We added another interesting customer recently - Jimmy Evans Companies. They are tracking their fleet of heavy construction trucks and equipment. The first units are going on some Water Trucks, Haul Trucks and Skid Steer Bobcats. There are a couple of particularly interesting aspects of this installation:
1) this is the first implementation using our new device grouping feature; so Jimmy Evans can now view different icons for each type of vehicle
2) Jimmy Evans also hopes to use the system’s stop reports to get an idea of actual work time for the Bobcats, i.e., a piece of equipment may stay in the same general area for a couple of weeks, so a breadcrumb really isn’t important. But by using the Stop Reports feature, they can analyze how much time in the day the Bobcat is actually working.

What are you selling?

I was asked that question a few nights ago. We were having dinner at an upscale place in Cabo. The guy that asked me is one of the best salesmen I have ever met. I have heard the question before at a sales seminar by Jack Daley and knew immediately where my friend was going. “Peace of mind” I said with the utmost of confidence.

According to C.S. Lewis, there never has been and never will be a radically new value or value system. “The human mind can no more invent a new value than create a new primary color.”

You had better be selling something that people value or you will fail.

Knowing where your kids are and that they are OK provides peace of mind.

Knowing where your stuff is and how it is doing provides peace of mind.

A retail notion is that all purchases are emotional and then buyers rationalize the need after the purchase.

I can’t help but relate this to a comment from the “Nanny” post. This customer is buying peace of mind. The comment from “Janis” criticizes the purchase as “keeping her on a leash”. The customer has decided that the incremental cost of a device to provide “touch points” during the day gives more peace of mind than the same money used to pay for a more secure Nanny. All purchases are emotional. I doubt an increase of $15 a month to a Nanny, would provide the same incremental “peace of mind” that the Ublip tracker provides.

I had lunch with a good friend the other day. It was her turn to buy and it made the sushi taste even better. But by far the conversation was the best part. I am not a degree bigot, but Donna Reganbaum reflects well on her Stanford undergrad and Harvard (pronounced “HAH-vahd”) MBA. She is the poster child for intellectual curiosity and lifelong learning. I always leave lunch with my head exploding AND a homework assignment. It nostalgically takes me back to office visits with Dr. Kamangar at UTA while working on myPhD.

This time, my homework was to investigate the Hawthorne effect. She was able to label something I had observed and exploited without knowing the underlying psychology. After doing my homework - I now understand the why as well as the what and when.

From Wikipedia - The Hawthorne effect describes a temporary change in behavior or performance in response to a change in environmental conditions. Others have broadened this definition to mean that people’s behavior and performance change (generally improve) following any new or increased attention.

In the 90’s I sold a bunch of firewalls to managers that needed to keep employees in check. “Surfing” during working hours reduced productivity substantially. By installing a system to track where people were going on the web while at work, peoples behavior changed.

I’d like to propose a corollary to Hawthorne. People’s behaviors change even when they only perceive that there is a change in environmental conditions - increased attention - even though it may not be the case.

Even if the manager never looked at the reports, the “Hawthorne Effect” is real.

This of course leads to all kinds of opportunities. One of the most interesting is the “Red Light” - devices. They detect people that run red lights. The most profitable provider of these systems is the one that sells many more “dummy” devices than real ones. Higher gross margin when there are no components inside.

Years ago I said that “m2m will be successful when nobody notices”. Well, that is true, but when everyone notices, m2m will provide ROI .

To many customers, who are buying just one or two GPS units, the answer to that question is pretty simple: they just want to know how much for the hardware, installation and service. But when you start dealing with small fleets, the answer gets a little more complicated. The one-time costs aren’t always telling the whole picture. The ones who have had systems in the past know how to ask good questions, like: how easy is it to make changes to our system? can we customize it ourselves? can we add users and change vehicle names ourselves? Lots of so-called low cost GPS tracking systems are really not so low cost because they are so hard to use - and they require going to the vendor for even little changes. So fleet buyers should be sure to consider ease of use in the total cost equation.

I was visiting a prospect the other day who is looking at ripping out their existing GPS tracking system and replacing it with the Ublip Fleet Tracker. We asked the end user (who is a job dispatcher) what was wrong with their existing system and frankly we were shocked: the biggest complaint was that for EVERY change, the vendor had to do the work. Even things as easy as changing the name of a vehicle had to be sent to the vendor. And the dispatcher could only see one vehicle at a time! Finally, because the tracking device was using a Paging Network, the data rarely was current.

It was pretty simple what she needed: “I just want to be able to see at a glance:

- “where are my trucks right now?”

- “where have they been?”

- “how long did they stop at each location?”

- “how fast were they going?”

This business really isn’t brain surgery. Customers just want low-cost GPS tracking that is reliable, simple and easy to use.