Daniel Barnett, the founder of WORK[etc], was a recent guest on the TechnologyAdvice Expert Interview Series to share his insight on our business management platform. The series, which is hosted by TechnologyAdvice’s Clark Buckner, explores a variety of business and technology landscapes through conversations with industry leaders.
Daniel joined Buckner to discuss integrations and all-in-one business technology solutions, the benefits of this approach, and the best practices for finding a solution.
Here are a few of the highlights from the conversation:
TechnologyAdvice: How are the needs of small business owners and teams evolving?
Daniel: The biggest change is 5 years ago we would get new customers that were moving from systems that still included paper and pen. If they were more advanced, they would have Excel and email. Now, I don’t think we’ve had a paper customer for a long time. There’s been a huge migration in the last 5 years to web applications.
TA: What do you think is biggest pain point most small business leaders face on a daily basis?
Daniel: It’s definitely time. Small business is just so busy on a day to day basis. Any owner or manager in a small business has a task list that is literally hundreds of items long and no matter what productivity system or tool or whatever they focus on that, that work is always still there. So we see customers that sign-up and we just know that they’re so busy from day 1 that we’re going to be trying to do everything we can to make that job of getting up and running with a product like WORK[etc] that much easier.
TA: How does WORK[etc] address the market for business owners and project managers who need multiple technology solutions?
Daniel: The pattern we see is that small business has jumped on to web applications because they’ve quickly identified that they could be running their business better.
Example: they’ve signed up for a product like Salesforce for CRM and then perhaps Zendesk for customer support, Freshbooks for billing and something else for document management and the business owner or the business manager has literally woken up one day and gone, “Well hold on, why am I paying for 5 different subscriptions here and training my staff on 5 different products and trying to work out how to integrate the data so they all speak to each other — although all the contact information is all the same?”
And so they start on this path of looking for a better solution, an all in one business management tool or all in one CRM software product. WORK[etc] addresses that because it allows the business to get up and running with a suite of tools that are all inclusive, that allows more business to do everything from customer lifecycle management.
Essentially, if you can imagine a nice big circle: the first stage is find a customer, sell to the customer, deliver their product and service, bill that customer, support that customer, and repeat the process there.
We like to use the term customer lifecycle management.
Listen to the entire show above in order to hear the full conversation or download the show to listen later.
You can subscribe to the Expert Interview Series via Soundcloud or just the Project Management category.
This podcast was created and published by TechnologyAdvice. Interview conducted by Clark Buckner.
