The Savvy CIO

Every business person knows it is cheaper to keep your current customers than to gain new ones. Customer support is often thought of as a necessary cost of business, and a cost that grows as your business grows. But good customer support is also the lowest cost means available for gaining additional sales of any form.

To do customer support well, your support reps need reliable, current information about your customers and any outstanding problems. Without good data requests are missed, responses are duplicated, and your company ends up looking incompetent at best and uncaring at worst.

A CRM can empower your staff to make your customers truly satisfied and help lower the cost of doing so.

Here are six ways a CRM can help customer support: read more »

Traditional email programs that are disconnected from everything are still the centerpiece of many a businesses’ communications. Each staff member has their own Outlook or Mac Mail or Thunderbird pulling email down from a server somewhere and storing all of their own email, contact information, company directory and calendar.

Everyone is on an email island.

Staff members have their own internal ecosystem (emails related to people related to appointments related to tasks), but there is only one way information comes in our out: through an email.

Usually staff members are also managing a separate “phone island” with contact phone numbers and voicemails completely disconnected from their email.

This is a fractured and frustrating setup.

Every person is managing two (phone and email) critical but separate communication islands. And those islands are separate from everyone else in the company as well.

There is a better way: moving email and phones from islands into a communication hub.

Here’s what I mean: read more »

Highland isn’t a software reseller shop. We do custom solutions.

So when we advocate a piece of software that we didn’t create, we feel a bit of obligation to justify our preference.

Any CRM worth its salt offers similar benefits to an organization. Why do we think SugarCRM is currently the best CRM to offer our clients? Here’s a peek into a bit of Highland history and our thoughts on the matter.

Five years ago, it became obvious to us that CRM was a recurring need among our development clients. We had built a few custom CRMs from scratch, but were looking for a solid building block we could use in our solutions so we could stop re-inventing the wheel.

We prefer open, flexible, low cost solutions, and those preferences drove our search process. After extensive research and getting our hands on several possible solutions, we began working with SugarCRM in 2005 as part of Sugar’s open source community. Since that time we’ve deployed Community and Professional Editions of SugarCRM for our clients, both as a stand-alone CRM solution and integrated into a larger web application deployment.

So why do we use SugarCRM instead of other offerings like Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics? Without a full competitive breakdown, here are four quick reasons we’ve come to strongly prefer SugarCRM. read more »

Every business wants to sell more. The most common use for a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is just that: to help sales.

This usage is so central that many systems and vendors have a unique name for it: Sales Force Automation system, or SFA for short. (Because technology always needs more acronyms.)

Here are five key ways a CRM (or SFA) can aid your sales staff in identifying, responding to and closing sales opportunities.

Gain Customer Insight

A CRM centralizes key customer information that helps sales identify when to act. Vehicle Specialties uses their CRM to show sales reps account revenue history for the past 24 months. With visibility into buying patterns, reps know when a particular account is becoming less active and can then reach out to identify and respond to a developing issue. read more »

There’s a logic often employed when launching a CRM: If you build it, they will use it. If you build it with a lot of features, they will use it a lot. If you build it capable of everything they could ever want or imagine, they will use it for everything they could ever want or imagine.

But it’s not true. Increasing the capabilities of your CRM at launch actually decreases the chances your staff will use the CRM.

So the one thing we tell every CRM client, whether they want to hear it or not, is less is more.

A CRM can do a lot of great things for your business, but only if people use it. Want to make sure no one uses your CRM? Load it up with so many expectations and features that everyone is completely overwhelmed.

Here’s a snippet of a CRM request we received a few months back: read more »

It’s easy to see CRM as the silver-bullet to solve a host of sales and support related problems: organizing and overseeing sales staff, centralizing company information, improving accuracy of forecasting and planning, among others.

Yet successfully deploying a CRM takes much more than just turning on the technology.

Without some foresight, care and planning, business leaders can actually sabotage their own CRM, dooming the project to poor acceptance and eventual failure.

The most common forms of sabotage?

read more »

We’ve been long-time users (and advocates) of SugarCRM.

Sugar fits within our preference for flexible, powerful, open-source platforms, and we’ve found it to be incredibly useful through the past few years, both internally for our business and as a platform for our clients. We’ve used SugarCRM both “out of the box” and as a foundation for some very deep customization and integration work.

Sugar’s next major update, SugarCRM 5.5, is now generally available, and it adds several great new capabilities to Sugar Professional:

• Mobile Studio: Customizable interfaces for mobile smartphone access.
• Cloud Connectors: Real time data integration from online sources like LinkedIn and Hoovers.
• Dynamic Teams: Add multiple teams and individuals to a single record.
• Social Feeds: User created Facebook-style work status updates.

Here’s a closer look at how these new features can benefit your business:
read more »

Data centers used to be the domain of huge online giants, like Google or eBay. But as accessibility has increased and prices decreased, the data center has become a viable alternative for small businesses who want to trade in the capital and maintenance costs of a server (and security, backups, etc.) for predictable monthly fees that cover hardware, maintenance and support.

How are small businesses using the data center to their advantage? read more »

This is part 6 of a series on IT Self-Assessment for small businesses. We’re providing information and guidelines for a simple IT check, giving you the ability to gain free insights into how your technology can serve your  business better. Each post covers a critical area of technology.

Communications: Email & Collaboration

Function & Value

Email has become the central form of communication for business. Email is critical to your company in marketing, sales, customer service, operations and more.

A host of related functions have grown up around email: calendars, contact lists, task lists, instant messaging, etc. Collaboration technology takes these functions and connects them: you see not only your own calendar, but also your team members’. Contact lists, project tasks and more now become shared information. The effects on productivity are incredible.

Common Problems

(1) Lack of collaboration. Email is provided (often for free) by a website host, and is accessed through a basic webmail program or Outlook. This creates two major issues:

• Each employee’s information is on an “island”, with no ability to share schedules, contact information, or to-do lists. This is a massive time sink with significant cost to your business.
• All email and related information is stored on individual PCs. When a hard drive fails, all of that information is lost. This is a massive business risk with significant potential cost to your business.

Take an informal survey. Find out how much time staff is spending each week managing contacts and calendars, or making phone calls and emails to set up meetings. Multiply that out into annual salary to see what lack of collaboration is costing your business. (And that’s not even considering lost revenue from all that wasted time!)

(2) Overly complex and costly tools. The collaboration tools with the most brand recognition (Microsoft Exchange, Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes) were made for very large corporations. They work in economies of scale. 1,000 users utilizing a $10,000 investment makes a lot of sense. 25 users utilizing a $10,000 investment does not. These tools are too costly and complex to maintain for smaller businesses.

read more »

Google recently launched a “Going Google” billboard campaign in several major US cities, including our beloved Chicago. The ads focus on Google Apps for small and medium businesses: Gmail, Calendar, Google Documents and Google Chat.

The Savvy CIO is always interested in the best solutions for Chicago small businesses, and believes cloud computing is often a smart and cost-effective. So we took a closer look at Google Apps for small businesses: the good, the bad and the ugly.

Not to spoil the ending, but boy does it get ugly.
read more »