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2011 was a great year for VisibleGains. Kicking off 2011 was the big launch of our 2.0 product, which executed on our vision that any B2B marketer could make personalized, interactive, video-based campaigns. Our customers stretched the limits of our product to innovate in ways we never expected. One particularly interesting innovation was how our customers used Video Apps deeper in the sales funnel. Instead of only using them on landing pages, we saw customers using them as prospecting collateral, in Free Trial nurturing, and as interactive proposals.
We focused much of the second half of 2011 on enabling the sales teams to be even more effective in using Video Apps and other content throughout their sales life-cycle. We introduced an Outlook Add-In, developed technology for generating personalized sites to host the content, and introduced tracking, alerting, and reporting features to help salespeople get feedback on what’s working. As a result, we have many more people using VisibleGains every day than we ever have and we’re getting a ton of feature requests around email productivity for salespeople.
There’s no doubt that VisibleGains could leave rich media behind and pivot into a full-fledged sales email productivity company. We have the resources, the customer base, and the early traction to justify it. The problem is that we don’t see email productivity as a sustainable, long-term, business. The quick “fix” that salespeople get from knowing that someone has read their email or clicked on a link is fleeting. They’ll be hooked for a few days or weeks, but then they realize that they have to get back to banging the phones and closing deals. The product quickly turns into a “nice to have” rather than a “must have”.
Don’t get me wrong, the Outlook Add-In has been huge for us. Sales reps don’t use a lot of tools besides their email and phone, so if you don’t integrate with them, they’ll never even try your product. We’ll continue to support and enhance it in 2012. We’re particularly excited by a core group of our users who are embracing selling best practices: doing research on their prospect, writing relevant and personal emails, and using personalized rich media and content to elevate their communication. The Outlook Add-In gives these reps the tools to use content and rich media with the click of a button, effectively helping them to do the right things without a lot of the work.
We strongly believe that it is best to hitch our wagon to the emerging wave of trends rather than propping up a dying trend. We support sales and service pros who live and breathe social, engage in real relationships with their clients, and use email only as a means to an end. They don’t send 250 of the same email template each day and then use tracking tools to see if they got a hit. They believe quality over quantity. They use technology to make their relationships stronger, not to cheapen them.
Our long term vision remains unchanged. In order to compete in the internet-enabled world, marketers, sales, support, and service providers need to step up their game. They need to do the extra work to personalize their communication to connect with their prospects and customers. They need to provide content that educates and better communicates their value proposition. At VisibleGains, we are going to remove every barrier to make this new reality just as easy as sending that same boring email.
Our main product goal for 2012 is to continue to dramatically simplify the process of working with video, rich media, and other content. We’ll introduce a new mobile app, a Gmail plugin, and continue to enhance our Outlook support. my.visiblegains.com will be overhauled with a new design, better content management, and simpler sharing.
We’re excited for 2012 and how our company will evolve and grow. We’re looking forward to the journey.
Yes, the age old moral question of to dip a chip once and be polite, or go back in for the double dip and possibly offend someone else who finds this behavior inappropriate. We have had many in-office discussions on the topic and to this day we have yet to come to a consensus, so I figured it would be a great metaphor for another wall we find ourselves up against often: product customization.
As a newbie developer I was always ambitious to add new settings to our application because it was possible and it would show of my abilities as developer. Crazy drop-down menu’s and ajax updating. Cool form validation and tabbed layouts. A customer would request a certain feature, and I’d be thinking how I could add a “simple” checkbox to easily accommodate their request. But with each successive checkbox came customization that was probably perfect for one client, but confusing and overkill for another.
Once you go down the path of providing the custom solutions, you are actually moving farther away from a solution for all. A search for antonyms of the word custom brings up words like departure, deviation, difference, and divergence. Before you know it you’ve created an exponential maze of settings to try an accommodate every permutations of what any customer could possibly think up.
I had to learn that to try an accommodate more people I should actually move up higher in the settings to be much broader and simpler, rather then going deeper and complex. The deeper you go, and the more permutations you have adds boat loads of work to development and actually makes your product much harder to work with. “Oh, you want to {name of simple feature}. Thats easy! First go to the setting page and…{begin list of about five settings that the client needs to set, on 4 different pages, and if they ever need to change something they will be calling you back anyways, cause they have no idea why they are setting them in the first place}”
Anything is “possible”. But does introducing possibilities introduce complexity that makes using your product a poor experience for everyone else, and a maintenance nightmare for your engineering and support teams. True double dipping is to move higher up and to simplify. If the broader solution of your product is not a good fit for someone, how is a more refined solution going to be any better (for the client or the company).
Back to my metaphor. I’m now pretty confident in my simplification of settings for our product, but I would like some closure on the whole chip double dipping debate. My argument is this: If upon a second dip, you come out of the bowl with more dip on your chip then you went in with, how is it possible that you left anything behind in the bowl that would pose a hazard to anyway else? I’m not not gonna double dip.
Maybe its time I call MythBusters.
Hello customers, fans, and loyal readers of our blog. As you may have noticed, we’ve been on a bit of a blogging vacation lately. This is mainly due to the fact that we’ve been heads down on a few major initiatives that we’ll be sharing in the coming weeks. This is no excuse, and we know that we’re breaking all sorts of best practices, but we’re focusing on getting through these goals in September.
We will be hosting our first customer council this Friday and we’re really excited about the attendance. We’ll have almost every customer present as well as some partners, prospects, and our advisory board. We’re breaking it up into two sessions: our hands-on users in one session and their executive counterparts in the other. We realize these are two different perspectives and we wanted to segment them for the greatest efficiency of all.
We’re putting the finishing touches on a 2.0 version of our product. We’ll be showing it at the customer event and we’ll also be releasing it on our website in the next few days. The major difference from our current product is that we’re incorporating a gallery of templates to help customers get started. Our goals is for making a video in VisibleGains 2.0 to be as easy as making an email in ConstantContact or making a business card in Vistaprint. We’ll share some more details shortly.
There are a few more things that you’ll hear as well, but we can’t quite talk about them yet. Stay tuned!
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