Customer Post: SaaS, PMs, CMS, CRMs, ERPs oh my (Part 2)

I recently had a call with Adrian Sanders, co-founder of a Halfslant, a contemporary art consultancy for alternative spaces and events. He put up some great questions, the type that only someone with street smarts and experience working with a lot of software products would know to ask. After the call he circled back and asked “where can I send feedback to warn the others”. I suggested a post on our blog; here it is as it arrived.

January 6, 2009 In my last post, I talked a little bit about why I picked Solve360 as my business platform. As an art consultant for businesses and private clients, one of the most crucial elements of my work is recognizing that a good lead can come from anywhere at anytime, like say on an express train from Warsaw to Krakow in Poland. In this post, I want to show more specifically how Solve360 functionality has proven invaluable already by allowing me to leverage my contact database quickly, build on-the-fly editable “proposal” blogs for potential clients, and create my network in Krakow starting with some small talk on an intercity train.

Solve360 contact list has the type of flexibility I need to add seemingly random or isolated bits of data (like that a certain art collector LOVES pâté) as well as more standard searchable fields so that I get a bigger picture of who people are. I'm not in the business of selling to anonymous people. I consider each contact in a deal as an individual, as well as a representative of their business. And though many clients work for corporations, they are all individual people with diverse interests (and temperaments) who may be interested in commissioning contemporary art. With this many different type of contacts, entering the field determining what information is the most important can be tricky, but Solve360 has so far been up to the task.

On the express train to Krakow, I sat next to a Polish businessman on his way home for the holiday. Though he worked in Warsaw, he was born and raised in Krakow. He began telling me about the fantastic cultural scene there, summing it up with an old Krakovian saying: “In Warsaw, history passes in seconds, in Krakow, history passes in centuries.” I told him about Halfslant, and about my interest in Krakow as an up-and-coming hot spot for contemporary art. He wanted to hear more and talked about the Krakovian love for theatre and performing arts. We exchanged business cards and I promised to send him an email. “English lessons are expensive in Warsaw”, he explained. The one key bit of information that proved more fruitful than his strong connection into one of the biggest corporations in Poland was his pride in Krakow's heritage and culture.

That night, before I wrote to him, I did a series of tasks in Solve360 to prepare myself for some meetings. I created a new contact from the businessman's card, and made notes of some of the comments he had made that pertained to my business in my project blog called “Prospects in Krakow”. I flipped through my contacts tagged “artist” “eastern Europe” and emailed about a dozen artists in our portfolio asking if any were interested in working in Poland. In Solve360, I've configured the artist contact profiles to act as mini-portfolios with image thumbnails of their work and website links to their online content. I was able to quickly determine which artists would be best suited for work in Krakow and more specifically in what types of spaces or events.

Then picking three artists and one potential alternative space in Krakow, I built an example proposal blog with sample deadlines, thumbnails, event times etc. The blog was a way to “show” him and was far more clear than anything I could write up (especially in English). I published it and sent the link along with the promised email to my friend on the train. We exchanged some holiday wishes and I left it at that.

Two days later, after meeting with two different cold leads that didn't pan out, I got a cc'd email from him putting me in direct contact with the director of the Dom Kultury (Cultural center of Krakow). “Old college buddies”, he later said. The example proposal blog has since been completely revamped and changed, but is now tagged “won”, and will represent my first project in Krakow.

February 3, 2009 What is the best way to cook eggs? Over easy? Sunny-side up? Poached? I'm a scrambled type of guy personally.

But who asks that question anyways? More often than not, it's "how do you like your eggs?" Unless of course you're talking with business consultants. Then you might hear suggestions like "your eggs should really be fried, everyone is going fried." Or "you can get maximum leverage from you eggs by poaching them. That's what the English do."

For me personally, the better question is "what is the best way to cook scrambled eggs?"

Finding the best Project Management and CRM solution for your business is about knowing your own preferences first. As I said in the last post, I'm a networking type, and I really enjoy making contacts, and so my Solve360 setup reflects this. The art world is a lot of schmoozing, so sometimes a friend is a client is a contact. Others may prefer to keep their contact list pruned and closely tied to their business, and keeping personal relationships separate.

For companies that deal mainly in retail, large scale corporate CRMs provide the type infrastructure they need to manage millions of products, handle customer complaints and provide a level of micro-managing and middle managing they need to justify huge overhead. OK that last part was a joke, but you get the picture. The problem with these big boxed solutions is that they really do force your work flow (and your lexicon) into a prepackaged way. So whether you like the term "leads" or not, you're going to get it.

Solve360 is a much more flexible platform. If you want to call your leads "interested customers" you can do just that, through tags and categories. This "sandbox" approach means the system comes configured to handle a lot of different work flows. The simplified use of three main categories (activities, project blogs and contacts) gives the end user an enormous amount of flexibility. Uploading any type of file or using Google docs is just one element of the functionality that might be a core element of your business... or you may not use it at all. One thing I've noticed when we started using Solve360 was that a lot of discussions were had concerning "how are we supposed to do this?" Does this correspondence go under contacts or projects or both? Should there be one main blog for a project or various sub-blogs for smaller parts of the project? Tags vs. categories? Et cetera. The issue isn't that Solve360 can't handle our company's practice, it's that it offers a myriad of possible solutions. So much so that it can be confusing when you find two different ways to do something and both of them work.

For example, our website provides an email address to get in contact with us, but for our friends and partners, we give them our personal email addresses. One way to discern where our customers came from was to use tags. This was working fine. But after thinking about it more, and how we use our project blogs, I found it best to create a blog to catch auto forwarded emails from our website email account. By labeling the blog "website lead" we had a quick and easy heads-up on interest and traffic.

For businesses with many advertising campaigns, you can see how piping leads into separate blogs (titled according to their ad stream name or reply subject) can yield a very low cost way of filtering where your traffic is coming from that requires no real admin or tech setup. Then tagging all those blogs as "leads" let's you see where you're getting the most emails from.

The key is to sit down with your employees (even if it's just you and your dog) and think hard on what you specifically want Solve360 to do.

Does it need to be a place for your magazine to upload their stories, images and layouts?

Do you design websites, and thus need clean and clear milestones for your clients need to contribute and when you'll have parts of the website ready?

Even though these two examples have different business models and income streams, they both have work flows that can viably be structured inside of Solve360. The key is to set the guidelines initially. Whether your company decides to change work flows later is not the point, the most important thing you can do is deciding what Solve360 needs to do, and then deciding how it should be done.

Have you got any interesting tips or creative uses for Solve360? Let me know in the comments section. Have any questions about how to implement a work flow or how to setup your database? Post a comment and see what others think.

Continue to part 3 …

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