You might think that because we’re busy building the New Batchbook, it would be all work and no play around here. But, now and then we get up from our laptops and take a break. Last weekend we had our annual BatchBBQ and we enjoyed the company of almost all of our virtual employees (our 14 employees live in 5 different states). We laughed, we ate, we bounced and we put on crazy glasses. It was a great opportunity to relax and hang out with our co-workers and their families.
I thought you might like to meet the BatchBlue teams in their natural environment.
Administration
Darlene & Pamela
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A few months ago Constant Contact announced the acquisition of social CRM product Bantam Live. As part of the technology transfer, the Bantam Live service will be unavailable to its customers for an extended period of time. Here at BatchBlue we started to hear from a number of those customers who were looking for a new home for their contacts.
Though deep in the middle of our Batchbook rewrite, we could not leave fellow small businesses (especially when they were asking so nicely) without a good option for managing their contacts. So we turned to trusted friends and Batchbook Experts Xioup.com to write a script that would import the XML files available as an export from Bantam Live directly into Batchbook.
Kurt Milam from Xioup wrote up a very nice description of how the import works and how to go about setting it up. This quick excerpt explains what data is available for transfer:
We’re happy to report that our importer brings in all contacts (companies and people, including all address information, tags, special dates, social networking profiles and rss feeds). It also brings in 100% of Bantam deal and project information, notes, tweets and internal messages (including creation date, author and recipients). Bantam statuses are brought in, as well, albeit without creation dates, since they’re not included in Bantam’s export archives.
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I was once told that when interviewing for a new job at any company, it is beneficial to ask any real questions you have to the person who has been working at the company for the least amount of time as they are likely to be the least loyal and thus have the least reason to lie.
At BatchBlue Software, technically that person would be me.
Bill Pasnau, nice to meet you. I’m a part of the Customer Experience team which means if you’ve got an issue that you’ve sent over to support@batchblue.com there is a pretty good chance we’ve already had some interaction! When asked if I would be willing to write a post for the company blog, the first topic that came to my mind was how amazingly different my new job is compared to any other position I’ve ever held. Why is it so different? The flexibility.
I was in a staff meeting this morning in our office in Providence, RI. Monday is the only day of the week that I come into the office. I come for the meeting, and stay for the pastries (let’s be real, you would stay too). Outside of Monday morning staff meetings though, driving into the office is about as optional as the last week of high school for the senior class. Why? BatchBlue is designed so I can effectively do my job from anywhere I have an internet connection and a laptop! I can answer support emails from my uncle’s house in western CT, or my sister’s horse farm, or my mother in law’s house a couple days before her second daughter’s wedding (all things I’ve gotten to do with this new position). I rarely have to ask for time off since I can check emails from almost anywhere.
A big part of the tele-commuting success though is the support I receive from my co-workers. My wife wondered if I was going to ever get anything done working from home, other than really getting some mileage out of my Netflix subscription. The thing is, I’m never “alone” while I’m working. We use Skype to chat with each other from RI to NY to IL, even WA! We video chat once a week as well, because just that little bit of virtual face time with your co-workers after a few days at home or working from coffee shops around town, really lifts the spirits. If that doesn’t work, the treats on Monday morning do!
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We get a lot of questions about how best to manage sales using Batchbook. The truth is there are a lot of different ways you can use Batchbook to stay on top of your sales. Each business will do sales a little bit differently and, luckily, Batchbook is very flexible!
While this means we can’t share an exact sales management plan, we can explain how to use the tools inside of Batchbook to help you get a better grasp on your own unique sales process. There are 3 main tools in Batchbook that you can use together to help manage your own sales process. To help you get a better handle on how to use these tools to keep track of your sales, we have created a short tutorial for your learning pleasure.
But first, a little explanation since this is the first (but not the last) of these tutorials we will be presenting. We are using a tool called Screensteps (a fellow member of the Small Business Web) to help us put together nice little guides to some of the great features in Batchbook. These are highly visual guides, but they are also in document form, so you can follow along at your own pace and try things out as you go. Where a screencast can give you a great overview of a Batchbook feature, ScreenSteps helps us provide more in depth how to information.
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A couple months back we launched a very popular feature allowing folks to search for a contacts social connections on the web.
This has and continues to work great but we are always looking at ways to enhance features at BatchBook and we think the Flowtown integration does just that.
Flowtown is able to take an email address and turn that into a full social profile. They provide very targeted results based on email address which in most cases provides more accurate results than just a name based search as email addresses are unique. Please note you must have a Flowtown account for this to work and of course we highly recommend you get one if you do not already. They are a fantastic service.
The way the integration works is to head the to Sync & Integrations tab and add a new service. You will see Flowtown as an option and after clicking it you will be asked for your Flowtown account name and API key. Your API key is located in your Flowtown account under: Settings -> My Info.
Once enabled the process is very similar to the existing search social network button. Since the results are exact matches you do not have to go through the step of actually choosing the relevant profile. Just click the Search Social Network button and if results are found we will automatically add them to the Social Media SuperTag all in one step:
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