Two essential tools for your business toolkit

Organising two important areas of your business can be made a lot easier by using a couple of simple but powerful tools. Effective Leads Management and Project Management are as essential to many small businesses as they are to large corporations. Fortunately, great brains and expertise have been roped in to develop a couple of tools that make these facets of business easy to do.

Sales people will tell you that it’s not enough that you market your product or service effectively if that doesn’t result in quality sales. But the sales also don’t just happen. Successful sales is a science in itself: generating leads, recording them, contacting them, qualifying them, following them up, converting them into sales, generating repeat business, generating referral business. It’s no wonder a whole industry of amazing CRM (Customer Relationship Management) programs using confusing terminology have been thrust upon businesses.

You almost need a degree in sales just to navigate the plethora of products out there to choose the right one for your business. Is it right for the size of your company? Will it still be suitable when your company is 10 times bigger (scalable)? Is it easy to use? Will it do the things that you need it to? Can you use it on-the-go? Is it right for your type of business?

Will it ‘talk to’ your other software (integrates with invoicing, accounting…)? Is its cost appropriate to its value to your business? Will it give you useful reports? Will you get the support that you need from the vendor?

I have done this research and tested some ‘highly recommended’ CRM programmes. I was pleasantly impressed when I came across Future Simple’s Base CRM. This online app runs equally well on your computer and on your smart phone and of course your same information appears on both. You don’t have to be a sales wiz to use Base, it’s easy to learn how to use it and you can try it out for a couple of weeks for free. One of the important tasks for sales people is following up leads, Base makes this intuitive.

Sales staff are often on-the-road and with Base, you still have your most up to date customer information at your fingertips. Keep comprehensive, real time information about your customers by uploading and linking relevant documents. Capture leads, follow them up and convert them. Email customers directly from Base and make important notes in the same place. Track deals (and their sources) from prospect to qualified to closed, and get an overview of them on the dashboard.

I really like the interactive tasks app on my phone making sure I don’t miss an appointment. And of course, the calendar syncs tasks with Google Calendar and the customer address links to Google Maps. It would be very useful if Base also integrated with LinkedIn. The analysis reporting tool is available in the Professional version of Base. Try Base, I think you’ll like it.

Many business owners don’t realise that when they are overseeing a job being done, they are actually doing Project Management. Whether buying stock or writing a computer program, making furniture or running an attorney’s practice, you have to manage a series of processes; you could say you are managing “projects”.

With any task, whether you do it without thinking about it or not, you go through several steps: deciding what needs to be done (define it), planning how it will be done (design it), getting it done (do it). You can flesh this out by adding overseeing the process along the way, and evaluation at the end. You may want to allocate responsibility for the steps to different people, and costs, and timelines, and so an ordinary job can actually be quite complex. With the possibility of something going wrong somewhere if it is not carefully managed.

This is where Trello comes in. As an online app, Trello runs equally well on your desktop and on your smart phone, so you have easy access to all your information on both platforms. Trello is easy to figure out, and the standard version is free. And, of course, your team can go log in and get an overview of their project at a glance or update it.

Trello organises your work hierarchically using ‘boards’, ‘lists’ and ‘cards’. You could make a board for each (say) project and, on the board, lists for each phase of a project, eg: define, design, do and review. Then in each list, you could make cards for each task within that phase. On each card, you could put the team members, due dates, activities, costs, and even attach documents or links for that task. It is very easy to update and to move the cards around.

If the project is large, you can group the boards as part of an ‘organisation’. If you get stuck, there’s great online help. When I couldn’t find the answer to a problem, they got back with an answer within a day. One thing I miss is a timeline to track task due dates. Give it a go, I think you’ll be as impressed as I am.
Enjoy using these tools and please let me know if they were useful to you and how.