Evolving Your Interactive Business

Back in the late eighties and early 90’s, every publisher considered migrating to the web. Some edged forward, albeit at turtle speed, and actually registered a domain name. A few started to create a “home page” so their publications could have a presence. How about hte most aggressive step forward? A single webpage. Yes, your domain name was not your actual company but rather your flagship product. It had little other than your magazine and book covers, if you remember, that took forever to load.


But the remaining majority, and admit it you were one of them, sat on your hands and watched the clock ticking.


And while you sat there, (no doubt focused on your telemarketing efforts), the world around you changed- rapidly. For those of you still standing still; it’s not too late to wake up and embrace the internet and interactive digital media. We are a lot smarter and more strategic we were during the birth of online and have evolved into greater risk takers. Why? Because we understand that in today’s market our survial depends on it. You can not stay competitive any other way.



I’ll bet lots of CEO’s, COO’s are now golfing with the CIO’s and CTO’s. I’d also wager they invite them to sales meetings and steering committees, which was unheard of even a few years ago. Why? Because your companies 3-5 year strategic growth plan either lives or dies in their hands and you know it. Now all you have to do is approve their budget, which I estimate will be roughly 60-70 percent of your entire operational group request!


If you think approving that big budget gets you on the cutting edge you are WRONG!

If you really want to face the challenges of growing your web based businesses keep in mind a couple of recommendations:

Start to prepare and rebuild your organization. What does this mean?

• Technology handicapped Staff - Seriously consider getting rid of the circulation/ad sales staff that are technologically inept, and can’t think on their feet! If they are still trying to figure out what “user authentication, user registration” means, they can’t pitch your online business.

• Walk the floor – if you see your sales staff still using those yellow stickies to have their contact lists at their reach - you have a problem! If they have never heard of or do not know what CRM stands for, get rid of them! They will effectively do what you tell them (make more calls…) but can’t think creatively about your business none the less your customer. By the way, they hardly even talk to each other so a chance for cross-selling opportunities brewing is slim to none.

• Invest in reeducating your organization (especially sales and marketing) on simple MS tools: Outlook, MS Office, Excel, Word and Power Point. This investment goes a long way – think about it they can get organized with their tasks, contacts (at least have them in a central place) maybe even do presentations one day.

• Hire Web Savvy staff - that look outside the box “Traditional Print” -Especially your editorial and production team. If your editors don’t know what a blog is how will they ever understand their own readers?

• Start to invest in your infrastructure. The IT department is now a critical component of your growth and your strategic positioning. Your CTO should be living on the web!
  
  
  A CRM system will stream line your processes, keep your contacts, leads, opportunities centralized and your marketing efforts in tune with your sales efforts. Couple this with new interactive/digital sales and marketing methodology and you will capitalize on your investments, I promise you. But please be selective when you are selecting a CRM solution.
  
  
  Deploy SharePoint – for collaboration, workflow and task management. Get that critical matrix out in the hands of your business owners, executives and directors – real time!

• Same old approach doesn't work - How many times are you going to try same thing? Stop wasting time and money on print initiatives that don’t work. Keep your print product vibrant (regardless of what you hear, it's not going anywhere) leverage it to boost your interactive business but don't confuse the two.
  
  Most importantly, challenge your staff. Become innovators, if you aren’t one yourself, capitalize on your biggest asset; your most important intellectual property, your team! They are dieing to be heard.

Mergers/Acquisitions? What has it done to your infrustructure support?

Walk into any organization and speak with any of their C-level executives and most likely, they’ll all be singing similar songs about similar issues.

• Expectations for ’07 ad revenue will decline slightly or remain flat at best.

• Subscription revenue is a constant battle (should I opt for an audit or is it a waste of time?)

• A 20-percent increase in online digital revenue. (By the way, where is my content? Or, now that I have my content, how do I search it?).

• My billing system is antiquated (but it does its job) but it doesn’t integrate with hosted or third-party solutions. Did I forget to mention that it can't handle my new online business, syndication, royalties, licensing or contractual requirements?

• Invoicing? Is it tailored to your customer formatting? You’re kidding me, right? we’re just trying to get the bills out the door...

• Revenue recognition? I have all these new products, services..How can I adjust my revenue recognition schedule around the negotiated contracts but leave my billing schedule alone? Is that even possible these days?

• Where are my customers? Multiple billing systems, can't roll them up. Do I know my top 10 clients? My top 20 clients?

• Where am I getting leads from? Are they qualified? Do I have cross-selling opportunities?

• Shall I change my sales management methodology and commission plans? OK. Done. Then how do I go about analyzing what the new methodology and plans should be if I can't get projection reports or historical reports that make sense by product or product line, or even "upsell vs. add-on" by channel?

The list can go on and on, And it does!

I’m sure you all get my point. Some do it well, some do it poorly and some unfortunately, keep shooting in the dark.

The standard practice is to hire a consultant to come in and tell us what we should do, how we should do it, and gauge the scope of our issues.

Better yet, I'll put that as '07 objective for the technology and operations guys. But someone comes in with a better idea:


“We'll cut the technology and operational headcount (i.e. VNU's plan to cut 4,000 jobs this year) because some private equity firm just bought us out and we need to show a decent ROI in the next 3 - 5 years.”

Round and round we go!
Needless to say, your technology and operations people are going crazy!

They’re trying to figure out how best to optimize your current solutions, but instead, they’re getting involved in due diligence work, business systems consolidations and evaluations. Even the process of documenting what applications are in use across your business lines and who’s using them is an all-occupying task.It is what it is. You have to keep growing your business and mergers & acquisitions are as much of a win-win as you’ll get.

Sometimes you’ll get lucky and the new company you just acquired already has a strong team and an impressive infrastructure support system. And you get to leverage those assets. More than likely it won’t happen exactly like this, but trust me, I’ve seen it happen.

I can’t help but wonder how you can formulate strategies when that venture cap who just bought you is pushing for immediate changes — especially a push to get your online business going while you’re trying to still gauge where your customers are.Let me remind you most often the CEO and the group publisher have only recently learned to operate Outlook and Instant Messenger. Therefore, they put their trust in the CTO to push the revolution on the online business you should have had ramped up by now.

Here’s where the war begins!

Your CTO is still stuck on the problem of Oracle vs. Microsoft. (By the way, do you even have a CTO or did you outsource that position too?)

Your Marketing folks are still buying list instead of capitalizing on your customer base

Your Publisher can’t get his/her website ramped up because the CTO is bogged down trying to upgrade hardware and is asking him “where is the business plan?” so you can put it on your list of deliverables….

Be prepared to duck!

I have to ask. How long do you realistically think it's going to take for you to adequately prepare your IT, operations, accounting and finance team to support this growth?

Or, will you be hiring consultants to do the dirty work — documenting your software inventory, workflows and processes and getting your IT and operations folks involved in what they’ve been hired to do — assisting you to build strategies and proactively grow your business.

I'd guess you'll do what most companies do — start to look at ways to "consolidate, integrate and streamline operations" by purchasing state of the art CRM, and ERP solutions. And oh, don't forget a fantastic (and often overpriced) data warehouse and analytics tool to bring it all together in some wonderful dashboard-like collaboration tool. This way you can run all the stats you can think of (and even a few you can’t) before you’ve given a thought as to how best apply all the data, metrics and reports you’ll soon be acquiring.

Round and round it goes!