The M Squared Group

The M Squared Group - a consulting firm in data mining and database marketing - uses WebEx WebOffice as both a central knowledge management tool and a collaboration forum to work with clients.

The mission of this six-person firm is to help Business-to-Business (B2B) customers determine who their best customers are and how to increase the amount of revenue from them.

The M Squared Group needed an efficient way to share documents and information both internally and with clients.

Thirty days after it’s founding, The M Squared Group started using the WebEx WebOffice as its central document repository.

The M Squared Group uses the WebOffice Document Manager to share: Presentation and supporting documents, transcripts from interviews, output files from analyses, and so on. The firm also has its proposals and financial information on WebOffice and even monitors its cash flow using the service every other week.

"The key to succeeding in a small company is to deliver outstanding work as efficiently as possible; WebEx WebOffice has become the central knowledge management and business organizing tool for our company. I believe that a lot of the features and functions within WebOffice are mission critical to us."

- Mark Price, Managing Partner, The M Squared Group

“We are basically using WebEx WebOffice as the central repository for all the critical knowledge of the company. It’s our operations center,” says Mark Price, Managing Partner, The M Squared Group.

WebOffice allows The M Squared Group staff to access and keep track of historical documents, analyses and approaches. “It would be almost impossible to do this without something like WebOffice. This type of knowledge management is absolutely necessary in our business. Otherwise, you reinvent the wheel, over and over again. We can’t afford to do that,” says Price.

WebOffice has also proved to be a valuable tool for working with clients. “WebOffice is particularly helpful as we iterate a number of versions of various documents and reports for our clients. We have found it very compelling to open specific folders in WebOffice to our clients. To do this, we set our clients up as WebOffice members and control their access to documents through the permissions system. At any given point, we can see how many clients are on our WebOffice. Right now, as we speak, I can see 13 clients online,” says Price WebOffice has played a key role in helping The M Squared Group grow. “Overall we are very heavy WebOffice users. We are on it constantly during the day. Everyone’s in the same office, but WebOffice allows us to work remotely too - at home and at client sites.”

WebOffice has also helped The M Squared Group handle staff turnover. “We are able to handle transitions almost seamlessly, with a lot less bumping around than we would normally have, because documents are reachable on WebOffice.”

“I am very big on keeping everyone to the discipline of loading all the documents they’ve been working on into the WebOffice Document Manager - every single day before they leave the office. We have yet to have one of our laptops have a spontaneous meltdown, but it does happen. We don’t have an IT person on our staff, so we’re using WebOffice as our document backup, as well as backup for our clients’ critical documents.”

Besides using the WebOffice Document Manager, The M Squared Group also uses many other WebOffice functions as key business tools. The firm is using the WebOffice Calendar to do all scheduling and the WebOffice timesheet function to track hours worked for each client. Staff members also use the WebOffice Expense Report and the Contacts Directories application, and they are using the synchronization function to transfer contact data from Microsoft Outlook.

“I actually came out of software development, on the marketing side, before going into services, and I know how hard it is to develop good software. WebOffice has a wonderful product here. We beat on it hard. We’re on it five days a week and it really does the job. Across the company, it is essentially doing what we need it to do. WebOffice is a very compelling piece of software,” Price concludes.