CRM Best Practices
Being able to easily share the same client contact information among your employees is a great benefit, but there are many other advantages to using a centralized CRM system:
Pursue every potential sales opportunity
Improve and measure staff performance across the company
So what’s it going to take to make CRM work? We were taught in kindergarten that sharing is good and the same principle applies in business, at least when it comes to managing customers. Share information between staff and departments so your team can provide feedback to each other and respond to your customers in a consistent and efficient way – your customers will notice. Have reasonable expectations – not everyone is going to use the system in exactly the same way or to its maximum potential. That’s still okay. In hindsight you'll notice you are much better off with it than without it.
Continue reading entire article…
Linking to External Calendars
You can sync your Solve360 events and tasks directly to Mac’s iCal, Google Calendar, Outlook 2007 and the iPhone / iTouch. Here are some short videos to walk you through the simple steps.
Continue reading entire article…
Project Management Best Practices
Solve360 is an internet based application that helps teams plan, organize information and manage day-to-day projects according to your own company's processes and workflow.
Good up-front planning is essential to running a successful project, but let's be real, just because you want it to happen “this way” isn’t going to make it so. Requirements change, issues pop-up and people respond in unexpected ways. The secret to a successful project is managing the daily project activities. This is where most traditional tools like Microsoft Project let you down and where Solve360 becomes essential. Projects don’t fail all of a sudden; they succeed or fail one day at a time and hinge on your team’s ability to continually synchronize information, communicate and manage changes like a smooth running machine.
Continue reading entire article…
The CRM “Money Bar”
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 is the latest email as it arrived.
March 11, 2009 It's safe to say that my business starts and ends in Solve360. From the moment in the morning I check my daily activity list to the last review before I call it a day, Solve is where I go to make sure I'm on track.
And basically, once I know what I've got lined up for the day, my world revolves around the contextual search bar, or as I like to call it, The Money Bar. It has proven to be one of the most important parts of my workflow in Solve. And though I've long since lost my ability to read human syntax on computer systems, the layout is a simple, efficient solution that any tech novice will understand.
Continue reading entire article…
Tags, Aren’t Just For Prices Anymore
If you're not familiar with the concept of using tags here are a few words to explain what tags are, what you can do with them and why this simple feature is so useful.
Continue reading entire article…
Linking Email Messages to Contacts, Companies, Project Blogs
The dropbox feature automatically attaches email messages to the correct Contact, Company and Project Blog so all prior history and email correspondence is in one place and can be shared with other users. It works with your current email system, requires nothing to install, and is simple to use - like magic with no tricks.Continue reading entire article…
Customer Post: SaaS, PMs, CMS, CRMs, ERPs oh my (Part 3)
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.
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.
Continue reading entire article…
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.