I can not tell you over the last 16 years of operating this business, how many dealers have told me they don’t have the time or desire to get a customer’s full name, address and phone numbers when all they want to do is sell something and get them out the door. I’m going to try to give you a few reasons why you should always collect a customer’s data and a few ways to engage the customer in the collection of that data.

A few very important reasons why you should always have a customer’s data is being able to view purchase history, help them out if they lost a receipt and need to return a product, identify repeat customers quickly and automatically even though you might not have ever met them, help a wife out when she needs to purchase something for her husband’s birthday and doesn’t know exactly what type of unit he owns, allowing the customer to login to the system and check their own service tickets and sales history, aid in sales campaigns. I’m sure there are more reasons I’ve left out but that is a good start. The point is, there are many reasons why this information is important to have and it should always be collected.

So the most common reason I get for why it can’t be done? Time of course. So lets address time and see where it all falls in the big scheme of things. To do this, lets first take a look at the amount of time it takes to collect the data. The important data needs to first be identified and recognized: Phone Number, First and Last Name, Address and Zipcode. These are the core parts of any customer’s data that should be collected and stored. However, if you are not on board with all this yet, maybe you could eliminate the address and zipcode and only collect a name and phone number. This is better than nothing, and you can grow from there. Another key component that I’d like to add is an email address.

Email addresses are probably the handiest thing to have with Lizzy™ because she will automatically notify them on all sorts of occasions, such as special order parts arriving, service ticket completion, sending invoice copies electronically instead of constantly printing them, and allowing them to login, if you wish, to check their own accounts. All of this is automatic, free, and built into Lizzy’s™ everyday processes so why not take advantage of them?

To collect the above information from a customer might take you a total of 1 extra minute, and only the first time they arrive. Afterwards you only need their name to locate the record in question and place them on the invoice. So I’d have to say the argument of time really doesn’t hold up well if that truly is your excuse. Next, lets take a look at the second most used argument, which is: “The Customer Won’t Give It To Me”:

Collecting this information doesn’t need to be presented to the customer as a pain or problem. It needs to be presented as a cool new tool that you have that engages the customer at the point of sale. After all, we do want this person to return to our store don’t we? Lets start with their very first moment at the counter. Here are just a few examples of things you could do to make this a fun process that gets you the needed data and gets your customers something as well. How about a monthly contest where you randomly pull a person from a hat and give away a $25.00 gift card? People like free things and Lizzy actually comes complete with your random selection tool to quickly find a customer and give away the gift. This gives them a very good reason to participate and provide their information and gets people back in your store to buy things that might not have come back at all.

You should provide your sales counter people with a whole list of reasons why the customer’s information is important, not to you, but to them. Use a few of the ones mentioned above and make up your own as well. You don’t need a whole list, just a few to make your point. You need to start making this an important part of every sale. It also helps your employees to start remembering names of people that frequent your store and lets management recognize people that they might want to give discounts to since they come in so often. This can even be done from home at night while everyone else is sleeping..

So even though the General Customer type is available for you to use, I personally hope you never do.

–glenn hancock

Indy 2010 went very well for Lizzy™ and if anything, let everyone know that she has arrived. We were a bit disappointed in the attendance and size of the show this year however, but considering the economy and the bad weather we faced all weekend from various parts of the country, I guess it made sense. We gave away two 19″ flat screen TV’s to people seeing demos of Lizzy™ doing her thing. Congratulations to Shauna Sobel from Northwest Motor Scooters and Steve Hyde from Mount Holly Power Sports for their good luck during the show.

And for Lizzy™? Well, Lizzy™ ROCKED!

We had originally planned on running Lizzy locally off my Macbook. However, I forgot to copy some of the forms and things we needed to demo F&I. So instead, we demoed her running across a 3G cell phone connection and no one could tell the difference. The response was truly amazing and she performed perfectly all weekend. We got a few suggestions for things we hadn’t thought of and a few tweaks to make in the F&I module as well. Those things have all been completed and added to Lizzy’s™ processes. Overall the show was a huge success and there are no complaints.

Now for the update:
Warranty claims continue to be the sticking point for no other reason than we just haven’t gotten through it all yet. Purchase orders only lack the ability to pay major units which I’m planning to start knocking out today. F&I seems to be finished other than just testing it, and we’re going to start the process for printing all the forms within the next few days. The miscellaneous reports are starting to get ticked off our list as well.

Overall we’ve completed the things that have taken the most time and are in cleanup mode now, writing reports, tweaking interface elements, and finishing the Warranty claim module. We are all starting to relax a bit now that we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. We’re also quite excited with the way the program performed at the show. Everything that was asked was shown and she performed perfectly with not a single glitch along the way.

The Future is Here!

–glenn

SofTek Software has been in business for 15 years now and is going through its paces just like any other day.  It is still making changes to TBA and is still selling software.  If  left to its own vices, SSI would continue to be a market leader in dealer management systems in the couple industries in which it provides solutions.  The problem however is that we have created some confusion as to the direction of the solutions we provide.  SofTek has devoted some of its resources towards a new product that isn’t just a new release of  TBA but a totally new product built from the ground up with the latest technologies that will one day replace TBA.  It has all the good things that TBA has and none of the bad.  We have listened to our clients over the years, kept notes on their complaints and wishes.  Lizzy™ is the culmination of all those efforts.  As it turns out our competitors are attempting to use that confusion to promote themselves by claiming we are going out of business. As you can see there is no truth in those rumors.

When I started SofTek back in 1994, I was the only company selling Windows software. My competitors (and there were many) always poked fun at me and continued to do their thing. Eventually they started to go out of business and we forged ahead. Some began to realize that they couldn’t continue to operate in DOS forever and started to move towards Windows themselves. Some, have only recently completed this project, and while they’ve been trying to catch up, we’ve been forging ahead. We’ve again pushed the envelope and are about to release the strongest, most complete package ever imagined for the Powersports and Lawn & Garden industries. Are we excited to show off this new product? You better believe it! And the above mentioned Group 1; yes they are too. We know this because we keep in constant contact with them. And Group 2? Well, apparently not so much.

So what do we have? Why are we so excited? Because we realized something a long time ago. That to be as strong as we wanted to be, and to provide the level of service we wanted to provide, we needed more. We needed to do more than just sell software in one industry, we needed to do more with research and development, we needed to expand operations and provide a system that was far easier to learn and operate than anything else on the market. Lizzy™ is just what we’ve always wished we had and more.

Lizzy™ has been designed to streamline and simplify every single process that exists within your dealership. She has been designed to eliminate any General Ledger balances getting out of sync. She’s been designed to eliminate inventory discrepancies and to walk each employee through each required step to insure information is collected and stored properly. However, we didn’t just want to write something better, we wanted the world. We realized that we needed to take care of our current customer base, but we also realized that to continue to provide the level of service our customers are used to, we needed to be able to get into other markets as well. We needed a system that could be quickly customized and supported for all sorts of tasks, and we needed a system that did everything, instead of one that had to integrate to 20 other companies to provide a complete solution.

This brings me to the creation of Nizex, Inc. and its relationship with SSI. With this new product, I wanted to start fresh. I wanted to separate the old processes from the new and to move into 2010 and beyond with a cleaner stronger company. After lots of back and forth we decided that to do what we wanted to do we would start a new company and have it compete with the old (at least to some degree). After all, if Lizzy™ is what we think it is, TBA shouldn’t be able to compete with it any better than our competition. So SSI continues along the path laid out years ago, and the new company will forge ahead like none other.

Here are just a few reasons that we’re so excited:

With Lizzy™ 2.0 you’ll be gaining access to an advanced and complete CRM (Customer Relationship Management) module. This package is as complete as Microsoft’s CRM and Salesforce.com’s CRM platforms, except it also has something neither of them have ever had. It has a completely integrated business system tied into its every corner.

Lizzy™ has integrated modules such as Payroll that can be ran standalone for those only needing payroll services or can be tightly integrated into your existing environment to the point that she’ll even handle your time sheets and filling in your payroll automatically.

Lizzy’s™ all or nothing approach to data processing ensures that nothing will ever hit your GL unless everything that caused it also hits. No more wondering where that single side entry came from or how your inventory got out of whack.

Lizzy™ is multi-lingual out of the box, allowing industries that stretch across the globe to all share a standard set of code objects while being able to speak their own languages. She also deals with time zone processes so that a meeting scheduled on the East coast at 5pm will show up on a persons calendar in California for 2pm.

As mentioned, we realize where our customer base is, and aren’t focused on any other industries other than Lawn & Garden and Powersports. We may never move into another industry. The point is that we have a solution that can, and our loyal customers are going to be getting it for free. For all of you on regular maintenance plans with SSI, you’ll be able to switch over to Lizzy™ without a dime of extra expense. Of course, you’ll also have the ability to stay with SSI if that is your choice.

I could go on for hours about everything Lizzy™ is going to do for your business, but I think I’ll let you wait a bit longer to see for yourself. We appreciate all of you calling to let us know what is going on with our competitors trying to trick you into believing we’re going out of business and we hope that you all can see where we’re headed and that going out of business is the furthest thing from the truth. Next time you’re told this lie, ask them to provide names and numbers of all the dealers that have apparently left us, we’d like to know who they are as well…

–
Glenn Hancock
President
Nizex, Inc.

The special order processing has been added to the inventory object and is about 80% finished in the purchasing object. We spent a little time going through redesigning the flow and storage routines and in the end we’re pretty happy that we’re going to have a really nice and simple process for tracking special orders. We’re hoping to have it wrapped up the first few days of next week and get onto Units. As mentioned before, the Units getting done will mark the end of the major construction work with respect to the Phase I release, so we’re getting pretty excited.

I hope to start doing some videos of various parts of the application in the next few weeks so that we can start sharing it with everyone and I’m working up the details to have a webinar at some point that you’ll all be invited to participate in, where I’ll give an actual presentation of the product. I know there will be something that comes up to slow things down a bit but so far we’re sticking pretty close to the schedule.

Here are a few specific things that got done this week:
1) Added special order processing (80% complete)

2) Added ACH processing to payment method form as well as added necessary routines to allow paying purchase orders with ACH’s and added routines to the deposit module that actually generate the necessary file to upload to the bank. Payroll processing will also be using this same process once it’s finished.

3) We hired another developer this week to start working on finishing up Payroll and hope to have that ready for full testing within a few weeks.

4) Added a new Tax report to the invoice that will not only print out the taxes you owe but will also generate payables for each tax vendor when you elect to process the taxes.

Lots of little things got done along the way as well. Overall the entire project could not be going any better. Most of the developers have been involved in TBA development over the years and to see and hear their excitement when they’re working with Lizzy™ is, well, exciting.

Oh, and I’ve tweaked my video editing a bit and uploaded a few new videos to the Learn More page that should be a bit easier to view. They also scale and zoom in and out during the presentation to make it a bit easier to read the screen. Now I just need to pick through the other videos so that I can get them all operating the same.

Well I hope everyone has a great weekend and we’ll see you next week.

glenn

So it’s a terrible thing for these company executives to ignore Facebook and Linkedin? I tried to join linkedin as I’d never heard of it before I read this article. While I’m still not sure of exactly what Linkedin does for me as a business owner, I can tell you that I’ll most likely never use it due to it not working very well. For the last 5 minutes the site has been sitting here spinning just trying to register my name.

As for Facebook, it’s a great website for catching up with friends and chewing the rug, but it’s real usefulness to a business owner is questionable at best. Can you find customers on it? Do people actually go to Facebook and ask others what they know of Lizzy and Nizex Inc.? Do they spend time researching how to best run their companies? Or heck, how many are actual business owners to begin with? To give merit to these sites as some sort of wonderful untapped sales tool seems weak at best. Before you can tell me I should have a facebook account for my business, you should first explain to me how having a facebook account is going to increase sales or support and by how much.

Again, I’m not against Facebook and I’m not sure what Linkedin even is since it’s still sitting here spinning its wheels just trying to get me registered, but to suggest that my business is in jeopardy just because I don’t have a linkedin account seems to me a survey done by someone that has never herself run a real business. Oh, and the company executives that she suggests she surveyed? Well, it seems she didn’t actually speak with any of them and they run companies so large that I doubt their using Facebook ever enters into their minds.