Brightpearl Blog

Brightpearl on BBC Radio 4
Posted on September 7th, 2010 by Toby Lewis

Chris Tanner speaks to Peter Day

Brightpearl founder Chris Tanner will appear on the BBC Radio 4 programme In Business this week.

This particular episode Chips off the Old Block has the description:

Once upon a time, British computing led the world. In a mobile world, some people think it might be happening again. From Bletchley Park to Bristol, Peter Day reports on the past, present and future of computers UK.

The programme will be broadcast at the following two times.

Thu 9 Sep 2010 20:30
Sun 12 Sep 2010 21:30

Update: Listen to it online here. It’s all good but if you just want to hear the part about Cloud computing fast forward to 18:35 – 23:10 which is roughly five minutes.

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Google priority inbox
Posted on September 3rd, 2010 by Chris Tanner

We know that loads of our users are running Googlemail or Google Apps. We do too. It’s been so easy adding more users to the company email system as we’ve grown over the past few months, and of course it’s fully integrated with Brightpearl.

Google have just launched the “priority inbox” feature. We think this is a great idea. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to make business more efficient, so thought you’d like to know about this too. Your Gmail/ Google Apps account should have a new link at the top suggesting that you try the new feature – give it a go!

Google Priority Inbox

Whilst you’re looking at how efficient email processing can help your business, take a look at the Rapportive/Brightpearl integration that delivers CRM data right into your Google inbox (Firefox and Chrome browsers only). From a customer’s email, you can see what they owe you, any notes that a colleague may have added to their timeline and more. It’s free and easy, and really, really powerful.

Read more here

Tags: CRM, email, integration
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I’m leaving you: you didn’t write, you never called
Posted on September 2nd, 2010 by Toby Lewis

Customers vote with their feet

Anyone in business has heard the “fact” that it costs five times (or seven times or ten times) more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. Whatever the actual multiplier – which is going different for each industry and company, there is an undoubted amount of truth in the basic sentiment.

It’s not that businesses don’t know this and it’s not that businesses forget it, as such, but often they just don’t end up looking after their existing customers as much as they should. Part of the reason may be that it isn’t anyone’s specific job. Sure sales make sales, order processing handle the fulfilment, accounts send out the invoice and so on. But once outside of that loop who is looking after the customer?

The other reason can be that there is no “system” in place to make it happen. Order processing is good at handling orders but not at following up afterwards. Your accounts system may tell you who hasn’t paid their bill, but it won’t necessarily tell you who hasn’t placed an order lately.

This is where a CRM (Customer Relationship System) comes in. It is a system that is designed to help you keep an eye on your customers current, future and past. When your CRM is attached to the accounts system, you can start to ask questions like “who has bought more than £10k from us but has not placed an order in the last three months?”

Many customers will actually be expecting you to make contact again after an appropriate period. Part of the service you are offering them is a reminder so that they don’t run short of whatever you provide. You would probably be annoyed if your home insurance company quietly allowed your cover to expire and they did not send you an offer to renew in good time to maintain continuous cover.

Why should other types of business be any different? Why should the customer have to run out stock or check for themselves? They may even know they need to place a new order, but this may not be their top priority and by calling you actually save them time, and help shorten their to-do list. If a competitor called instead, then you would no longer be their current supplier.

Every contact record in the system can be given a status and each status can be set to remind you if there has not been any activity on the record over the period that you set for that status. During the sales process, a contact can be given ‘prospect’ status and if the reminder is set for seven days, the contact will appear in the reminder list if you have not chased them for a week or more. Once a contact is set as a customer, that status can be set to remind you about them if you have not interacted with them for 90 days, or 180 days, or whatever would be a sensible interval.

Before making contact, you can look at the timeline view for the contact to see all past interactions including tasks, orders, invoices, change of status, support tickets or other notes or calls.

There is a lot more to CRM and it really should be core to any business regardless of the size. That is why CRM is a standard module within Brightpearl. It helps you to remember your customers and to keep them happy, in the same easy way it helps you manage your bookkeeping, accounting and other key business functions.

Posted in E-commerce, General posts | 3 Comments »

Stuck for Choice
Posted on August 30th, 2010 by Toby Lewis

photo credit Mannobhai / Manoj Jacob

It is easy to think that more choice has to be a good thing. After all, if you are free to choose whatever you want that must be better than being forced to use something you don’t particularly want. But there is a growing body of evidence to show that people are confronted with too many choices in matters big and small, from salad dressings to pension investment choices, and this is actually inhibiting them.

In cases where we are experts or connoisseurs, we may have very specific preferences or can simply identify what we prefer from a wide selection of choices. But in many other areas the options we have to choose from are unfamiliar to us. There will be a cost, usually in terms of time, to investigate all of these options. People have busy lives, and when confronted by the mountain of extra work, their reaction is simply to “switch off” and they frequently don’t choose anything.

An experiment was conducted by a behavioural psychologist, Sheena Iyenger, in which people at a supermarket were invited to try different flavours of jam from a particular manufacturer. When people were offered six different flavours 30 percent of the people bought a jar of the flavour they preferred. When there were 24 flavours offered only 3 percent of people went on to buy a jar.

Other studies have shown that when people are given a selection of different company pension funds to invest in, the more funds that they have to choose from the less they end up investing. For every 10 funds, the investment level dropped by 2 percent.

In a TED Talk Professor Barry Schwartz explains four aspects of this paradox of more choice making us less happy and stopping us choosing at all:

It is easy to imagine that there is a better choice and we regret that we did not pick it,
Even if we are happy with what we chose we still feel we may be missing out on other choices,
With so much choice we expect there to be a perfect choice and if our choice is not perfect we feel let down,
Because we were free to choose, we must be to blame if we made the wrong choice.

There are lessons here for life, but this is also something that anyone selling a product or service should bear in mind. If you offer something where people know exactly what they want, then choice can be a good thing.

But where customers might not come with the necessary experience or knowledge of the full range of possibilities, you might actually improve your offering by giving them a smaller selection of options which are likely to satisfy the normal range of wants. This could have other business advantages such as better stock turnover and reducing slow moving items.

Another approach is to keep the full range of options but use your knowledge and expertise to identify a smaller selection of choices which cover the normal range. By clearly promoting this smaller range for the bulk of customers it will not be too daunting for the less experienced customers. And this does not prevent you from offering more choices to those customers who have more experience or a greater understanding of your type of products or services.

Posted in Customers, General posts | No Comments »

Console Games Moving into the Cloud
Posted on August 26th, 2010 by Toby Lewis

OnLive Website

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is not just for the business world as a new kind of gaming service is starting to emerge on the internet which makes it possible to play the type of games that normally require a games console in your web browser or even on a portable device like an iPad

Playing that sort of game normally requires plenty of local processing power which is delivered by a high spec PC or by a games console. By moving the processing to the web server, the client machine only needs to be capable of streaming movie content but does need fast internet access (5MB to 10MB connection).

As with business services, offering games-as-a-service gives customers many advantages over traditional hardware based gaming:

There is no upfront investment necessary in a games console.
Game choice is not restricted to the console owned.
Can afford to play a wider variety of titles.
Low commitment to a title, can try cheaply without having to buy it.
No upgrade costs when new consoles are released.

This significantly lowers the barriers to entry and means that more people will play online games. There may be more revenue in the long tail of more casual gamers than in the high end enthusiasts.

In the short term broadband speeds and latency, especially on wireless connection will be a problem for some people. But there will be enough takers for now; moreover wireless and wired speeds will improve over the next few years.

As with business SaaS there will be different uses and pricing models. One company, Gaikai, is offering “try before you buy” uses of games mainly on online stores where play will be restricted to initial game levels.

OnLive is offering (currently in the US only) a full games subscription where members create a free account that gives them access to the social aspects of the site, but they then pay for day passes or unlimited passes to a particular game. Day passes have the same sort of prices as a physical game rental and the unlimited passes are about 75% of the game’s normal retail price.

This new delivery system will have a significant impact on the gaming market, just as SaaS is changing the way companies buy software. Everything is moving into the cloud.

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Death of “the Salesman”
Posted on August 23rd, 2010 by Toby Lewis

When I spend any time on our Brightpearl sales and support floor, one thing really strikes me: it is hard to tell who is on support and who is on sales. Listening to the calls, all I can hear are conversations helping customers understand and get the best from the system.

When people sign up to the free trial, the sales team do phone to introduce themselves and to offer help, but it’s not really a sales call. It is important for people on the trial to know that if they do get stuck, there is someone they can call to get an answer, and it is easier if they have spoken before.

In this age of “on demand” SaaS software there is no point in a hard sell. If you force someone to sign up, they can cancel after a month or even after a day, so there is no point in pushing them. Even worse, when people feel conned or pressured by a company they shout about it on the social web. Any company still using the aggressive tactics isn’t going to do well in the long run.

Any good sales person will tell you that selling is actually all about communication anyway. As the old adage goes, “you have two ears and one mouth and you should use them proportionally”.

And in a way that is just what the guys and gals in sales and support are doing. They are listening to the customer and then giving the specific answers that help people to not only understand how to use Brightpearl, they allow the customer to feel the real benefits from the system. Once that happens, there is no need to sell, people just want to sign up.

In a recent post Filiberto Selvas of Social CRM was discussing the objectives of sales and support and concluding that traditionally although the objectives are aligned the compensation incentives diverge which can hinder a good customer experience. And Alan Stein at LiveLogic was recently talking about how the “customer thing” seems to elude many companies and is really down to making sure customer facing staff care about the customers’ needs and have the incentives and authority to help.

In a company like Brightpearl where everyone is either customer facing or talks on a daily basis to other staff members who are, the focus remains with the customer. When a company knows its customers and the customers can know the company, really the traditional salesman is unnecessary.

Posted in Customers, General posts, Service Desk | 1 Comment »

Why you should be using more SaaS
Posted on August 19th, 2010 by Toby Lewis

There is a lot of jargon in business and even more in IT. Put them together and you have an alphabet soup of three letter acronyms (or TLAs as they are known in the biz). What’s worse these terms often replace older terms meaning more or less the same thing, in short, the jargon is actually a fashion and it is simply trendy to use the latest buzz words.

But sometimes jargon actually encapsulates some fairly fundamental shifts in thinking. Take SaaS or “Software-as-a-Service” for instance. Although coined in 2001, the term has really only hit the mainstream over the last two or three years as the number of companies offering SaaS products has risen sharply.

SaaS means that instead of buying a piece of software and installing it on your own computer, you buy the service that the software offers by accessing the functions through a web browser.

Fundamentally SaaS is not technical term, but a new paradigm or “business model” that relies on a network delivery. It is becoming popular, both for companies providing the software and for companies using the services because it solves a lot of problems that have existed with shrink wrapped PC software.

Advantages that SaaS services offer include:

License per person not per computer,
One person can use multiple computers on one license,
Where people work no longer matters,
No software to download, install or update,
Runs on Mac or Windows,
Lower overall IT support costs,
Data stored at service not on local computer so is safer,
Service does regular backups,
Can get back to work without disruption after loss or failure of local computer,
Networked system gives everyone access to the latest data wherever they are,
Allow remote access by outside partners or consultants,
SaaS services offer expertise and functions to all company sizes that were formerly only affordable to large companies,
SaaS services tend to be more in touch with users who shape development and improvements.

Most of the above will apply to all SaaS services. Pricing and terms will differ by supplier and service.

Brightpearl offers an extremely flexible payment options to give customers the best possible value.

First it is based on concurrent licenses, so even if five different people at a company use the system but only three use it at the same time, then the company only needs to pay for three licenses.

Second, there is no “contract” and since the service is “pay as you go” it is possible, to lower the number of licenses during quite periods like over Christmas, and add extra licenses for a short time, perhaps before Christmas when there might be extra staff doing order processing.

Safe, Secure and Available

Any responsible business owner will be concerned with the safety, security and availability of their data and systems because these are vital to their business. Rather than compromising on any of these issues, SaaS really does lower these risks to the business.

The system databases are maintained in state of the art data centres which are protected from intrusion, power failure and environmental problems like heat and dust. Hardware is routinely checked, serviced and since there is redundancy in the system faulty units can be removed and replaced without disruption to the service. Data is backed up regularly at the data centre which frees the customer from the laborious but essential task.

The high quality of the data centre also ensures the availability of the service to customers. Lack of access is more likely to be due to a failed or lost computer at the customer site, but since there is no installation required, a customer can simply use a new computer to access the system. Since the data is never stored on the customer’s computer, theft or loss of a laptop never presents a security risk.

All communications from the service and the browsers accessing it is done using secure html. The address in the web browser starts with “https” and often the browser gives other indications that communications are in secure mode. This is the same security system used when you enter credit card details for online purchases.

Start as you mean to go on

Because of the scalability of pricing, the lack of upfront expenditure, lower IT support requirement, the expandability of user numbers and functions, the sooner a company can start using SaaS services to run the business the less disruption it will face as it grows.

Changing systems, especially accounting systems, can be a daunting task and one not taken lightly even when the existing system is creaking and causing much frustration for a company and its customers.

Existing companies should be looking at moving to SaaS and new companies really should not be considering anything else.

Posted in General posts | 1 Comment »

Playing like the big boys / Punching above your weight
Posted on August 16th, 2010 by Toby Lewis

The great thing about running a small business is that you can be lean, swift and make things happen. Being a small business owner provides the freedom to get stuff done. Larger companies often seem to be bogged down with processes and bureaucracy, and often the lack of speed and agility to react or change. This is why new companies can succeed in new or emerging markets where established rivals don’t.

But there is another side to the story. With the freedom and flexibility, small companies often lack any formalised systems (computerised or manual) and internal communication can be haphazard. When there are just a few people in a company,each person can keep all of their tasks and information in their head, and everyone can still have a good idea of what their colleagues are doing.

As the company grows, these informal ways of working start to get strained and fail to deliver. When one employee is out of the office, others might not be able to help a customer because no one else knows what is going on with that account. When one person used to handle a client from start to finish, the service was good and personal, but as more staff members handle different aspects of the customer or client interaction the need for internal communication grows. When communication is not good customer satisfaction drops.

We are all familiar with these growing pains. How many times have we been the dissatisfied customer told by a company that “they are a victim of their own success”? They are not a victim, they have simply failed to run their business properly as it expanded.

Big companies manage their data and processes across their organisation with big, integrated systems from providers like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. These systems are referred to as “enterprise resource planning” software or ERP software. And this sort of software can cost tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of pounds. They are not only out of reach for smaller companies, they are the proverbial elephant gun to shoot a mouse.

Small, successful and growing businesses have the following dilemma: how to structure business process and share data within the organisation without losing the agility they have enjoyed in the early stages?

Over the last twenty years computers on each desk have helped but only up to a point. There are different programs to different things and these can help with individual tasks but they don’t really make the business function as a whole. One part of the business may be using spreadsheets to track information, the accounts department may have Sage or other accounts package, sales may have a contacts database like ACT!, but none of these programs share information easily with the others.

Although each department is now doing its own task a little better internal communication is bad, and there is a lot of duplication of effort (for example re-keying of contact details and order details from sales to accounts). Mistakes still occur and then rectifying them takes more time and can be costly in terms of lost customers or lost stock.

Enter Brightpearl

Brightpearl is an online business service that can be used by a company as small as a one man band and can scale to support a medium sized company with tens or hundreds of users. It helps bring all of the key business processes together so that they work in harmony.

Being an online business service means you can access Brightpearl from any web browser, anywhere there is an internet connection. You don’t need an IT department to set it up or keep it running.

With Brightpearl, all your business processes can be integrated seamlessly together in one service, meaning that each part of the business has access to exactly the same, always up-to-date information. Companies can use whichever of Brightpearl’s modules are suitable for their business, but typically, information about prospects and customers flows into the customer relationship management (CRM) module as sales or support staff use the system or from contact forms on the integrated website or ecommerce store module. Data then flows from the CRM and stock modules into the quotes and orders module. When quotes become orders the data flows into the accounts system which updates the stock module and can trigger action in the purchasing module. The integrated help desk module ensures good support and lets other parts of the organisation know when there are problems or other interactions with the customer. At every point everyone in the company with authorisation can see all of the information they need to deliver on your company’s promise.

Finally Brightpearl allows an SME to start and stay organised, with a service that aids their agility rather than hinders it and will serve the company for many years to come as it goes from success to success.

Posted in General posts, Products | No Comments »

Integrated v Internal Business Suites
Posted on August 11th, 2010 by Toby Lewis

Ben Kepes at Diversity Limited was recently talking about whether online business services that contain modules for all business functions in one package are going to do better than solutions that integrate a number of “best of breed” applications into a sort of suite.

Obviously there are strong arguments for both approaches and ultimately this is not necessarily and “either or” situation as it is still possible to have an application which does a number of tasks well and integrates with other applications for specialised tasks.

There are lots of good SaaS applications out there to address all sorts of different needs including ecommerce, accounting, form handling, email marketing, support, customer relationship management (CRM), project management and so on. Developers can concentrate on these products and lavish them with every imaginable feature and function. So if your business consisted entirely of this one activity and you need all of the bells and whistles then these solutions are going to appeal.

On the other hand there is little point in having all of those extra features if your business really only needs the basic functionality. There may also be an overhead in integration in terms of reliability, switching between interfaces, timely sharing of data, multiple billing, multiple accounts to sign into and so on.

When other functions and modules are considered, the company has to decide if they want a single supplier solution or whether they need various specialised application that are integrated together.

All businesses are going to have certain needs such as accounts and CRM. And using a system that intimately binds these aspects of the business is going to give a clear advantage over companies where the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

To a business an all-in-one solution is very attractive. It saves them effort in terms of researching all of the various possible modules from different vendors, it does not require as much set up or custom development and there is a single company responsible for making sure it all works properly.

From the vendor side there are a number considerations. Integrating with an outside application may save the effort of developing the module, but integration still takes some work and there will be a loss of the revenue that would come from that function or module. There are technical considerations such as how much data can be shared, how and when that data is transferred and whether the applications can work well enough together to make it a viable solution.

Establishing links to other applications will mean having a relationship with the other application vendor, either passively or actively. The other application is going to have an independent upgrade cycle, it may not be around forever, it will change over time, its billing model may change. All of these factors have to be weighed into the equation when building links.

For the customer the ideal solution is an online service that handles most of the core internal functions that the business needs with tight integration between modules and selected links to best of breed external applications to serve needs that may not be applicable to all businesses. This works best where the external application has a large customer facing element (rather than being a purley internal function).

Buy choosing partner applications well the main service can make the integration as smooth and painless as possible to the customer and deliver superior functions both to the core function and the specialist application function.

For instance, MailChimp has been perfecting its email marketing services for years and if a company is going to be running email campaigns it is going to benefit greatly from using a good service. Not only is this sort of service client facing there is a clear bottleneck where contact data flows in and out of the core system but all of the mailing activity can happily reside on the MailChimp side of the link.

Another example is Eventbrite, which allows events to be organised and registrations to be made and paid for. This activity can tick over outside of the main system, and then at a certain times the contact data can flow back to the core system.

Posted in Customers, General posts, Products | No Comments »

We are living in the science fiction of yesterday
Posted on August 9th, 2010 by Toby Lewis

If you want to put a satellite into orbit around the Earth you can now buy a satellite kit and get it launched into low Earth orbit for only $8000! An American aerospace company in Mojave, California, called Interorbital Systems, is offering this service and you can pay for it online with PayPal!

Admittedly the satellite kit is small, it’s about the size of the bottom half of a wine bottle, but it has solar panels on the outside and you can put whatever electronics you want inside to conduct experiments and send signals back to Earth.

Sputnik, the first man made satellite, was launched on 4 October 1957 by the Soviet Union, sending the United States into a cold war panic and starting the space race. It is astonishing to think that only 53 years later, anyone with $8000 can launch their own satellite into space! In just over five decades what used to be possible only for superpower nations is now available to anyone in the world with a bit of cash.

It seems amazing but perhaps only because space still seems quite remote. Back here on Earth we have become blasé to all sorts of technology that, not so long ago, would have left people in wonder. 20 years ago a palm sized TV was science fiction and now virtually everyone has one in their mobile phone along with a music player, photo collections, applications and more. The internet puts more information into every home than used to be found in entire libraries. We now expect medicine to have a magic pill to cure whatever illness we might have.

Cloud Computing

There are also amazing things that are less visible but are equally impressive. For instance the phenomenon known as “cloud computing” has become more and more available due to a number of enabling technologies including the internet and server virtualisation.

Putting aside the jargon, what cloud computing means is that anyone in the world can tap into just about as much computer power as they want, almost like you can draw as much electricity out of a wall socket as you need.

In the past a company needed to own computers and have them on their premises to use them. Internet hosting has enabled companies to buy space and time on someone else’s server computer in a remote location. This can be inefficient as the server still costs money when it is idle and may grind to a halt if too many people try to access it at the same time.

Cloud computing takes away the limits and the administrative headaches. Anyone using cloud computing can just tap into computing power “in the cloud” as and when they need it through the internet. Google uses cloud computing for its services and so do Amazon and these sites are always quick and reliable.

Brightpearl also uses cloud computing to run its service, which means the company can concentrate on making the software easy and powerful without having to worry about the hardware it runs on. Rather than having clients download software they can access it through the internet and this is why services like Brightpearl are sometimes referred to as “Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS).

So although cloud computing may not be the most exciting type of technology for the average person, it is already out there making our lives better in numerous small ways. It may be some time before being able to launch your own satellite will bring as much benefit.

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