CircleDog Gets Great PC World Review!

It’s great to receive some additional validation for work! PC World just posted the following review of CircleDog at PCWorld.com. Here’s part of it–click here to read the whole shabang.

“Unlike enterprise-level CRM software, there’s practically no learning curve, so you won’t need to spend much time learning the software. Adding contacts, for example, is simple as filling out a series of screens, and even tasks such as mail merge are straightforward.”

Customer and contact management software should be easy in 2008. We’re working hard on adding some functionality, but we pledge to never clutter the interface when we add new features. This review pretty much nails what we’re trying to accomplish: powerful, simple, well-designed software for small businesses.

Thanks for supporting us!

The Meltdown and Small Business: Build Your Own Economy

I’m a big believer in working through problems, identifying solutions, setting goals, and hitting them. I expect you know by now that the country is in the midst of a crisis caused by deregulation and its aftereffects. I won’t go into who’s really responsible, aside from noting that the fix to the Great Depression included regulating the financial industry through the New Deal legislation, and that most of the regulations were dismantled or watered down in the 1999 Gramm-Bliley-Leach Act.

So, credit is tight, capital is tight, and we’re not sure what’s next. The bailout is huge; $700 billion of a revolving fund to buy back bad debt. Now, wouldn’t it be nice if there were something in that bailout package that helped small businesses? Like affordable healthcare, for instance? Or a nice line of credit? One can dream.

The economy’s not great in general. But yours doesn’t have to be. Build your own economy! That’s right–you can ignore the bad news and create your own good news. Here are a few ideas.

• Measure everything: how much you spend on each marketing tactic, the revenue that comes in per tactic, then refine your marketing and invest in what works. Stop the scattershot approach. 80% of your business will come from 20% of your customers, so that’s where you should start.
• Call your top customers and ask them how they are. Listen. Don’t sell
• Send them a letter thanking them for their business. Include any new product or service brochure or product sheet.
• Identify customers that haven’t bought from you in the past year or two. Send them a targeted promotion. Include the line “we’d love to have you as a customer again!”, because you would, of course.
• If you don’t have a monthly or quarterly newsletter, start one! It doesn’t have to be fancy, and it doesn’t have to have a lot of features. But it should include something new and interesting about your part of the world, and should NOT be a marketing or sales piece. Ask yourself this: what would be useful information for my customers?
• Look for sources of new leads. If you don’t have a website, start one (easy to create and set up at Homestead.com, Godaddy.com, and a long list of others). If you have a website, improve your searchability with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you are already optimizing your site for search, try Google Adwords. Even with a small budget, you can drive relevant traffic to your site.
• Reach out to a complementary business and create a bundle offer and split the marketing costs. You might be able to create new value for your customers and make friends along the way.
• Ask your friends and family for leads. Don’t ever feel bad about asking for help–it’s human nature to want to help, and people appreciate it when you ask for it.
• Watch your own spending. Cut down on things that don’t work. Invest in what works.
• Don’t cut your healthcare coverage. Maybe increase the deductible, definitely start an HSA, but don’t give up your coverage. That’s a vulnerability you simply cannot afford to take on.

I hope this has been helpful. CircleDog, of course, is great for creating segmented lists of your customers and sending mail to them in a few clicks, so it makes it a LOT easier to do some of the things I’m suggesting.

Making CircleDog Reflect Your Business

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!