Leopard Catalyst Blog
CRM Software for Small Business
05 Dec 07 by Dan
Being small in business can have major advantages. It can take a long time to change the direction of a large ship, but a small boat can move about with agility and speed.
Traditionally, CRM software has been complicated, inflexible and it could only turn like a large ship. Traditional methods of software development have helped to build over-complicated CRM systems. Large corporations, with their difficulty in changing direction, have embraced CRM philosophies that are in line with their existing culture. The big CRM vendors need their own large corporations to develop such over-complicated software, so they speak the same language as their large customers. Because of this, CRM vendors have mainly focused on selling CRM systems to large corporations.
The CRM scene has been operating like this for a long time, and during this time, the small and medium guys have missed out. However, they don't miss using the same software. Why would a small, agile boat try to use big, over complex navigation systems designed for large ships? They wouldn't (it'd probably weigh enough to sink their boat!). So small business carried on as usual, and CRM vendors carried on developing complex and inflexible software for complex and inflexible organisational cultures.
I have worked with small and medium businesses for many years, and I've always enjoyed working in a culture that is agile and flexible. I focus quite a bit on the customer, and if I see a business missing customer needs, I'm grieved. If a business is missing a customer, then the customer is unhappy because they don't get to enjoy the whizz-bang widget or service that the business is selling. The business is ultimately unhappy because their business is not growing as they would like.
That's why Leopard CRM is all about transforming small and medium business. Our CRM software enhances the strengths that small and medium businesses already posess. Leopard CRM is designed to be agile and fast, in development, and in every day use. The purpose is to make small and medium businesses faster and more adaptable to challenges. With help from Leopard CRM, businesses can react to marketing opportunities faster and with more accuracy.
This kind of enhanced agility makes a happy business with happy customers, and that's what we ultimately aim to deliver through Leopard CRM.
Find out more about small business CRM software.
Make First, Second, Third Impressions Count
01 Dec 07 by Dan
Making first impressions count is an important part of any business. Customers want to have confidence in you and your business. The impression that you make when you first meet a customer can go a long way, and it can really give the relationship the best chance at succeeding for both parties.
There are many ways to improve your first impression: branding, logos, marketing messages, personal presentation and other visual or verbal communications. I believe that effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can also help. "How?" I hear you say? Well, please allow me to explain.
One of the purposes of CRM is that it's designed to be a knowledge resource for your business, particularly in regards to customer information. Knowing as much as possible about a customer before meeting with them helps in making a good first impression. You'll have an understanding about the customer and why you are there. This means a great start to the relationship.
The second, third, fourth, etc, impressions are just as important and the staple RM feature, tracking your customer history, will really improve the ongoing relationships with your customers.
Another important first impression may not be a first impression with your business. If you change account managers for a customer, they will need to make a great first impression on the customer when they first meet. If a new account manager can review the customer's history within your customer relationship management system, they already know how they can best serve the customer when they first meet. If your customer history is not able to be retrieved easily, or if it is not organised in a central location, a new account manager could already be at a disadvantage. Having a searchable CRM system could help ensure that customers continue a great relationship with your business, which means that sales continue!
Impressions count - Leopard CRM can help to make sure they equal increased sales for your business.
Find out more about small business CRM software.
Transform Your Business
01 Dec 07 by Dan
As you may have guessed from the rest of the Leopard CRM website, we're all about transformation. We know that there are thousands of businesses out there who are feeling the pinch. The pinch comes when you've grown to a point that your current systems and procedures can't support you anymore. We believe that customer relationship management (CRM) is a tool that can be used to help ease the burdens through the growth of a business.
When a business starts, the founder will bring in whatever methods are efficient enough and affordable enough to enable the job to be done. At this stage, the system may just be knowledge kept in the founder's heads. At some point however, some other system is needed when staff come on board. An obvious one is a job description, which now needs attention because you need to comminicate to a person starting in a newly created position what is expected of them.
Then as the business puts on more staff, knowedge about customers, jobs, products, and other relationships need to be shared. This gets more complex at an exponential rate as more staff are hired and the business grows.
This is where Information Technology can step in and take some of the burden. Files like spreadsheets and similar documents can be shared fairly easily with a basic IT network. However, it can be difficult when the information you need is held within the files, but all you have is a filename. As before, this type of system relies on the general contents of the files being known to people. Unfortunately, as with the last example, this scales only so far. It can be very difficult on new staff as it can take some time to learn where everything is.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is an ideal IT system to be implemented at this time of business growth. A CRM system like Leopard CRM gives you a central location for all your customer, product, jobs, projects, sales and marketing history. Leopard CRM has powerful searching capabilities, so new staff who are not quite sure where to look can find things quickly. When a customer calls on you, you'll be able to quickly find their history with a few clicks of the mouse, instead of having to find information from multiple sources.
Leopard CRM can actually grow your business as well as bring efficiency and speed. Leopard CRM has the ability to track your sales and marketing effectiveness which means you can devote business resources where they bring the most return.
Staff can share information easily with Leopard CRM through the shared calendar, and customer history no longer needs to be stored in people's brains. Instead it can be instantly accessible to everyone.
Support staff such as administration, accounts and finance, and technical support can also feel like they're a part of the action because they can also see what is happening within the business. This can bring some important changes to your organisational culture because you bring empowerment to staff who traditionally make have only stuck to what they know. Now however, with a CRM software system, they can be proactive by serving customers or internal staff when they see what needs to be done. They no longer need to be asked, as they now have the opportunity to act by being made knowledgeable of what's happening at the time.
There are many different ways that Leopard CRM can transform your business, and we're keen to help you with all of them.
Find out more about small business CRM software.
Leopard CRM 1.4.0.0 Released
26 Nov 07 by Dan
Leopard CRM 1.4.0.0 has been released today. All hosted customers will be upgraded over the course of this week. Changes include:
Advanced Search
- Add operators: Does not exist, Does not contain, Exists
- Ability to exclude search relationships (not just restrict/only include)
- "Restrict" changed to "only include" - now the opposite of "exclude"
- Add include/exclude by marketing campaign
- Add include/exclude by referral source
Company
- Ability to add note to company
- Duplicate company addresses/phone numbers are not shown on company view screen
Person
- Show date created/updated
Import Data
- Less geeky language on the import test screen
- Show person was imported on the person screen
Sales
- Alert to user when entering a note and a sales cycle is active
- When adding a sale for a person, redirect back to person screen
Project Management
- Attach files to a project
- Put project dates on calendar
- Correctly show all/historical projects
Marketing
- Attach files and description
Bug Fixes
- Error when searching for email contains a full stop
- Error when importing an exported file
- Error when searching for "@" in an email address
- Error when searching with # character
- Inconsistent results when searching with boolean "or" with an "and" in advanced search
- Error when deleting a calendar item from the view or edit calendar item screen
- Error when no search results on super search
- Calendar reminders not working
- Error when viewing a project task
- Last note incorrect on company screen (person list)
- Error when assigning to event and not selecting an event on the event selection screen
We're really excited to see this release go out as it makes Leopard CRM even easier to use.
Find out more about small business CRM software.
Power Marketing with CRM Software
25 Nov 07 by Dan
Using customer relationship management software within your business really gives you some power in your marketing. The old way of marketing is to send the same marketing message to all of your leads or customers. The new way of marketing is to customise each message being spoken to your customers and leads depending on what you know about them.
Customers these days are savvy and smart, they are bombarded with all kinds of marketing messages throughout a single day. How are you going to communicate to them effectively? How can you make sure they take notice of you?
Well, with a CRM system, you can hold important information about your customers and leads. As each customer interacts with your business, your CRM system can keep a record of what was spoken about or what they were looking for. You can then use this information when marketing to your customers.
Let's use a simple example. One of the services that you provide to your customers is technical support for your product. When a customer gets in contact with you, Leopard CRM tracks whether the conversation was tech support related. Over a year, your business probably handled hundreds, maybe thousands of technical support related queries.
Your business is expanding, and so you decide to add a section to your website that features a knowledge base for customers as a resource when they need some technical help. Having this as a first point of call for customers helps to lower the number of technical support queries your staff need to handle.
Now, this is a great marketing opportunity. Customers love to know that you're looking after them, and building them a knowledge base is just the type of thing that you want them all to know about.
The old way of marketing would be to draft an email or letter and send out the one email to all of your customers. All of your customers would then know about your new gift to them, but you can do better than that! If you're using a customer relationship management system like Leopard CRM, you have information about your customers that you can use to let tham know that not only are you looking after them, but that you know them and you're listening to them.
Using the new way of marketing, you could customise each message you send to your customers based on their history with your business. For customers who have called for technical support in the last year, you could say to them:
"Thank you for calling us this year for technical support. We have listened carefully to you and our other customers, and whilst doing this, we have realised that some customers are calling with the same question! We thought that a great way to help our customers more would be to create an online knowledge base for these questions. This means that you can use this to get your questions answered sooner in the future!"
Leopard CRM helps you to create a marketing campaign focusing on these particular customers through its Advanced Search functionality. Here is an example search to find all the customers who have called for technical support throughout the year:
This gives you a targeted marketing message to your existing customers. It lets them know that you're really paying attention to them, and that you value their business and their time.
Of course, you still want your other customers to know about your great gift to them:
"It's fantastic that you haven't needed to call us for technical support. We'd love to hear about any problems that you have that you may not have told us about, we're always looking to improve our products. If you ever do need technical support in the future, we have created an online knowledge base so that you can get an answer to your question as fast as possible. We know your time is valuable, so we want to make sure that we help you get back on track as soon as possible."
Leopard CRM makes it easy to identify these customers also through the Advanced Search:
A powerful CRM system can really enhance your relationship with your customers. Take a look through the site to see how easy it is to use Leopard CRM and have it really transform your business. Please get in touch with us if you have any questions, we're always happy to help.
Find out more about small business CRM software.
An Overview of Leopard CRM History
23 Nov 07 by Dan
Leopard CRM has existed in some shape of form since the year 2000. We thought that it would be great to blog about the history of the software so that everyone can get an idea of the philosophy behind the product.
I intend to write about important moments in Leopard CRM history in more detail. However, here is a brief timeline:
- 2000 - The very first Leopard CRM version is released.
- 2001 - Leopard CRM is revamped with faster and more flexible database server technology.
- 2002 - Leopard CRM gains traction with users.
- 2003 - Leopard CRM is expanded in scope to automate more business processes.
- 2004 - Leopard CRM is ported to the Windows Server platform and the source code is made Open Source.
- 2004-2005 - Some maintenance versions of Leopard CRM are released, but no new development work.
- June 2006 - An opportunity presents itself where Leopard CRM could be resurrected!
- June 2006 - Leopard Software decides to begin development on an entirely new customer relationship management system.
- July 2006 - The first version (v1.0) of the new Leopard CRM is released.
- August 2006 - v1.1.0 of Leopard CRM is released.
- November 2006 - v1.2.0 of Leopard CRM is released.
- January 2007 - v1.2.2 of Leopard CRM is released.
- March 2007 - v1.3.0 of Leopard CRM is released.
- August 2007 - v1.3.1 of Leopard CRM is released.
- November 2007 - v1.4.0 of Leopard CRM is released.
Find out more about small business CRM software.
Leopard CRM Website Released
20 Oct 07 by Dan
Leopard Software are proud to announce the release of the Leopard CRM website. Leopard CRM is an easy to use customer relationship management software system for small business.
Leopard CRM has been actively developed since June 2006 and after plenty of development, and testing from our existing customers, we've decided that it is ready for the rest of the world!
We'll be adding further enhancements to this website in the near future, so stay tuned!
Find out more about small business CRM software.
