Fifty-Five Conversations

A local business wants to deal with one company. Ideally one person. The trouble starts behind that person.

At Vendasta our purpose is to make technology easy, accessible and affordable for local businesses. That is a hard problem. Most businesses have a very hard time buying, setting up and running technology themselves. It is simply not what they are good at. So they find someone they trust to pick it, buy it, set it up and run it for them.

That is the right answer for the business. A trusted expert beats a vendor and a do-it-yourself project almost every time.

It also moves the pain. Making things easy for the business makes them harder for the expert and the vendors behind the expert.

The formula

There is a simple way to see it. Count the people who have to talk to each other.

Complexity = N × (N − 1) / 2, where N is the number of people on the project.

A channel partner builds a website for a business. The partner talks to the owner and the owner's accountant. That is three people and three lines of communication. Easy.

Now the business wants more. A website, ecommerce, a payment gateway, internet access, security, point of sale, advertising, social media and listings. That is maybe five vendors, each with one contact. The business has an owner, a marketing person and someone in finance. The partner has a salesperson, someone in fulfillment and someone in finance.

That is eleven people. 11 × 10 / 2 = 55.

Fifty-five separate lines of conversation for one customer. It is no surprise the Project Management Institute says about 90% of a project manager's time goes to communicating.

It gets worse

Those conversations happen in email, chat, paper forms, texts and hallway talk. Some of them have to be white-labelled. The vendor has to act as if it works for the partner. Mistakes happen. Mistakes create more messages over more channels.

The result is the thing I see at partner after partner. Salespeople and fulfillment people turn into project managers. They spend most of their day coordinating and very little of it doing the job they were hired for.

What we are building

This is the problem we are working on with our inbox, task management and order management. The goal is fewer messages, fewer channels, better accuracy and answers you can find.

1. One system of record for every conversation, so there is a single source of truth.
2. Automatic white-labelling of vendor messages, so the partner can stop being the middleman for every note.
3. One view of fulfillment from the sales opportunity to the finished project.
4. A date, time and user stamp on everything, including billing, so there is accountability.
5. A shared inbox, so a team owns the conversation together, with private threads still possible between any two parties.

Communication overhead is an unglamorous problem. It may also be the biggest one our customers have.