Helping your business to do more business
Sunday, 22 June 2008
What do you do with the details of the contacts that you meet? In business when we meet new people we seem to invariably exchange business cards. That's great, as we end up with a card giving details of how to contact the person that we've just met. But what do we do with those details? Do we retain the business cards or store them on the computer somehow? For small businesses it seems to be an enduring problem, which people solve in a wide variety of ways. Many realise that the 'best' answer involves some form of database and so the simplest database of all, Microsoft Excel, gets roped into the solution.
Once they have started to compile a list of contacts, many then wish to 'do' something with it but what? Ultimately, it's a marketing database and in recognising that some small businesses look into the possibility of performing a direct mail, while others wonder how to send a marketing email or two and others have the goal of sending a monthly newsletter via email.
Over the past couple years we've talked to many people that have expressed different aspects of the 'contact database' problem. Some of those who have received our email newsletter ask how we do it. Well up until a few weeks ago our answer would have been that we use the distribution list functionality of Outlook, a somewhat less than satisfactory solution as the mailing list grows.
A few weeks ago we were ready to start testing our own solution to the 'contact database' problem. We call it ConvallisCRM (Contact Relationship Manager) and it is designed to be a simple contact database with some of the features of more advanced 'CRM' systems. So in addition to storing the contacts name, address, phone numbers and email addresses users can create and assign categories to contacts, add contacts to pre-defined mailing lists and record where and when you came across the contact (i.e. the result of which marketing campaign).
With ConvallisCRM the user can search for contacts by name, town, county, postcode, category or mailing list. Upon selecting a contact the details are displayed in a 'dashboard' which includes the name, address, phone and other useful information such as notes about the last meeting or phone call (which can be added to the database as and when they occur), tasks associated with the contact or files/folders associated with him/her.
ConvallisCRM also has the built in ability to query the contact data and then export that data to Excel which would then allow a user to perform a Word mail merge. This means that all contacts from the 'EX' postcode area could be selected for instance, exported to Word and a letter sent - a very useful ability. On top of that ConvallisCRM has the ability to send emails to an individual or to a mailing list, giving the user an easy way of sending emails to a wide range of people - making sending an email newsletter much less of a chore.
At the moment we're still testing it and new features and refinements are being added on an almost daily basis. But it will soon be ready for a wider audience and so over the next weeks you can expect to see announcements regarding the availability and pricing of our new product!