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I woke up this morning to an early Christmas gift from Jonathan Blum at TheStreet.com. He posted a great review of BatchBook this morning entitled “To Sell Better, Sell Smarter.” While Jonathan had some very nice things to say about the simplicity of BatchBook as a CRM tool, he also had some very insightful criticism as well.
Jonathan writes that “BatchBook is no CRM final solution. As with all CRM tools, BatchBook is no miracle.” I could not agree with him more. I wrote an article for Network Solution’s Grow Smart Business blog a few months ago titled “For Start-up Businesses, CRM Software is Not the Answer”, where I argued that CRM software is a tool that can help small businesses collect and share information across the team as they learn together what their winning sales strategy will be. I argued that “there are no magic growing beans for new businesses. The fun part is figuring it out as you go.”
CRM software that tries to sell a small business the right sales funnel or the winning pipeline is selling magic beans. Even within the same industry, same market and same product offering, two competitors are going to have very different sales strategies. If not, neither is likely to succeed. What your CRM software should do is make it easier for you, your team, your network and your customers to work together to find the right way to make your business successful.
As Jonathan notes in the article, “Cleaner, faster, leaner selling will be job No. 1 in 2010. Or you can expect not to make it to 2011. And BatchBook is as simple a way to fight that fight, as I have found.” With BatchBook, we’ve provided a tool to help small businesses be more successful in managing their contact network. In 2010, we look forward to both expanding our tool set and helping our customers better manage their workflow processes.
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Tags: crm, small business, small business CRM, social crm
We’ve put together a new program here at BatchBlue. You see, as we’ve grown our product and our relationships with the folks who are using it, we came to realize there are some very smart people out there who are coming up with some ingenious ways to set up and use BatchBook for their various CRM needs.
We wanted to introduce you to the folks who we know from their involvement in our forums or with our customer service team as expert BatchBook users. They each have experience setting up BatchBook accounts for themselves and their own clients, and are now available to help our users with some of the more advanced functions in BatchBook such as:
- Prepping database and spreadsheet files and importing them into BatchBook.
- Setting up custom fields using SuperTags and importing custom data from other systems.
- Developing custom reports and lists.
- Writing scripts to connect the BatchBook API to other products such as e-commerce forms, blog site, etc.
- Using the BatchBook API to migrate data from other CRM systems
We borrowed this idea (with their blessing) from our friends at MailChimp.com, who have had their own successful experts program in place for a while now. Also — special thanks to our Lead Expert Scott Blitstein from eSeMBe.com for helping us put this program together.
Please check out our newly vetted experts. If you’d like some help with your own BatchBook account, feel free to contact them directly for more information on their services and rates. And, if you think you have what it takes to guide our users through the wonderful world of BatchBook, you can learn more about the Experts program and apply here. Whooo knows? One day you could be BatchBook Expert, too!
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Tags: batchbook, crm, Customer Service, customers, experts, small business CRM
Jeremiah Owyang recently wrote an article for CRM Magazine Social CRM Vendors Don’t Walk The Talk where he puts a number of CRM vendors through the spreadsheet grinder to see how their social media engagement measures up to the social media features their products espouse. BatchBook was not included in the analysis, though BatchFriend and customer Paul Mabray from Vintank.com was kind enough to mention us in the comments.
I agree with Jeremiah, but I think there is a clear distinction between the CRM companies that are now making a social media play versus the social media upstarts who are incorporating some traditional CRM features such as sales and customer service management into their products as they build them. Jeremiah highlighted a number of products that were developed around older (phone, e-mail, direct mail) marketing tools and are now working to add social media as an additional sales channel. Alternately, there are newer products like Jive, Gist and our own BatchBook that really began as social media communication tools and have added sales features as another layer.
Not surprisingly, those with Web 2.0 roots have more integration with social media throughout our products and throughout our company cultures, as well. As he mentions, social media is not a linear channel that can be “added on” in the same way previous channels have been. It is an intricate web of blogs, comments, tweets, direct messages, friend requests, recommendations, favorites and hashtags each with their own sub-culture and mini-dialect that together shape the direction of a conversation. Whether it’s sales, customer service, or project management, this new dialogue is not fully represented unless you can track all aspects of the conversation, and more importantly, understand their meaning in context with your relationships.
I applaud Jeremiah for calling companies out for more engagement. He makes great points about not only supporting customer and developer discussions, but also showcasing those communities as a vibrant component of the product. He’s also given us a few ideas for pushing our community into a more prominent part of the product. And isn’t that what social media is about? Using a public kick in the pants to move your efforts forward.
While it’s certainly interesting to watch how the older, more established companies work to fit social media into their product offerings, I think it’s even more interesting to build a product around the new tools as they are being developed.
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Tags: batchblue, batchbook, crm, social crm, Social Media
Another new major update as part of the new release of BatchBook for Sales is the new permissions based access to all of your BatchBook data. While we do still feel that access to the valuable customer information being collected in BatchBook is important to share with the team, we also realize there are times when you want to give an outside contractor or temporary sales rep access to a certain portion of the information.
By popular request, we’ve launched a new user level called the “Basic User” that has very limited access to only those contacts, communications, calendar items and deals that are assigned to them, that they have created themselves, or that you have proactively given them access to yourself. You will now see an option at the bottom of your BatchBook records to “Choose who can see this record” with checkboxes for each of the basic users in your account (and an option to give access to all basic users on your account). The basic user can then log into their own version of BatchBook and work on those items assigned to them without having access to the entire account.
For more information on setting up the new account level and granting permissions within BatchBook, please see our Basic User FAQ. And for more information on all user levels you can check out a description of all account levels.
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Tags: batchbook, crm, permissions, sales
As a part of the new BatchBook for Sales version, we also launched this handy new tab called a Calendar. You may be familiar with the concept – an organized way to view all all of the action items in your work schedule. But we have taken it a bit further by giving you the option to include not only your meetings and upcoming tasks, but you can see a history of all of your communications, your team’s communications and any other custom events you create using SuperTags.
Just a few ways you can use the new Calendar feature:
- View upcoming meetings by team member, by meeting type or by deal (using tags)
- View all activity for each team member for the month – including their to-do items, communications sent, meetings attended, deal closing dates, and more
- Add new event types such as customer birthdays, closing dates for deals, due dates for proposals, and more using SuperTags.
- View all communications sent by a specific team member distributed across the entire month.
- Give outside vendors or temp staff access to only those events and tasks that are assigned to them so they can be kept in the loop.
We are very excited about the new Calendar feature. If you need help using it, please take a look at the FAQs for calendar.
As always we would love to hear how you are using it, what suggestions you have for others and what we can do to keep improving this new feature. Please let us know!
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Tags: batchbook, calendar, crm, sales
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