Sage Blog

Formerly a sales promotion and business adviser, Worcestershire-based Mark Edwards is now an acclaimed adviser and public speaker on low-cost, low-carbon eco-heating – after building a revolutionary new home for his family using Sage ACT.  Mark talks to us about how he managed such a mammoth project.

As a recent dad to two sons, Mark tells us that his awareness of the world and his surroundings has become increasingly more acute.  The more the media reminded him of the expanding global population, dwindling natural resources and the inevitable increase in domestic heating costs, the more he felt compelled to act.  Mark set to work on a major project: building a new, eco-friendly home for his family that would be low-cost to run, and  that would last for generations.

But it wasn’t enough for the house to be energy efficient and eco-friendly.  Mark was determined to prove the point that renewable eco-technology which would lower fuel consumption and expenditure could still look great.  Taking the Gherkin in London as his inspiration, he planned a home full of curved structures, natural light and character – a far cry from the builds of the traditional cottages and Georgian houses in the area, and costing only a fraction of the heating bills to boot.

The project wasn’t a walk in the park.  The plans took Mark to Germany to meet a renowned property developer, and it was during this visit that Mark learned that his projected energy savings were indeed possible – but that they were yet to be achieved in the UK.  Full of determination, Mark attended no fewer than eight trade shows to learn how to integrate the latest industry technologies into his new home, all the while networking with a large number of German, Italian, Belgian and British suppliers and industry specialists along the way.

Every step of Mark’s journey involved a huge list of new contacts, new information and new actions and, to manage all of this information, Mark used Sage’s leading CRM and project management tool: Sage ACT.  This software helped Mark to:

• Manage contractors, provide training and track results
• Track 927 points of contact from his idea, the trip to Germany, project and business planning, reporting, and seeking additional funding
• Access Sage ACT on his smartphone, enabling him to send pictures and specifications of new products to architects and advisors while on the move – without the delay of arranging meetings

Thanks to Sage ACT, Mark had full oversight and control of his growing database of suppliers, their details and their updates.  Commenting that it was ”easy” to manage and analyse transaction and action history, and to always have a clear overview of his next steps, he used Sage ACT to schedule and track his progress, review proposals, make decisions and build and cement relationships.

Mark believes it would have been impossible to complete such a revolutionary new home on budget and on time without the use of Sage ACT.  Sage ACT was crucial to maximising Mark’s productivity and making his new eco-friendly home, Valley Views, a huge success for him and his family for many years to come.

Guy Clack, CRM Expert

Having worked on an app for our CRM software Sage ACT! for the last year or so I was especially amused to see last night’s The Apprentice and their attempts to design and release an app in just 24 hours.

The world of mobile is certainly here, and it’s a fast moving one. It’s all about apps, accessing data, accessing the mobile internet on the move and using the device of your choice. Yodel, a leading research company in this field helps businesses understand mobile through a simple lens,  say “Mobile” for a business is being able to communicate, interact and supply a service to your audience or customers at any time and at anyplace” and they encourage businesses to think outside of the box when interpreting Mobile – “Mobile is your tablet, your phone, your Kindle, your MP3 player, GPS… “

For businesses it’s important to capitalise on having a mobile app but also to ensure that customers can access their business through the mobile internet. The first is a bigger step change for businesses, than repurposing or changing an existing website to be mobile friendly and compatible. However, across the globe there are now 700,000+ apps now available from Apple and Google app stores with a breathtaking 13bn downloads to date. In the UK market, 33% of UK mobile users are already using apps of the 45 million aged 18+ mobile phone users.

The opportunity is clearly there for small to medium sized businesses and most now are already capitalising on the opportunity that mobile presents; through the usage of apps to improve business efficiency, communications and market to their customers. Helping their customers to find out information or complete a task quickly and simply.

For a business venturing into the mobile app space for the first time, it can be quite daunting. So to help you along the journey here’s some tips on how to design the perfect mobile application for your business:

Flesh out your idea

• What do you want it to do – It can be a game or something for your business but make sure it satisfies a need or customer want, is supported by research and doesn’t offend anyone.
• Who you want to attract ­- local to global new and existing customers
• What your commercial model might look like – You might offer it for free to start with. Think additional functionality, tiers and revenue opportunities going forward
• Building your app – You’re not alone. There’s a vast community of mobile developers and “build your own” tools that can help you get the mobile app for your business at the price you want.

Designing your app

• Easy to use - get it right first time. Successful apps are really easy to use and deliver on the need
• How it looks on the device – the look, feel and use of the app all important to the user. Use effective icons, design for touch and help the user get results quickly and effectively
• Personalisation – Users may want to personalise the way they use or see the app. Provide users with some capabilities to do this with early releases of apps
• Choose the devices, platforms and app stores for your app – You’re not in control of the device, platforms or app store your current and / or future customers use. Understand what’s hot and what your customers use and build solutions for these.

Getting your app out there

• Post it to the app stores – Your apps built, press the button and launch it the app stores of your choice.
• Provide a description to support your app – Describe your app in a short punchy strapline. Something that will instantly turn on your users and get them to download the app.
• Promote your app – showcase and communicate your app to everyone. There’s some great technology websites who can help you and a recommendation, as opposed to a mention can mean the difference between a few downloads and millions.

So, be inspired by The Apprentice and start work on your app today. If they can, anyone can!

We’d love to hear how you’re getting on with your own app.

Guy Clack, Sage ACT! Team

www.twitter.com/guyclack

www.sage.co.uk/act

Why E-marketing and CRM are more effective when used together

CRM expert, Duncan Wood

I have been recently working with Dan Ogden of Swiftpage on our presentation “CRM and eMarketing – the targeted marketing dream to create more qualified leads” for next week’s Technology for Advertising and Marketing (TFM&A) exhibition and thought it would be good to share some of it here; of course it’ll be even better to pop along and see it in person on 1^st March at 3pm in the CRM Theatre!

Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise

Customer Relationship Management, or CRM as it is more commonly referred to, is a pretty well understood term and business strategy. However, CRM software can be somewhat of a battle to implement within the enterprise especially if it is only about one particular aspect of the business. The simple truth is that people only naturally champion things that they believe in. The challenge for any CRM project is to find the business objectives of people across the enterprise and provide the tools to make it easier. I think the combination of E-marketing and CRM is a highly potent cocktail of business value that can deliver such tools.

Why CRM?

The main reason people use CRM is to help them manage and improve relationships with both current and prospective customers and suppliers. Once CRM is embedded into an organisation’s integral business processes then a highly illuminating insight is revealed about what works and what doesn’t work in a business strategy. Hopefully with reflection on these insights an organisation can achieve its CRM goals which normally centre around increasing revenue, higher profitability and increase customer satisfaction. The improvement normally comes down to changing and tuning business processes in one or all of the Sales, Marketing, Customer Service areas of the business.

Why E-marketing?

The E-marketing toolset is a fabulous, low-cost way of creating and nurturing relationships within your marketplace. One of the historic problems with Marketing has been cost, potentially stifling creativity and the ability to learn from the audiences responses. E-marketing changes all of that. It allows you to deliver on the theory of best practice Marketing by designing, testing and measuring your ideas on specific target segments of your audience – all done quickly and at very little cost. The solution provides a fantastic way to find profitable relationships and deliver the content a customer is actually looking for in a timely fashion.

Why together?

I love the phrase “data is just data until you do something with it”; CRM and E-marketing together create a mutually beneficial relationship which is why our CRM software, Sage CRM, Sage SalesLogix and Sage ACT! all integrate with Sage E-marketing provided by Swiftpage.  From the CRM point of view E-Marketing helps both the Sales and Marketing departments work closer together and more efficiently – overall it could be one of the key benefits that makes the difference between the CRM project being successful or failing. From an E-marketing point of view CRM provides the critical insight and data to making successful targeted marketing campaigns.

In summary, having a single place where both CRM and E-marketing live provides benefits to the whole ecosystem both inside and outside the organisation using it.

If you’re interested to hear more, and why not register for TFM&A for free online and say “hi” to Dan and I.

Duncan Wood, CRM Expert

So, what’s this all got to do with the customer-relationship software you use and your business’ customer strategy ? 

Let’s start with the software first.  You are likely to be using customer-relationship software  to help your lead prospecting activities.  Capturing names & interests is at the very heart of of customer-relationship software.  Yet, those same prospect records can be greatly enriched through the information available on through Social Media outlets.  Information such as:

• What topics are important to them?
• Who else are they talking to?
• What are they saying experiences (products & more) ?

You can use information from these sites to help enrich a prospect’s record as part of building your  customer relations program.  That’s converting time spent on social media sites into revenue for your business.  Information from these sites can be fed directly into CRM – be that ACT!, Sage CRM or SalesLogix, informing & improving your direct marketing activities.

Relating Social media to your customer strategy – listening for & managing the content.

Your investment in CRM is key to your customer retention strategy.  Ensuring you stay relevant in to customers, both before and after a sale.  But without social media interaction, you can only “know” about the conversations you have directly with them.  What happens when they talk about you in other forums – blogs, forums, social networking sites, etc ?

 Investing time in social media outlets provides you with an opportunity to ‘listen in’ to the conversations being discussed (check out our free guide Connecting with your customers; a guide to social media to help you get started). You can develop an understanding of your customers and benefit from insights within their communities.  Further, with businesses getting more than half of their customers through word of mouth, staying tuned in & monitoring the flow of conversation will give insights to other prospects & encourage the flow across these informal networks.

 Listening in also gives you a chance to improve customer relations when things go wrong for a customer.  By tuning in to relevant conversations, you can dramatically improve your chances of finding unhappy customers quickly and addressing their issues before they do serious damage to your brand.  

 An investment in CRM software is only partially realised without a matching customer strategy.  Harnessing Social Media is an essential part of your business’ customer strategy & key to keeping customers.