My Notes On “The Prime Solution”
Posted: 4:34 pm January 7th, 2010	General

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

ExchangeDefender Web Security Launch
Posted: 5:53 pm January 4th, 2010	ExchangeDefender

Dear Partners,

Please join me this Thursday (January 7th @ 3 PM EST) for a live webcast covering the launch of ExchangeDefender Web Security Suite. The webcast will be live and you’re welcome to dial in and post questions. If you cannot make it, recording will be available for download later on Thursday.

What’s the topic? It’s become evident that threats are migrating from the email and SPAM to the web where few users are adequately protected. Even worse, most users have little or no protection outside of their corporate offices while most users browse the web with older and unpatched browsers that make easy targets. As more of our applications and communications move to the web, ExchangeDefender is launching the following products this Thursday:

ExchangeDefender Web Filtering – Agent based web filtering solution is designed for Windows PC’s and operates as a service that blocks URL requests at the TCP level. This way we can intercept dangerous traffic even if it is sent through anonymizer proxy or a port other than 80/443. Because each agent is user authenticated, each ExchangeDefender can have their own block policy that is refreshed every hour with either your custom URL lists or over 80 categories of web sites sorted by content.

ExchangeDefender Web Sharing – The web sharing and collaboration needs have grown beyond the feature offerings of FTP and ExchangeDefender is delivering a platform for file sharing and distribution. ExchangeDefender Web Filtering allows users to upload content to their private site, email links, be notified when downloads happen, automatically destroy files after a certain amount of time and more.

ExchangeDefender LDAP Integration – For larger enterprises, user management is a pain. With ExchangeDefender LDAP integration, our user list is in complete sync with your Active Directory or any other LDAP user database. Our agent monitors any account modifications, additions and deletions and replicates them to the ExchangeDefender network.

We will continue to release new components of ExchangeDefender throughout January and February because the scope of our platform is immense – we want to explore and collect feedback on each and every piece and make sure our partner base is educated.

We are holding partner Lunch & Learn events where either I or one of my senior engineers will walk your staff through our product and discuss any integration ideas or best practices. If you’re interested, let me know.

So tune in: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/991505921

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE

CEO, Own Web Now Corp

January 1st, 2010
Posted: 9:54 pm January 1st, 2010	Announcements

Welcome to the new year, new decade. Today is the day to start doing something great. Even if you don’t buy into the 1st of the year and resolutions, it is the first day of the new fiscal year and time for us to kick off our 2010 agenda.

Our resolution is that 2010 is the year of our partners: We have never been more involved in the building of our partners businesses and the way our marketing and support teams will push our partners in 2010 will surprise you.

First things first, let’s find out where you are at this moment: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FTZF3BT

The survey above will give us an idea of how/if you work with us and what we can do to immediately improve in January. For us, 2009 was a year to retool, rebuild and revise all that we’ve build through the years. Our core products have been immensely popular through the years and we experienced some growing pains – but now we’re ready, with bandwidth and experience to take you to the next level.

Start by filling out the survey, whether you work with us or not: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FTZF3BT

Thank you and Happy New Year!

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

P.S. Remember, in 2010 I am here for you. You can reach me directly on my cell (407) 536-VLAD

ExchangeDefender 5 UI Changes Webcast Available
Posted: 2:53 pm December 14th, 2009	ExchangeDefender

Just a brief note to bring you up to date with the ExchangeDefender 5 launch and all the wonderful stuff that is coming with it. If you didn’t get a chance to join me during one of the three webcasts last week, don’t worry, you can download it now and watch it at your own pace:

Download ExchangeDefender 5 UI Webcast

Please watch the video in full screen, on my Windows 7 system it started with a black screen and I could not see the presentation without resizing.

The Progress So Far

Things are going remarkably well with the new release and the few issues that we have faced so far have been addressed very quickly. We have all hands on ExchangeDefender at the moment and are doing all we can to make the product rock solid and inform everyone of the changes and get you to take what I feel is once in a lifetime sale you will see in ExchangeDefender. ExchangeDefender 5 is a radical change in our business model and really the first in our industry, so we want to thank those of you that have helped us build it. The promotion runs through March 1st or first 250,000 mailboxes, whichever comes first.

So far so good! Thank you for your business and keep those emails coming, I’m really happy to read the market response about ExchangeDefender 5!

ExchangeDefender 5 Released – Update Policy
Posted: 11:07 am December 9th, 2009	ExchangeDefender

Thank you all for helping us with ExchangeDefender 5 – it is now up and running and the new UI’s are drawing a lot of attention. So far everything is moving well but I wanted to share the official policy when it comes to addressing bugs and issues.

Through Jan 1st, 2010 we will be making daily updates to the portal to patch any bugs and optimize the site as much as we can. I’d like to ask for your patience and documentation of anything that seems out of place, we are working on the product constantly for the next few weeks.

You will be receiving an update on every new domain added and we will manually check each new account creation, deletion and modification to make sure everything is operating flawlessly.

As mentioned on the webcast, ExchangeDefender 5 is a fully modular system and we do not anticipate releasing another point release in the future. Updates, enhancements and optimizations along with new features will be released on a monthly and quarterly basis from now on.

Again, thank you for your patience and your business – we hope you enjoy ExchangeDefender 5!

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE, CEO Own Web Now Corp

P.S. Webcasts will be released this week.

ExchangeDefender 5.. So Far
Posted: 11:02 pm December 3rd, 2009	ExchangeDefender

Last week I got the pleasure of finally unloading the business pitch about ExchangeDefender 5 and all the features we’ve built for this new business model.

If you missed the webcast, you can download it here.

If you have any questions about what we’re up to or how it stacks up with what you’re currently using – please take the compete challenge.

Make no mistake, there is no comparison to the feature set, price or organization that stands behind the solution. Simply, none. Take a look at the PDF and find another SAS 70 Type II audited company that will deliver all that for 75 cents / mailbox and you’ll be right back here. We worked very hard to build this offering and make our partners winners in 2010. We’ve made serious investments and addressed some of the “you’ll never see that happen” concerns and comments we’ve gotten over the years.

So let’s talk about some less-than-glamorous changes in ExchangeDefender 5:

SMTP tempfail

Our new SMTP implementation has reduced the inbound mail flow by 91%. It went live with ExchangeDefender 5 backend which is the reason why you have so little SPAM to deal with or review all of a sudden.

“I have to admit that I never looked at the old reports because they had nothing but junk. I love the new short list and it still hasn’t caught a single piece of real mail. Nice combination!”

What does this mean for you? Well, less SPAM to review. Less likelyhood that the user will blindly whitelist a forged address and let a ton of SPAM in. Less storage on the server. More attentive users. Less SPAM or accidental whitelist slippage. Overall, less nightmares.

Want more? ExchangeDefender will give you an option (for free) to queue up to 1 month of SPAM on our servers. This way, if you take a 3 week vacation, you can still access the SPAM that got trapped while you’re out. Nobody else does this.

Support Tiering

Once upon a time, I answered the phone. Every time.

That’s because I was the only one working at Own Web Now Corp.

Grow by leaps and bounds and you get a logistical nightmare of providing expert support, knowledge and customer service around the clock. At the end of the day, we are paid for our performance and reliability (SLA) – not for the customer service and brownie points. The new support escalation process has been fantastic, we got a ton of great comments and we’re still working out all the details as well.

But don’t take my word for it, here is the impression our partners get:

“I called in to Travis today to ask about the intended cutover process (was it worth me getting something rolling now before the upgrade or should I wait?)  I have to tell you that might have been the (good) Customer Service example of the month (although his competition at Intuit yesterday left him plenty of room).  He answered all the questions directly and more importantly I was impressed with what he did with the ones he COULDN’T answer.  He excused himself momentarily as he wrote them down on the whiteboard to insure he asked (whomever) before he got back to me.  He confirmed my email address and phone number and then proceeded to tell me what he was going to do and by when.  (And he did all of that in an accent I could understand!)

If you have an employee of the <timeframe> – I nominate Travis.  Not for going above and beyond.  Not for being outstanding.  Just for doing his job well and leaving this individual with a perception of having been well taken care of.  He didn’t fix all my sh*t but he did his job so well, I didn’t care.  That’s all we ask for with customer f*ckig service.” 

We don’t consider our support a cost center – we consider it to be a key feature in our service. Our new escalation let’s everyone document the case, the smartest and right person to solve the problem and the nicest and most market aware person to call you back when you have a true problem.

The Backend

ExchangeDefender 5 has been live on the backend and running flawlessly for a while now. In addition to reducing the load, reducing the SPAM counts and making the overall system more effective we have noticed the following changes:

1. Lowest whitelist / blacklist activity of the year (fewer false whitelists of forged addresses)
2. Faster login and message search due to database compression
3. Faster message delivery due to the elimination of deliver/deliver across different SPAM confidence levels that got misused.
4. No complaints about delays.
5. No complaints about the whitelists with the new MagicKey infrastructure.

We have made the system more efficient, less burdensome and managing SPAM has become an afterthought. Now we turn to making profits with everything else ExchangeDefender brings you free of charge.

Next Steps

Our new User, Domain Administrator and Service Provider UI launches this week (on December 8th) and if you’re technical you need to be there. I will be holding three live webinars and launching ExchangeDefender 5 in the final one, at 10 PM. Here are the webinars, the first two have just a few seats left:

Tuesday, December 8th, 7 AM – 8 AM EST

Tuesday, December 8th, 3 PM – 4 PM EST

Tuesday, December 8th, 10 PM – 11 PM EST

So to review:

If you missed the first webcast, download it from here and find out the business proposition. If you are currently not on ExchangeDefender, you seriously need to figure out what you’re missing. Finally, register for the 3 webcasts due next week to showcase the new UI launch. So far, things are going great!

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE

CEO, Own Web Now Corp

P.S. One of my competitors in this space that I have a pretty good relationship with told me today that I’m killing him and when the torture will be over. Which brings me to the funny conversation I had in the parking lot earlier tonight as we were leaving the office and I tried to fill in a few holes in the details. My coworkers response: “Wow. We are going to be doing all that?” – yep, folks, it’s on.

Big changes at ExchangeDefender
Posted: 3:28 pm November 20th, 2009	ExchangeDefender

We have some new and exciting changes coming to ExchangeDefender with the new release now less than two weeks from launch. However, I wanted to introduce you to some network-wide changes and explain them to the best of my ability so you can clearly communicate them to your clients.

If you take a look at www.ownwebnow.com/new and sign up for one of our webcasts, you will notice that there are a ton of new features coming to ExchangeDefender. We are also running a huge sales special. No, we are not a car lot, we don’t “make it up with volume” but by optimizing our technology.

Starting November 23, 2009 we will no longer accept messages from known spammers that have been listed on SpamCop and SpamHaus realtime blacklists. We have used SpamCop and SpamHaus to automatically drop non-whitelisted messages into the SureSPAM quarantine and during that time we have had less than 0.0000000001% release rate with an overwhelming number of released messages being forged junk messages. To put it even more plainly, even the messages from these servers that our clients thought were legitimate turned out to be fraudulent.

This has become even more obvious lately as spoofing has become more and more common. Say a client whitelists “@aol.com” or “@live.com” domain. ExchangeDefender will look at the header of the incoming message and even though we know it’s on multiple RBL’s, we will accept it and deliver it to the user as a non-spam. This has increased the complaint rate by our users who say more and more SPAM is getting through while they knowingly whitelisted domains that are often spoofed.

We will be joining almost all of the other major providers that do not accept mail from the known SPAM addresses.

Wait, you’re going to be deleting my mail?

No. We will only be deferring them. Every message reviewed by ExchangeDefender and confirmed to be on a RBL will be temporarily deferred (not accepted) and the remote senders server will attempt to send the message again later. Since messages on SpamCop and SpamHaus are not accepted by any of the large service providers, the sender will be alerted by dozens of other recipients who automatically reject messages on RBL networks. They will not only not be able to send mail to you but to anyone else.

We believe that if the sender is legitimate, they will address the RBL situation quickly and messages will be delivered to us promptly. However, if they are a known source of SPAM and choose to do nothing about distributing viruses and/or SPAM we have to do what’s in the best interest of the network and all the users that it protects.

We don’t expect this to be an issue as it really is a norm in the industry and virtually nobody knowingly accepts SPAM from addresses on these large, reputable commercial RBLs. SpamHaus and SpamCop come with excellent reputation and our own statistical models indicate that this will be a nonissue. This policy has been in place with our Exchange 2007 hosting network and our virtual web / mail hosting platform for over a year without complaints.

But we wanted you to know why your SPAM counts will drop dramatically ahead of time.

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE

CEO, Own Web Now Corp

Thank You, we’re OK
Posted: 2:18 pm November 6th, 2009	General

I would like to personally thank many of you that were concerned about me and my staff in beautiful Downtown Orlando. We are OK, thank you for the emails, texts and calls.

There was an office shooting a few blocks from our office in Downtown Orlando, apparent disgruntaled worker seriously harmed at least 7 people and is still at large with Orlando Police & SWAT looking for him. All banks and buildings are now closed.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the injured and their families. Please assist the authorities with any information you may have.

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp

Support SLA Interruption
Posted: 10:02 pm October 11th, 2009	General

On Monday, October 12th, 2009, we will be suspending our normal and lower SLA response times.

While we do not expect to have any interruptions in the support availability, during certain times staff will only be tasked with responding to high and urgent priority requests during business hours in the EST time zone. We are using a quiet holiday on Monday to roll out our new SLA framework, new call handling and handoff procedures and completely test the systems.

We expect to announce the changes to our support systems later this week and thank you for your patience during this launch. We will certainly do all we can to help during this time, we just wanted to apologize for any inconveniences that may be caused ahead of time.

Tough Times
Posted: 10:35 am September 14th, 2009	Announcements

The downturn in the economy has affected many of our partners, between downturn in business, longer collection periods, tighter credit market and more have made the reoccuring billing business a lot more difficult.

As the CEO of Own Web Now, I am here to tell you that we stand by our partners and we are willing to work with anyone that may be going through a tough time collecting money from clients. We’re in on this together.

However, in the interest of fairness, if we cannot contact you we cannot assume the collections expense that goes with avoiding calls and emails – we are simply not in that business. With the launch of new ExchangeDefender, new Shockey Monkey, new systems for our entire hosting platform we simply must turn our focus to the software and professional services our partners demand.

Today, we have had to say goodbye to a number of our partners that have had a poor payment track record (6+ months declines/delinquencies of 10+ days or more). In plain terms that means that we’ve had partners who have missed a payment every other month and that raises the fees for everyone which is simply not fair. Our partners and clients expect us to spend every dollar on R&D and enhancements, not collections.

I wanted to offer you our billing collections process so that you’re aware of our attempts:

 

1st of the month: If the transaction has been declined, retry transaction and document.

2nd of the month: Open support request in our portal (https://support.ownwebnow.com) about the past due invoice, retry transaction.

5th of the month: Retry transaction. If it still fails a phone call is made to the billing contact on record, if they were not contacted directly (secretary, voicemail) support request is updated.

8th of the month: Retry transaction. If it still fails a phone call is made with the 2nd notice, support request is updated.

10th of the month: Final retry and suspension notice is given in the portal. Partner is given 24 hours to provide valid billing information.

11th of the month: If the new billing information is not provided, all services are suspended.

We are not heartless, we are more than willing to work with companies that are affected by the economic downturn. Unfortunately, if we cannot contact you on the phone, if the support portal is ignored and over a week passes with repeated notices, we have no choice but to move on.

Today we have permanently suspended companies that have abused our kindness and had a consistently poor payment track record. It is within our right to suspend services within 3 days, charge reconnection fees, etc: We usually do not. However, when our company is clearly abused we have no choice but to reconsider whether it’s fair to other partners to let a small group of companies abuse the billing concessions we have made.

So to recap: Collections are expensive and we’re a software company; that meant that we’ve had to remove a number of partners that abused our billing grace periods. We know it’s tough out there, reach out to us and we will bend backwards to help you.

Thank you!

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek

CEO, Own Web Now Corp.