Our next adventure is going to be finding a good project management tool. We have looked at Microsoft Sharepoint, Huddle, Google Docs/Sites, Basecamp and Zoho and have realised there are some fantastic cost effective ways to share data with clients and associates without shelling out £££ to design your own system. We have yet to decide but Basecamp is looking v.interesting!
If you have any suggestions of your own then let us know!
Business Support Services for UK and Foreign companies and entrepreneurs. Our services allow companies to have an immidiate structure and presence in the UK. - Company formation - Virtual office - Personal assitant. - Marketing Development - Accouting, legal and HR support - Onshore and Off-shore services. Visit our webite: www.tailoredtime.com or contact us at contact@tailoredtime.com - tel: +44 207 243 6455
Friday, 19 September 2008
Wednesday, 17 September 2008
Managing your databases
There comes a time in every small business when they need to use a new bit of kit which is invariably technology/software based. Its something that I love to get my teeth into - any thing to make the business work smarter and harder and make a process more efficient.
Recently, we felt it was time to grow up a bit with our CRM and move on from using excel and ACT. Both of these solutions work well but have their limitations. The brief was to find something that was accessible online, didnt cost a fortune (or free!) and would provide a way of categorising leads, creating call lists and storing all of the latest up to date info.
There are plenty of applications that will do this - some are extremely expensive and therefore mainly marketed to large corps and some are far too complicated to use. CRM systems are a bit like an iceberg and invariably you only end up using a small fraction of their potential functionality. This can either be because it is not user friendly or you just dont need it.
We reviewed Salesforce www.salesforce.com and free CRM www.freecrm.com - and ended up going for free CRM and spending far too long getting our data structure right, but its all a wonderful learning curve! It was a bit cantankerous to start with and some of the functionality was clunky (like deleting en masse) but now that we have it, it is fantastic! It makes me wonder why it took so long for us to sort it out... it is saving us so much time!
Recently, we felt it was time to grow up a bit with our CRM and move on from using excel and ACT. Both of these solutions work well but have their limitations. The brief was to find something that was accessible online, didnt cost a fortune (or free!) and would provide a way of categorising leads, creating call lists and storing all of the latest up to date info.
There are plenty of applications that will do this - some are extremely expensive and therefore mainly marketed to large corps and some are far too complicated to use. CRM systems are a bit like an iceberg and invariably you only end up using a small fraction of their potential functionality. This can either be because it is not user friendly or you just dont need it.
We reviewed Salesforce www.salesforce.com and free CRM www.freecrm.com - and ended up going for free CRM and spending far too long getting our data structure right, but its all a wonderful learning curve! It was a bit cantankerous to start with and some of the functionality was clunky (like deleting en masse) but now that we have it, it is fantastic! It makes me wonder why it took so long for us to sort it out... it is saving us so much time!
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