Digging In During a Recession

So we’re in a recession, so what. What’s interesting is that while Nieman Marcus dropped 28% last month, WalMart did well. Message? High-end stuff is slowing down (we’re seeing that across the board). Customers are looking for value.

For us, sales are picking up. It’s hard to beat $99 for software that helps you generate new revenue. But what about you? I know–it depends on your industry, and our customers come from such different businesses it’s hard to generalize.

But if the message is value, then take a look at what you’re doing, and see if you can position yourself as a value solution. This doesn’t mean lower your prices necessarily; you might want to consider adding a service or item to create greater value for the same price, rather than join a race to the bottom.

That said, lowering your prices for your loyal customers might be a great way to get them to spend and to reward them for being great customers. But ask a favor. Everyone knows we’re in tougher times–ask them to tell a friend about you. If you’ve nurtured your customers and taken care of them, they’ll more often than not help you spread the word. But do ask them–they don’t always think to do it themselves.

The good news is that recessions are just that–dips in the economy, not outright collapses. Nieman Marcus is in a depression–they’ve dropped off a cliff. Try not to focus on news like that and instead focus on what you can do well for your customers. Focus, simplify, and reposition.

Finally, don’t forget to take a break. It’s hard building a business, but it gets grinding when you do what I’ve been doing the past month. 7 days a week with a lot of nights thrown in isn’t great for the health–I stayed home with the flu today and got a lot less done. The obsessive entrepreneur thing can really catch up with you after a while!

I’m optimistic–customers are telling us good things about their businesses, and it’s great to see how fired up they are about what they are doing. And we’re happy to help.

CircleDog Mentioned by Scoble

Robert Scoble discusses recession-proof businesses and mentions CircleDog and our tagline, Build Your Own Economy. http://www.scobleizer.com/2008/10/17/recessionproof/

That line is an expression of our belief in you and your ability to press on through the tough times. Be tenacious. Work harder than the next guy. Listen to your customers. Better than that, listen to your lost prospects and lost customers and see what you can do to win them.

It’s nice to get recognized. Now time to get back to work on wrapping up the new Outlook integration. And GMail, and Yahoo Mail…

Competition

When I talk with friends, investors, and some customers, I am often asked “what about Salesforce.com?” And I smile.

Salesforce.com has 47,000 customers or so. It sells to very large companies and mid-sized companies,and then tries to shoehorn their package into something for small businesses. Our customers are small and very small businesses. There are 4.6 million QuickBooks customers, mostly small businesses. Salesforce is indeed an enterprise software company.

So no, these are not things we worry about. When you evaluate CircleDog, the first thing you’ll notice is how clean the interface is. We are very deliberate about leaving out unnecessary icons and a long row of drop-down menus that hide critical tasks.

Instead, everything is ordered according to what you need to get done–Sections are on the top, things you can do are on the left, and help is on the right and is context-sensitive: it appears for every screen so you don’t have to go looking for it.

With enterprise CRM (customer relationship management) software like Salesforce.com, NetSuite.com, and a host of others, the interfaces are filled with lots of features, the navigation is somewhat complicated, and they are designed for larger-scale operations. And these are web-based applications, which tend to perform more slowly and lock in your data.

This last point is important in some cases: if the service fails your data is held hostage until they get it running again. One of our possible competitors just shut down because of internal fraud–you can get your data out (someone will fix this for them, I’m hoping).

Add to that the cost for even the baseline packages and most small businesses have trouble with the total cost of ownership: annual or monthly fees, significant training, and reluctance of some staffers to learn complicated software just to get work done or make calls to customers.

We built CircleDog specifically for small businesses. It’s easy to learn, easy to use,   where you need it to be. And we’re always looking to improve it–your feedback makes it a better product. We read all comments and consider all feature requests. The one thing we will always strive for is satisfying your needs for simple, powerful software that just works.

We hope you’ll participate in the forums and encourage your input. There aren’t a lot of companies serving the very small business market, and with CircleDog, you’ve got a product solely focused on you.