March 2009 - Posts

• Hotlist Column Views: Sorting Your Hotlist Based On User-defined Fields.

  In this blog posting, I’m going to talk about column setups in the Hotlist window. We all know that you can do it for the Opportunities and the Address Book windows, but some people don’t know that it exists for the Hotlist window as well. This can be very helpful when trying to organize your hotlist based on a user-defined field. But before I get into an example, let me fill you in on some background information. March/April is always a fun time for me because of one reason: the drive to the NHL playoffs, also known as the Stretch Drive. I’m a big hockey fan. I like all aspects of the sport. One thing I’m big on is hockey pools. I’m currently sitting in #3 in the company hockey pool. One of my dreams was to be a player agent. Well, this is one of my dreams after my mom enrolled me in math class rather than hockey. The NHL off season with all the player movement and politics has always been thrilling. Who gets sent where, who has the most cap space, and so on. So imagine that you are a player agent and you have a roster of players who all have different needs during the year. And sometimes some things take precedence over others. In my hockey example, a suspension appeal might be at the top of your list and getting offers from other teams can wait until later. Or maybe you want to always make sure your franchise players are grouped together so that they don’t fall through the cracks. One way of doing this is creating a column view for your hotlist and sorting by a field. You can include user-defined fields and hotlist information in the column view. So you can sort by type of player and it will it group all the types of players together making it easier to see all of the tasks you have for specific types of players.   Of course this can port over to the business world. If you have a user-defined field called “big lead” for example and want to bend over backwards and do everything right away for these “big lead” companies, then this would be a good way of organizing your hotlist. Posted Mar 26 2009, 03:22 PM by wleung with no comments

• Showing Some Love to Other Mobile Devices

  I recently picked up an iPhone, and I love it. Don't get me wrong, I think Blackberries are great. But I love my iPhone. The big news on Tuesday was the news of the iPhone 3.0 OS. So after dreaming about all the possibilities that peer-to-peer bluetooth connectivity and copy-and-paste will bring (Gizmodo published an excellent summary of some of the great features that are coming in OS 3.0 ), I think I'm going to take the time to show some love to the iPhone and show you something cool that you can do with your iPhone (or any other mobile device with an internet browser) and Maximizer Wireless Access. I remember getting a pep-talk a while back from somebody about mobile CRM. They laid out the following scenario: You are meeting with a potential customer and the meeting goes well. They want to see some more documentation and a draft contract. What do you do? You whip out your (BlackBerry/iPhone/Windows Mobile Device/some newer incarnations of a Palm device) find the document and send an e-mail instantly to your potential client who is standing/sitting right in front of you. He quickly browses through the documents, signs the contract, and closes the deal. How great is that? Sooner or later, laptops will go the way of the abacus and many chiropractors will be out of a job because you will no longer have to awkwardly carry a 5 to 10 pound laptop on one shoulder and throw off your posture. But that's another discussion for another day... or click here. So here's how you would do this: If you have it setup, browse to your Wireless Access portal. Sorry Entrepreneur customers, this is only available in Group, Professional, and Enterprise editions of Maximizer. Go to the Company Library. This is generally where your fliers, promotional documentation, and generic contracts are stored, or should I say, should be stored. Select the documents you want to email out. In the Actions drop down, select Email Document, and click GO. Fill in who to send the email to, write as much or as little of an email that you want, and hit send. Voila. Deal is one step closer to being closed and you are one step closer to cashing in that commission cheque. Posted Mar 19 2009, 04:24 PM by wleung with no comments

• Selecting all the Contacts, Opportunities, Partners, or Customer Service cases from a group of contacts.

  Usually, when I look at my Address Book, I like looking at the names of companies only. To see the contacts associated with the company, I look at the contacts following window. In some circumstances, I need to find contacts within companies and display them in the main Address Book window.  For example, this would be useful if I want to send a Christmas card to all the contacts from a specific couple of companies, or after I do a search on a company specific user-defined field and I want to select all the contacts from the results. To do this, do your search and select all the company's from which you want to select the contacts from. Then go to search, Retrieve Contacts. This area of the search menu is pretty handy. You can search for Contacts, Opportunities, Partners, and Customer Service cases associated with the companies that you have selected in the Address Book window. Now this is not very useful if you only have one entry that is selected in the Address book because you can get the same information from the following windows. Where this becomes really useful is if you have multiple entries selected.  You can get some valuable metrics just by looking at all the Opportunities, Partners, or Customer Service cases associated with specific companies.  For example, you can see what kind of Customer Service cases are created for all companies in the East region or you can see what kind of Opportunities are present for Companies who only deal in a specific type of Wine.   Posted Mar 10 2009, 10:48 AM by wleung with 2 comment(s)