8 participating agencies/organizations.
5 potential projects that require evaluation.
13 participants, working from 13 locations.
Deadline: 30 days.
A three Tylenol headache? Try taking a good Cloud Based CRM program and skip the meds.
I was recently invited to join a group of professional women who created a fund that mentors and invests in projects that impact woman and girls in our area. This amazing group has invested in programs that provide life skills to young women who are leaving the foster care system, another that provides financial training to single mothers and yet another that, through monthly programs, works to build self-esteem to ‘tweens’ (between childhood and teen years) at risk.
This group is made up of busy, multi-tasking women and scheduling a meeting, let alone coordinating all the tasks, research and communication these investments require is challenging. How best to manage these projects in an effective and cost-efficient manner?
Off to the cloud.
Here are the 5 steps that we are implementing that will get us off to a great cloud-start!
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A Cloud Based CRM Primer.
“A recent survey by Intuit found that more than one-half of small businesses perform CRM (customer relationship management) tasks manually or with software not designed for the job; 28 percent use pen and paper, while another 28 percent manually enter data on spreadsheets.”
I expected the number to be even higher. I was invited to participate in a woman’s small business forum and during breakfast, I asked a number of attendees what CRM program they used. This is a forum comprised of successful small business owners and based on their area of expertise, a number were using industry specific programs, although very few were cloud based. What surprised me however were how many were using their accounting and billing systems as their client management program. I guess this falls under ‘software not designed for the job’. CRMs aren’t new yet the older generation programs, the ones that came on CD-s, were complicated to use and were just as often discarded. My firm belief is that any tool that requires a tutorial isn’t worth my time. Yet a good, cloud based CRM app can increase sales, customer retention and employee productivity and are easy to use.
So let’s start with the basics: The A,B,C of CRM:
