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- CRM Tools for Virtual Businesses & Teams
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- Does Twitter Prompt Good Conversation?
| CRM Tools for Virtual Businesses & Teams Posted: 10 Jun 2012 08:00 AM PDT What’s a CRM & why would I use one?“CRM” stands for “Customer Relationship Management” – going off that, we can safely conclude that a CRM tool is a tool that helps you manage and organize your customer relationships (as well as potential customer relationships & past customer relationships). A CRM tool is a great way to keep track of how many times you’ve contacted or followed up with a particular person, what you talked about, what their needs are, and what they’re interested in; after someone becomes a client or customer it’s a great way to keep track of what they’ve bought and when, along with notes on you & your team’s interactions with them. Depending on the type of business you’re running, you might not need or want anything for customer relationship management. If you mostly sell digital products, you probably won’t find many uses for it, unless you’re a pretty hardcore networker and just want to keep track of your conversations with and notes on your network of colleagues. If, however, you’re in a service based business, a CRM can be a pretty invaluable tool. It makes keeping track of who’s in what stage of your sales funnel much easier, with the chances of potential clients (or, even worse, current clients) falling through the cracks much slimmer. Hopefully I don’t have to explain why this is a good thing & how it can help both your business and you customers! Without further ado, here’s a couple of picks to get you started on your CRM journey: CapsuleStandout features: Intuitive, easy to use design, integrates with several other online business apps (FreshBooks, Zendesk, MailChimp, and Wufoo to name a few, see the rest here), easy to read graphs to track your sales pipeline, and a lot of great functionality with tasks associated with contacts. You can create tasks & a calendar associated with various contacts, get reminders & tasks to team members, link the tasks to contacts, cases, or opportunities, and create “tracks” with standard processes for things like client intake (example: sending a follow up email three days after an initial call). Mobile: Yes – Blackberry, Android, iPhone Great for: Smaller teams – especially if some of your team members are less tech-savvy than others. Capsule is pretty easy to get the hang of and less intimidating than many other CRM options out there, without losing any functionality at all. Pricing: Free version limited to no integration, 2 users, 10 MB of storage, & 250 contacts; professional version is $12/month/user. Free 30 day trial of professional version.
ContactuallyStandout features: Contactually bills itself as the “effortless CRM” that’s a “personal assistant for your inbox”. It has a great design and is pretty easy to get the hang of. It automatically prompts you to take action on emails you haven’t replied to or people you haven’t talked to in a while, and it also connects and synchronizes with other CRMs like SalesForce and Highrise. A favorite feature among users is easily sorting & prioritizing contacts – and the cute encouraging messages don’t hurt, either. Mobile: No dedicated app but mobile site versions Great for: Contactually is one of the few tools out there that’s equally usable for freelancers and teams alike. It’s also great for design-conscious users, and the email integration makes it a good tool for those users who keep in contact with clients via email more than phone or Skype. Pricing: Free option available with limited features; paid plans start at $15/month (the freelancer plan, limited features & 1 user) and go up to $200/month (for extra features & teams of up to 30)
BatchBookStandout features: BatchBook is quickly becoming one of the standout powerhouses of the online CRM world. With user plans that go up to 50 users, it’s meant to be a comprehensive way to keep track of all of your contacts and share them with your team, no matter what size your team is. It integrates with a whole host of other online tools, including Rapportive, MailChimp, Freshbooks, Eventbrite, and Zendesk (see more here, & yet more here). There’s built-in social media monitoring, custom fields, the ability to forward customer communication emails and have them put in the database, web forms…and that’s really only scratching the surface. Mobile: Yes, iPhone & Android Great for: BatchBook might be overkill for those who don’t have a large contact/client database or team. And if you’re a team of one, it’s definitely overkill. The interface is a little more intimidating (especially to less tech-savvy folks) than some of the other CRM tools on this list, but as a trade-off you get a huge amount of possibilities when it comes to usage. Pricing: Plans start at $15/month for 1 user and 2 GB of storage and go up to $150/month for up to 50 users and unlimited storage. Free 30 day trial for all plans. For the person or biz with less intense CRM needs, you have a few options…If all of the above options sound like overkill to you (and they might be, depending on your team size, needs, & industry), you have a few options that are a little less hardcore. Rapportive Rapportive isn’t a full-fledged CRM but is a good option for those who want to see a quick overview of a person’s information and previous conversations with them, all from your inbox. It automatically pulls up the person’s latest tweets or Facebook postings, as well as links to their other profiles across the social web. You can even add notes on individuals. If you need a searchable database, Rapportive might not be your thing, but it’s still pretty useful. Project management tools with built-in CRM features Two project management tools that do built-in CRM features very nicely are Rule.fm and Subernova, but I’m sure there’s others out there. And if you don’t need a full-fledged CRM, it’s nice & convenient to have your projects and contacts all in one spot. Do you use a CRM tool? How does it make your business more profitable? |
| Upmarket Magazine (all over the web) Posted: 10 Jun 2012 05:00 AM PDT
If you just want our very best articles – the cream of the crop — you can sign up for Upmarket’s “Latest & Greatest,” which goes out once a week and includes only our very best and most remarkable business insights. Just drop your email into the signup box on the top right — see it? Yeah, that one! You can also find the signup page here. And while we’re at it — feel free to tell us what’s on your mind. Is there anything we can do for you? Image credit: Martin Whitmore |
| Does Twitter Prompt Good Conversation? Posted: 10 Jun 2012 02:00 AM PDT
Note: This article was co-written by Kevin F. Adler, the founder of an award-winning startup and an online mentoring nonprofit. For more about Kevin, check out his bio at the end of this article. Kevin and I first met for coffee on a Thursday morning in San Francisco, through a serendipitous internet sequence that linked us together across various social networks. Barely acquainted for more than a few moments, we jumped straight into conversation about the various uses of different social tools for bringing people together online and offline – namely, Twitter. I lamented the thinly veiled marketing speak of Twitter. While there is something brilliant about forcing people to be concise (as Keith Rabois wrote on Quora, "limiting time and space for expression eliminates procrastination and fuels content-production"), I couldn't help but think that there was something lacking about the type of conversations that follow. Do we type each word with the urgency that 140 characters deserves? Are we all just standing around talking at each other about ourselves? So we dreamed. We drew a scenario of Twitter-come-to-real-life, and what it might look like if an entire block of Valencia Street, the street just outside the coffee shop where we were sitting in the Mission of San Francisco, were blocked off. People could be allowed in—but in this imaginary construction, what if they could only read from their past days' tweets, and could say nothing else? How would others respond? Would what they say generate good conversation, or result in a series of ridiculous people talking at themselves and each other? That is: does Twitter actually promote conversation? Maybe it would look like the art gallery's version of an installation-within-an-installation—itself a commentary on the art gallery scene, by reconstructing the visitors and the thought processes of what it means to view art. In this case, the mockery would be a commentary on what it means to speak. Or have a conversation. We pondered the types of conversation Twitter is well-suited to facilitate. Twitter's value seems clear as a tool for broadcast messaging, where the primary goal is unidirectional information-sharing such as self-promotion and emergency situation updates. Quick response messaging is another obvious use case, when the purpose is direct and focused dialogue like customer service complaints and online conference or topical chats. Less clear is whether Twitter is capable of conveying the nuances of human emotion, and whether this tool engenders meaningful conversation. A landmark 2009 study by the Web Ecology Project following Michael Jackson's death found notable disagreement among human coders in the sentimental meaning of tweets with the word "sad," whether its use was intended as a genuine expression, for irony, as a meta-commentary on the news and public's reaction, or otherwise. In the high profile passing of the King of Pop, Twitter served more as a tool for general reportage rather than collective grieving or memorializing. We discussed for the whole of twenty minutes before pushing back our chairs excitedly and getting up to try an experiment ourselves. We didn't want to wait for the show-and-production of designing an intervention weeks later. We're the "now generation," impatient to get things started and off the ground. Less planning, more doing: what if we got up and walked outside and said, alright, let's wander—the only parameter is that to speak, I must only read from my Twitter stream? In a short, impromptu experimental video, I took my phone and read the last five tweets in my stream. The tweets included a mix of self-congratulatory remarks, news mentions, and tidbits that seemed difficult to understand out of context. If you want to hear me call “bullshit” on this particular selection, you can watch it right now: So far, so much for Twitter as a tool for dialogue. Perhaps the problem is that we're collecting all of the talkers together, all of the excited electrons in the room, if you will — and we haven't actually found a good way to measure the number of people listening, besides the count of followers or re-tweets. If Twitter were a physical space, you might have a talker (a tweet), and a crowd of people nodding and smiling, or musing. How do you measure thinking, if the thinking goes unseen? How do you measure listening, if you're only using words on a computer screen? Kevin took the experiment another step further. He took the tweets from his stream (a custom stream entirely different than mine) and used them as opening lines to prompt conversation with strangers. The reactions were awkward at best; people just didn't know what to do with you when you walked up to them and commented, "I can show you how to get 113,000 new Twitter followers!" It's not contextual or relational, and it says nothing about the audience or the person you may be approaching. Is this an effective analogy for Twitter? We're not sure. But we do think we tweet an awful lot about ourselves. And the news. "Twitter: 140 characters to channel your inner Walter Kronkite and Stuart Smiley?" Photo credit: mikebaird Kevin F. Adler is a champion for our common humanity. As an entrepreneur and startup advisor, he helps initiate new ventures that bring people together to do amazing things with transformative potential. He founded and leads Alumn.us, an award-winning startup that strengthens communities around schools, and BetterGrads, an online mentoring nonprofit. Find him @kevinfadler. |
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