Big Changes In Support & Service
Today we are proud to announce the Own Web Now University series of business and technical training seminars. Through these weekly webinars we will deliver ongoing training and introduction to Own Web Now products and service, both for our new partners just joining the program and for existing partners that are hiring new staff.
Part of becoming an Own Web Now Partner (or becoming a profitable one) will now include free web seminars that you can take advantage of to save time, become more efficient and find the best practices behind our services. We hope you join us, we will be emailing invitations regularly from now on.
Little bit of background…
We used to be a small software company and everything we did was personal, direct and we worked with very smart people. As our products matured and grew in popularity quicker than our ability to handle the demand and the quality of the product support and billing, honestly, sucked. For the past 16 months we’ve worked extremely hard not just on our products and service, but on our support and management of the actual service delivery. We’re proud to say that today we have the most versatile products in the market, the most sophisticated billing, support and statistics integration with mainstream MSP management platforms (PSA) in the market and the solutions that help our partners compete even with the Fortune 500 solutions.
A lot can change in 16 months. Last time this year we were constantly criticized for our lack of documentation. We were told often and repeatedly that our support “sucked” and that we needed far better service notification and responsiveness. We have improved all of those areas. All of our core products have video training as well as extensive whitepaper and FAQ collection. We have created an OWN University site to help partners get on board. We have automated the process of getting OWN service and management of all the solutions we provide. We have posted countless webcasts with in-depth information on our services, should you care for the details. We’ve even opened forums to help our partners connect and work more closely with our developers and support teams on changes you want to see made. We’ve made a ton of progress and now we deal with a different problem.
Today, we are not receiving complaints about the lack of documentation, support or assistance – quite the opposite: there is too much of it. That is not subject to change, as a matter of fact you will see more OWN people and more OWN documentation and services in the coming year. It’s a matter of distinction and positioning, there are two kinds of clients:
- Those that have business continuity, regulatory compliance and security concerns.
- Those that don’t care about any of the above, they just want the basics to work.
More on #2 later; OWN is here to help our partners win business from #1. The kind of client that fits that profile is also the one that is willing to pay for excellent service and a comprehensive solution. The days of just selling spot products (spam filtering, web hosting) are over – with ExchangeDefender 5 changed the game by including everything in one low price. In late July, new versions of Encryption, Web Sharing and Web Filtering will be in beta and the complexity of delivering these services grows. Today, we receive different comments and criticism:
- We’re just not aware of all your offerings..
- We’re just not sure how to make money in the cloud..
- We’re trying to figure out how this fits into our model..
- We love it, we’ll send our senior tech to evaluate your product..
- We love everything about it, we just need to figure out how to sell it..
Let us ease your mind: We know how to sell it. We’ve made millions of dollars with our partners delivering these solutions for over a decade and we’re here to help you do it. We know the problems that you’ll eventually face because we’ve had to deal with them ourselves.
Personally, and on behalf of everyone at Own Web Now, we want your criticism with these seminars. I will be personally holding the first few and they will be small – we want to help you fit our services in your model and help you figure out how to make it more profitable. We want your feedback and your input.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
Changes to OWN Support Coming Soon
Every year since the incorporation of Own Web Now we’ve strived to enhance the level of support and service available to our partners. Back in the day when I was the only one interacting with clients, the service was great but the flexibility and variety was not – now that there are a ton of OWN people working with partners we have a lot of resources and a lot of support options but awareness and connection take a hit. The evolution of IT, to the cloud, and the evolution of the partner IT solution providers is causing us to again revise how we offer support, how we communicate and how we train our partner base to be effective, competitive and comprehensive in the amount of service and solution you offer.
For us, service has been the cornerstone of the organization and I want to assure you that we are using all of our experience and expertise from working from truly the most successful people in the business to deliver the level of service that is required to be successful.
Throughout May and June we will be introducing some support changes and new partner programs to help you with our expanding service and solution portfolio. More forums. More integrations into third party solutions. More free training. More assistance. More marketing support and business development ideas.
All I ask is for your attention. Starting with May 2010, we will be removing “vanity” emails and inactive partner accounts from the portal. If we work with you we need to know your name and your phone number (so no more “IT Support”, support@ and –0000 phone numbers).
In turn, we will make the experience more personal and make sure you are armed with the resources before you even set any of the services up.
We are making a business investment to make you more successful at doing what you’re already doing. We’re spending the money you’re paying us to improve the level of service you get. It’s as simple and beautiful as it gets.
As always, thank you for your business!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
Announcing OWN & ExchangeDefender Forums
You’ve asked, and now, we’ve delivered. Please say hello to OWN Forums.
These forums are a little unique in the way we’re positioning them and what we intend to use them for. Typically, software companies offer forums to allow users to help support one another. We wanted to make sure our technical support was rock solid, integrated with your PSA and most importantly free. We did not want to consider support as something separate from the product, that would not be officially delivered without a firm SLA. Products should always work, and company should stand behind them. Those are our values. When we ask our partners why they pick us, they repeat this paragraph.
We are spending a LOT of money on the next wave of products and we wanted to work closely with more people. You will see a lot of new stuff in ExchangeDefender in 2010 and the forums are an informal way of involving you in the development and beta testing process. We want to make sure that we get the most data and embrace the feedback and ideas that you wish to share with us in the open.
So hop on in and help us develop great solutions. http://www.ownwebnow.com/forums
P.S. Your forum credentials have been emailed to you, if you wish to add someone in your organization to them just add them as a contact in https://support.ownwebnow.com
Introducing Orangutime for Autotask
Allow me to introduce you to our 1-2 punch for Autotask users: Orangutime, a time and note tracking desktop application. Autotask develops a fantastic IT management solution and their UI feature set is quite impressive. But there is a need for a more rapid, responsive way to provide quick updates to support requests (notes, time) when there isn’t a lot of bandwidth or while we’re completely offline.
Own Web Now has developed a time and note tracking software and today we’re proud to introduce you to 1.0. Here are some highlights:
- Allows you to start and pause time as you work on your support requests.
- Allows you to provide notes that can be posted back to the support ticket along with the time.
- Resides on your desktop as a native Windows application (it’s fast!)
- Completely secure, uses Autotask API to post your data.
- Just download & login, no installation, deployment or management complexity. Or waiting for stuff to load
Here is how it works. Download the app and double click on it! (Link is available to beta testers, if you’re interested in it please open a support request at https://support.ownwebnow.com). Provide your credentials and login.
Add a ticket you want to work on.
Hit the play button and it will sit on your desktop in the background, tracking time as you work.
When you’re done with the task (or move on to the next one) just pause it. You can see all your current tickets and their time.
If you want to sync a ticket to Autotask, hit the blue arrow and it will upload the contents to the portal.
It’s that simple. It’s also that fast, and when it’s simple and seamless people tend to use it.
We’re looking forward to adding a ton of features to it and we want your help in making it simpler, easier, faster and more effective in helping you track your time and get paid for it.
ConnectWise Integration Released
Earlier today Hank Newman and I presented our ConnectWise integration, you can download the video here.
I would like to thank Howard Cunningham of Macro LLC (MSP servicing Washington DC and Virginia) and Raymond Smith of EZ Network Systems (MSP Servicing Stockton, California) for all the help and ConnectWise insight in creating this integration to serve all of our partners.
The video covered about 50 minutes of exploring the ConnectWise integration value, business case and use scenarios, deployment, getting the buyin of the person deploying it, etc. It will give you some insight into all the areas of ConnectWise and Own Web Now.
A Favor
This effort now completes our integration efforts with ConnectWise and we have no further development plans on our roadmap. We have no ETA on our “hosted ConnectWise” integration of our ConnectWise on-premise billing as it’s not currently possible with ConnectWise cloud API’s and will not be possible in the foreseeable future. With that in mind, I have two requests:
1) If you wish to see an integration point with ConnectWise you need to voice that need to ConnectWise through their forums, user groups and management. You are a ConnectWise client and you simply have more pull than we do. To give the benefit of the doubt to ConnectWise, we are certain that integration points some of you are asking for do not exist because enough users aren’t requesting them and the software company has to allocate resources to the development of features that are most requested. If you want a level of integration that isn’t there, voice it with ConnectWise, not us.
2) If you wish to get more information from us, or our input on the ConnectWise, feel free to invite us to the forums, events, user groups, etc. ConnectWise does not allow vendors at user groups, we have absolutely no access to the ConnectWise University, we have no insight into how to use ConnectWise or a way to formally or informally pool ConnectWise users. We only have our users.
We have made an extraordinary effort at a great expense and a tremendous amount of dedication of a few of our partners. How far we take the ConnectWise integration is at this point up to you. It is easily the most sophisticated integration of support, billing and statistics available not just for a cloud services provider but also for offsite backups and SMTP filtering and hygiene in ConnectWise. It is also the only integration of two way agreement sync, only hosted exchange, web hosting, sharepoint and virtual server billing available for ConnectWise. We have really gone the distance for our partners to help you be competitive in the market.
Now it’s your turn.
ConnectWise Integration Tour
Join us tomorrow at 11 AM for a full walkthrough of Own Web Now’s integration with ConnectWise: statistics, support, billing and agreements. We have the most sophisticated integration into ConnectWise of any cloud services or antispam vendor, guaranteeing you that your OWN services are properly billed, accounted and reported for.
You can download details and whitepapers here: www.ownwebnow.com/connectwise
The presentation will last approximately 30 minutes with some Q&A time as well.
Please register for the webcast here:
March 3rd, 11 AM EST:
Look forward to seeing you there.
ExchangeDefender Promotion Expires This Weekend
First of all, let me thank you all for such tremendous support of ExchangeDefender and all your help with the new release. As I mentioned, the product has been rewritten from the ground up with the 5.0 release to allow us to be more aggressive and introduce new features, faster. This of course is never a flawless or simple process, it caused several snags in the rollout that we’ve addressed quickly with our partners and the product is now on a very solid foundation that we look forward to protecting all our partners with.
You’re already seeing some results – we’re the first and only platform to provide billing sync with both Autotask and ConnectWise. We’re the only ones that offer all-you-can-eat features in the cloud, giving you web filtering, encryption, business continuity and some cool new stuff – free! Plus the big MSP news in March.
We had hoped that the promotional special price would be a great token of appreciation for our growing partner base and something that would help you add clients during the off season from Thanksgiving to March 1st, 2010. I’m proud to say we’ve done that and the numbers show it as well.
The big question is…
Can you extend the promotional pricing for … The answer is unfortunately no. The promotional pricing is over and we do not anticipate bringing it back again. This was the most massive development effort in the company history, since the first time I hacked sendmail to prescan mail for Exchange 5.5. 🙂
So the promotional period is over on March 1st, as expected.
We will consider offering a few concessions for partners that are working on larger accounts that have not yet moved over. Here are the details and requirements:
1) You must have an active service provider account with us with at least 1 paying promo pricing client signed up since December 1st, 2009. If you don’t, we won’t have that pricing available for your account and when the code expires on March 1st we won’t be able to add it into your company profile.
2) We must have a list of domains that you intend to move over. This way we can activate the service in our billing system with 0 users.
3) You have to add them over the next 30-60 days. There will be no way to add domains that were not mentioned in point #2.
4) All requests must be approved by Shannon Brewer.
I hope the concessions above are enough. I know that some of you would want more than that, and I understand, but the billing systems just do not make that possible.
New pricing will be announced on Monday. I cannot thank all of our partners for helping us get to this point and I hope that you’re seeing all the new stuff we’re doing as an overwhelmingly positive thing to your business development.
On a personal note: I was recently presenting ExchangeDefender at a conference and stated point-blank that all of this stuff will soon be free. The same goes for the other products and services you provide. The opportunity to build everything in, offer everything and reimage your business as a service that doesn’t exist as a point or a solution but as a peace of mind is now. If all your products and services do is solve a problem that the client is able to identify, you will find that they quickly start to question why they are paying so much money for the problem they no longer deal with day in and day out. The time to go beyond solutions and point products is now, and we’ll help you deliver that.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
Have you tuned into the OWN University?
Thanks to your support and business over the years we’ve grown tremendously. We’ve also done our fair share to promote our partners and deliver the solutions that have made our clients grow exponentially – and now we’re all feeling the pain of training new staff, getting up to speed with the new technology and changes to the existing systems. It’s a wonderful problem to have and solving it will make all of us amazingly successful.
I want you to know that the Support Services are first and foremost in 2010. We can’t go forward if we do not have the foundation of our business rock solid: What we offer is very simple and you should be able to go from a novice to an expert within the hour. That’s our goal and here is how we are doing it:
OWN University is located at http://go.ownwebnow.com and is our process of delivering support training to our partners and clients. We’ve always had the Support Portal, the Help, the ExchangeDefender Video Library but we’ve never had a landing page that would help train our partners on the product from start to finish and link in all the relevant information.
We have received high praise for the amount of training and the quality of information presented by Own Web Now and it’s something we take pride in – but finding that specific information has not always been easy. Now, we have a single landing page to point you to and it’s accessible from every page at ownwebnow.com
What to Expect
We will be adding relevant content on a monthly basis and in a wide range of media. We have whitepapers and FAQ articles for those of you that want to quickly locate information. We also have long-form training videos as well as SPAM Show and Webcasts designed to be consumed on the go and give you the full range of information. Here are some examples:
Onboarding Video – This guide will give you a full walkthrough of all OWN systems for service orders, technical support, marketing collateral and service management.
Exchange + SharePoint Hosting – This guide will walk you through the order and provisioning process for our Exchange & SharePoint products. We will then walk you through the Microsoft Outlook configuration, importing old mail to the new profile and more.
Offsite Backups – In this guide we will show you how to order Offsite Backups, manage the quota, configure the offsite backup agent and get the backups started.
Web Hosting – This guide will show you our web hosting control panel, process of purchasing hosting, your options when provisioning the site, if you should choose .NET or PHP hosting and more.
All of our videos are complemented by a whitepaper with screenshots and best practices tips – and vice versa. This gives you the ability to copy the content to your web sites and allow your clients to benefit from the same training without exposing our trademarks or relationship.
Most importantly, this is an ongoing commitment to our clients and partners, we stand behind our products more so than any of our competitors. Not only are our solutions integrated into PSA’s that you use to manage your business but we also allow you to offload that labor to our engineers – so the cost of support to you is $0. By providing better training and on boarding we also hope to reduce the costs associated with the deployment and management of our solutions.
I hope you agree that 2010 is going to be fantastic for us all. As always, thank you for your business!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender Web Security Webcast
As promised, I held the ExchangeDefender Web Security launch today. Documentation, features and downloads will be available on this blog this weekend. In the meantime, please download the webcast and watch at your leisure. Note: You should play it in full screen to get the smooth page transitions. If that doesn’t work, the PowerPoint is also included.
My Notes On “The Prime Solution”
The past couple of weeks I have taken it upon myself to help expand my sales/business knowledge by reading “The Prime Solution” by Jeff Thull. It’s a fairly easy read of about 200 or so pages sprinkled intermittently with stories of companies who have successfully implemented his techniques to not only win the sale, but increase revenues and in most cases even change the way they run their business. I personally found the book to be fairly repetitive at times, but I also found some techniques and exampled that screamed “Managed Service Provider!” So basically what I’ve done is condensed the book to give you guys somewhat of a summary if you will of what I read. Take a look at it (as you will spend far less time reading my summary then the actual book, and lets face it… Time is money) and next week I will do a follow up. I will basically be trimming the fat and pulling out the substance to where I believe we can actually apply The Prime Solution to our way of thinking in the MSP world to create more opportunities for sales, and a more mutually beneficial relationship with our clients.
Part One: SWALLOWED UP IN THE GAP
Ch. 1: The Elusive Prime Solution
This tells the story of IBM’s CEO Lou Gerstner’s influence on the company during his tenure. After a shocking loss in 1992, IBM was ready for the fresh new start. Gerstner’s background of IT systems made him privy to the fact that IBM’s target market had no concern of the actual commodities that was being sold, they wanted solutions. Gerstner in turn refocused the company with his implementation of “Global Services” which provided customer solutions to their problems and challenges by delivering on the value of promise. All in all, his vision accounted for 80% of the company’s growth during his term with IBM.
A solution failure occurs when the value promised to the customer is not achieved. This occurs several ways: 1.The product or service itself can’t deliver on the promise made. 2. The customer is unable to implement the technology properly. 3. The customers’ expectations have not yet been met. This hurts potential as well as future clients.
The Value Gap is often created by the frustration and animosity of trying to fill the gap between the promise of value and its ultimate fulfillment. The failure of this is impertinent to avoiding barriers that sellers will encounter.
Ch. 2: Three Eras of Value Dilution
The value gap is something that has been created overtime driven by the ever changing definition of the word value. Abrupt changes typically shoot up a red flag for us to make an adjustment, but slower changes over an extended period of time can leave us behind. Innovation and technology advances push sellers to add value to their offerings as a means to create advantage over their competitors. These advances, while impertinent, add to the complexity for all parties involved. Let’s look at this by exploring the changing definition of value over the years:
· Era 1: Obvious Value– (1950’s-1960’s) Businesses created a product and sales people went door to door trying to persuade people to buy it. Buyers easily understood the function of the product and easily saw the value it would present to their problems.
· Era 2: Augmented Value– (1970’s-1990’s) Products were sold with a range of possibilities stemming from generic, to fulfilling customers’ expectations, to exceeding customers expectations with added value. For the most part buyers still understood their own problems, but they need the sales person to ‘problem solve’ and show them that their expectations could be exceeded.
· Era 3: Complex Value– (1990’s-Present) Because of technology advances, buyers have a difficult time understanding their own needs, and problems. For the most part they know their goals but are unaware of how to achieve them. Sellers must help them diagnose, design, evaluate and implement the solution.
Ch.3: Five Barriers to Keeping Value Promises
Each barrier has a consequence and must be understood and addressed before closing the value gap.
· Relevancy Barrier: Sellers decide for themselves value in the service and apply this rule to all buyers, and are unable to actually produce meaningful value because of generalization
· Inflation Barrier: Sellers only sell the benefits and features and avoid their duty in walking the customer through the steps, and risks involved with achieving this value and completely undermine the business relationship.
· Comprehensive Barrier: Sellers assume that the customer fully understands their own problem and the complex solution being provided to them. This sets the customer up for failure with the solution. Comprehension only grows as the solution becomes more widespread.
· Dilution Barrier: Customer’s take control and approach the situation from a price based decision, and completely dilutes the value and benefits of the solution. Don’t let buyers strip the components out of your solution so that they can compare ‘apples to apples.’
· Implementation Barrier: Sellers leave the buyers ill equipped with the implementation of the solution and don’t take accountability when for their customer’s lack of value achievement.
To bring down these barriers, there are 3 main considerations to keep in mind:
1. The cause of the barrier is not to assign blame, but to overcome these obstacles and establish a relationship. The dilution(cost) barrier is often used because the buyer is afraid of getting taken advantage of.
2. On barrier often supports and reinforces another one. Always be prepared to address all five barriers.
3. The point where the consequences of a barrier manifest is often not where the collision takes place. It can flow from R&D, Manufacturing, Marketing, Sales, to Support. Overcoming all 5 barriers and closing the value gap involves participation at all levels.
Part Two: PRIME SOLUTIONS AND THEIR PROTOCOLS
Ch. 4: Value Leverage for Business Performance
Value maximization is the cornerstone. Sellers must identify the factors that are significantly affecting the customers, and show the absence of value, and link their solution as a strategy to fulfill the buyer’s ultimate goal. Define, address, and connect with value on the customers’ terms. Sellers must be able to point out all the components of a high quality decision including priorities, change, investment, commitment and risk.
The value impact of a Prime Solution is raised as it is able to connect to multiple customer business drivers:
· Financial– Either Revenues or Expenses
· Quality– Customer Satisfaction, Employee Satisfaction, Regulatory Compliance
· Competitive– Uniqueness or Availability
Georgia Pacific Resins, Inc (GPRI) is a somewhat of a commodity based company since they sell resins necessary for paper quality optimization. After dealing with clients that were only concerned with the best price, GPRI took their organization to the process level and now tailor makes the resin for clients depending on the need to help optimize their production, leveraging the value of their solution.
Ch. 5: Multiple Decisions, Mutual Understandings & Ch.6: Effective Execution, Measurable Results
Business managers are usually not well equipped to make high-quality decisions. Sellers combat this situation with either a reactive, proactive, or interactive relationship level. The most effective of the three relationships is interactive. This is where the seller helps expand the customers understanding of their own problem, and makes them fully aware of their alternatives. Seller must show them the incentive to change and give them the confidence to invest. You must make them recognize the negative cost associated with not implementing the solution, or they will have no incentive to change.
High-quality decisions involve decisions about priorities, change, investment, commitment and risk. Provide them with the tools they need to measure their results and justify the risk. Act as Partners during implementation and help with tactics, leveraging the value of your solution.
Part Three: IN PERSUIT OF PRIME SOLUTIONS
Ch. 7: Creating The Prime Solution
A Prime Solution should enable your company to:
· Discover and research the companies that are most likely at a disadvantage without your solution.
· Diagnose the problem, close the performance gap by involving your solution, and give them the confidence and knowledge to make the change.
· Design solutions that minimize the risk of change, maximize their return on investment, and provide them with the confidence to invest.
· Deliver measured results and establish the promise of value made to your customers.
Ch. 8 Marketing The Prime Solution
This marketing strategy will prevent the no sale scenario:
The problem with solution based differentiation is when dealing with complex products the customer just wants the best solution.
Diagnostic marketing will allow you to solve your customers most complex problems. This is the most effective method for complex solutions in the market.
When advancing the progression of change you must remember that people are more resistant to change unless the pain experienced by staying is greater than the pain of changing.
There are four tenses of marketing:
· Positive present is describing the customer’s situation in positive terms.
· Positive future is the customers’ need for a better future.
· Negative future is the dangers the customer might face one day.
· Negative present is the current problems or bad situations.
Complex solutions need extensive change there for negative-present tense are the most effective.
Ch.9 Selling The Prime Solution
When selling the prime solution:
It should always be a “win” for the seller. From the customers point of view it is another expense and a preserved loss if the value is not achieved.
A high quality decision is the goal of the sale. It’s based on an honest, thorough and rational evaluation between the seller solution and the customer’s problem.
Ch.10 Delivering on The Prime Solution
Having the ability to accept and deal with change is the main competency implementing The Prime Solution. Accepting change not only from your perspective but also from the customers as well. Yes you are dealing with the ever morphing definition of value, and technology advancements, bur customer is dealing with a lot more changes that you are accountable for making as smooth as possible.
To ensure a successful change management process is implemented it must meet at least two of the following criteria:
· Adaptability– This should be based somewhat on the customers input, and design customized strategies for change.
· Technology– The technology should have no bugs, when implementing the solution for the customer it should in no way disrupt their existing technology.
· Process-The implementation should be a smooth process, one which has been thoroughly mapped out addressing any problems that may occur downstream.
· People– it must address the physical skill and the behavior of the people that the solution is meant for.
Kind Regards,
Shannon Brewer