Tim Steeves dot com

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.

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

Aptana has a plugin for Eclipse that makes developing websites and web applications for the iPhone really simple.  Here’s the installation notes from Aptana:

Installing this Plugin via Aptana or Eclipse

1. From the Help menu, select Software Updates > Find and Install… to open an Install/Update pop-up window.
2. On the Install/Update pop-up window, choose the Search for new features to install option, and click the Next button.
3. Set up a new remote site to scan for updates.
   1. Click the New Remote Site… button to open a New Update Site pop-up window.
   2. On the New Update Site pop-up window, type the name of the new plug-in in the site Name text box.
   3. In the URL text box, type the URL http://update2.aptana.org/studio/24131b/ for the update site.
   4. Click OK.
   5. Click the Finish button to open an Updates window.
4. On the Updates window, check the box next to the name of the plug-in, and click the Next button.
5. Choose the option to accept the terms of the license agreement, and click the Next button.
6. Click the Finish button.
7. Click the Install All button.

Now when you create a new iPhone project, it adds in some nice CSS and other features that makes developing on the iPhone much simpler.