I often find myself at customer sites meeting with managers and/or owners discussing how to improve their business by using IT more effectively. One area that is often overlooked in the SMB market is Customer Relationship Managemet (CRM). Most small businesses care for and service their customers with a great deal of personal attention, but without a CRM system.
Due to this method of account management, some problems/issues can arise. Here are a few:
- There is no detailed account history, except for what the account manager has documented.
- When an employee leaves, there is no real way to pick up where they left off
- Reporting of KPI's (key performance indicators) is nearly impossible
- A sales pipeline is difficult to collect
- There is no centralized system for working as a team
The extent of what a CRM system should do must be decided by the business owners/managers. They should really understand why CRM is important, not just for giving better service to your customers, but also to the bottom line.
In the SMB market, there are several popular CRM systems. Some are hosted and can offer enterprise level reliability at a reasonable cost. Here are a few that I'd had a chance to use:
- Salesforce
- SugarCRM
- vTiger
- ACT!
- Microsoft CRM
- Microsoft Business Contact Manager
Learn more about CRM!
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Send email to myself with Gmail and Outlook
If you want to send email to yourself / myself with Gmail and Outlook, you may need to review your settings in Gmail.
I found that if you do not have all of your sending aliases under Accounts and Import that the Label on the email will be Sent Mail, not Inbox as desired.
Be sure that all of "Send email as" settings include all of the email addresses (aliases) that you will receive email with as well. When Gmail sends and receives the email that you sent to yourself... if the email address in question isn't listed in the "Send email as" settings, the email will only show up in the All Mail and Sent Mail.
But when you have the email address specified in "Send email as" (even if you don't make it your default), Gmail will change the label to be Inbox.
Hence, you can successfully send email to yourself / myself with Gmail and Outlook.
I found that if you do not have all of your sending aliases under Accounts and Import that the Label on the email will be Sent Mail, not Inbox as desired.
Be sure that all of "Send email as" settings include all of the email addresses (aliases) that you will receive email with as well. When Gmail sends and receives the email that you sent to yourself... if the email address in question isn't listed in the "Send email as" settings, the email will only show up in the All Mail and Sent Mail.
But when you have the email address specified in "Send email as" (even if you don't make it your default), Gmail will change the label to be Inbox.
Hence, you can successfully send email to yourself / myself with Gmail and Outlook.
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