Tag: Contact Management Software
Sales Force Automation – 15 Years in the Making - Story From: SalesNexus - Online CRM and Email Marketing for Salespeople » Blog
December 22nd, 2011, Comments Off
If you’ve been in the sales game for a decade or more, you’ve seen a tremendous amount of change in the technology area. Remember ACT! Contact Management Software? Goldmine? These early sales contact management solutions dominated the market and virtually every sales person alive during the late 80′s and early 90′s had their hands on [...]
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Small Businesses Crave Automation - Story From: The Official Infusionsoft Blog
February 17th, 2011, Comments Off
With yesterday’s news of Constant Contact acquiring contact management software provider Bantam Live, I thought I’d share our take on what this means for small businesses. We appreciate what Constant Contact has done. Their software introduces beginners to basic email marketing. They’ve helped teach thousands of small businesses to use the email channel simply to [...]
How to Video – Managing User Roles & Permissions - Story From: BigContacts Product News
February 17th, 2011, Comments Off
As promised, we have created a video that will walk you through all of the features and capabilities of our new user roles and permissions module. This video is in reference to the blog post released on 02.16.2011
Take a look and please feel free to visit our support center with any additional questions you may have.
Text Editor helps better document Contact Management history - Story From: BigContacts Product News
February 1st, 2011, Comments Off
At BigContacts, our web based contact management software has always offered an easy-to-use, yet robust set of tools for documenting your meetings, notes, tasks, and calls with clients and prospects.
Based on feedback from subscribers, we decided to enhance your ability to document and store information about your contacts. There are two important enhancements that have been made that we want to point out here.
1) Notes that are written and Calls that are logged in a contact record are now permanently recorded and cannot be later edited. With ever increasing demands for data integrity and documentation it is no longer possible to comply with current data standards while allowing notes and calls to be edited. Each note or call that is logged in your system contains a date and time stamp – allowing one of your users to edit this information after the fact diminishes the integrity of your data. As the date and time noted in the record are no longer valid.
If you currently edit your notes and calls after the fact – we encourage you to create a new note for any subsequent information that you wish to add to that contact record. This will ensure a very accurate accounting of your notes and history in the future and can actually protect you should you ever need this important accounting/ time line to accurately track the activity of an employee, or need an accurate accounting of interactions with a client or prospect.
2) The next time you use the “write a note” or “log a call”functions in the contact record, you will see the same rich text editor that we offer in our email module. This new enhancement will give you much greater flexibility to store different forms of information. No longer are you restricted to text only notes and history.
Some of the more common uses we think we will see with this new tool might be to:
- Embed website links in your notes that refer to information pertinent to a call or meeting that was held
- Link to and display images/photos from the web that may be helpful for later reference
- Embed a video for easy access and playback as needed
- Insert a table to more effectively display a set of important numbers
- Insert pure HTML You can get fancy and paste in full HTML to reproduce and store any HTML document you wish to embed directly into your notes
- Use rich text You may simply want the ability to bold, bullet point, number , underline, or even change the color of your text for more emphasis on certain parts of your notes
These are just a few of the many uses for this new text editor. We hope you fund this to be useful to you in your day-to-day efforts to better manage your contacts. I look forward to hearing your ideas for using this new tool.
NOTE: We will be releasing a video on this to show in greater detail how each of these new functions will work and how they will look when viewing them in the history section of your contacts record.
As always…stay tuned for more enhancements as we are about to release a new “User permissions” and “Team Management” module that we think you will really like.
Please feel free to comment here or send us an email at support@bigcontacts.com with any questions you may have on this article or any other aspect of BigContacts.
Please feel free to submit a support ticket or join us for a live chat should you have any questions as you work with this new module.
Is Your Business Ready for a Contact Management Software Solution? – Part 2 - Story From: Sell, Sell, Sell!
December 14th, 2010, Comments Off
The following is Part 2 of “Is Your Business Ready for a Contact Management Software Solution”. Read Part 1 Here. Organizing prospect and customer information in contact management software is important. Each individual sales person within your organization can be more effective and more productive by using contact software to organize their information. However, if [...]
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BigContacts – now a Certified Partner of HubSpot - Story From: BigContacts Product News
December 10th, 2010, Comments Off
A website is a very important part of any business today. Your website operates as a virtual storefront, a cyber window into your world. A well designed and optimized website can help you to:
- Create more visibility for your business
- Generate more qualified leads, and ultimately
- Convert more new clients for your business
The challenge most businesses face is how and where to turn to get affordable and competent help in designing and updating your website. A standard HTML website requires that you either know how to write in HTML or hire someone every time you need to update anything on your site. When you’re paying someone by the hour the costs can add up quickly.
Over 18 months ago BigContacts faced this same challenge. It was so expensive and took so long to make updates and enhancements to our site that we essentially let it sit – hoping that what we had was good enough to help us grow our business. To make matters even worse, we had no way to measure our success as the website we had provided no tools for us to monitor and analyze the traffic that was visiting BigContacts.
It was through great fortune that we found HubSpot. HubSpot has provided us with the tools we need to easily manage our own website. These easy-to-use tools have helped us to significantly grow our web presence over the past year and a half. And today we can say, with confidence, that not only have we doubled our web traffic and qualified leads, we now know the areas we need to continue to work on and improve going forward so that we can continue to grow our business.
Seeing results like we have, we believe so strongly in this great resource that we have decided to integrate BigContacts with the HubSpot platform. Soon all BigContacts subscribers that also have a HubSpot “Medium” or “Large” account will be able to seamlessly capture, nurture and convert leads that come directly from your website. Stay tuned for more information on this exciting new integration!
If you are serious about growing your web presence, generating more qualified leads from your website and converting more of these leads to clients, you NEED to put HubSpot to work for you.
Learn More about this great platform and how this can work with BigContacts to help you streamline your sales and marketing efforts.
Got duplicate Contact Records? A new tool for your Contact Manager! - Story From: BigContacts Product News
November 16th, 2010, Comments Off
We have just released a de-duplication (de-dupe) tool for Contact Management Software. With this new tool, you will be able to merge standard contact fields, custom fields and ALL notes & history!
This new tool will allow you to check for duplicate records using (contact names) or (email addresses) as the primary comparison points. You can also filter for a certain subset of your contacts. For example, you may only wish to look at all of the contact records with the last name of (Smith) in your search for duplicate records. This tool will allow you to narrow your filter down to any subsection of contacts to make your de-duplication work more manageable.
The are two primary “use cases” for the BigContacts de-dupe tool.
Importing contacts
When importing contacts to your BigContacts account you can choose to have the de-duplication tool automatically activated after a new list of contacts has been imported. You will find a checkbox where you can select option when using the import wizard. This will allow you to quickly and easily identify new contacts that have been imported that are in fact duplicates of records that already exist in your database.
General database maintenance
From the “Contacts” Tab in the upper left hand corner of the screen you can select the “Show All” button. I here you will find a button labeled “De-Duplication”. Selecting this will activate this tool and allow you to check your entire database for duplicates.
This is a very intuitive and easy-to-use tool, yet is very thorough in what it will allow you to merge in your database.
Using 3 simple screens you can clean up your entire Contact Manager database.
1st Screen
Step 1 – You will select which filtering mode you wish to use (name) or (email). Selecting “name” will group duplicates by first and last name. Choosing “email” will group by both the personal and company email addresses.
Step 2 - You can choose to be more specific/ narrow in your filtering by adding another level of filter. For example, you may only want to work with all contacts that have the last name of “Smith”. In the field provided you would type “smith”. If you want to do a partial search use “%”. For example, if you wanted to match all contacts with a bigcontacts.com email address, you would enter “%bigcontacts.com”. This is not a required filed and is only necessary if you wish to further narrow your search.
Step 3 – Select the number of contacts that you wish to be able to view and work with per page as you go through the de-duplication process.
After you have your criteria selected, press the “Proceed” button at the bottom of the screen.
2nd screen
On this screen you will see the contacts that we found to be duplicates based on your search criteria.
There are a few things to pay attention to when reviewing each Contact record.
- Number of contacts – Just under the contact name you will see the number of contacts that were found that are duplicates.
- Field Conflicts – Just under the number of contacts you will see whether or not there were “conflicts” in any of the fields within the duplicate records.
A conflict occurs when two contacts have different values for the same field. You will need to pick one of these values to keep.- If there are conflicts, you will see the name of the field and then be given the choice to select the value that you wish to remain after merging the duplicate records.
- If there are not any conflicts, you will simply see the message “There were no field conflicts.”
If you do not wish to merge a group of contacts, un-check the box in the upper right hand corner of that (Read more...)
Make Contact Management fields “Required” or “Hide” them if you like! - Story From: BigContacts Product News
November 3rd, 2010, Comments Off
Have you ever wanted to hide certain fields that you just don’t use in BigContacts? Or maybe there are certain fields that you really need to have completed by your team anytime a new contact is added or edited in your database. We have just released a need “Field Management” feature that will now allow you to do both.
If you are an administrator on your company’s BigContacts account, you now have access to this “Field Management” feature. This can be accessed by going to the “Admin” Tab and then by selecting the “Field Management” Tab.
It’s our goal to keep any new feature/ module that we add to BigContacts very simple and easy to use. This is no exception. Once you open the “Field Management” tab you will see the view displayed below. There are two columns; one for setting the fields that are going to be “required” in the contact record and a column for those fields that you wish to have “hidden”. Simply make you selections in each column and save the changes. It’s that easy!
So, how does this look on the front-end?
Any fields that you mark as required will now have an (*) asterisk next to them. The next time a contact record is either added OR edited within your system these fields will now be required. If one of your employees/ team members adds or edits a contact record without completing all of the required fields, any field that still requires data will turn red to make it visually very easy to see what is still missing from this record.
As for the hidden fields, they will simply disappear from view as seen below in the “before” and “after” images.
Before hiding certain fields
After hiding certain fields
Please Note: This new feature will initially affect adding contacts, editing contacts, reports, and searching for contacts.
In the future we will extend the “required” field feature to our web-forms. Any web-form that you have connected to BigContacts for lead capture can be set up to require the prospect filling out the form to complete certain fields as well. If they miss or omit a field, our system will direct them back to the form and note the fields that are required in order to complete your web-form.
To learn more about how to use this great tool in BigContacts, start a live chat (Monday – Friday 8am-5pm EST)
Or join us for a live webinar to see first hand how this can work for you in your business.
Please feel free to submit a support ticket or join us for a live chat should you have any questions as you work with this new module.
NEW resource for customizing Contact Management Software - Story From: BigContacts Product News
October 29th, 2010, Comments Off
At BigContacts we’re constantly working to deliver a better user experience. It’s our mission to ensure that you have all the tools you need to get off to a quick and successful start with your new Contact Management (CRM) system.
As you may already know, we already offer an entire suite of articles, videos, user guides, and worksheets to help you get setup and to customize the system in a way that works best for your business.
For your convenience, I have listed links to these resources below:
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Video Library |
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How-to Articles |
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Quick Start Guide |
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Customization Worksheet |
So what’s New?
One of the requests we frequently hear is that some customers would like one-on-one consultations to help them think through the organization of their contact database and ultimately the customization of their account with BigContacts. They have a database or spreadsheet now, but they want to figure out a better system for getting organized.
We’ve gone to great lengths to develop self-guided resources for you, but sometimes it makes sense to pay for some one-on-one time to discuss your specific business needs in order to determine the right formula for organizing your database and customizing the system to best meet your specific business needs.
Well, we have listened and now offer a one-on-one “Getting Started with BigContacts” Consultation. This service is geared toward customers that want help in organizing their database of contacts and customizing their system on the front-end. This service will ensure that you implement all of the best practices for organizing your business as you get started with BigContacts.
What’s Included?
- (2) 30 minute phone sessions to discuss your business and determine the best organization of your database
- Areas covered can include (non are required):
- Identify the groups, categories, contacts types and tags needed to best organize your contacts
- Identify common tasks and workflows within your business
- Identify sales process and pipeline stages
- Areas covered can include (non are required):
- Implement customization that is needed in your BigContacts account
- Import your Contacts into BigContacts (all contacts and custom fields – notes and history are not inlcuded in this service)
What does this service cost?
The total time invested to complete this process is approximately 4 hours. In order to cover our core costs, we are offering this new service for a flat fee of $195.
For more information on this service or to get started, give us a call at 1.888.286.6578 Ext. 701
Personalize your Automated Emails with Custom Fields - Story From: BigContacts Product News
October 5th, 2010, Comments Off
As many of you may already know, BigContacts offers a free email drip marketing module that allows you to automate email campaigns in your business. We call this free module our “Autopilot” module. You can easily set up a campaign, and “Autopilot” works automatically in the background sending out targeted emails at specific intervals and assigning tasks to specific people on your team as well.
“Autopilot” is like having a virtual assistant that works for free – helping you to deliver a automated messages to specific groups of your clients and prospects. This module allows you to queue up specific email drip marketing campaigns in one of two ways:
- You can associate specific clients or prospects with an “Autopilot campaign” and the system will automatically start a clock to begin delivering your targeted message through a series of emails to the contacts that you have identified. Along the way, tasks can also be generated to remind someone on your team to follow up on this message that you are delivering to them, etc.
- You can initiate an “Autopilot” drip marketing campaign if you use our webforms feature to collect leads from your website. Our webforms function will not only load the contact information into your BigContacts account for you, but it can also be set up to automatically start a drip marketing campaign for this prospect.
In addition to these drip marketing campaigns running automatically in the background, our system will capture and store a record of each email that has been sent to this contact directly in the “email correspondence” folder for each contact. Having this information at your fingertips gives you a very clear record of the message that has been communicated to that client of prospect the next time they call or you try and reach out to them.
So what’s New?
If you already use this free service through BigContacts you may be asking yourself at this point “so what’s new”?
We have just released custom fields for Autopilot!
One of the biggest challenges with automated drip marketing emails is to deliver a message without looking too canned. How many times have you received an email from a company and knew it was just a canned and impersonal message. Automation can be great, but is only truly effective if it still allows you to deliver custom messages to your audience.
BigContacts gives you the ability to create and populate all sorts of custom fields for each contact. Now you can embed these custom fields into your “Autopilot email templates to deliver very specific content to your contacts – all the while not lifting a finger to actually send the email! Now that’s how automation is supposed to work!
Let’s say, for example, you have a webform on your website that allows prospects to request information on different product lines that you carry. The prospect comes to your site, fills out a form to request information on a certain product line. Let’s say you want to have the system (BigContacts Autopilot) send them an automated email to thank them for their interest and to let them know that you will be sending them a brochure on the {{product}} (fill in the blank here) that they just requested info for.
All of this can now be done using BigContacts Autopilot – your free virtual assistant that works 24/7 and never calls in sick!
Maybe you have gone beyond mailing things and want to have the system not only deliver a reply but to also deliver and unfold an entire campaign of information centered around that specific product, you can now do this with this great tool.
To learn more about how to use this great tool in BigContacts, feel free to start a live chat (Monday – Friday 8am-5pm EST)
Please feel free to submit a support ticket or join us for a live chat should you have any questions as you work with this new module.
