“Everything went great on the call and they wanted a proposal. So, once we hung up we put together an agreement and emailed it over. The client had to head out that day and we haven’t been able to track them down since. That was two weeks ago and this happens all the time.”

Life today is filled with interruptions and many get in the way of completing even what we are committed to and enthusiastic about.

One might consider overcoming these interruptions the duty of all professionals but assisting your clients in overcoming them with you will delivery higher revenues and satisfaction from your clients.

The key window I am focusing on here is the time between the verbal commitment and then actual project agreement that leads to a check.

In the above scenario, the addition of an Electronic Signature or eSignature application would likely avoid ending the conversation before the deal is signed. For example, while still on the phone my client could spend 2 minutes customizing a document and have it sent to the client via email. Whether in the office or on their iPhone or Blackberry, they could review it with the benefit of the sales rep on the phone and eSign it while still on the phone.

Now you just need the check but that’s a separate issue – you got the deal signed by providing a convenient and accommodating method of turning verbal commitment into a written confirmation.

Also, you can add eSignature capabilities to any workflow or document using MS Word, PDF, or any image. You don’t need CRM or any sophisticated system.

My readers can try it for free with the service I use: www.EchoSign.com.

I provide 15 minutes of free advice for first time callers to prove my value. Schedule it here.

To your success.

jc

The issue relates to disclosures. In a real estate transaction you have lots of disclosures but they are written and reviewed prior to or during the visit to the Escrow office.

What happens when many of these need to be conveyed over the phone and then archived for future reference? What if they also need to include order specific information such as pricing or quantity information? Additionally, how do you insure that updating the compliance script in the future won’t overwrite previously saved versions that are only valid if kept as they were read originally?

The last requirement is the most important and challenging one to implement, especially in light of custom information to be included within the text to be read to the client.

The first option many would choose here is to use text formulas which work great for simple statements that will have minimal or insignificant changes in the future. However, since changes to formulas are global, they must be changed with care as they will automatically update previous records and leave no trace since formula fields currently can’t be included in Field History. This will work for some but certainly not all as legal language will have to change over time without overwriting data on previous records.

The best option is to separate all the necessary information into simple descriptions that have custom, order specific data that use formulas such as:

 "Your order today, December 12, 2010, will be for $58,434.92."

and more detailed disclaimers and proscriptions that use field default values such as:

"You understand that the purchase of physical precious metals does 
not pay dividends, interest, or earned income and may lose value."

Salesforce.com Field Default Value

By using field default values for the key aspects that are read to the client, you avoid the issue of overwriting by field updating as changing the field default value only affects future records, not previous ones. The formula values will update previous records but since they are simple and descriptive when done correctly, it will be insignificant.

I provide 15 minutes of free advice for first time callers to prove my value. Schedule it here.

Happy new year.

The Test

1. Do you have at least 2 versions of the same form and have difficulty getting your team to use the right one?
2. Do you let your sales reps come up with their own method to manage leads?
3. Do you only hear of a deal once it’s been signed?
4. Does your staff complain of too much “admin” or “overhead” time?
5. Do you have an employee that manages docs and spreadsheets regularly?
6. Do clients complain that their expressed needs were not met or items were forgotten?
7. When a sales rep departs, is their little hope of finding, not to mention working his in progress deals?
8. Does your sales manager have little visibility into your sales pipeline (i.e. accounts, deal size, win rate, discounting)
9. Is there little historical data available without significant manual labor?
10. 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.

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

When I am ready, I simply copy the text I have entered into the spreadsheet and paste it into JEdit, a free java based text editor. The great part about JEdit is you can create custom Macros that do common manipulations to text. In this case, I am replacing the tabs automatically created from my copy/paste operation with pipes (“|”) and new lines with pipe and new line combinations. Here is the macro so you can quickly create your own. My Mac stores them in /Users/joncline/.jedit/macros/, your computer may have a different location.


textArea.goToPrevLine(false);
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("\\t");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString(" | ");
SearchAndReplace.setBeanShellReplace(false);
SearchAndReplace.setIgnoreCase(true);
SearchAndReplace.setRegexp(true);
SearchAndReplace.setSearchFileSet(new CurrentBufferSet());
SearchAndReplace.replaceAll(view);
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("\\n");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString(" |\\n| ");
SearchAndReplace.setBeanShellReplace(false);
SearchAndReplace.setIgnoreCase(true);
SearchAndReplace.setRegexp(true);
SearchAndReplace.setSearchFileSet(new CurrentBufferSet());
SearchAndReplace.replaceAll(view);


So, I paste this now tab separated value (TSV) text block into Jedit:

Field Type Values (CSV) Note Landing
MonthlyUnits number(8) - What is their average monthly unit volume per month? Account
MonthlyUnitSales number(8) - What is their average monthly sales? Account
SeasonalBusiness boolean yes, no From Lead Questionnaire Form Account


Run the macro on it to turn it into this:
(you may have to add the leading or trailing pipe symbol depending whether you had line breaks before or after your tab)


| Field | Type | Values (CSV) | Note | Landing |
| MonthlyUnits | number(8) | - | What is their average monthly unit volume per month? | Account |
| MonthlyUnitSales | number(8) | - | What is their average monthly sales? | Account |
| SeasonalBusiness | boolean | yes, no | From Lead Questionnaire Form | Account |


I can now paste this code directly into any Basecamp Message, Writeboard, ToDo/Milestone Chat, etc. to get a table.

BONUS: What if I want to edit my Basecamp table again or add more fields? Must I do it in basecamp now?

This is a great question and since Basecamp is collaborative, I would expect this. The method is actually quite simple if you are using a Writeboard, which you should be since you are collaborating on the source data, not just commenting on it (read: Message). Instead of opening the spreadsheet and typing in your columns and rows, you simply go to your Writeboard, click the Export button at the top and view the HTML version.

Now, simply copy the columns and rows you want from the HTML file and paste them into your spreadsheet. You may get a confirmation menu to confirm the columns and rows were selected accurately but you quickly are back into the powerful spreadsheet interface for sorting, additional columns, reordering, etc.

Once finished, simply follow the directions above and move the data back into Basecamp from TSV text again.

Keep working together, and that doesn’t mean using “Track Changes” in your favorite Office app!

Your Digital Coach,

P.S.
If you don’t want to do any of this and your data is not confidential, you might consider just embedding a public Google Spreadsheet into your Message, Writeboard, etc. and you can just modify it as needed.

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:

• By default, the Tab bar will be organized horizontally at the top like Firefox does without it. Change it to organize them vertically to get the productivity gain.
• When you have multiple tabs open, the first 10 are attached to keyboard shortcuts CTRL/+0 through CTRL/+9 so you can move between the tabs quickly.
• When you want to navigate Tabs in context rather than by number, you can use CTRL-TAB and CTRL-SHIFT-TAB for next Tab and previous Tab respectively.
• Now that you can handle many pages as Tabs at a glance, you might consider bookmarking an entire set of pages as Tabs such as “Shopping” instead of just Amazon.com or WhatSheBuys.com.