.gs hopes to encourage good deeds throughout its community of business and personal users, so that people have a better chance of actually retrieving lost items.
Those who want to take part in the lost and found program can order sticker tags with QR codes that can be attached to valuable items. Business customers can order special corporate tags, which look like normal Belon.gs tags but can be tracked in your company's name with special corporate features. Belon.gs asset management features, which run on a cloud-based platform, can also help companies with tasks like taking inventory and tracking item locations. When users find an item with a Belon.gs tag, they can go to the website and enter the code located on the tag. (See screenshot above — the pink arrows point what the code looks like.) Then Belon.gs will anonymously put the finder in touch with the owner of the lost item, and they can arrange for the delivery of the lost item. Then the owner can reward the finder for returning the lost item. Currently in its beta version, Belon.gs is free for individuals, and offers several different plans for business customers, ranging in price depending on how many tagged items each company requires. However, Belon.gs does offer a one-month free trial for business customers.
From Small Business Trends |
| Funding For a Small Project or Product with Kickstarter Posted: 27 Jul 2012 11:00 AM PDT Despite its enormous popularity, Kickstarter is still not as well known in the small business community as you would expect. If you haven’t heard about this crowdfunding platform, read on and I’ll share how this still-new service is shaking up the startup and new product world.
Kickstarter is a funding platform as the screenshot above states, but let’s unpack that just a bit. This is not a venture capital or angel investor network. The simple explanation I share is this: You are pre-selling a product before its finished and getting real customers to take a risk on you by purchasing ahead of production. Your “product” might be a movie, or a music CD, or a piece of art, or a new 3D printer that you’ve invented. There are some boundaries (guidelines) and you can read about them here, but more fun to consider the statistics.
That’s not a lot of money. But if you’re a small, micro business and you want to test the waters and launch a new product (again, product can be defined in many ways that might fit what you do), Kickstarter is one of the top places to consider. Some projects have hyper-funded — seven have raised over $1,000,000. The Kickstarter website helps define what a “project” is:
As you can see, there’s a lot of room for small business owners to create a project and get funds to make it a reality. Here are a few of my current favorites:
Gadgets and consumer items tend to be super popular when designed well. Books, music and films are hyper-popular, too. The Kickstarter team offers up its staff picks and there are also curated collections. I mention all of these to help you brainstorm if a crowdfunded project or product is in your future. I’ve tried it a few times and even though my projects have not funded I have learned a ton and adapted my business. I view it as a real-time customer research lab. Let us know if you launch a Kickstarter project and your experiences. From Small Business Trends |
| Chris Cabrera of Xactly: Making Sales Compensation Easy for Small Businesses Posted: 27 Jul 2012 08:00 AM PDT Most of us want more sales, right? But as a company grows, the complexities of managing sales quotas and calculating sale commissions also grow. That’s why it’s so important to have good systems so that you can design best-in-class sales compensation plans and automate the calculations so as not to get bogged down in doing it manually with spreadsheets. In this interview, I’d like to introduce you to Chris Cabrera of Exactly. Xactly is a Web-based application to automate and keep track of sales compensation — and even integrate with your QuickBooks data, thereby avoiding duplicate data entry. * * * * *
Chris Cabrera: About 14 years ago, I started with a company selling on-premise solutions, big heavy expensive on-premise solutions that solved the sales compensation problem. Seven years ago I embarked on starting this company, Xactly, to really focus on smaller companies and to do it all on the Cloud. Today, we have 500 customers that include companies with two reps, 10 and 50, all the way up to thousands. Small Business Trends: What kind of challenge is it, from a small business perspective, to handle sales compensation? Chris Cabrera: For years small businesses have been precluded from being able to take advantage of these automated solutions to handle it. A lot of these smaller companies don't have a dedicated comp analyst or compensation manager. But the challenges are no less difficult and the benefit is no less great. What is now happening is we are seeing small businesses waking up to the fact that they can now afford to use the best in class, the best practices, and the best software solutions that are in the cloud. The same ones that these giant public companies use. When you think about sales comp, we are not talking about insignificant dollars, right? I mean if you are paying sales reps, chances are you are paying those reps $50,000 to $100,000 a year to sell your wares. That is a lot of dollars that the company is spending. Yet, the way these sales comp plans are designed, often they are done in the back room and at the last minute. Again, by the CEO or the VP of sales. These are smart folks, but that is not their area of expertise. So what we said to these SMBs is, “Hey, this is what we do for a living and this is all we do. So why don't you let us help you design better plans that will drive better performance?” Small Business Trends: Paying people on time, right away and what they are expecting, that goes along way to keep them happy I assume? Chris Cabrera: It does. I’m always amazed that the paradigm today is that companies literally pay four or five weeks in arrears. They are at the end of their month or their quarter, then they start doing the calculations, and about four weeks later, they are giving their reps a statement with their check. In the Xactly world, those reps can see, day by day, through the month or the quarter how they're doing. Even if they are using a CRM tool, they can begin to look at a deal prior to them even closing it. They can do these "what if" scenarios that we have. The "show me the money" button where they can say, “How much can I earn if I close this deal?” Small Business Trends: What kind of things should companies be on the lookout for when they develop a sales compensation plan? Chris Cabrera: Some of the common pitfalls are people that tried to use the compensation plan do to too many things. As a quick example, I have gone into companies where they are using valuable compensation dollars and they are paying on deals only if it was put into CRM, as an example, right? So what they are trying to do is say, “I want to improve adoption of CRM so I am going to use compensation dollars to enforce that.” That is not a good practice, that is a management practice that should be handled by management. You should not use your valuable compensation dollars for that purposes. What you should use your valuable compensation dollars for is driving whatever is in your business that makes you better. It is selling more widgets; is it selling more profitable widgets; it is discounting less; is it getting better payment terms; is it getting more cash up front. I mean, everybody's challenges are different. But comp can be used if used correctly and, by the way, it can change. It should change over time depending on the needs of the business change. Small Business Trends: You say that CRM adoption is improved, but it should not be on the sales compensation plan, right? Chris Cabrera: Correct. I mean you shouldn't use the valuable dollars that you pay to drive the behavior, to get them to adopt CRM. What our customers tell us is once they have installed Xactly on top of the CRM tool, the reps now have a reason to go into their CRM more often because they are going to see all of their commission's right through the CRM tool. They have a reason to go into this CRM tool and make the data more accurate because they want to do these "show me the money" exercises to see how much money they can earn Small Business Trends: You recently announced integrations with QuickBooks. How does that impact how small businesses do sales compensation? Chris Cabrera: QuickBooks is omnipresent. Clearly one of the things that you need to pay compensation is order entry data. We already have partnerships with CRM vendors in particular, Salesforce.com, Oracle, and Microsoft. But we realized if we can get a partnership with Intuit, such that the data can be brought directly into Xactly, we are going to make it that much more seamless for SMBs to sign up and, in a very short matter of hours, become live. It pulls data right out of Intuit and displays all of the compensation right through their CRM system and then pumps the data right back to the payroll tool. That whole process today is typically manual, usually in Excel, and is a nightmare. So this partnership with Intuit is really exciting and starting to pay dividends as SMB are coming and adopting this in droves. From Small Business Trends This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Stamp Of . . Err, Let’s Wait And See Posted: 27 Jul 2012 05:00 AM PDT
After each exchange, he’d scuttle off to his managers office, chat them up, get their opinion, and then – and only then – could he deliver a decision. Listen, I understand the value in getting another point of view, but often these were simple, even mundane decisions like, “Greg and I would like to trade lunch hours today. Okay with you?” Scuttle, chat, question, “I guess it’s Okay.” Maddening to be sure. But at least I got a good cartoon out of it. From Small Business Trends |
| Facebook Barely Meets Income Goals Posted: 27 Jul 2012 02:30 AM PDT Since a disappointing IPO, Facebook has struggled to impress investors. This quarter, the social network struggled to meet revenue goals, and growth is slower than before the company went public. Meanwhile, the social media giant remains critical for business marketing and networking. Here’s the latest on Facebook’s business and tools. Measuring UpShow us the money. The majority of Facebook’s earnings this quarter, as in all previous quarters reported, is advertising revenue. This quarter, ad revenues accounted for $992 million, representing 84 percent of the social media networking giant’s earnings, a 45 percent increase year over year from 2011. The Verge Earn some respect. Here’s a look at Facebook’s second quarter earnings in detail. What businesses using the social network regularly will like most is not revenue totals, but the 29 percent increase in monthly users and the 32 percent increase in daily active users. Facebook Investor Relations Take the plunge. Businesses using Facebook to advertise and connect with customer are happy with growing user numbers, but investors in the company aren’t as Facebook’s stock value dropped to an all-time low following its report on quarterly earnings. This won’t affect business users of the site unless it means Facebook’s days are numbered. CNBC New DirectionsHold the phone. Don’t expect a mobile device from Facebook, despite all the rumors circulating. In a recent conference call, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it wouldn’t make any sense for the company to make a phone, but given reports that the social media giant is investing in smartphone development, observers are speculating on what this could really mean. Business Insider Stop buggin’ out. If you’re worried about Facebook security, you’re not alone. The company’s management team has taken an unprecedented step among tech firms, rewarding white hat hackers for finding and reporting security holes that expose user data. The new bug bounty program should inspire more confidence in the company’s efforts to protect user information. Bloomberg Facebook’s FutureMake your recommendations. A new recommendation bar introduced yesterday helps people find articles on your site based on what their friends have liked or shared on Facebook. The plugin is a boon for Website owners using Facebook to promote content, and sites testing the tool so far are seeing three times the click through rate than that of Facebook’s other means of social promotion. Facebook Developers Survey says. Change is inevitable. While Facebook continues to gain users completely outdistancing competitors, it might not stay that way forever. Business users rely on the dominant social network for marketing and connecting, but a recent survey by the American Customer Satisfaction Index indicates users are more satisfied with Facebook competitor Google+, even if it has nowhere near the user numbers. Wired From Small Business Trends |
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