CRM & Tech for The Small Business

While our home here at Inside Small Biz CRM has served us well for several years, we have moved to a simplified domain name:   CRMSuccessPlans.com

This new site serves as a location for both our blog and our website, making it easier for you to get the information you need about ACT! CRM and all of the great small business software and technologies we help our customers with.

We will leave this site online for the foreseeable future, but will not be adding any new content.

Be sure to visit us at www.CRMSuccessPlans.com and bookmark us there!

Continuing from our “Getting More Out Of LinkedIn” discussion, here are a few more things that you can make part of your social media practices so as to reap higher benefits from your LinkedIn efforts…                                                             

• Get Involved:  Join the Conversation

Obviously, just joining targeted groups that have members who may be your prospects by itself won’t do you any good.  Start reading the conversations in the groups.  “Listen” to what is going on.

In particular look for discussions/posts that have lots of comments.  These threads will receive more weight as being “important” and will tend to stay toward the top in the list of the conversations.

Also, the more people who have commented, the more people who are monitoring the thread for additional content – i.e. – your comments.

After you have listened, when and where you can, post relevant, helpful comments – remember “lead with value”. 

This brings me to the next point:

• Listen Before Speaking

Have you ever been reading a thread and someone, from seemingly out of the blue, posts a comment that basically repeats something that someone else already stated 5 comments back?  Annoying right?  Yes!  When we are conversing person to person we would never find that acceptable, and we don’t online either.  Few things will destroy your credibility within the group as quickly as the practice of not reading the conversation before commenting on it. 

Show fellow group members the same consideration you would like yourself – “listen” to the conversation – in its ENTIRITY - before posting anything.  Think of that as earning the right to comment.

• Follow Up

Don’t be the bore at the party who is only interested in what they have to say.  When someone responds to one of your comments, when it makes sense, be sure to respond back, show that you are “engaged” in the community.

Also, “like” your comment after you post it.  This will boost the activity of the post and thereby its visibility, and again, that is what you want.

Post an additional comment a day or two later with more relevant content.  This will serve to increase activity on the thread.

I hope you find these simple, yet effective methods of enhancing your value from LinkedIn helpful!  Let me know.

  So, maybe you are just getting started on LinkedIn.  Or, perhaps you have been at it awhile, but you aren’t feeling like you are getting the traction out of it you should.

There are approximately 110 million – yes that’s 110,000,000 – users on Linked In these days, and unlike Facebook or Twitter, most of those users are all about business. Continue reading

Virtual Box 4.x is an open source virtualization software that supports multiple operating systems including Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.  It offers excellent performance, and, it is free!  It’s a great platform that allows for testing various software systems that do not allow more than one version installed at a time.

This article will provide an overview of the steps you will want to take when cloning your virtual machines to avoid causing Windows to reactivate in the cloned machine.  (Note:  Be sure you understand your licensing with Microsoft so that you remain in compliance.) Continue reading

Here are 6 more quick tips for better business blogging (if you haven’t seen the first article in this series, check it out here). 

This time we are focusing on ideas for topics you might want to use: Continue reading

Here are 6 quick tips on business blogging from the collection I have been building:

• Develop your own style of writing and perspective and work with a theme that will make you want to keep writing.  (Have you ever been to a blog that hasn’t seen an update in 14 months?  Now you know!) 
  Be authentic, and maintaining your “voice” will come naturally.  Oh, and one other thing – don’t sound like an advertisement.
• Read other blogs, and make mental notes (written if you want) about what you like and don’t like.
• If you are just starting out, to test your chosen theme, see how hard it is to come up with 10 topics.  If you get rolling, don’t stop at 10. Refer to this list for topic reminders later.
• Make your content “scannable” wherever possible.  Folks want to get what they are interested in and move on.  (Hint: Bullet points are one of my favorites.)
• More on the previous:  Don’t be overly long – don’t hesitate to break an article into multiple sections that you post over the course of your typical schedule.  (This makes writing easier – 2 or 3 for the price of one.)  And as much as possible:  Use subheadings.
• Lastly:  Be honest and informative in your headlines.  Note the title of this article.  Did I not give you what I said I would?  “6 Quick Tips for Business Blogging”.  Nothing will cause potential readers to hit the road quicker than misleading or uninformative article titles.

That’s all for now!  Go blog now.

Disclaimer:  This post talks about installing and using a tool that is not the creation of Winnovative Technology Consulting.  You are assuming full responsbility should you choose to use this tool.  As always, be big, be smart, and use your own discretion.

One of the things that came to the fore with the introduction of ACT! 2011 this past year, is how ACT! always defaults to a history type of “Call”…  Or at least until it did until 2011.  Starting with that version, the new default became “Appointment”.  If you want to know why – and better yet! – a way to “fix” this, read on… Continue reading

 New software is not your answer. 

If you use something more sophisticated than Excel or Outlook, your “problem” with the CRM system is probably not the software.  Continue reading

 This week one of the highlighted questions posed in the CRM community of Focus.com is “Has anyone dropped SalesForce.com and migrated to another CRM platform?  And if so, to who and why?” Continue reading

On of the great features of ACT! CRM is its deep integration with Microsoft applications:  Attach web page to a contact from Internet Explorer; send email from Outlook and have it saved automatically in your ACT! database; one-click exports and reports to Excel, and document merges to Microsoft Word.

It’s this last feature we want to talk about in this article.

Continue reading