Feelin’ for Microsoft

(two part series of selling into SMB space: Postmaster Woes is next)

One of my biggest pet peeves about SMB IT Professionals, and that term ought to be used very loosely for some, is the constant complaints about inability to stay on top of everything thats going on. Now common sense would dictate that if you’re having trouble staying on top of all you’re doing you may need to sharpen your focus because you’re spreading yourself too thin. But this isn’t common sense, this is SMB, and in SMB you make stupid decisions because money is tight.

Nonetheless, I felt that the problem of SMB following product changes and communication was a legitimate complaint by the SMB folks. I’ve been trying my hardest for years to help consolidate the huge body of knowledge for the SMB sector, produce 101/introductory podcasts and videos, present at UG meetings and (no, I’m not as stupid as I look) all of that is an extension of what we do at Own Web Now and how we learn and perfect our approach. How do we communicate to the client that there will be changes? How do we alert them when there are problems? How do we handle the issues that come up as a result of the holes in the above?

When it came to handing off my direct touch with our partners and clients I went with a three prong approach. First, we created a single point of contact for all the alerts and issues that our company publishes, stuck it on a public blog (http://www.ownwebnow.com/blog) and even have the top five stories syndicated on our front page. Step 2, we wrapped a portal around the above to make sure everyone had a place to get in touch with us in an accountable way so issues can be tracked, recorded and documented over time (http://support.ownwebnow.com). Final and third step included direct email, the worst method of communication since the launch of Vistaprint.com, that let our product subscribers know things are coming.

So about two months ago we announced the launch of a huge new OWN data center. Over a month ago I sent an email to the customer base saying “This new stuff is going to require you to drop in some more IP addresses in the SMTP access lists.” and followed it up by five blog posts on the corporate site, two on this site, and even Susan Friggin Bradley blogged it.

Yet, day after day, people are constantly, constantly, constantly not receiving some email, some email is missing.

Did you add in the new IP address ranges? Yes, of course! 

I have to this date personally closed over 300 trouble tickets at support.ownwebnow.com that were complaints about messages not getting there and the resolution was to add the IP addresses we published over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. Which leads me to the following thesis:

“There is no information overload in SMB – you just aren’t paying attention.”

Now granted I am a very very tiny paramecium in comparison to the universe of information that Microsoft is, but the parallels that I see in complaints are just enormous. What is particularly frustrating (and just the cosmic way of balancing out the carma for all the smack I’ve said about Microsoft in the past) is that when things break people blame you first. Why? Well, they had problems a week ago, this surely must be related.

Point is, there is only so much of a margin you can use when talking about being too busy before it becomes a loud sign of complete and total incompetence. Yes, things are going to slip your mind every now and then, you’re going to make mistakes, after all we are all human and this isn’t exactly a minimum wage job (hint: most people reading this blog demand $80 or more an hour for their time) and the reason there is a premium on this profession is because you’re expected to know a lot and do a lot. But when you end up doing too much and knowing too little you can no longer blame Microsoft or Vlad for your shortcomings, you have to take a good hard look at the mirror and re-evaluate the extent to which you’ve spread yourself.

After all, you don’t see surgeons working 3–4 operations at a time. Why do you think that is?