Print Management Blog
Wed, 18 Mar 2009
Apologies to all those honorable software vendors out there, but we have had a few instances lately where prospects have understood enough about CRM to think it would be good to join their new system to what they already have in other parts of their business, but have had a problem.
Although most suppliers are great and honest, the problem can come when you speak to the existing system supplier about what's involved to link them to a new system.
Some responses have been "It's expensive to link systems together", "it's complicated and takes a long time" or even "It simply can't be done".
Usually these are all wrong. The issues are actually as follows:
- You are a business owner not a software tekky, so you don't know when you are being fed a line.
- Some vendors have a vested interest in you not using technology that they haven't got yet, because they worry they will lose you for their system as well.
- They would rather push you to their part developed technology and use you as a test bed. Stories like "We have CRM (for example) coming soon and can do you a great deal" which stops you thinking about whether their CRM does what you need and starts you thinking that all CRM does the same job. It doesn't.
- They see an opportunity to charge you over the top for simple work so make it sound complicated.
The reality is that if your sales and marketing system is web based - not PC or network based linked to the web - 99% of the time linkage is cheap and easy because web based systems are designed to link to PC based systems. Of course languages like XML are better, but in reality your only question for your existing systems is "can we get data into Excel or import data from Excel".
At worst, virtually all systems still use an old fashioned file language called .csv. If you can get files into Excel you can get them to and from other systems. The people supporting your other systems might make a charge for writing an import routine, but it's normally a few hundred pounds tops.
Anyone suffered from this?
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Fri, 06 Mar 2009
Like a shiny new car, or a delapidated old banger, you'd be surprised how much you are judged on your website. We all do it, who can honestly say that haven't checked out a few competing websites and thought, "hmmm, that looks better than mine", or (hopefuly) "thank god that's not ours"?
The value of a clean, attractive and informative website is paramount. They truly are worth their weight in cyber-gold. Not only is it a platform for which you can reach millions of people, but it is really the
FIRST thing
ANYONE will look at when they want to find about you or buy your products.
That's a pretty daunting thought. You could have all these people finding your site, and no one buying a thing.
So what do you really think about your website? Is it just another cost, an online catalogue to maintain.. OR is it an asset that produces leads and makes your processes more efficient?
In the current economic conditions the need to minimise your overheads and drive sales from both existing and new customers is higher than ever. Anything that does this has to be
A Good Thing.
Incase you were wondering, and incase you didn't know, we might be able to help.
No guarantees, we don't know your business (yet), but if you feel you might be wasting money because your website is doing nothing for your business, speak to our in house technical and design team for a quote on a Search Engine Optimised website which links directly to your sales and marketing databases.
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