BatchBook Blog
We love to hear how you are using Batchbook. Occasionally we share these stories here with the hopes that you can discover new ways of being productive in your business.
When Chris Jacobson brought his annual trade show, PrintFest, to an end in 2008, he found himself in the position of needing to re-invent his business. This is a familiar position for many entrepreneurs, who find themselves changing course to follow new opportunities throughout their career.
Chris grew up doing trade shows. His family business ran a trade show called the Gutenberg Festival and published a trade magazine for the printing industry called “Horsetrader”. Being a part of a family business meant that Chris learned every part of the business from the ground up, starting in the mailroom and warehouse. At any time he might be called on to hop on the forklift or assemble a pallet rack.
That kind of roll up your sleeves and get it done attitude has helped Chris move forward in his business career after closing PrintFest.
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Do you have some great customers that you want to stay in touch with, whether you have a current sale or not? If so, you can build a handy list in Batchbook which will show you all of your best customers who you haven’t interacted with in awhile.
What to Do:
First, you will want a way to identify your high value customers. We suggest tagging these contacts as champions. Use this tag for your special customers, the ones that are near and dear to your heart. This tag will come in handy as a filter on the contact list you create.
Next, create a new list in the Lists & Reports tab. We call our list “Haven’t Talked to In Awhile”. For the search criteria, you will want to make a few selections, as seen below.
Use the Record Not Communicated field to pull in customers who you haven’t interacted with recently. Using a natural language search, such as 30 days ago, works really well here. Note that in the middle field you should select “greater than” as that will give you contacts who you haven’t recorded a communication with since a certain date.
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I had the great pleasure of showing the first official demo of the new Batchbook at the Providence Geeks meeting last night. We met with many oohs and ahs, and some great feedback on the new design and features. For those of you who don’t happen to be in the Providence area (or perhaps just aren’t geeks), I want to give you a quick update on our progress so far and show you a bit more of the coming attractions.
Progress Report
We are closing in on the release of the new version. At this point we have finalized development of the contacts, custom fields and search and lists (see more below). And we are finishing up development of the communications and to-dos features which should go into QA soon. We have been working this past month with a number of beta users and are continuing to invite users into the beta accounts. Please contact our support team if you are interested. As I mentioned before, the initial release of the new Batchbook will be for new users only. We will then start migrating existing users into the new system based on availability of required features. You can see more about the transition here.
We will be sending multiple e-mail messages to the administrators of all of our accounts notifying you of the release of the new version and again when it is time for your account to be migrated. Please watch for these messages.
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Last Saturday, I got a chance to attend my first BarCamp. It was the first of our stops on the BarCamp Tour, this one taking place in Harrisburg, PA.
First, if you don’t know what a BarCamp is, it doesn’t really have anything to do with a bar. This, from Wikipedia, explains the name:
The name BarCamp is a playful allusion to the event’s origins, with reference to the programmer slang term, foobar: BarCamp arose as an open-to-the-public alternative to Foo Camp, which is an annual invitation-only (for Friends of O’Reilly) participant-driven conference hosted by Tim O’Reilly.
A BarCamp is an un-conference, which simply means there is not an official schedule of speakers. Instead, the attendees sign up for slots to speak, in this case on a big whiteboard, and the rest of us decide what sounds interesting.
Each BarCamp tends to have its own flavor. Harrisburg had a developer vibe, with lots of sessions on coding, design, and technology.
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If you are looking for a tool to help you manage and track your emails, you may be interested in Yesware. Designed to help salespeople gain more control over their emails, Yesware is a simple tool that sits right within Gmail. With it, you can manage email templates by category, track who reads your emails, record important emails in your CRM (ahem, Batchbook) with the click of a button, and more!
One neat feature is the way it integrates with Batchbook to record any emails you send with the click of a button. Yesware’s Gmail interface includes a CRM button, which you can configure with your Batchbox email address. When you want to record a sent email inside your Batchbook account, all you need to do is click the button. This adds an extra level of intuitiveness to our Batchbox feature. With the CRM button right there, you are more likely to remember to record those important emails in Batchbook!
You can also choose to track your emails so that you can see when they are opened and by whom. This is great for those of us who hover over the computer waiting for a response to an important email. This kind of tracking can also help you improve open rates by testing out different subject lines, or to improve responses from emails by A/B testing different email content. (more…)
