Top Five Tech Tools You're Probably Using - but could use BETTER: part five

Calendar/Task Management

Microsoft Outlook

I had a client a few years back - an office with about five people working in it. You could stand up at your desk and turn around 360 degrees and see the entire company in the sweep of your glance.

While I was there working on low-level installation and configuring, I couldn't help but overhear something occur more than once: an important meeting scheduled with a client had to be rescheduled because one or more staff members had a scheduling conflict. What?

Everyone that worked in the office was in view of each other, and within earshot. Even more puzzling, everyone had Microsoft Outlook installed on their computers. What, I finally asked, were they using to manage inter-office scheduling. Answer: NOTHING!

I'm not a shill for Microsoft, but Outlook is the corporate standard for good reason -- in addition to being an email client (which is all they were using it for) it's a contact manager, a task scheduler, and has individual and group calendar capabilities. Don't think I'm picking on Small Businesses, though -- most of the larger firms and corporations I've worked at and for didn't use Outlook for anything but email either.

Outlook isn't the only viable candidate for task scheduling and shared calendar management: Google Calendar, leveraging the iCal standard, is a great FREE alternative, which interacts natively with almost any Smartphone, making it an even better mobile solution than stationary desktop-based Outlook. As I often say in situations like this, "It's not the tool you choose, it's the tool you USE".

Google Calendar

Task management and calendar (appointment) management about more than just making checklists. Making sure that appointments are kept and tasks don't fall through the cracks are essential aspects of providing superior customer service. They're also areas in which Small Businesses tend to fail miserably since, if they manage them at all, they usually depend on memory or old-fashioned, 20th Century pen and paper methods.

Managing your appointments, tasks and to-do lists manually, by some paper-based method is a non-starter in the 21st Century business environment.

• You can't copy and paste
• You can't search
• You can't import or export email addresses, phone numbers and website URLs
• You can't easily categorize or prioritize your activities
• You can't share your schedule with multiple co-workers
• You can't see, at a glance, available free time to schedule the activity of several people

Let's face it: most Small Businesses still aren't in a position to increase their staff or budgets. Increasing efficiency and eliminating wasted time and effort are simple, accessible ways to step up your customer service game. Google Calendar allows you to create alerts for your scheduled appointments that will send you reminders by email, popup messages or SMS text messages delivered to your cell phone.

I use Google Calendar's alerts to help me not "airhead" important meetings. I create email reminders five days, three days and one day before each appointment. Two hours and one hour before each appointment, I have text reminders sent to my cell phone number. It's like having the most efficient executive assistant constantly shadowing me, keeping me on track with my schedule.

So I can concentrate on the important things: attending the meetings on time, and providing superior customer service to my clients. To-do lists that track to my phone keep the "what I have to do next" literally at my fingertips. So very little falls through the cracks. And tasks that are tracked in a system like Outlook, Google Calendar or some other computer-based/online system, roll forward until they're cancelled or completed.

Thus, fewer important things are overlooked or fogotten. And I don't double-book my time anymore, which used to happen when I managed my schedule on paper or, even worse, by "remembering" them. Because a mind IS a terrible thing to waste -- on the trivial details of task and time management.

Let you computer and you Smart phone do the grunt work -- so you can focus on the stuff you get paid for.

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Related articles

• ClickMeeting Introduces Plug-In for Microsoft Outlook (prweb.com)
• Why I moved from Microsoft Office 365 to Google Apps - Part One (tubblog.co.uk)
• Latest Zoho Calendar Updates: Sync for Google Calendar, Birthday Calendar (zoho.com)
• Two-way Gmail Outlook Sync by CompanionLink (sys-con.com)

Top Five Tech Tools You're Probably Not Using - but SHOULD BE: part four

CRM

As is the recurring theme of these series, business is about relationships. Some time ago major corporations and the software companies that serve them realized it was time to bundle that concept into application form.

So, just as Outlook bundled email, contact management, scheduling and task management (even though few of us use it to its full potential), the many aspects of managing the efforts of acquiring leads, tracking communication with them, converting them into paying customers and figuring out how much money they've made (or cost) your business was bundled into a class of software.

This type of application is called "CRM" -- which stands for, simply enough, "Customer Relationship Management". There are many different CRM applications, both free and commercial of various levels of complexity, but the basic elements of CRM are:

• Contact Management
• Associating contacts with companies or, as they are often called, "accounts"
• Distinguishing between potential customers ("leads") and actual clients
• Tracking the level of engagement in the "conversion" process (nurturing the relationship of converting a "lead" [potential] into a customer)
• Associating accounts/contacts with your company's revenue stream

Now many of you, especially you solopreneurs out there, may consider CRM to be overkill -- "I have a list of my customers, I call or email them often, and I have a spreadsheet (or maybe Quickbooks) to track what I earn and what I owe. Why", you might ask, "do I need to introduce yet another program into the mix?"

Well... ask yourself a few questions:

• Have you ever met a prospect at an event, or had one referred... and then somehow, failed to follow up and convert them to a paying customer?
• Have you ever taken things to the next level - an actual phone call or meeting - but never closed the deal, despite a positive feeling at the end of the initial encounter?
• Have you ever hesitated to follow up with a lead you had contacted in the past because you couldn't remember where you had left things during you last encounter -- or couldn't remember exactly when that last encounter was?
• Do you find yourself staring at a stack of business cards, without a clue as to who most of those people are, where you met them, or whether they are prospects, vendors, or potential referral partners...?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you can see a bit of the value of the CRM approach. More that just a particular program, CRM is the approach of tracking the entire flow of the relationship, from initial encounter throughout the lifetime of the business relationship:

• When and how did we meet?
• Does this individual prefer phone calls, emails or face-to-face meetings
• How interested are they in doing business? How hard can I "push"?
• When was our last encounter?
• What was the mode (call/email/meeting) and result of our last meeting?
• When should I follow up... and how?
• How much business am I doing with my existing customers?
• Which customers are costing me more than I make doing business with them? (this question is almost never asked, regardless of business size or type)

You could attempt to manage all of this, and more, with a manual process consisting of various unassociated emails, word processor documents, spreadsheets, untracked phone calls and quickly forgotten physical encounters, but that's what you're doing now. How's that working for you?

We're in the 21st Century - already in progress, as I like to say - and isn't it time to get past the excuse that technology is too complicated or time consuming to learn.

In this "Great Recession" economy, every business, small and large, needs every competitive advantage at their disposal. If you fail to convert a potential customer, or exploit business opportunities with your existing clients, you're leaving money on the table.

Is your business doing that well? Can you afford to do that? You don't have to jump head first into the CRM mix, and it need not cost you anything but the time to learn how to integrate CRM into your current work flow. There are many choices of CRM software, both free and commercial.

Most CRM software is designed for larger businesses, and might overwhelm the solopreneur or SOHO organization just getting started with this type of application. But this doesn't leave you without options.

Here's the short list Your Open Source CIO recommends:

Free:

• CRM for MS Office
• vTigerCRM
• SugarCRM

Commercial:

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• SugarCRM
• Salesforce

The free programs install on a PC within Your Small Business, with varying degrees of difficulty; the commercial applications all offer options which are hosted on the respective companies' server farms, making it much easier to set up and get going, but putting ownership of your customer data in the hands of strangers.

The top choice in each list integrates well with Microsoft Outlook, which I assume most of you readers are using as your email/contact/calendar application right now. I recommend these as the fastest way to get on board with CRM, whether you have a marginal software budget or no budget at all. Going down each list, the applications have more features, but also a steeper learning curve.

Whatever you do, pick one, and start using it. There's gold to be mined in the business cards and email addresses you already possess: don't leave money on the table that belongs in Your Small Business bank account.

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Related articles

• What is CRM??? (sales.about.com)
• Yes, you need a CRM (christopherspenn.com)
• Firms Can No Longer Afford to Ignore Adopting CRM as a Strategy (CustomerEffective.com)
• How to Create the Best Customer Experience with CRM (customerthink.com)