37 Signals Features Our Blog Post

Today, those cool kids from 37 Signals featured our latest blog post.

You can see it here.

Click on icons below and learn more about Backpack for your internal project management and intranet and Basecamp for your client project management.

Let’s say you are working on a project for a client. The project consists of stuff you need to share and get done with your team and you also have stuff you need to share with your client. The two should always be separate.

Think of Backpack as your small business intranet where you share, store, secure, and discuss everything that is important for your team to accomplish a client engagement.

You can add any combination of notes, to-dos, files, photos, and dividers to a page. Pages just take seconds to create and can be used to organize, share, and discuss anything. See photo below and view the easy setup visual.

Backpack Page Created in Seconds

For example, we are currently working on multiple client engagements. We have an office located in Greater NYC area and one in Portland. Occasionally we have specialty contractors from different parts of country. We needed a shared system enabling each person to access, share, and store information vital to the client project success.

I’ll share a brief overview of how we use Backpack within minutes of partnering with a new client.

When Company-X partners with The Strategic Incubator, a process is set in motion:

• We establish a Backpack page of Company X. It takes us about 10 seconds and then we click one button to send an automatic email and text message notifying selected members of our team that we have a new project page.
• Each team member gets to work adding to the to-do list, notes section, and the writeboard section to brainstorm some preliminary creative ideas.

Before Backpack, we would pick-up the phone and receive a work status a few times a day.

Now, we just open our shared and secured Backpack URL site from any computer and in seconds I can see exactly what our individuals are doing.

Work Status

What if I’m on the road and I did not have immediate access to my Mac laptop?

No worries, because Backpack is a web application and I can access our business account from anywhere and from any computer.

Here are some more ideas of how you can use Backpack for your own fast business:

• Market research page. Everyone collects and places shared market research on one page.
• Media kit. You can place all of your media coverage over time on one page and then share with anyone-including the press.
• Meeting prep notes. Stop wasting time trying to brief one another on an upcoming. Post it on your Backpack page and there will be no excuses for everyone to be prepared.
  
• Standard Operating Procedures. Think of all the times you may have prepared a document, a proposal, or a document that you will use over and over again. Why not keep an on-going page of documents and protocol so you no longer have to repeat.
• Most frequently asked questions. Keep a list of your most frequently asked questions in one place and then email to anyone you like for quick and easy client support.
• Shared calendar. We know where and what we are doing at all times. Backpack makes it a snap to share a master online calendar.
• Share design ideas. Have an idea for a certain graphic for one of our client seminars? Upload it and share with everyone.
• Professional education notes. Let’s say one of our team members attends a meeting. That night before happy hour, he can update and share the important stuff with everyone.

All of this sounds like it should be really expensive right?

How does $24 dollars per month sound? We thought the same thing… This is a no-brainer price.

If you decide you want to learn more about Backpack as your fast business intranet and internal project manager, I will share the Backpack home page with you and you can determine if it’s what you need.

If you decide you need, please consider letting us know in the comment section below how you are using and like for your own business.

What's next?

The prospective client who excluded himself today is reading this post…

He is such a great and talented guy. A successful blogger, author, teacher, and possibly a successful digital entrepreneur. He is everything we are looking for in a client, except we professionally determined we are not a fit at this time.

He has all the talent and drive to be very successful in his new venture with or without us. It just will not be with us.

• Have you had a situation like this recently?

• Tell me the truth, did you want or need the business? What is the difference between want and need for you and your business?
  

We did not reject one-another, we just uncovered we are not a fit at this time.

The truth is we wanted his business, but we did not need his business. And at one point in time during our process, he wanted our business, but ultimately decided he did not need our business.

I could take my behavioral sciences background and analyze why we did not end up signing our agreement and begin working together, but it really does not matter intellectually or emotionally. He has made the decision to not pay us to be his solution provider.

As a team, we conducted our normal after-action-review on all prospective client engagements:

We determined we could have improved our communication process with him. We learned that our experience of explaining our process to our previous six clients was very similar. It just clicked.

It was not his fault that our process did not click for him.

Still, our process did what it was designed to do…

We did not always have this process…

Just two years ago we were hurt financially and even relationship wise because we did not have a tactful process to enable our great prospects to exclude themselves from what we have to offer. We did what most consulting firms do. And it did not click for us.

Here is what our prospective client qualifying process does for our us:

• Prevents us from feeling rejected. It just was not a fit, nothing personal.
  
• Saves both parties time & money. We conduct a quick kill or fill strategic discussion upon the idea. In fact, we have the prospective client present 10 slides or less in 30 minutes or less to our decision-making team. If they refuse to present to us, we don’t move forward. If it passes our fill requirements, we engage in a discovery session focused on our price, process, and decision-making. At any point, if either our prospective client our us can’t agree upon the non-negotiated price, process, and decision-making then we stop the process. Some prospective clients don’t like this process and they elect to exclude themselves. We respect their decision and then repeat the process until we find paying clients who determine we are the solution.
• Provides a know, like, and trust opportunity for both us and prospective client. On the front-end of our process we are able to gain the required fundamentals for conducting business together. If any of these requirements (know, like, and trust) are missing from either party, you will not and should not partner in business.
• Prevents us from feeling like we have to sell to gain new clients.
  

Do you have an online and offline process to enable great prospects to exclude themselves from what you have to offer?