Everyone, it seems, is agreed that the coming year is going to be harder with the national and global economy being as it is. How are modern businesses going to react to this? What can businesses do to ride through the turbulent economic waters to come? How can managers and directors steer their companies to success? Is success possible? All these questions are valid and need answers.

The e³ SymVolli Conference 2008 is an event that addresses these core questions focusing on the three e’s: Efficiency, Effectiveness and the Economy. The e³ SymVolli Conference 2008 is being held at the Advait conference centre in Wembley, London on the 17th June.

For more information visit http://www.symvolli.com/html/symvolli_conference2008.aspx

Formerly known as Maximizer Enterprise the newest edition of Maximizer's CRM software is available for small medium and large companies. Now re-branded as Maximizer CRM – the latest version of this customer relationship software is available to the general business public. As Maximizer themselves say, with over 1 million licenses sold and over 8000 corporate customers, Maximizer's CRM is offering the "best value in its class for full-featured CRM".

But what does Maximizer CRM 10 actually offer to businesses over previous versions?

Firstly, there is greater web access for anywhere access to information. But there was web access on 9.5 as well. Though 9.5 was capable of web access this was only available in the top end eCRM version, now in Maximizer CRM 10 all versions have web portal access.

Another point that directly relates to on demand access for business people on the go is Maximizer CRM 10s ability to integrate better with mobile phone technology. Again, version 9.5 did have this but to a lesser extent. The biggest mention would be integration with Blackberry's which in 9.5 could only be synchronised through Outlook but which CRM 10 does directly.

Further benefits of Maximizer CRM 10 include new "Territory Management" capabilities whereby you can order sales, leads, contacts etc. through territories and new "Quote Generation" abilities whereby you can…generate quotes.

These are but a few of the new benefits that Maximizer's new CRM version offers. For further information look at our What’s New in Maximizer CRM 10 page.

In this litigious society that we now live in organisations are covering themselves by asking the customer and support engineers to document everything. Now how can this be easily implemented and executed.

ANSWER: OF COURSE THE WEB…

Why not have everybody submit their support query via the web?!! This will automate the process of raising a ticket for the specific case which could then be emailed directly to the customer without a moments thought. Furthermore, the client and the support engineer could communicate directly via the web, by email, and therefore every comment and suggestion will be documented without the fear of come back because the client has made a change to their registry settings have been told to do so by the engineer, and now the computer doesn’t work and they have lost a days work plus all their data and what are they going to do, they depend on their computer to be able to do their job etc. etc.

The truth is this is customer support gone wrong. The idea of developing a relationship, especially in the case of support is that the end user feels comfortable with you; that they feel that their case is being dealt with professionally and efficiently. That they are not receiving template emails that a monkey let alone a support engineers could send.

All too often organisations are turning to the web in order to cut costs; the web costs more up-front however there is no salary to pay and little maintenance to finance.

THE WEB IS A TOOL…

Mrs. Barbara Blackburn of Salem, Oregon was recorded at 212 words per minute (Source: Norris McWhirter, ed. (1985), THE GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS, 23rd US edition, New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.) however few can manage that speed, further more that was on a specially designed keyboard. Then there is the problem of interpretation or misinterpretation. People speak quicker than they type; people are clearer when they speak than when they type; people are afforded greater occasion to explain themselves when they speak rather than when they type and furthermore there is the time delay between sending and receiving an email.

The web is a great tool but isn't the answer to absolutetly everything. Customer support is a science of answering your clients needs and connecting with your customer base and so every opportunity that you let delay through endless reparte is potentially annoying to your clients. Sometimes it is wiser to pick up the phone and make that call. Hearing a person at the end of the line can be a lot more effective in dealing with some customer problems.

How many times have you been faced with the prospect of trying to source a product off the internet? You struggle under the million or so websites and then all of a sudden you appear to strike gold. You find the site that has exactly what you are looking for.

Next step… enquire about the product.

You are faced with two options: the site is littered with “click here to get a quote” buttons and telephone numbers. Due to the pressing nature of your timescales and deadlines you decide to call. Now this happened to me the other day: I called up a ‘potential’ supplier asked the questions I had, to then be told “sorry to progress this enquiry any further you will have to fill out the form on our website”. Imagine if I didn’t have internet access!! Not likely, but you never know.

Now the reason I needed to fill out the form rather than the lady on the phone taking my details and generating a quote was because the form populates their main database with all my contact details. The system was all automated so that enquiries would not ‘fall between the cracks’.

Well this enquiry “fell between the cracks”. Some would argue that it is a way of qualifying a serious enquiry from a speculative one but to have gone through a whole telephone conversation to be told that I would have to further ‘put myself out’ by filling out an online form, for the sake of automation, made me turn to the next entry on my Google search results.

What went wrong? Well the CRM aspect of my call was completely over looked. The lady was not interested in my enquiry rather the data she could gather from me. She was interested in the contact management aspect of my call, my name, address, telephone number etc. Data has its value but whilst it is merely details stored in a database, it is minimal. Good relationships however, are priceless.

Perhaps we are in a changing world and technology is definitely the catalyst for it, but we now live in a world where you can speak English at varying degrees. You wouldn’t dream of writing text copy for a business site that said “Wd U lk 2 Buy 1 of R products?”, yet because the internet and mobile phone’s have separated the rules of language etiquette the danger is that the barriers of language will spill over into important collateral for your business.

I am not for once suggesting a need to use one universal language in every medium, texting would be infuriating otherwise. Nor are the rules for blogging and forum posting that stringent either because the free flow of ideas is more the point, rather than the grammar. However, what is damaging is when lack of discipline spills over into the corporate environment. Think of the energy and effort that goes into building up a corporate brand that people trust and associate with. The association of your brand with what you want can so easily be taken away by simple mistakes in grammar.

Once that mistake is out there, your brand will suddenly be associated with mirth and merriment and if you are a business that needs to be taken seriously then this is a major problem. So, unless, you are selling ‘business goats’ or have a cure for ‘sales mangement’ then re-read those all important documents and articles before comedy takes over your business.

Penguins is one of the leading Events Organisers in this country and as such are dealing with some of the largest companies and conglomerates, not to mention some prestigious and well known personalities. They cater for conferences, functions, parties and team building events for all size companies and with experience in the events industry spanning more than 20 years Penguins are at the forefront event management.

Nomis’s relationship with Penguins goes back some years now in a range of different fields including doing a lot of their e shot campaigns. For the past year, Penguins have looked at SalesVision as one of the options that they were looking for in dealing with managing their high end business management. In the same way that formula 1 cars are tested to their limits, Penguins have tested SalesVision in their events environment.

Penguins official announcement of corporate affiliation and sponsorship of future SalesVision products is an endorsement to the power and adaptability of SalesVision in the corporate environment. As Mark Buist, MD of Penguins says “SalesVision in effect provides us what we would initially have needed three business software solutions for” and that is the power that we are offering our clients.

The Penguins relationship has been valuable, informative and reciprocal in nature and goes to show the entire ideology behind SalesVision in that we aim to create a tailored product that integrates entirely with the client organisation so that it can reap the maximum returns. This is why SalesVision can adapt to any environment and why Penguins is the ideal showcase of this concept.

During the month of August, Maximizer is offering new users and existing users the opportunity to get special discounts on Maximizer bundles. For those who are looking to get Maximizer 9 or Maximizer Enterprise 9.5 they can save over 20% on five user licenses.

For those interested in using Maximizer or Maximizer Enterprise with MaxMobile then Maximizer is offering £215 and £375 savings respectively. This offer is great for busy professionals who are rushing to meetings all over the city, it is ideal for keeping your CRM system updated.

If you are interested in getting CRM or you are an existing user who is looking to get a few more licenses then this offer really is a great opportunity to get a great CRM system at a brilliant price. Sounds corny, I know, but hurry while stocks last etc. etc

Sooty’s review on ‘How To Design An Eshot Campaign’ draws upon several well defined and important points in developing email marketing campaigns. I don’t have much to add to this review in so far as the advice given but would instead back up what Sooty says about good design, permissions and valuable information.

Nomis has, as part of our general marketing campaign, used eshots to deliver information on our products, services and latest news for some time now and experience and experimentation with designs and content together with strong collaboration with the people who receive them have yielded strong retention and responses. Further to this, and this I will admit to being unexpected, is how many people still view eshots that we have sent out many months and sometimes years ago. Email marketing can and is viewed as a short term marketing campaign but our experience is that because your emails and eshots contain that all important information of content (And not to forget contact details), this is more likely to be kept for future cataloguing or filing by your users. Strange as this sounds, we have customers who have kept all our eshots that we have sent. In this respect, this is where email marketing differs from other short term marketing avenues in that it can be kept and reused by the consumer, and that is why it is all the more important to keep to the guidelines that Sooty points out in her review.

The definition of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) appears to be defined according to the capabilities of software; contact management, sales force automation, customer & field service management and marketing campaign management. However, unless we have all become robots, do we really want to receive or even feel that we are receiving an email or a telephone call because a piece of software has flashed up an alert on someone’s screen to say email/call so-and-so?

The introduction of technology was embraced and marvelled at, constantly allowing people to push back boundaries… yet at times it appears to be at the expense of certain values. As a child I was taught telephone manners; to be polite, to forget what is going on around you and dedicate time and attention to the person you are calling or the person who is calling you. We have now de-personalised telephone calls, in fact most form of communications. Telephone calls are made from busy offices where the caller talks into a microphone which picks up as much of what is being said, as the noise around; emails are put together with “Dear [Insert First Name Here]”.

CRM systems are about facilitating communication, interaction etc. They will not communicate or interact for you. If you allow them to do so it will no longer be Customer Relationship Management (CRM) but rather CM (Customer Management).

At last somebody is prepared to voice what a lot of us feel about On-Demand CRM systems. Reading Richard Smiths article “Is on-demand CRM better than an on-premises solution? – No”, showed aspects of the on-demand CRM that is so overlooked by businesses who are looking to purchase high quality business systems.

Just looking at the finance aspect, which is the major reason why hosted systems are so popular, over 2-3 years a hosted system costs more than an on-premises system. If paying monthly is the attraction to relieve the pressure on cash flow then this can also be achieved by taking up finance and the beauty of finance is that once you have stopped paying the system is still yours and you still have the ability to use it even if you don’t continue with maintenance and support.

Gone are the days when having one or two web pages up constituted “online marketing” and this is more so with regards to promoting the often forgotten marketing collateral ‘yourself’. It used to be that the garden variety web site was such an impersonal portfolio of a company’s products and mission statement and even personal web portfolios were a list or catalogue.

Today’s online experience involves buzz words such as ‘interactivity’, ‘social media’, ‘web 2.0’ and ‘social bookmarking’ to name but a few. So where does promoting yourself fit into this?

In the real world, promoting yourself would include networking with other people usually at events, social gatherings or on a one to one level. It would involve connecting with people of a like mind and generating interest in the character and skills that you possess. Online, this is no different and all the buzz words in the world cannot hide the fact that all you are doing is networking with other people to the same effect.

Social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Mybloglog and Bumpzee are the equivalent to the venue of a real social gathering where you have the opportunity to find and connect with people who you think are interesting and who might be interested in you. Whereas in the real world you would converse and talk with someone and they would base judgments on what you say, for an effective online character assessment a person would normally look to your web site or blog. This is where an effective web presence or striking blog would pay dividends as it shows the character and personality of your online credentials.

Business relationships will often develop from there on the same lines as the real world. Sometimes, you will never meet an business associate that you meet online, and sometimes you will develop from an online relationship to a face to face relationship, however the myth that developing online contacts is in any way easier is misguided. The internet destroys barriers of geography but the time involved in developing trust and reciprocity requires time, effort and patience - much like the real world.

The trouble with Maximizer is that it is so intuitive that many companies decide that they can cut back on training. It’s surprising how many times I have heard people say that they have been using Maximizer for years and therefore do not need to have any training. WRONG. It’s amazing that when they do eventually get round to grudgingly doing training all you hear them say “but I didn’t know you could do that” or “I never thought of doing it that way”. Training is not just about learning what features are in Maximizer but also how best to use the system and also pointing out what the repercussions are further down the line.

Nomis has spent years of listening to customers and their problems and customising Maximizer to address a lot of those issues and this all points to the fact that, in order to harness the full power of Maximizer, it cannot be treated as an “out of the box” solution.

At Nomis we run an open course on the last Wednesday of every month where you too can find out some of the little secrets which only come about from experience and having customers who are always getting us to push Maximizer to its limits.

Quite often customers tell me that they use Outlook for email and file their communications in folders in Outlook and therefore do not want to use Maximizer for email. It’s not until they realise that Maximizer is not an email provider and just mirrors Outlook that they begin to thaw slightly. They then realise that if they generate and save their emails through Maximizer then all their colleagues will be able to have access to the same documents.

The boon is that not only will their colleagues be able to view out going emails but because incoming emails can also be saved against the sender, colleagues will also be able to see the responses. And when they see how easy that is to do they are well and truly sold on using Maximizer for email.

We often hear the acronym CRM or Customer Relationship Management but is this true, or is it the customer who actually has to maintain the relationship. Prime examples are the mobile phone operators.

If you sign up as a new customer you are rewarded with contracts that cost ‘NOTHING’ and phones that will do everything and anything at the discounted price of… ‘NOTHING’. However as a loyal customer, someone who has been with the same mobile phone operator for a handful of years, to switch tariffs you are often told that you will have to close your contract and open a new one with a new number and if YOU want the phone that does everything and anything well… “that will be £100 please sir/madam”. The focus is upon attracting new customers rather than retaining loyal existing ones.

Question: how many people have been on the same tariff for years and years to find that someone else is getting the same deal at a reduced price?

Existing customers are left behind on old tariffs, at inflated rates paying for the new customer to get his/her phone at the discounted price of… ‘NOTHING’.

At no point has someone from my mobile phone operator contacted me to see whether I am happy with the service. I fear I am only contacted on the rare occasion that they have something to sell to me. Successful CRM would suggest if not implore you to develop a relationship based on trust and ‘friendship’ rather than fear.

Question: how many people have not bothered transferring or changing because of the hassle or because they are unsure as to what to do?

In this case the customer has had to ‘maintain’ the relationship in order to get the service they require and deserve. Businesses count on the sentiment exhibited in the previous question as it allows them to pursue new customers, expanding the customer base in a pro-active manner whilst dealing with the existing customer base in a reactive manner.

For customer maintained relationship read “you have to fight for what you deserve”.

Time to put things right: CRM is not a system, it is not a piece of software, nor a piece of hardware. Whilst people treat it as such we will continue to live in a reactive rather than pro-active world. It is all well and good having a system which holds every last detail about your customers but useless if you have not had the training or do not know what to do with it. CRM is an acronym given to a concept of interacting, communicating, dealing your customers whilst knowing the VITAL details about them helping both you and them further the relationship that has been setup.

The editors of Customer Inter@ction Solutions Magazine have named Maximizer ‘Product of the Year’. The publication recognised Maximizer Software for its outstanding contribution to the CRM software industry.

Not really surprising – I remember going into a training session a couple of years ago and you can imagine how my heart sunk when, politely chatting with the first person who turned up, he stated that he had previously used a high end CRM system and had also been a sales person of another. I had visions of heckling right the way through the day and having to answer difficult questions. His silence made me feel even worse as I envisaged him going back and reporting to management that they had just wasted their money. As the morning coffee break arrived I could not hold back any longer and I had to find out. His response to my question was “I didn’t realise that for that price Maximizer was so powerful”!!!!!

With all that power and it still does not require an army to maintain or deploy. It is user friendly and therefore intuitive and companies can take responsibility of their system without forever referring back to the experts. It’s flexibility means that as the business requirements change and become more demanding Maximizer can cope and it does not require more expense and additional modules to be purchased.

Back in the late 90s the website emerged as the fashion accessory of the business world; everyone had to have one yet few knew what they intended to do with it or in turn what it could do for them.

“The competition has got one, so I thought we should have one too.”

The truth is if you look around the internet today you will still see remnants of the internet boom, sites which are poorly designed, in every manner possible (search engine optimisation (SEO) as well as graphically and code) which add very little value to the business they are trying to promote. Many sites were put together by a friend of a friend who did web design as a pass time to earn a little bit of money on the side.

To have a successful website there are many considerations to keep in mind, however there are a few that should never be forgotten:

• The purpose of the website
• And whether a website is actually needed to fulfil the purpose you had in mind.

If these are answered in a positive manner, then and only then can you move onto engaging a designer in discourse as to your future website.

The truth of the matter is that web design is a combination of art and science; you need to know the science of web design so as you do not fall into the pitfalls littering your journey ahead. One of my pet hates which separates responsible web design from flagrantly irresponsible is the manner of displaying email addresses on a website:

Question: hand on heart how many people have an email address that receives masses and masses of spam each day and yet you are unsure as to why it is happening?

Web design is also a matter of art: merely consider it to be a different medium to say watercolours, oil paints or crayons.

Successful web design will keep all this in mind as it itself is a vehicle for Customer Relationship Management (CRM). A website is a way of keeping your customer base regularly up-to-date with what is going on with your business, product line etc. It is a way of communicating a message without harassing anyone. Couple this with successful e-marketing campaigns and it will seem as though you have never left your customer’s