Developing Brand Awareness through Outlook and NetSuite

My firm advises business owners and executive management on competitive practices through information technology.  As such, I look to develop relationships with other advisors for a number of reasons.  I can list those reasons but for the purposes of this discussion, the most important is the development of new business prospects.  Let’s face it — all businesses have this concern and there is nothing to be ashamed of — especially if we act as advisors to business managers.

In my assessment, what I seek to produce as a skill within my boutique consulting firm is applicable to many professional service organizations.  Given we are technology advisors, we possess capacities that many other businesses lack; that is the capacity to produce more powerful practices utilizing information technology.   So here is the practice I am developing in our business.  First, some background:

Background

1. Microsoft Outlook is used in the day to day management of contacts, calendar and email.  As of this writing, the majority of professional service organizations in the United States use Outlook.
2. We endorse utilizing the BlackBerry Enterprise Service against Microsoft Exchange for mobile computing management.  I could go further into why this is important; but let’s say for now it is foundational to the practice because of its superior synchronization technology with Outlook / Exchange.
3. I produce a blog primarily to take a stand in the world about what I philosophically believe in.  My stand guides the services we offer and the clients we serve.  Some might call this the product strategy.
4. We utilize NetSuite in our business.  Why?  Because it fits very well with our stand: cloud computing and full system integration.  See this article for more discussion.  Bottom line: NetSuite is our business management system that takes care of our concern for Customer Relationship Management.   In this case, we are talking about the domain of Marketing.
5. We need an efficient mechanism to distribute communications to people we have relationships with.  Back to the blog discussion. What are we going to talk about?  It’s in the blog.  And we want to send email to people about conversations we are producing through the blog.
6. We need a way to track who is interested in our conversations so we can make assessments about the intimacy in our relationships and the likelihood that we may develop referrals.  Ultimately, we need to stay in the minds of all the good people we know.   In some domains, this would be called Branding.
7. In my assessment, to be good at this practice, we need to produce it at low cost and naturally.   Communications must happen regularly, purposely, and connected to all existing and anticipated marketplace action we participate in.
8. Thus fundamentally, the practice must work with Outlook because this is the primary productivity tool we use all the time.  I suspect it is for many other professionals as well; thus this conversation is relevant to anyone seeking to develop more referral business who uses Outlook.

The Practice

With all that background, we envision a simple to understand but relatively difficult to produce practice:

1. All Outlook contacts will be categorized according to the role they hold and their relationship to being a possible referral.  See this post to learn how to do this powerfully.
2. Updates to the BlackBerry will automatically keep Outlook fully in sync.  Hence BlackBerry is fundamental to allowing us to be mobile and work in a natural, yet powerful, state.  When we update BlackBerry, we must be disciplined.
3. On a regular basis, we will sync our Outlook contacts to NetSuite; this is an important goal of any CRM system. In my utopia ideal, there would be perfect synchronization between Outlook and NetSuite; similar to how well BlackBerry synchronizes.  We are not there today.  That’s an opportunity!  However, see this post about our Outlook to NetSuite Sync tool.
4. We will regularly blog about relevant and meaningful topics of interest which reinforces our identity and brand.
5. We will leverage NetSuite’s Subscription Email Campaign Manager to distribute our blog to our contacts.  NetSuite will allow us to appropriately target communications according to the Outlook Categories and based on other information that NetSuite captures.
6. As NetSuite tracks opt-in, opt-out, and bounced messages, we will update (synchronize) Outlook so we can continue to make assessments about our relationships and work to deepen and improve them.

The Challenge

This basic practice is closed loop and should be self-reinforcing.  Where is it hard?

1. The discipline to keep Outlook (and BlackBerry) current.
2. The weakness in tight synchronization (integration) tools between Outlook and NetSuite (I observe this breakdown in many of the leading CRM packages, saleforce.com included).
3. The discipline to blog frequently on meaningful and relevant topics that reflect our skills and capacities.

Fortunately, our firm possesses the capacity to overcome these obstacles.   We will write more about it as our practice evolves. 

Was this relevant and meaningful to you?  If so, let us know your thinking and perhaps we can collaborate on how we can help each other.

Update on January 1, 2010

We are getting closer on this practice. We just created a program that solves many of the costly issues in the above process. See Solution for Syncing and Bounced Emails between NetSuite and Outlook

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Marty Zigman

Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.

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