Tim Steeves dot com

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.

During the economic bubble of the late 90’s, and early 2000’s, many companies invested hand-over-fist in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology. With the anticipated benefits that CRM brings, it is no wonder that many companies jumped on the bandwagon.  Benefits realized by the effective implementation of a CRM system include:

• Increased revenue and profitability through repeat and new business
• Improved customer retention and employee satisfaction
• Increased operational efficiencies through simplified management routines

But first, what is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management has been defined as a business approach that integrates people, process and technology to maximize relationships with all customers, through the seamless coordination between all customer-facing functions.

Yet, according to estimates provided by leading analysts, over half of all CRM projects fail to meet their initial ROI targets. A recent study published by Nucleus Research, Inc. found that 61% of Siebel Systems’ reference customers reported negative ROIs from their CRM implementations after two years of use. Another report issued by The Gartner Group, Inc. estimated that well over 65% of all CRM projects fail. There are a handful of reasons at the root-cause of CRM failures. We will review each, and identify the strategy that you can use to avoid common these pitfalls.

I’ll cover the flowoing pitfals of CRMs over the next few days:

• Viewed as a technical, not a business, problem
• Driven from the top down
• Lack of senior management involvement
• Not targeting the areas of highest adoption
• Driven by the IT organization vs. business leaders
• Trying to do too much at once

If you are not currently using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to keep track of customers, here are a few points to keep in mind when determining a solution that is right for your business.  For those of you who are using a CRM, you’ll find that the information below will help you to rethink how you’re using the technology to yield positive dividends.

In a nutshell, CRM software is essentially just a database which enables staff to store, manage and access sales and marketing data.  CRM solutions should be able to manage existing customers and prospects, provide access from virtually anywhere in the world, be able to quickly generate customer profiles for sales and marketing reference, analyze customer needs and preferences, identify customer attributes to reveal optimal marketing methods, and be able to work in colaboration with other software and methods that your company uses to operate effectively.

Here are some pointers to choosing the right CRM:

• Capture relevant information about interactions with customers.  CRM systems can help collect, store, share and mine information about customers, but it needs to collect the right information and be able to run reports and reflect changes in real time
• Deep coverage of your business is required to fully utilize the benefits of a CRM.  It’s often not enough for just the sales department to use the CRM.  When a CRM is used by the sales, marketing and customer service areas of your business, the benefits to your bottom line increase exponentially.
• Integration with your current business workflow will not only save a tremendous amount of time, but ensures that the CRM is fitting your company rather than your company fitting the CRM.  Your staff should already have general or specific routines that they follow during the sales and service process.  By integrating a CRM with these workflows you are able to monitor what works best and ensure that your staff stays on track.  If you don’t have concrete workflows, a CRM consultant should be capable in helping you get started in the right direction.
• Integration with other software that your business uses can have a postitive effect on the bottom line.  By reducing the amount of paper-work as well as reducing the probability of human error, CRMs can become the central interface for inputing data into your company’s systems.
• Technical support is a must for successful CRM solutions.  CRM software are some of the most sophisticated technologies on the market.  Ensuring that your company can not only have a CRM setup and installed properly, but upgraded and taught to your staff is crutial.  A consultant that can help improve workflows and give recommendations on marketing and data-mining is worth their weight in gold.
• Customizable to fit your company.  CRMs can often cause more overhead than they earn.  The problem with many CRMs is that they force you to change the way you do business in order to accomplish their goals.  Although it is always going to take a bit more time to document customer information, a CRM should not take up more resources than it gains.

Many CRMs have virtually identical features, so finding the one that stands out as the best fit for your company can often be difficult.  CRMs should capture relavent information about your customers, integrate with your current business process, and be flexible enough to fit into your company so that it will be used by a large range of staff.  In finding the right CRM, your company will see how this type of system can truly help you flourish and grow.

Samsung has released a new phone in the hopes of competing with the Apple iPhone.  It’s called the Samsung Omnia.  Some of the highlights are a 5 megapixel camera, GPS, EVDO, and 8GB of memory.

One thing that really bugs me about the iPhone is that you cannot plug in an SD card and there is no tactile feedback when you press a “button.”  The Samsung Omnia supports up to 16GB SD cards so the total capacity could potentially be 24GB, and it vibrates when you press stuff…not bad Samsung.

There’s a bunch of other cool features as well, but I’ll let you explore that.  Here’s the link to the phone:

http://pages.samsung.com/ca/omnia/English