When it comes to business, using flexible tools in the wrong place can make your profitability flexible too. Every business does it for at least a short time but the successful will proactively innovate to avoid the high cost it brings with growth. Here’s a short test to see where you are on the scale.
The Test
- Do you have at least 2 versions of the same form and have difficulty getting your team to use the right one?
- Do you let your sales reps come up with their own method to manage leads?
- Do you only hear of a deal once it’s been signed?
- Does your staff complain of too much “admin” or “overhead” time?
- Do you have an employee that manages docs and spreadsheets regularly?
- Do clients complain that their expressed needs were not met or items were forgotten?
- When a sales rep departs, is their little hope of finding, not to mention working his in progress deals?
- Does your sales manager have little visibility into your sales pipeline (i.e. accounts, deal size, win rate, discounting)
- Is there little historical data available without significant manual labor?
- Do you often have to search through numerous docs and emails for account related info?
Each ‘yes’ answer on this list is shaving hundreds of dollars from your profitability for each employee!
The flexibility of these tools is very helpful at times, especially when doing one-off tasks or exploring a process. However, when you are looking to grow and add on additional resources as needed, this flexibility puts too much creativity into the hands of each person and leads to an organization headache with lots of confusion. Especially if the situation isn’t changed before the next growth spurt.
The worst time to change is when potential customers are knocking down your doors.
The Solution
Most businesses make the decision to move away from this flexibility toward a manageable system when they are small and want to grow. Profitable growth is very challenging in general and without a simple, consistent system to manage the increase of very important information, it can be stunted.
My recommendation to any business that answered ‘yes’ to at least one question above is to consider starting with Salesforce.com Group Edition. With a free 7 day trial and just $8 or so per user per month for up to five users, you can see quickly the benefits of having a common system for all your team.
As a Digital Coach, I leverage Basecamp in my business and coach others to do so as well. It helps managers better manage and everyone executes better because they know what is expected by when in a simple, easy to understand fashion.
One of the underused elements of Basecamp is it’s ability to render tables for columnar data. I used this when detailing out field, page layout, and formula changes prior to implementing them in Salesforce so they can all be seen at a glance and updated in a Writeboard before ever hitting the Salesforce.com admin portal.
Basecamp renders visual tables very well with the help of Textile.
However, there are many other reasons tables are generally useful. One example is sorting by a specific column. You cannot do this in Basecamp but you can in OpenOffice Calc or Excel. However, if it was easy to go back and forth between them then using the best of each when needed would be feasible. This is what I will be illustrating.
I prefer the former so this tip will be using OpenOffice.
I want to create a table in Basecamp but rather than create it as text and insert the pipe (”|”) symbols, etc. as I go, I start with a new Calc doc and drop in my column headings and fill in the rows.
OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet
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During both of my last two online coaching sessions, my client has asked me about the way I have setup my own web browser, Firefox.
Specifically, they wanted to know how I could have over 20 open Tabs at once and still remain sane. The ability to have multiple pages in your browser be seen as Tabs instead of unique windows has been in Firefox for a few years and came to Internet Explorer and Safari more recently. Each Tab indicates a unique web page and with all of the various on-demand apps, sites, and pages I make use of, having 20 open pages seems to be the rule nowadays, not the exception.
Tree Style Tab Add-On for Firefox
I am one of those people who “get’s nervous” — my words — when I have many things open and cannot easily discern or navigate them. This is why I moved to the Mac and this is why prior to this Add-On I would only have as many Tabs as I could horizontally stack and still read, usually about 4-7, depending on page titles.
So, try this in your Firefox and let me know how it helps you.
Tree Style Tab Add-On for Firefox.
Additionally, here are a few additional tips for Firefox:
