Client Acquisition and Relationship Management

No, not that kind of relationship. I am talking about keeping track of clients and potential clients, not managing my personal life. Back in the Fall I bought Sage ACT! to track potential clients and my interactions with them. While there are plug-ins for the software to interact with other standard applications, such as Microsoft Outlook, I have a number of problems with my version of ACT!. For one thing, the supposed integration with Outlook doesn't work very well and doesn't recognize e-mails sent by other people within the same organization, unless I set each person up as a separate contact. That's quite a task for larger language service providers with many different project managers.

Besides, I have moved away from Outlook and now mostly use Gmail to manage my e-mail. The e-mail address connected to my website domain name forwards to a Gmail account that I can easily access from my phone or any browser. That greatly simplifies negotiating projects when I'm not sitting at my computer - for example while having my morning coffee (at which point it's already early afternoon in Europe).

I am therefore looking again for another customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Samantha Gluck mentioned on Twitter a blog post with a list of some 20 CRM solutions for freelancers, with a brief blurb and links to all of them. This yielded a couple of promising options: Work[etc] and Insight.ly. The first one is expensive (at least for a one-person company), but includes a billing solution. The second one has a free version, but no billing module and seems less customizable than Work[etc].

Unfortunately both of them are cloud-based (i.e., hosted on someone else's server). I suppose this is necessary if I want to be able to access this information on the go, for example at a conference, but I'm not sure how I feel about entrusting my client contact information to "the cloud". On the other hand, my gmail contacts are already on Google's servers and all my e-mails are stored on my web hosting company's and/or Google's computers. So this may not make much of a difference.

About client acquisition: a few posts ago, I wrote about creating a second, more client-focused blog and alternating posts between this blog and the other one. In preparation I started to re-write some of the older posts from this blog that might be interesting to potential clients. But while uploading a new photo of myself (courtesy of my daughter and son-in-law who took and cropped/processed the photo, respectively) I realized that most social media sites only let you list one blog URL. So now I am rethinking the entire two-blog concept. Back to the drawing board, then ... (By the way, the new picture is in the bio section to the right of this post.)

Note: I will be at the STC Technical Communication Summit in Chicago next week and may not post next Wednesday, unless I have enough time (and an internet connection) at O'Hare before my flight back.

So I'm Buying CRM Software, After All

I promised in my last post that I'd explain why I am now getting customer relationship management software, when in December I had still thought I'd get by with Outlook Business Contact Manager and work-arounds.

For one thing, as I am adding more and more information to Outlook (and getting and keeping more e-mails), it has become rather sluggish. The only way I could find to group people in one company together in Outlook is to create a new account for each company, then add individual contact records. That was becoming quite tedious. The search function is also not as flexible as I need it to be and the work-around for creating letters, etc. just got to be too much of a problem. And Outlook interfaces for most programs seem to only look at the regular contact list, not the Business Contact Manager contacts (which are apparently in a separate database).

So I looked around the web some more and decided to give ACT! a try. I installed a trial version of their newest product, wound up importing my Outlook business contacts via a generic .csv file, and started to work with it. Most of my problems with Outlook seem to be addressed here, including options for more extensive customization than Microsoft products -- including Outlook -- generally provide. There is also a version for Windows mobile (the operating system on my Smartphone), which I may buy later.

Once I decided to spend the money on "real" CRM software, I found a deal where I could get more than half the purchase price back as a refund check. So I ordered the full version of the software.

Now, of course, another snowstorm hit in the Northeast, so who knows when it will actually be delivered ...

No Trial Version, No Sale

A few weeks ago I detailed the time I spent following up with contacts I had made at the German tekom conference in November (Follow-Up Is Time-Consuming). In addition, I am also receiving unsolicited e-mails inquiring about my services. Some of these seem promising, so I send out my brochure and try to track these potential clients, as well.

Until now, I've input all that contact information in Outlook with Business Contact Manager and linked all e-mail exchanges with a particular prospect to that prospect's record. Outlook seems to have its limits, though, when dealing with multiple contacts at the same agency and when trying to customize the information recorded for each contact. I use 3 of the 4 user-defined fields to track language of communication (English or German), form of address (there are 2 different ones in German), and whether I've mailed them my brochure (checkbox). Also, there is no way to directly jump from a contact's record to MS Word in order to write a cover letter for the brochure mailing.

So I began to look at customer relationship management software for small businesses. Turns out, while there are a number of such programs, most are either web-based or don't seem to offer more useful functionality than the Outlook I already own. I don't want to entrust my customer data to the web and I don't need inventory management or salesperson assignments. All I really need is a better integration of Outlook and Word and a way to customize Outlook so that the data I need to track is easily accessible at a glance and tracking communications with the client can be automated.

Rooting around my copy of Outlook yielded a feature that allows me to design my own screens. That might let me track the data I need on each contact's main screen. While that doesn't solve the Word integration problem, it seems if I start from Word, I can create a one-record mail merge that will pull name and address from the Outlook record. That does seem the long way around, though.

There is one product I discovered that works within Outlook and might have been useful. It is called Prophet and also exists for various Smartphone platforms. While it appeared to be more sales-oriented than I need, it seemed worth a try. A major drawback, though: there is no free trial edition. I am not about to spend $150 on some software without knowing whether it will, in fact, do what I need it to do. The company does have a 30-day money-back guarantee, but do I really want the potential hassle and time I'd need to spend to actually get my money back?

For the time being, I'll therefore stick with my Outlook and try to customize it to work for my purposes. I'll keep you updated on that project after the New Year.

Happy holidays!

Follow-Up Is Time-Consuming

No more blog-writing on the train. I'm back in New York and writing this one on my PC's large screen -- it is an improvement over the 10" screen on my netbook, I must say.

After attending the tekom conference in early November, I wrote follow-up e-mails to everyone I had met there, as well as to the people to whom my contacts had referred me. (Many of the exhibitors were sales persons and gave me the name of their vendor management person.) Since I didn't have direct internet access from my netbook, that meant writing them all in one large Word file, copying that file onto a USB stick, then using a gmail account I had set up from the browser on my uncle's computer to copy and send each of the e-mails separately. It took probably a couple of hours to write and send these 40 or so e-mails.

Later during my trip I started to receive the first replies to my e-mails, usually asking for more information. Using the same gmail account from my sister's desktop, I replied that I'd supply that information upon my return to the U.S. the following week. These e-mails came in small doses, but let's say another half hour or so for checking my e-mail and replying to these.

After returning to New York on Monday of this week, I followed up on these e-mails and supplied the information requested -- most frequently by filling in online vendors questionnaires. Since each questionnaire was in a different format and requested different information (including the version numbers of some of my software and similar items I had to look up), it took a while to complete them all. Another hour and a half for this, I'd say.

Wednesday I input the information from all the business cards I had collected at tekom into my Outlook Business Contact Manager, including a note on whether the person in question was a direct contact or someone I was referred to and a note on the language of communication (English or German). That process was quite time-consuming since all the phone numbers and such on each business card had to be input and checked on screen. I probably spent a couple of hours on Outlook.

Yesterday I created cover letters to send brochures to either the person I was referred to or, if no referral occured, the direct contact. Since the text was slightly different for referrals versus direct contacts and some letters were in English while others were in German, a mail merge operation didn't seem to make much sense. I therefore wrote sample letters, copied them into a Word document and then personalized each one by copying the address information from the Outlook record, then adding the salutation and, in the case of referrals, the name of the person who had referred me. Once that file was done, I could load my printer with letterhead and let the entire file print on its own. Let's say an hour total for this operation.

After that was done, I had to print an envelope for each contact. My all-in-one printer/copier/scanner/fax only prints one envelope at a time, and misfeeds if loaded with more than 6 or 7 envelopes at a time. So the envelope printing process took quite some time, although I was signing and folding the cover letters at the same time, then stuffing envelopes as they printed. That entire operation must have taken another 45 minutes or so.

Next, the trip to the post office. The lines at our local post office are usually fairly long, but they now have a nifty self-service machine. Except that machine only does 5 stamps at a time if you don't want standard U.S. postage. I mailed more than 20 letters, in 5-stamp intervals, so that took a little while, too, maybe 15 minutes.

After all this I've received the first requests for test translations. I won't include the time spent on these here, but just the "advertising" portion of this follow-up has taken me a full workday. Maybe its time to investigate customer relationship management software after all ...