Tuesday, October 2, 2012

New Features in Nimble Help Manage the Social Stream

 Editors note: If you aren't on the Social Media train, you should be hearing the whistle. Businesses regularly have Directors of Social Media these days. That light in the tunnel is not going away folks it's coming at you!
Nimble is an amazing CRM variation that puts all your social noise in a place where you can see who's saying or Tweeting what to whom. Most "Social entry level" (over 35) business owners are just getting into the interesting world of LinkedIn. Nimble is a radical but very simple way of  pulling social info into your contact database automatically. It does all the normal stuff too, like linking IMAP emails, deals, calendars, etc. 
So give us a call for a guided tour and think about how it might fit in your business. (A single user copy is free and team versions are $15 per month per user). Shoot me an email or call at 847-382-4500.


The latest Nimble release was designed entirely with customer engagement in mind and is the first social selling platform that empowers companies to nurture their customers through social listening and engagement, helping them turn their social communities into customers for life.

Nimble’s new version  gives social businesses a competitive edge by integrating social discovery, engagement and collaboration.

Social Discovery

Nimble brings greater insight to every contact. A contact is no longer a flat, static, business-card-like record of contact details that your sales person types in, but instead has become a dynamic dashboard of social insight about the contact. Nimble has integrated with foursquare for location engagement and shows shared connections from your social graph. Nimble already showed an integrated conversation history with a contact - whether the exchange happened in email, Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin. Nimble now automatically associates Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter profiles to a contact when it’s confident in a match. And contacts come to life even more with live, actionable social streams from across a contact’s networks.

foursquare Integration

Get to Know Your Contacts Better

foursquare is a social app that helps you and your contacts connect based on location.  Now when friends, prospects or customers check-in near you or at your place of business you gain deeper insight into her interests and it creates an opportunity for engagement. With Nimble’s new foursquare integration, you can import contacts from foursquare and see their check-ins and mayorships.

Shared Connections

Use the Power of Social Connections to Close Your Next Deal

Calling on a cold contact out of the blue is a tough way to make a sale. But chances are, you are only a degree or two of separation away from anyone you want to know in your business. In today’s socially connected world, it’s possible to map out those relationships and identify who knows that key prospect. From there you can focus on getting a warm introduction and dramatically increasing your chances of making a sale. Nimble now identifies shared connections you have with each contact based on your shared connections.

Social Profile Mapping

Automatically link a contact to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter accounts

The world is a crowded place, and while each of us is unique, our names aren’t always so. Trying to match “Kim Smith” or “John Lee” to their social identities can be a struggle. But if you can find the right LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter match, you’ve got deep insight into a contact’s work history, travels, interests, and ruminations, and an opportunity for a richer, more fulfilling relationship. When confident in a match, Nimble automatically links social profiles to a contact using our powerful, proprietary algorithms.
Social streams in the contact card
Turn One-Dimensional Identities into Three-Dimensional People

The problem with business cards and a traditional rolodex is they are a static and flat representation of a person, often containing just a phone number or email address. Nimble aims to transform contacts from a one-dimensional cards into rich, three-dimensional, living and breathing people. Nimble already links all of your communication to each contact and provides quick access to social profiles. Now Nimble shows the social social stream - across all of the contacts social networks - on the contact record. Opening a contact record is now like opening a book into the life of the person.
Social Engagement   
Nimble picks out meaningful engagement opportunities with new and existing connections by looking at social activity and recent communication with each contact to ensure you stay top-of-mind with your most important contacts. Plus it’s easier to schedule social posts, import large amounts of contacts, track your notes on each contact, and find your contacts with advanced search on custom fields.

Nimble Daily Digest

Start Your Day with a Dose of Engagement Opportunities

The power of social is profound, but it can be overwhelming to cut through the noise of online social interactions and find those worth engaging on a deeper level. Nimble looks at all the social activity around you and picks out meaningful engagement opportunities with new and existing connections. These opportunities are delivered to your inbox every morning and include selected social notifications pulled from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The Nimble Daily also includes birthdays, job changes, and upcoming tasks and meetings.

Schedule Posts

Build Your Brand in a Measured Way

With the great power and reach of social networks comes the great responsibility to build your personal brand carefully and conscientiously - particularly when you intend to use social for business. Nimble provides not only the ability see what others are sharing in their social streams, but also provides tools for crafting your own social identity. With Nimble,
it is easier to share posts with a simple UI that automatically shortens links and provides the ability to schedule posts for the future. The ability to schedule posts allows you to queue up content and have it broadcast to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook when it can be most impactful.



Relationship Monitoring

Stay Top-of-Mind with Your Most Important Contacts

Every introduction, potential deal, and success adds to the challenge of staying top of the contacts that are most important to you. This struggle is compounded by a constantly shifting set of priorities and multi-channel social conversations. Nimble lays the groundwork for more powerful relationship nurturing by automatically linking recent communications and activities across your calendars, email accounts and social streams to your contacts; you won’t have to log another email, appointment or social conversation again. Now last-contacted information is highlighted and sortable in Nimble. Soon Nimble will evaluate each contact based on recency and frequency of interaction and will automatically remind you when someone is slipping away to ensure you stay top-of-mind with your most important contacts.
Rapportive Widget
Take Nimble With You To GMail

Most people spend a big chunk of their day in their favorite email application, but the email app isn’t usually connected to their CRM. With Nimble, your contacts now follow you into your most-used app, Gmail, with a new plug-in. When you are reading an email from a Nimble contact, or hover your mouse over an email address in a thread, the Nimble contact details appear in the Rapportive widget. If the contact isn’t in Nimble, you can easily import him with the click of a button.

Custom Field Search

Hyper-target Your Communications

A metal detector is to a needle in a haystack what search is to a database. Custom fields allow you to capture and retain more insight about your contacts, but without search - search that is powerful and simple to use - your stored insights are not actionable. Nimble includes the ability to search across all of your data, including custom fields, enabling you to hyper-target your communications to your community and create stronger relationships.

Log a Note

Link Rich-Text Notes to Contact

The humble notebook is a simple, yet profound tool for capturing ideas and observations for future reference. While the pocket notebook offered great advancements for this simple purpose, there is nothing quite so valuable as a note contextually linked to the people to which it refers. Nimble  brings the ability to log a note, link it to any number of contacts, and compose it with rich text formatting.

Contact Import Limit

Import Up To 50,000 Contacts at a Time

Nimble is a powerful tool for bringing together your contacts from many disparate locations into one place and helping you nurture the new and important contacts in your network. To take full advantage of this power, you must overcome the burden of getting all of your contacts into Nimble. In this new Nimble version, import limits have increased to 10,000 per list for social networks, and 50,000 for CSV files.

Social Collaboration

Whether your team spans twenty cities or just two desks, getting work done together can be a big challenge. Nimble makes it easier to coordinate activities and ensure people are executing the right priorities with the right context.

Task Notifications

Coordinate Your Activities with Context

Too often when you assign a task to someone on your team, it drops into a black hole of obscurity. Does the person you assigned it to understand the request? Has the work been completed or reassigned? In Nimble, tasks are a boon for team productivity because they can be easily linked to contacts and deals. Now with task notifications in Nimble, teams are even more effective. Notifications can now go straight to your inbox to alert you when a team member assigns, comments on, or completes a task. Soon these notifications will appear in the web application as well.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

8 CRM & SFA Implementation Mistakes!

Our greatest frustration after 18 years of CRM and sales automation consulting, is watching a program fail. The truth is, that less than 50% of all programs succeed. 

A successful program will require a significant investment. Don’t waste your money by going it alone. Take advantage of experience!
Take a minute to review the 8 most common reasons for failure. Then give us a call to discuss your program. 

1. Lack of understanding 
Sales force automation is not about computersIt is not about buying software. 
it is about using new technologies to increase sales. It is about getting to more of the right customers more effectively and efficiently. It is about shortening the sales cycle by making consistently better presentations and having the right information when your customer wants it. Before you do anything else, ask yourself a few questions. 

  1.  Why do we want to automate? 

  2.  What do we want to automate? 

  3.  What are our goals? 

  4.  What can we hope to accomplish, in what amount of time? 
Find a consultant who has implemented successful programs and who understands sales! He or she can share experiences of what should be important to you. 

2. Lack of management involvement 
To succeed, the top management of the company must be involved, and stay involved. They need to get a computer, be trained, and use the tools the reps will be expected to use. Top management must understand the learning curve, be able to determine the effectiveness of the tools, and must begin to think in terms of a new way of communicating and accomplishing sales strategies.

3. Failure to include the sales force 
Amazingly, many companies never ask the sales force what they would like to see in the program. They should develop a list of time wasting activities. They should list the pieces of information that are most often requested. They should be polled to see what computer generated sales tools they already use. These tools can be standardized for all reps in the program. In short, the sales team will choose to use or lose your program. Make sure they are involved and stay involved. Get constant feedback on what works and what doesn't.

4. Turning the program over to the IT department
In our experience, companies who give the challenge of automating the sales team to the MIS department fail. For the same reason that companies don't turn over their MIS department to the sales force. No practical experience. 
Sales force automation is a program designed to enhance the sales process. It must address the needs of sales people, customers, and sales management. The sales team must determine what needs to be automated, the MIS team can help with how to technically accomplish the task. If asked to create the program, they will fail due to lack of understanding of the sales job. 

5. Lack of testing 
Start your program with a pilot group. Do not drop your program on the entire sales team without thoroughly testing hardware software and how these components fit into the sales process. 

6. Lack of an ADEQUATE financial commitment 
Sales force automation and CRM is not cheap. Budget the program accordingly. Here are some things not to do: 

  1. Don’t think the investment stops with buying the software.

  2. A solid budget should include; planning, consulting, customizing the software to reflect your needs, training, adequate reporting, coaching for managers, administrators and IT. 

  3. Don't skimp on training. Until all the reps are standing on their feet and functional, the training job is not complete. 

7. Lack of MEASUREment! 
What gets measured gets done!  Without a scorecard, nobody would play golf! 
Don’t put data into a CRM program without a plan to get it out. Plan on reports to track who is using the program. Start the first week of the program! Who has completed activities and who is planning ahead by scheduling activities. If anyone isn’t on the report, they either need more training or they are seeing if they can out wait the program. As Barney Fife would say, “You gotta nip it in the bud” (Andy). 
Measure your pipeline. Make sure every opportunity has been entered. Make sure a follow up call is scheduled for every opportunity. Make it a living list, for the rep first and management second. 

8. Lack of training 
The biggest reasons programs fail! Training is time consuming and expensive. Yet, it is the only insurance you have on your investment in hardware and software. The only way your people will become more productive through the use of technology is if they know how to use it. Spend the time and money to help them. 

Need a little professional help with your CRM pursuit? Click through for a complimentary CRM tour and Q&A session with a Tech.Sell Pro.


Our services are available on an hourly, daily or contractual basis.
We provide consulting services, on-site or on-line, nationally and internationally.
For complete information and a list of references, call us at 847-382-4500 or E-Mail us .

Monday, September 10, 2012

Will you miss the START button in Windows 8?

With every step forward there are usually one or two steps back. So it may go, with the soon to be released Windows 8 from Microsoft. 
Win8 makes it's debut on October 26, and there is a big surprise for unsuspecting upgraders and those waiting to buy a Windows 8 loaded new PC or Laptop. MS decided to do away with the Start button, that we all have been using since Mick Jagger started us up in Windows '95! 
The Modern START screen. No start button on the desktop. 
Apparently, it was time for a change (where have we heard that before?) The concept being, that since tablets are huge and touch screens will be everywhere, we will be tapping and touching instead of pointing and clicking. 
There is some logic there but there are a lot of folks who will be incapacitated by the new "Modern" Start Screen. I've been doing tech stuff for 20 years and I have to say this "improvement" stopped me dead in my tracks. I spent hours fumbling around for some basic Windows stuff. Like the START button and my programs. 
Imagine my excitement when I Googled my way to a helping hand, if you will, for those of us without Windows 8 or RT touch screens; it's called Start8. It let's you run a little program and bingo there is the start button. Created by a company called Stardock, the current product is in beta, FREE but I installed it on a few Windows 8 machines and it works fine. Get it here
Notice the start button at lower left. 
Let's all breath a heavy sigh of relief together. Now we can all get our START button back and figure out what else there is to like about Windows 8. 

In our next episode, will see how long it takes the average user to figure out where the settings, or the restart or power off or control panel buttons are at. Oh and how if you hold your cursor just right they will actually appear!

BTW, what a fabulous time to look at a MAC!!! Visit us at techsell.net 

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Companionlink ios6 and windows 8 news

Apple iOS6 - iPhone and iPad Rumors - September is upon us
iPhone 5 with iOS 6 - Announcement September 12. Full release about one week later. Taller screen, thinner, lighter, faster, Apple maps, navigation, Siri 2.0, decline call with text feature.
iOS 6 update for iPhone 4S and the new iPad (iPad 3) - September 12 likely. Current iPhone/iPad users will be able to upgrade for free.
iPad Mini/iOS 6 - Rumors say the 7-inch iPad will not release with iPhone 5 in September 2012. This now appears to be October. Recent rumors hint at screen manufacturing shortages. The price is projected to be $199 to compete with Kindle Fire.
The big "risk" here is that many existing customers will update to iOS 6 in September. Not all Apps support iOS 6, so customers may see problems when they update.
CompanionLink and DejaOffice fully supports iOS 6 on all devices.
Windows 8, Office 2013 Release and Rumors - Late October
Windows 8 - Confirmed: October 26, 2012
"Metro" (to be renamed) interface, $40 upgrade from Windows 7.
Windows Phone 8 - Confirmed October 29, 2012
Phones are arriving from Nokia and Samsung across most carriers.
Windows Surface tablet with Windows 8 - Confirmed October 25, 2012
Office 2013 - Currently RTM - Rumor: February 2013
Not sure why Office 2013 is not shipping with Windows 8. With Office shipping so late, it is not likely to interfere with Fall 2012 business. Certainly some customers will need support if they upgrade their PC to Windows 8 and any current software is not fully compatible.
All CompanionLink releases are currently compatible with Windows 8 and Office 2013.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

CRM - To cloud or not to cloud?

Is a cloud based CRM system right for your company?

It's hard to see a future of install disks and elaborate IT infrastructures in small to mid sized businesses. We want smaller, thinner, lighter and more mobile. Many laptops no longer have a removable disk drive. We download everything. Apple's last two operating systems were only available on line as downloads. We live in a world of apps. Instead of desktops and servers we have SmartPhones and tablets.


So with that info under our hats, what does the future of Customer Relationship Management software look like? Will you host your own data on your server, on your network? Or will you just log on to the internet and get your work done?
There are pros and cons for each approach. I'll give you my view after nearly 20 years in the contact management and CRM business. Then we'd welcome your thoughts or input. 

Pros and Cons - Premise Based
The selection of premise based CRM is getting smaller. Today there are only a handful of solid choices. ACT! is the granddaddy of them all, but over the years it has had issues and today is mostly suitable for small non-demanding installations. GoldMine has a 20 year history and has evolved into a very full featured product that provides a myriad of features for the small to midsized network. Maximizer continues to evolve and has become a hybrid solution. SugarCRM, Sage and MS CRM also offer hybrid solutions.

Pros: 
Data - You know where your data is. If your internet connection goes down you are still in business. If the internet went down, you'd still have your valuable info.
Capabilities and features - In the case of GoldMine, there are many features that on line systems don't offer without significant extra fees; customization, duplicate checking/merge purge, complex imports, global replacement of data, advanced reporting options, etc. 
Use of existing IT infrastructure - If you have a developed network, the premise based solution can make sense.
Cost - Premise based gives you a relatively fixed cost. You pay for the software and then typically pay a low annual update and maintenance fee. 

Cons:
Start up costs - Initial cost of software, installation and possible IT hardware investments can be high.
Software headaches - Windows updates, software compatibility issues, etc. can waste time and money and slow down the organization waiting for a fix. 


Pros and Cons - Cloud Based
Pros:
Fast start up - Typically you can be up and running immediately following admin setup.
Mobility and flexibility - Cloud based systems are usually accessible from any mobile device or browser. Just log in.
No ongoing IT requirements
Lower startup cost

Cons:
Never ending cost - For as long as you use the cloud based service you will have a monthly charge per user, whether they log in to the system or not.
Service costs - Can be high to manipulate your data or customize beyond the built in admin functions. This varies by system but we have heard some amazing numbers for seemingly "simple" customizations or support requests.

Speed - Your response time is directly related to the speed of your internet connection.
Features - Most cloud based systems offer a package of features to start; reports, dashboards, modules and basic storage levels, but may add significant up charges to add features needed to complete your system. These per user fees can really add up over time.  


Basic cost comparison for a 10 user system - GoldMine vs. $50 /user/ month system Excludes customizations, consulting and training. We will make the assumption that these costs would be required either way and would be similar.
1st year cost
GoldMine Software (New seats) - $695 x 10=$6950    Annual Update and Maint - $1390 
     Installation and setup - est. $1000    Total = $9340 or $934 per user
Cloud based - 10 users x $50 per month X 12 months = $6000 or $600 per user 


2nd year cost 
GoldMine Annual Update and Maint - $1390 or $139 per user
Cloud based - 10 users x $50 per month X 12 months = $6000 or $600 per user


2 Year Cost
GoldMine       $10,730 or $1,073 per user
Cloud based   $12,000 or $1,200 per user


Important keys to success or failure whichever way you go....We've learned over the years that more CRM programs fail than succeed. (Disappointing and expensive). Why?
Basically because it's not just about buying, or subscribing to CRM software. It's what you do with the software you buy. 

You have to have a plan. Who MUST use it? How will they use it? What will they track and enter? How and what will you measure with reports? What are the short, medium and long term goals? Will management lead this program or will they feel that it's for everyone else? Will you invest in ongoing training and coaching for at least 6 months?

Hopefully this info will help you in your decision making. To talk about your situation and get a guided tour of a CRM system that fits your needs,  CLICK here or call us at 847-382-4500 or visit our website.