When I visited our customer and new friend Jagu out in California, I pointed out how to use SmartLists as a tool. It’s very easy to create a new list based on any field or combination of fields, like Customers With Tasks Today, or Contacts from My City, or Customers with More than $1000 of Purchases from Chicago. Go to SmartLists, read up a bit and try it out–you won’t hurt anything, and you’ll learn about the most powerful part of CIrcleDog: segmentation.
But to really make CircleDog reflect your business, to really develop powerful SmartList, you have to start from the ground up and customize CircleDog fields as much as possible. This will likely take a half hour to an hour (more if you’re really thinking hard about it and testing it out, but it’s easy to make the changes, try it out, and go back and make changes.
Here’s an example. When you look at a contact, you can Add a Task to that contact. When you click on Add a Task, you get the Add a Task window, and you can add a task or write in your own task name. But let’s say you don’t like the built-in names, like Make a Call. Well, change it in Settings!
CUSTOMIZE CIRCLEDOG FIELDS
That’s right–you can edit any of the existing field values. Or you can delete the field value, or add your own. And you can do that for about 20 different CircleDog fields. Let’s try it now–click on Settings on the top menu, thenclick on CUSTOMIZE CIRCLEDOG. Then select CHANGE CIRCLEDOG FIELDS, and make some changes–edit existing fields, remove them, or add your own.
Once you make the changes, go back and Add a Contact and see how your changes look. CircleDog now reflects your view of your business–not ours. We hope this will make it comfortable for your daily work!
CUSTOM FIELDS
And if our CircleDog fields don’t do the trick for ya, you can add your own. Again, go to settings, and Customize CircleDog. You’ll find Custom Fields somewhere in there–easy to find and easy to follow the directions for adding your own. (There’s a limit in Standard to the number of custom fields, but for Pro we’re adding unlimited customer fields for contacts, and possibly customer fields for sales. Pro is due in early November, but it depends on the completion of the new Outlook integration for Standard).
So now go back to SmartLists and create a new SmartLIst based on the field changes and additions you’ve made–you’ll get BOTH the power of customizing Circledog AND the power of SmartList based on your customizations. Pretty cool., easy to do, and nobody gets hurt.
Once you get your SmartList, try creating a mailing–just a couple of clicks. Or run a report on the SmartList. Once you try that you’ll see why we’re so excited about CircleDog–it’s really quite a lot of power but easy to use. Fun stuff!
Has this been helpful? Let us know what you think by clicking on Comments below. Thanks!
Charlie Crystle
September 18, 2008 at 1:46 am
I absolutely agree that using the customization features of CircleDog will prove to be extremely valueable to any small business owner.
To put the value of customization into perspective, companies spend millions of dollars every year in an effort to customize contact and customer management tools. In fact, one of the primary reasons CRM implementations fail is the amount of time and money it takes to customize to specific business needs. And as needs change, during company growth or struggle, it’s back to the drawing board…and the pocketbook.
Now, scale that down to a small business…without millions, or even thousands, to spend on customizing a CRM. CircleDog provides small business owners and employees with a way to easily customize the software to meet their needs. That’s it. It’s that simple. After just a short time, CircleDog can provide value based on what is needed…at that time….or for all the years to come.
In my experience (and Ive seen them all…from multi-million dollar, fully customized to home-grown CRM’s ), CircleDog is, without a doubt, the easiest to customize, most effective and intuitive CRM. Hands down.