Selling an Emergency Notification System within Your Organization

Today, most Business Continuity professionals recognize the need and value of an emergency notification system. But, as with so many other BCP requirements, the budget isn’t there. So what is a BCP professional to do? We hope to answer that question.

This article is divided into two parts. The first part will discuss how to sell the solution directly within your organization, for its primary BCP purpose, i.e. emergency notification at the time of a Disaster. The second part will give you the specifics that can be used with various departments to recruit them as allies for other uses of such a tool. In other words, use the technique called OPM (Other People’s Money) in order to convince other departments to spend their budget on an emergency notification system that will benefit their department and the entire organization.

An Emergency Notification System Sales Call

Sell what they want; not what they need – This title is always controversial when presented at conferences. Does it mean lie to management? Of course not. What it means is start small; ask for a pilot. Ask for a system to cover minimum critical staff. Ask for a budget that gets you started and allows you to educate your organization and perhaps even use it for an event…something as simple as a closure due to weather.

Plan the call – Too many people go into a meeting without planning. Don’t make this mistake. Go into the meeting with allies, as we’ll discuss later. Define the risk/reward. Use the techniques below.

Anticipate/handle objections – Another common mistake is to hope that objections like price don’t come up. Take the objections head on. Bring up the investment (use that word – not cost). Define the many benefits besides BCP. We’ll discuss these later. Define who is going to populate the database. Define the requirements on other departments such as IT and HR.

Reference sell – Describe to your management what their competition is doing. Your emergency notification system vendors will be happy to give you their references in your industry. In fact, almost all the emergency notification vendors list industry uses and even some actual customers on their web sites!

Package – Go to your management with one request for funding, not several. Package your emergency notification system with your hot site and consulting – or with your planning software. If your hot site vendor won’t package the emergency notification system that you want because they have their own, perhaps you should pick another hot site vendor. (There are a lot more of them out there than you realize.) This same philosophy applies to software vendors. Many emergency notification system vendors will package consulting with their solution. Maybe this is the way that you can finally get funding for your BIA.

Scare the executives – Discuss how an emergency notification system may help with product liability issues by automating product recalls; or regulatory issues such as SOX Section 409, NASD3510 or JCAHO by documenting communications, controlling the message and providing an audit trail. Executives always comment on the importance of employees, so explain how an emergency notification tool can improve employee safety with automation of notification of HAZMAT occurrences; or by expediting the dissemination of information in the event of a violation of personal information, resulting in the risk of identity theft of employees or a violation of HIPAA rules regarding patient data. Remember, all organizations are subject to HIPAA privacy rules, not just health care providers. Lastly, discuss the many values of a notification system for the customers such as preventing the loss of customers by increasing the productivity of Call Centers, and many other items discussed below under Sales and Marketing.

Review a recent event – Nothing demonstrates value better than showing how an emergency notification system would have helped with something that actually happened recently, such as an in-house communication failure, a regional communication outage, a weather event, a transportation issue, a missing employee, work-place violence, a security issue, a labor problem, data quality issues, a PC virus proliferation, product recall, an infrastructure failure, or an IT outage.

Business continuity versus disaster recovery – Discuss the requirement for an emergency notification system in support of the need to move from a strictly IT (DR) solution to a BCP (people) solution. Your organization is probably spending a significant amount of money to back-up and protect your technology. What value is recovered data and systems, if we can’t locate or communicate with the users?

Execute a BIA – Do this before you ask for the emergency notification system funding and you’ll have a much better handle on the number of critical people that need to be notified and the financial exposure of not reaching them.

OPM – Other People’s Money

We will now discuss techniques to recruit “partners” within your organization to either attend that meeting described above or provide all or some of the funding for that emergency notification system.

Information Technology – Nothing gets an IT department to spend money faster than a solution that will improve production availability through the reduction of the length of an outage due to some data center failure, e.g. hardware, software, or network. Discuss with your CIO how an emergency notification system can do this. Today when a system goes down, there’s a scramble to find the right systems programmer, the right application programmer, the right DBA, the key network specialist, etc. By creating a team for each major application or system or network within the emergency notification system, this scramble can be reduced to seconds because the team can be found and contacted by many methods in a very short time.

Human Resources – This is probably your best ally. Some time ago, one BCP manager wanted to buy an emergency notification system, but they had no budget. Then Katrina hit one of their facilities. And for many days they couldn’t’ find several of their employees. He went to the VP of HR, who’d been one of the BIA sponsors. The VP of HR provided the funding for the emergency notification system. Other things to discuss with HR include weather issues, other health and safety issues, workplace violence issues (subject for an excellent table top exercise with HR), and emergency evacuation.

One company had a building damaged by a tornado. HR used the system to advise employees to stay home or to define their alternate work location. One of the challenges for HR (and the BCP coordinator) today is keeping contact information current. Cell phones, PDAs, and even residences are constantly changing. An emergency notification system can help with this problem, because you can test this information periodically and get management information for those employees with missing or bad contacts.

Finance, Procurement, and Communications – An emergency notification system can improve communications with these organization’s key contacts. It can help with cash flow by improving A/R collections. Often, for productivity reasons, only the large A/R customers are called. An automated system can contact everyone and provide complete data on the A/R. Primary vendors in the supply chain can be contacted when there’s an inventory shortage. Alternate suppliers can be “researched” if there’s a failure in the primary supply chain. One company plans to use their newly installed system to assist Corporate Communications as they deliver messages about events to their stakeholders, e.g. bankers, Wall Street, customers, etc. This will help with Communications productivity and control the quality of the message.

Security – An emergency notification system can help with a workplace violence event, keeping employees out of harms way. It can be the tool to quickly inform employees of a HAZMAT incident. The system can be used in the event of an employee or executive kidnapping. It can help the security department keep executives informed of any kind of security issue. It can be used to notify all levels of law enforcement.

Manufacturing, Production, Processes and Services – An emergency notification system can be of great value in a “Just in Time” manufacturing environment by automating communications to alternate vendors if there’s a supply chain emergency, such as a parts shortage, destruction, or failure. Emergency back-up skills can be more easily and quickly contacted with an emergency notification system. An extra shift can be scheduled or canceled. An airline uses one of these systems to notify flight crews, improving the productivity of the crews AND the schedulers. A Professional Services firm uses their system for information dissemination. Several utilities use these systems to notify customers of planned and unplanned outages, of gas leaks, and downed power lines. Health and safety issues on the production or office floor can be addressed faster with an emergency notification system.

Sales and Marketing – An emergency notification system can be of significant value to marketing and sales in the event of a disaster by keeping customers informed. But the system can also be used for many other types of customer communications, such as new product announcements, special discounts, contract issues and fulfillment, SLAs, product recalls, and to even beat competition. The system can be used for order acknowledgement. Any sales professional will tell you that face-to-face customer communication is the best, and personal phone calls are next best. An emergency notification system can’t replace these. But what if you had to contact thousands of customers quickly; an emergency notification system can do this. Ten sales people can’t. And the content of the message will be controlled. One company plans to use their emergency notification system to address the “80/20” rule. Previously only the top 20% of customers got a call from their Sales Rep in the case of a Corporate event, product recall, product announcement, special discount, limited time incentives, or upcoming expiration of a contract. With the new system, ALL customers will receive a call to inform them: 20% will receive a call from their rep as in the past; 80% will receive a call from the system. And they can receive these calls in their native language.

Conclusion

Acquiring an emergency notification system may be the best decision that your organization can make in support of an enhanced Business Continuity Program. But you can’t buy it without the budget. And it’s of no value if people won’t use it. We hope that these techniques will help your organization on both counts. Good Luck!