Tim Steeves dot com

Firefox 3.5 has had over a million 2 million downloads (and counting) since it was released this morning.  Click on the image below to see the downloads from across the world in realtime.

For those of you who don’t know, iTeam consists of a highly qualified design and development team made up of graphic designers, programmers, and systems and business analysts. This team combines the skill and creativity required to promote your business online with website design and Search Engine Optimisation, increase online sales through website analytics, and improve productivity and efficiency through custom database software, and office network maintenance.

Check out the new site!

www.iTeamTech.ca

I appreciate any feedback you have.  Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think!

CRM programs have a tendency to be driven from the top down. Senior management wants reporting on sales, pipelines, or forecasts and CRMs are seen as the quick solution to getting this information.  The issue here is that in order to generate this information, the sales team needs to be entering quality information at regular intervals.  Over time, many companies discover that that their sales team begins to move back to their previous methods of developing and closing business and stop entering quality data into the CRM.

During the initial phase of your CRM deployment, it’s extremely important to not only consider the requirements of senior managment, but to ensure that the CRM meets the needs of the sales and service personnel.  It has been said that users need to obtain 3 units of benefits from a system in order for them to see value in 1 unit of work that they a required to put into the system.  If this is not addressed, CRM deployments can quickly become unsuccessful.

iTeam is launching a new website design and online marketing technique this week.  The idea is to provide website design that is FAST, EFFECTIVE, and AFFORDABLE – taking away the need to start your online markeing campaign with a $3000, $5000, or $10000 website launch for your small business.

Times are tough and a lot of companies are finding it difficult to get online with an effective website.  Advertising budgets are down and businesses are trying to find cost-effective ways to advertise online without having to put up all the cash at the start.  By streamlining some of our tools and slimming down our packages, we were able to come up with a way to pump out a great website at a reduced cost.  Under a new brand, Web in 7 will provide a streamlined design that is only $1000 including any applicable taxes and although this website can be considered a stepping-stone to the higher-end designs that iTeam and Black Tie Graphics have built their reputations on, it’s our intention to provide a high-end custom designed style that fits well with the company brand.  We don’t want to compromise in style or design as that is ultimately not going to get small businesses a good kick-start to the online advertising.

There is a couple catches though!  I won’t mention it here – we’ll wait till the site is launched – but I will say that there is a qualification process.  Not every small business will be able to get this product the first time they apply.  By restricting applicants to a certain guideline, it greatly reduces our time to develop a site, while still maintaining our high level of design quality.  Web in Seven’s website design and marketing technique is designed for small-businesses looking to launch an online presence and begin getting indexed in the search engines.

Again, Web in Seven’s platform will be totally scalable.  It’s not like those companies where you spend $500 or $1000 on a template site – when you want to upgrade, you have to throw away the original design.  The design is meant to look great on its own, then be able to be scaled up to a $10k+ site campaign – if that’s how much you were thinking of spending .

We will launch the marketing site for Web in Seven in the next few days.  In the mean time, there will be updates and a bit of information about our progress there.  Take a look and let me know what you think!

www.webinseven.com

One of the most common reasons a CRM – or for that matter any software that tries to encapsulate business logistics – fails is that the technology was designed to dictate how the problem would be managed instead of the business process dictating how the technology would be used.

Most CRMs tell you how they think your business should manage relationships with your customers: here’s how you create a lead and here’s how you track a service request.  The issue with this is that the underlying problem is not being addressed.  If the goal is to improve the performance of an organization’s customer service, then the first step is to develop a customer service process.  Once this process has been implemented and refined, the problem of finding the right CRM becomes almost moot.  The organization will define the requirements and then can easily define what is required of the CRM to enable the process to run more smoothly and efficiently.

Most CRM systems offer an off-the-shelf solution, but if your business is anything like mine, it’s not an off-the-shelf problem.  Thus finding a CRM that is flexible and customizable is key to solving your business problem.