 Welcome everybody. This is Jason Fisk and I am the business account manager here at FileMaker. And I'll be your host for today's Making the Case for FileMaker Web Seminar. Today we're going to be talking about business case development. We're talking about communication styles and options and communication techniques for presenting your FileMaker-based solutions to your users and getting buy-in from the appropriate decision makers within your organizations or possibly in your customer organizations. I'll be presenting and I'm going to be assisted today by Eric Frazier. Eric is our project manager in FileMaker Marketing. But before we get started, we do have some housekeeping that we'd like to chat with you about. First and foremost, for the best experience, we hope that you all have joined today's webinar with a broadband connection. The other thing that you might want to consider in the future is if you are going to be attending FileMaker Web Seminars, you may want to attend by an iPad or iPhone. I see that some of you have done that today. I've done it myself. It's an excellent experience. It allows you to go a little bit more mobile and enjoy that. And there's an app available in the App Store. Additionally, if you have any questions or require some assistance at any time on the technical front, please contact Citrix Technical Support. I'm going to give you their 800 number. It is 888-259-8414. That number again is 888-259-8414. Additionally, during today's presentation, you will have the opportunity to ask questions. So let's talk a little bit about how to ask a question. So you should all be seeing the control panel on your screen. And you'll notice here that we have a questions section. If it's not fully expanded, you can click on the arrow there and it should expand out. And once you've done that, you can go ahead and type your question into the questions area at the send button. And Eric will be sort of going through that and helping me at the end of the presentation to address some of the questions that you've entered there. And we're going to go through as many as we can, as many as time allows at the end of the presentation. So with that, let me introduce myself. As I said at the top there, I'm Jason from FileMaker. I'm the Business Account Manager. I'm based here in the Atlantic Territory, which means I cover the New York area. I also handle the D.C. market. And I'm celebrating my 10th year at FileMaker now. I meet with approximately 100 customers a year and I have more meetings than that, but oftentimes we have more than one meeting during the course of a year with a customer. And my customers run the gamut. So they're very small clients, small business owners, as well as all the way up to Fortune 10 businesses. And of course I also handle the federal government for FileMaker. And so all of that has given me something of a unique perspective on how people build FileMaker solutions and how the FileMaker solutions impact the lives of their coworkers and indeed the lives of the organizations that they work in. So my objective today is sort of to help you answer the question that I hear so often from our FileMaker developer community, which is, hey, this FileMaker platform is just wonderful. It's great. I can't believe what I can do with it. But I can understand why I struggle with explaining the wonderfulness of FileMaker to others. So hopefully I'm going to be able to help you devise a strategy for answering that question by the end of our conversation today. The other thing, and I'm giving away a little bit of the ending here, but I really want to motivate you all to take inventory of your solutions, your proposals, your plans, and your organizational needs and desires so that you can build an organizational benefit statement around the solutions that you've built. And one of the interesting challenges that FileMaker developers have because they are a wonderful group of people that are can-do people, have a great can-do spirit. It's a common thing that I see is they think the rest of the world shares the spirit, the can-do spirit. In reality, you all are quite the exception. So the notion is that we've got to present what you've done in a way that others can understand it. And so that'll be some of what we talk about today. And then the other thing that I want to talk a little bit about is encouraging you to plan and grow your communication styles, your techniques, and indeed some of the vocabulary. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that later on. But not everybody communicates in the same way. Indeed, within the FileMaker community, within the technical community at large, we all have our own dictionary, our own three-letter acronym, dictionary that we all speak in. One of the things that we're going to talk about at the end of the presentation is encouraging you all to kind of take a look at that and see how effective we can be with perhaps a different approach. So with that, ultimately what we're going to get to is that we want to make your lives easier and more enriching so that you can get what you want, which typically would mean more rewarding experiences of FileMaker developer and ultimately as a business leader. So first and foremost, communication point number one. FileMaker really the experience, again this is after 10 years and a couple hundred customers. I've seen the collective experiences about building solutions. It's not necessarily about having great solutions. It's about an ongoing constant improvement process. And so one of the things that is important to communicate early on with your end users, with your management, with your potential customers is that this is an ongoing relationship. The thing that separates FileMaker solutions from web-based solutions or off-the-shelf solutions is that development is part of what you're asking to do. You can work around and improve your solutions over a period of time so that you have something that you can grow into and it's something that's going to involve with your needs as your business changes. So that's a quick point there that I want to make. So the agenda here today, what we're going to do is we're going to go through a case study of what not to do. I've got a wonderful person. This is a real person who is struggling but they contribute mightily to their organization and they are making some mistakes there that I want to share with you briefly. But then what we're going to do in greater detail is go through some case studies of what folks have actually done in the while and what's been very, very effective. So we'll look at each one of those. And then finally what we're going to do is we're going to apply the lessons of these successful implementations to what I'll call a sales process or a communications process that we can all step through. So that's kind of the agenda for today. So I alluded to this word process before. I mean it in some steps here. So what I would encourage a file maker developer, someone who's accustomed to building file maker solutions, is view this as a development effort. View it as a project. We've got to understand the business need. We need to build rapport with the person that we're trying to communicate with. We need to take that individual on a journey. Here's what our file maker solution is. It does. Here's how it works. Not necessarily the nuts and bolts of how it works, but how the work flows through the solution. Help folks look at solutions and compare them to other alternatives. Hey, we could go with sales force as a CRM tool. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each one of those platforms? We could go with an off the shelf package that does project management for us. But how does a file maker solution compare with that? And then guide folks to understand what the parameters of the solution or file maker can scale to this number of users simultaneously. This solution that we might buy off the shelf can handle this number of people simultaneously and within these certain budget frames. So that's another thing that you can help your customers with. And when I say customer, I also mean manager or I mean decision maker within your organization. So we all have customers in that regard. And then finally, focusing on the benefits and the return on investment and coming up with a vocabulary and a terminology and a metric that we can all agree on. It doesn't make a lot of sense, for instance, to build a great return on investment presentation if your organization isn't interested in return on investment. They may be more interested in some kind of compliance standard as an example. So if we're building medical solutions, it's imperative that these solutions be HIPAA compliant or CFR 21 Part 11 compliant. So perhaps our presentation isn't about return on investment in a compliance environment. Perhaps our presentation is really about compliance. And so it's going to be incumbent upon you to understand what the metrics of success are within your organization and then build a business benefit statement that speaks to those needs. And that's really what we're going to talk about during the presentation today. And then finally, we'll talk a little bit about this ongoing project. I call it expanding the sale here, but in the first slide, file maker solutions are present tense. We're building. So we're constantly expanding. We're constantly looking to improve what we've done to build on our expertise and build on our experiences and leverage those as needs change. So case study number one, I've left this individual anonymous to protect what I'll call innocent, but they're really not so innocent. I think they're to a large extent, they're kind of culpable for their own predicament. This individual. So they work in a Fortune 1000 company, a Fortune 100 company. They have over 600 licensed file maker pro users that they support. They have many applications, many people that are using instant web publishing, but quite honestly the individual that we're talking about here doesn't know how many people are hitting their solution through the web, which I think is very important. They have a range of servers between two and four. And each one of these servers has about 100 files on each server. There are many multi-file solutions, but unfortunately this individual just doesn't have the time to really get a firm grasp on that. And they're serving and supporting over 10 business units within their organization. Now, a file maker is doing some pretty interesting things. They're pulling daily reports automatically generating PDF emails to the top executive teams giving readout on the prior days business results. So a very high profile activity. File maker is also responsible for keeping track of the production schedule for the core business of this particular customer. So two extraordinarily vital functions, business results and workflow, or project management. These are very, very mission critical applications. Unfortunately, this individual is very resource constrained, which is, of course, understandable when you're supporting 600 plus users and a few dozen solutions, a couple of hundred files for servers. Of course, you're going to be pretty constrained. They're also not often able to go to FileMaker's developer conference. They're concerned, however, that their development skills are atrophying in a fire put out mode as opposed to a business building mode. And, of course, over time, user expectations change, and if applications are not well maintained, they are perceived of as atrophying or decaying. So we have skills atrophy and we have got quality decay happening there. The end user community is getting behind on their version of FileMaker, the .fmp12 file format change. Those represent a pretty good challenge and we've got 600 users and a couple hundred FileMaker files. It's a project to convert. So they have yet to convert to FileMaker 12, which has now been in market not quite for two years, but coming up on it. So users know when they're using an old version of software that's something to be mindful of. And this individual, unfortunately, is becoming increasingly isolated within the FileMaker community because of .fmp12 being out so long and introducing so many wonderful new features, themes and execute sepal among them, and awful lot of the communications and conversations and development projects and webinars that FileMaker does are all around FileMaker 12 features, which, unfortunately, are just not relevant to this individual. So we've got that kind of isolation. I mentioned before to satisfied users. And then finally, you know, if enough users are upset, you've got a risk. You might find yourself looking for work. And after all those other circumstances above are true, do you really want to be looking for work when you haven't really developed in the current version of FileMaker? Do you want to be looking for work when you've kind of lost contact? It'll make even that act a little bit more complicated. So here's something that occurs to me when I work with folks that fit this profile. It makes me sad. I see wonderful hardworking people that are unable to get what they need as well as unable to really execute to the best of their abilities. So it does, unfortunately, make me, as an observer, frustrated for them and then certainly sad on their behalf. So I really do believe that there is a better way and the way that things should be. So let's talk a little bit more about that. So the first case study that I'm going to share with you today is for National Geographic. This is a very, very well run team. We have the team leader there is Rick in the front left with the mustache and glasses there. And he's got a wonderful team of FileMaker developers and he's done a wonderful job of presenting his solutions within National Geographic. And in fact, in the center there we've got George Hubs, who's the CIO at National Geographic who is willing to pose for this picture. And we have a great relationship with this team so much so that when I asked him for this photograph, not only were they willing to do it for me, but they put a wonderful National Geographic spin on it. They're proud of where they work and I'm proud of the work that they do. So this is a great team and let me tell you a little bit about them. So the business challenge that they were facing not too terribly long ago was that the National Geographic was deprecating their use of Lotus Notes in favor of Google Mail and Google Docs. But this left a little bit of a void, right? So Google Docs are great. Mail is great, but there's this little need for what I'll call tactical application development was not being met. And so as a result, each one of these individual organizations within that GEO had what I'll call discrete workflows, right? So National Geographic television had a different workflow, work process than the magazine. And even within the magazine division you've got daily, you've got weekly and you've got monthly activities that are being done and all have slightly different workflows and processes. So what's nice about National Geographic is a corporation is that they understand that these workflows are different. So this idea of a strategic versus tactical application is something that is well understood within National Geographic. So that is the first question that you might want to ask yourself when you're being faced with FileMaker challenges you're having a hard time articulating to folks why FileMaker is a valid part of your solution stack within your particular company. As you ask yourself do they understand and value discrete workflows? So for instance I've got a work group level application. This benefits five or ten or six or twenty people within my organization directly. I'm part of a hundred person organization. Do we understand that my team has a different workflow than someone else? I mean all too often we'll see is that the lowest common denominator is what IT typically supports. You could be a nuclear physicist or an administrative assistant or a football coach and you're going to get a laptop, you're going to get Microsoft Office, you'll get a browser and off you go. So if you're there then you really need to focus in on the need for local tools, local workflow tools that can facilitate efficiency. If you've already got an efficiency model then great that's one less thing and that's what they had at National Geographic. So it's imperative that you self-diagnose yourself as to which situation you're in there. But at National Geographic they accept the notion of work group level workflow processes and procedures. So that was great for them. So actions taken. FileMaker was analyzed along with many alternative platforms. What other stuff is out there? Can we look at Microsoft Access? How does that behave as a work group application? Can that do something for us? What other tools are available to us? Can we build these solutions in the web? Can we rewrite them? And the other thing that was done at the same time is that the Lotus Notes developer team was actually introduced to FileMaker through the FileMaker training series. So they were trained in FileMaker. And ultimately what happened is that the applications were migrated updated and rewritten in FileMaker Pro. And over time what they've done is they've maintained a very careful inventory of these applications who owns the application and built the application, the business unit that's using the application and what the business impact of each one of these applications is. And so as a result the presentation was built that articulated each one of these points. And it's a great way of keeping your inventory in. So here are some examples from a 66 slide internal presentation that the good folks at National Geographic were kind enough to share with me. And as we'll see, each one of these solutions articulates the business impact. So let's look at them. So first we've got an overview, right? We've got FileMaker servers, we've got a count of the applications, we've got a listing here of the other technologies that FileMaker touches. PHP, PeopleSoft and so forth. And then we also have a listing of the other physical assets that FileMaker is touching, right? So here's an example of a specific application. You'll see on the right what does the application do. We've got it branded. This is a nice touch as well. We've got a user interface that reflects the needs of the organization. This one happens to be National Geographic Television. We've got an articulation of which version of FileMaker this is being run. You'll notice we've got a conversion date that's expected for the application. We list the server, we list the user count, the status of the application, and what they'll call maintenance, right? How much work are we doing in this application to keep it working? And who's the administrator and who's the business owner? So this is a very great way of communicating to someone who may not be familiar with this tool, what this tool does and how it impacts the organization. So here's another similar organization is being supported, but here's a more detailed view of this application. So we can see this is expense reporting around a production. So some very specific functionality here is being tracked. You can see as well that there's a technology crossover here. So some of the data that's built, or I should say accumulated in this file maker system or captured in this file maker system then goes on and touches upstream system. So it affects the business down the road. Again, you can see the interface is branded to reflect the organization and there is a very clean way of communicating the systems that the file maker application is touching. Again, we reinforce with user count the impact of the application. So here's another example. In this case it is National Geographic Kids and you can see here again the user interface has been modified to reflect the personality of the publication, which is a great branding technique. We'll hit on this a number of times throughout the presentation. But branding is imperative. It's imperative that you build your file maker applications to be delightful and user standards have gone up. Not the least of which is because of the availability of iPads and iPhones user expectations are really through the roof in that regard. So it's imperative that we use the developer community, keep an eye on that and reflect the personalities of our end users in our applications that we build. And I think FileMaker has done a pretty good job of actually making content available to you as well as tools within the platform itself to make the user interface building challenge a little bit easier for folks on your end. So again, we've got user systems that we're touching where the crossover points are and who the business owner is as well. So generally speaking, this is not terribly difficult information or shouldn't be terribly difficult information to come by but it's great that we're able to look at it all at once. And again another slide of the same application this time a little bit more detail. And again you can see this is performing some fairly important things in terms of managing contracts and so forth. And again we've got a connection to an external system here that's relevant. Another tip so this is another application that the Nat Geo team built and again this is a great benefit is if you've got an internal IT organization and you're trying to influence them in the direction of favoring FileMaker, wouldn't it be great if you could build them an application so that they could benefit from your skills. In this case the Nat Geo team was good enough to do that. You can see here we've got a directory application, we've got some tracking application functionality as well some work requests and so forth. So again a lovely way of making friends with the good people in the IT organization and again we can see that the branding has been thought of here as well. So what are the outcomes? So organizational stability this team has been in place for a while which is saying something given that the publishing industry has been in flux of late. We've got a team of folks that was able to join us at the FileMaker developer conference so we've got budget, we've got the time off so that the team could improve their skills by going out to the FileMaker developer conference. We've got staffing levels one of the individuals that was in that photograph is actually a consultant that's on staff at Nat Geo. So again one of the challenges is in tough economic times how do we maintain our staffing levels so they've been able to do that. They also have access to training and I'm not just talking about FileMaker training but I'm also talking about external system training so PHP is an example of getting PHP training that's a nice way to extend your functionality or FileMaker solution and it's great that the FileMaker team can get that PHP training and of course hardware, plugins these sorts of things when things are running well you can get the tools that you need to do the job and I think this is one of the greatest benefits a place at the planning table all too often in customer situations I've been called in as the solution of last resort more often than I care to admit I've heard the following phrase hey we just blew our six figure budget on a non FileMaker system that we had decided on to replace the FileMaker system that we didn't know we liked and so can you FileMaker possibly help us because we spent all our money on a system implementation that ultimately has failed I hope not to get to that so what Rick has been able to do with his hard work at National Geographic was hey look at the solutions that we're providing look at the business impact of these solutions that we're providing instead of asking why FileMaker let's turn it around now and now the situation is why not FileMaker this is our low cost tactical solution it's our platform of choice for this kind of business challenge why not use FileMaker so again a place at the planning table and then ultimately job satisfaction job satisfaction I think is an outcome of all of the other benefits that we've we've already listed here so generally speaking this is a a well-run team that's content with what they do they get the resources that they need in a timely manner so that's one of the benefits another case study this is IT solutions this is a Platinum FileMaker Development organization out of the Philadelphia area and we're going to be talking about one of their customers but the solution that we're going to be looking at is built by this team we've got Mark Adler we've got Colin Keefe we've got Winnie and we've got Jim there and so let's talk about the solution that they've built so their customer is a diversified financial services company they are Fortune 1000 they've got a nine billion dollar market capitalization and they have a centralized marketing services department this marketing services department is about 100 people and they do approximately 5,000 jobs a year they're distributed across five locations and they are across platform right so this is a fairly standard profile for a creative services organization that is entertaining using FileMaker we've got many many examples of these throughout the industry so here's the before photo this is my single favorite slide of the entire presentation so unfortunately I can't see everybody here but hands up if you've ever seen one of these right so this is a job tracking system we're keeping track of job numbers based on a printout I'll imagine that there's some very important significance associated with pink highlighter as opposed to blue highlighter as opposed to what looks like a light blue highlighter and look at the green up there that must have been a very very important job or a not so important job no way to tell at this point but this is this is very typical right people will ask me often what who FileMaker competitors are and sometimes we'll say spreadsheets sometimes I'll say Microsoft Access and sometimes I'll say nothing it depends on how I feel that day so in this particular case we can see that the competitors spreadsheet pen and ink the other thing that I'll point out here as you can see in the bottom right of the photograph it looks as though this particular customer forged a strategic alliance with the 3M Corporation for what I'll call a data cohesion strategy so in other words they've taped the rip in the piece of paper right so all too often this is the before the best part about this is that the developer had the forethought when the customer was working in this kind of environment to take this photograph and establish this as the before because you know human nature being what it is if you can't remind them periodically that this is where we were before the FileMaker implementation it's very easy to focus in on some of the challenges that you might be facing as opposed to focusing in on how far you've come right so this is a great stake in the ground in that regard so what are the challenges right so we wanted to create a centralized workflow we wanted to increase the transparency across the departments and we wanted to provide some trend reporting so these are fairly standard goals when one implements a creative services job tracking application the development phase was initially six months so from concept to development and they focused in on the top benefits and this is something that we'll touch on at the end of the presentation but focusing in on a couple of big things that you can do to improve the business is what I would advocate for at first right so have an incremental approach one of the great strengths of FileMaker is that there are no blind allies if you've got to make changes you can and so you focus on the big stuff and then hopefully down the road you'll have the opportunity to get to other things through additional phases right so that's what I called expanding the fail in the original slide of the agenda so focusing on campaign job schedule management file server integration in quotes and then down the road do time tracking and internal charge back in that kind of thing and then ultimately reporting so here's a couple of screenshots of the application as it was built and the one point that I'll make on this slide is you'll notice this red badge in the top right corner with the number nine in it I've got the red arrow pointing to it and this is a great example of when a FileMaker consultant is a business consultant as well as being a development shop so typically what customers will ask for at this particular stage of the game is hey if I've got something that I've got to act on I would like for the system to send me an email right we get that request all the time when we're talking to customers and what the consultant did in this particular case to say hey you know what that's a great request we can certainly accomplish that goal that's not a big challenge from a FileMaker point of view however as a workflow tool I think you're undermining the system by doing that by just telling people in email that they've got work to do you're probably going to create kind of a callus people will just automatically delete those emails or the email will be going off at all times of today and then people ultimately will ignore them why not instead require that people log into the system and then have the entire system all the time remind them of work that they've got to do and so you'll see this badge changing during the course of the examples that I'm about to show you and again the idea is that this is a FileMaker development shop that says look we're going to talk to you not only about the technical speeds and feeds but we're going to act as a business consultant we're going to improve your process and we're going to make recommendations about how your users interact with the system that are ultimately going to have business impact that are going to have nothing to do with the core functionality of FileMaker the speeds and feeds if you will of the platform so we'll talk more about that in the language section but you can see here here's another slide for a different person Jim happens to be in the procurement department and you can see he has 21 jobs that he's going to act on Jim was a skeptical of the system initially he didn't feel like he needed help he had his Excel quoting tool and he could build those requests and knock them out but he eventually became a believer in the system and was able to improve his quality of life and one of the things that we did for him of course was with this job reminder so at the end remember we saw in the earlier part that the second phase was reporting so one of the oldest sayings in computing is like garbage in, garbage out so one of the challenges you face with reporting systems is if people aren't using the tool if there isn't what we call voluntary compliance then the reports at the end of the day are not going to be that good if I just say you're saying as a classic example is you need to log your hours and if I'm logging my hours say 5.15 on a Friday before I leave the accuracy and the granularity of that data is probably not going to be the best but if my system allows me to track my hours as I do my job and I do my job the most efficient manner by using the system then we'll get great reporting that's very very accurate and allow us to do all kinds of wonderful things like load balancing across resources, managing people getting them the training that they need in a timely manner forecasting so that if we need to staff up we can do it defense in the event that people are saying hey you know we need budget cuts can you give us some headcount here so again a system that people want to use that's built around their needs is going to give you great reporting so focus on the system first and reporting second all too often systems are built around outcomes reports as opposed to around the individuals in my opinion that's what makes FileMaker great is we focus on the productivity of the individual or we can't focus on the productivity of the individual and that's a nuanced conversation I'll grant you but it's imperative that you communicate that to your audience the people that you're going to ask to pay for the system the people that you're going to ask to support the system down the road hey this is unique about FileMaker again getting back to that original theme FileMaker is about building great solutions so we need to communicate that that's part of it great solutions are solutions that people want to use and ultimately the reporting which is the outcome is going to be great because of that so here are the outcomes for this particular customer drastic improvement in role relations I'm from New Jersey what we say is people aren't yelling at each other anymore some resources are reassigned rather than having to walk around and sort of be professional mags for a living they've been reassigned and allowed to do creative work instead there's no more physical job jacket that's great as well and there's a streamline process Jim our procurement guy he can do his job more quickly we reduce the number of rush charges as an example so there's a return on investment benefit right there in terms of cost and actually you'll see here when the ROI was calculated for this particular solution it was less than a year so for the developer this has been a five year plus ongoing relationship with this customer it's been stable and of course it's been profitable for them so these are the outcomes a great example so what can we learn from these examples here's a saying I like to remind people of success has many fathers failure is an orphan and what I mean by this is your success if you have a file maker system that's been successful you should share it your success is your manager's success right so make sure that you're sharing and let's talk a little bit about sharing communications how does your organization communicate with one another what's the internal culture do you do a lot of presentations can you do a lot of presentations for the most part people would prefer to get their content through presentations go to meetings if you're a spread out team in person presentations if you're a team that are brief that are well rehearsed that are pithy and ultimately entertaining and relevant typically presentations are better documents less so right unless you live in a culture where people do spend an awful lot of time reading documents I recommend that a presentation is a much better way of communicating your success over documentation documentation is a nice complimentary thing it can be a steak steak in the ground it can act as a as a data point but presentations are how you know that your audience is listening and that they've heard what you said and forwards them the opportunity to ask you questions about it but great presentations do not happen by accident and so it's imperative that you practice and seek training not everyone is born a steve jobs indeed steve jobs was not born a steve jobs and so this is a book that I I've used it to help me in my journey of becoming a presenter is called resonate and wonderful thing about this particular book it actually goes through two of the most beautiful presentations that you've ever seen one is happens to be the iPhone launch and it studies exactly what Mr. Jobs did during that presentation that made that presentation so memorable so relevant and so powerful so I'll remind you there it's not enough to be right when you when you've built your file maker based solutions you've got to be effective right so some of that is these guys may not understand outsiders may not understand the business impact of your solution so it's imperative that you take some time to help them understand that and so another little pointer here is do you have a portfolio are you ready to give this presentation think of the national geographic example rick is ready to give that presentation at a moment's notice he's got that slide deck with him at any time he can cut it down he can trim it to the salient points for the audience that he's got but he's got that presentation at the ready so again focus on presentation skills do them and present your solutions and present the relevant business impact of those solutions here's another tip design proposed solutions with the stated benefit right so why are you building the file maker based solution right why have you done it what was the original challenge that you were facing remember that piece of paper right with all the writing on it what problem were we trying to solve was it a relevant problem that we solved so what are your individual organizations metrics for success is it return on investment is it total cost of ownership is it compliance we talked about those so specifically correlate your solution to those metrics and I saw this cartoon Matta O'Dell our systems engine one of our systems engineers now he's in marketing and shared this cartoon with me many years ago but I always thought it was relevant to the file maker community can you pass the salt and then the developer says you know hey I said pass the salt I know I'm developing a system to pass you arbitrary condiments yeah but it's been 20 minutes right well but it'll save you time in the long run right so I've developed a cumbersome system that's taking lots of time and it's not relevant to your needs right so I have a saying that I use from time to time which is you know anytime a module is built in file maker and it goes unused a file maker and systems engineer sheds a tear right so it's something that we see from time to time and so I'll remind everyone when you're building your file maker based systems make sure it's relevant and you understand that what it what's impact is going to be before you endeavor to spend so much of your own time and energy on building a solution document your return on investment or whatever the metric is right so you name your solution right getting back to that branding issue every report should have the name of the solution right at the bottom there's your fantastic tips think of our first friend our anonymous friend who's sending reports out to the executives company every day as part of an automated process it's a PDF what if he just wrote on the bottom of it powered by your could be powered by file maker but it could be powered by your application development department or whatever that is so it's branding right so this is where that that particular report comes from so when someone says hey what's this department do we we built that awareness within the organization and then focus on the thing that the application does right it can be one right think of you know the presentation for national geographic what what did that application specifically accomplish what did each one of those applications accomplish here's another tip note know the cost of doing this particular function whatever the application does in another technology so one of the interesting stories the second case study that we did there the financial services company the the solution was built both in file maker as well as in dot net and so IT solutions are platinum members dot net certified developers well as a file maker based developer and when a customer came to them looking for a solution they said hey you know they'd come to them with the dot net request they said we this is our development environment choice if you guys could build this application for us that would be great and the IT solutions folks of course we can build for you dot net but they have you looked at file maker right and of course the the cost basis for a file maker based solution versus a dot net solution is for ten one and so financial services companies were leapt at the opportunity to have a low cost fully functional solution out there so again if you're not familiar with other technologies what would it cost to build a file maker this solution that you've gotten file maker in a web based application or in a dot net best application if you've got an existing application I would encourage you bid it out using other technologies you don't have to become masters yourselves you could take take your file maker based solution and turn it into a request for proposal from alternative vendors and say hey to replicate this functionality what would the cost be right so that that's a great thing to do proactively and then as you're building the solutions just remember get back to that benefit statement or return on investment statement constantly focusing on that so data gathering right it's it's what we do is file maker developers right so why not use the tool or why not use our process to gather information so one of my clients has a questionnaire that they distribute before they engage in any development project and you can see it's fairly straightforward if I'm an end user or I should say if I'm an end user I don't think it's unfair of my developer to ask for these questions be answered before I ask them to spend so much of their time and effort so for instance you can see what's this type of benefit that you expect from implementation of this database check all that apply so here's some questions that you could be asking your end users what are the metrics of success is it labor savings is it cost savings and then you'll see here my favorite which is question four here is would there be any additional repercussions resulting from delaying or canceling the implementation of this database this is one of my favorite all time questions I say it a little bit differently what I mean is what's the cost of doing nothing right if people are not willing to engage in the solution there's an implied cost meaning if you don't do it today you're going to incur some cost what is that can you document that so gather data demos slightly different than presentations right or let me say that definitively demos are different than presentations so it's imperative that not only do you polish up your presentation skills but it's imperative that your demo skills be top notch as well anybody that's had the good fortune to go to a file maker developer conference and sit through one of Dave Knight's presentations can tell you that some people can really demo and some people maybe can't but Dave is one of the best in the file maker community and when I ask him about preparation time he'll tell me about four hours six hours and I did a casual kind of poll of all the developers at file maker developer conference who were presenting and I asked them about presentation preparation and I said the number range from two hours to six hours for preparation so again it's imperative that you prepare to demonstrate your application and you need to take the audience in their position in mind right so you're presenting to your solution to a bunch of file maker developers you're going to want to focus on the technical aspects of the solution hey here's where I use script triggers to do this notice here we're using execute sql to give me this list of unique values from related table I've simplified my relational graph using execute sql these are all relevant things to a file maker developer community but if I'm presenting to end users we might want to talk about user interface we might want to talk about buttons on layouts and things like that and functions that they perform so your demo is going to be very very different so plan accordingly and rehearse your demonstrations and tell a story what was the problem think back to that again the picture of the list of handwritten numbers from before what was the use case how is it what are we solving again another example of a fantastic a fantastically talented individual who does great demonstrations Terry Barwigan did a great job at this year's file maker developer conference and he's focusing on the benefits of the application right so when you're building a demonstration in your plan for the demo you focus on benefits right and again use scenario based solutions right so what's the use case tell a story right file maker has something we call zero to 60 demonstration where we take a spreadsheet which is a reference point for the general audience most people use spreadsheets for many things many people you abuse spreadsheets and so we take these a very complicated very large spreadsheet we bring in a file maker we make it available to multiple users we then projected on to an iPad we then allow people that are using iPads and iPhones to edit the data we got a container field we allow people using the iPhones and iPads to add a picture to the database and they get the idea of what file maker is a platform from this demonstration because the point that we're trying to make is hey this is a great tool to use and this is a great demo that you can do to communicate that I think you all should be a depth at handling that kind of demonstration because you're trying to communicate what the platform is to people right so if you've got that demo set we'd be happy to provide that for you we've got webinars building your first iOS app is basically this iOS presentation so look for that and be prepared for that so communications that's the other challenge that we're talking about communicating with folks is something that can require a plan right how are we going to communicate as we're preparing to do one of these presentation again we've hit on a number of these things but focusing on solving problems and serving as what I'll call a trusted advisor right how many times have you been in those communications situations where you keep telling people the same thing over and over again this is the right way to go guys this is the right way to go and you're just not getting anywhere you're not making any headway and some that has to do with communication style so these are two books that I particularly enjoy the conceptual selling I think is just absolutely great and I would strongly encourage you to take a look at that book and it talks about how do we build a plan for communication right it's a sales book on its surface but it is a communications lesson and so I would strongly encourage you to take a look at that particular book so communications here's a cartoon that nearly everyone in the technical community will get right away and find humorous but you'll notice there's an awful lot that's not said here if you really dig into this particular cartoon you'll see that while we're not saying that this individual is using iPhoto and we're saying well G Superman is Clark Kent right so these are not necessarily being said but everyone in the technical community can look at this and instantly understand the joke if we were to show this to a non-technical community they may not understand what iPhoto face recognition is as an example so that's something to be mindful of when we're building our communications plan and we're preparing for a presentation who are we talking to are they a technical audience are they not a technical audience are they a business audience do they communicate visually using charts or would they prefer raw data you need to know your audience credibility this is a wonderful book I strongly recommend it's called the man who lied to his laptop it's by Clifford Nass and interestingly enough Clifford was hired by Microsoft to explain to Microsoft why people hated clippy and so this book attracted my attention based on that but what we talked a lot about in this book was about how credibility is acquired right are you credible when you walk in to speak to somebody and oftentimes we're not credible and we don't know why right so one of the challenges that you have as a file maker developers are you credible if you're telling somebody something over and over again they're still not taking your advice chances are you're not and that could come from a variety of different reasons one of them might be are you certified right are you certified file maker developer if you're an in-house file maker developer you should pursue certification not only for your career benefits but it will help you be a credible resource within your organization as well so I would encourage you to study up on on credibility as well it's a great book for that speaking of credibility being a trusted advisor right so once you have obtained credibility and you're credible resource within your organization you can then become a consultant would call a trusted advisor and what that means is when you provide advice to folks they're not questioning where you're coming from they believe that you have an understanding of their business objective you have their best interest at heart when you're giving them advice you're placing the business need first you're understanding the relative impact of the potential solution and what it might have you're asking that customer to when we say generate diversion thinking we're saying go look at other solutions good look at other alternatives what's the cost of doing nothing and what are the other alternatives and what's their impact and then finally we're going to assist them in making the best alternative we're going to help them make the right choice for them and we're going to be neutral the entire time we're not going to advocate for FileMaker over another platform as a reflex action instead we're going to stay neutral as we can because ultimately the technical community the FileMaker community we're charged with being a technical liaison we can provide advice on how to pursue a challenge how to resolve a business challenge and by remaining neutral we can maximize our credibility and we can ultimately serve the needs of the business and FileMaker is a great platform it's a great tool we don't need to influence beyond it what it earns in its own right so the more neutral we are the more credible and the more trusted we will become other tips for advancing the process here we use the FileMaker website we've got lots of resources I'm going to share those with you at the end of the presentation we've got a total cost of ownership white paper we've got a return on investment tool but the other thing that I would advocate for is know your FileMaker sales reps I'm one of them I've got many counterparts within the organization know your systems engineers they're great resources know your inside rep if you don't know these things the FileMaker management team is an available resource as well so come to DevCon and meet them and develop your own process what are your options so to summarize understand the goals of your customer first again we're defining customers anybody that might be a consumer or a funder or decision maker on our solution build solutions that have a valid business reason for being built they're agreed upon, they're documented and then of course you document and present your good work so that people can understand what the valid business reason was and what the business impact your solution is and then finally invest in yourself communication styles, sales, communication styles presentation, demonstrations expand your skills in that regard so in summary here what we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a new beginning and what I'm going to encourage you all to do is to make a new beginning with that so I think now this gets to our FileMaker resources and now what we're going to do is we're going to step into Q&A so I'm going to hit the escape button here I'll leave this slide up and we'll answer any questions if there are any Jason thank you very much for that informative presentation first question that came in the customer was asking about the book or article that you mentioned about the iPhone launch can we just refer back to that so the customer can look that up that's Nancy Duarte is the author this is available on Amazon.com the book is called Resonate great thank you here's probably a very common question or pushback that people might get from their IT department so FileMaker works with MySQL why invest resources in FileMaker when MySQL or MySQL plus PHP does it all great question does what all right so the way I would answer that question is what specifically are we trying to accomplish there are many ways to skin a cat and there are functionality benefits to MySQL and PHP that FileMaker doesn't have similarly there are certain functions that FileMaker can perform that My PHP and SQL will struggle to perform a quick example of that would be projection of a container field to an iPhone and being able to use the native iPhone camera to add an image to a FileMaker database that can be done in seconds with FileMaker that would take a SQL or PHP developer weeks and or months and or hundreds of thousands of dollars to replicate that functionality so again getting back to what are we trying to accomplish if they can accomplish it within by their terms with PHP and SQL great but that doesn't change what FileMaker is great at right so the question is what's the problem and is FileMaker the right solution for that particular problem great thank you Jason another question that came in somebody asked are university IT often alludes to security concerns are there any resources available to make a case for security and more specifically FileMaker insecurity that's a great question so there's a couple of ways so there's a speeds and feeds way of having that conversation and I mean it's a technical way to have that conversation and that's where your FileMaker systems engineer can come into be of great value the other way of accomplishing this security debate is to talk about FileMaker implementations so for instance I handle the federal government I can tell you the NSA uses FileMaker I can tell you that the United States Army has evaluated FileMaker and they have given it something called a certificate of net worthiness FileMaker can work with something that they call a Kikak card the United States Army so there are many many examples of FileMaker working very very well in highly secure environments in the educational space there are many many examples of FileMaker being FERPA compliance so I would direct you to your FileMaker sales representative for that Thank you Jason and it looks like we are close to the end point here so I'd like to thank you for your presentation Jason and for everybody else logging in today we do appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to find out more about FileMaker and we look forward to seeing you at a future FileMaker event thank you