CRM Hunt

As a team grows the needs for organized reporting & documenting rises higher than ever before, adding more work and less time in hand it’s a great deal of challenge to find a solution that works in a team environment. Now adding multi-platform workplace with mixture of PCs and Macs, the ad-hoc workflow becomes a disaster.

At dots & lines we’ve been looking for a suiting CRM for about a month now.

Our requirements:

• Contacts Management with E-mail client integration
• Calendars & Event Notes(calls, meetings, etc…)
• Leads, Prospects, and Opportunities Management
• Tasks & Project Handling & Reporting
• File repository

Being a Web Consultancy firm, first thing comes in one’s mind is, well, it has to be online, you know, the religion. But that was to an aim. No IT work, no Storage problems to be handled at our end, and best of all accessible through a Browser, no brainer out there. But we still evaluated that choice. The downsides of online apps are:

• unnecessary traffic & Imagine sharing a file in the same office would require a round trip to a server in the cloud and back
• the limitations in Filesize in uploads(it’s really a headache using another app for file handling and uploads)

But then again, it’s online, so it’s fun and natural to us.

Evaluating our choices, note that we’re looking for a subcription based service where we do not need to install any application nor in office or on our online servers.

So the obvious HighRise came first, since it is in the same circle of our interests, but then it has to be working side by side with BaseCamp for it to form a minimal CRM. It’s 37Signals thingy that made us first think of it, the developer mind.

But then thinking about the users who will be using these apps, not so geeky and not so all jazzed up with whatever the Blogosphere knows, Sales people who want to sell. So we tried out SalesForce, being it the dominant subsription based CRM (Credibility in the Enterprise world). We tested the app for about a month with the demo versions, not so bad, with a few tweaks it could become something that we could customize. Neat! We had options, unlike BaseCamp & Highrise.

While we’re still on the looks, I just remembered Microsoft’s Dynamics; Hosted Solutions, and they’ve got their CRM ported there too, now that’s an important one to check, waiting for the trial version to be enabled to us. Since I looked at the Enterprise Market(don’t get me wrong, these solutions are for SMBs too but by the Enterprise leaders), even SAP has an on-demand CRM service, getting interesting. We’re still in the looks, had a good experience with a CRM of choice?

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Spam CVs n’ Wrong Cover Letters

Why are Web agencies always mistaken with IT firms?

Here’s the latest Spam CV in my inbox:

Dear Sirs,
I would like to apply for an Engineering position at your company.
I have chosen your company because of the international exposure, the variety of products and services your company provides and the continual innovations and new technologies your company is famous for.

I believe that I perfectly fit in your company as I already completed my studies in “Electrical Engineering” successfully and I got certificates in CCNA, CCNP BSCI and CCNP Attendance.
Furthermore I am working as a Field Engineer, Data communications and Network operations department at an internet services provider.

Don’t they read or find out about the website they e-mail?

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Yet another fake Prospect

A few months ago I posted about a number of Fake Prospect incidents where it was just new market entrants trying to Shop us at dots and lines. Shopping other businesses, well, that’s fine, but really, wasting their time is not. This time the fake prospect took the drill to another level.

The US and the UK

Man how much I hate hearing someone being proud for having served US or UK companies. It’s like a magic word for some people for them to think they’ll get the backstage pass. I would really like it if it was like well, “we helped firms in Seattle or Manchester. Okay not forgetting how the “The US” and the “The UK” are usually accompanied with eye brows up with a cool-wannabe look. Jus’ wanned to say this one more time.

Suckups

“We’ve heard so much about your Mobile Web service and heard good stuff about it, you guys rock”

And I started thinkin’ at that time, we have NDAs with the people we deploy Mobile solutions and for the agencies that we do Mobile Web consultancy, we actually work under their umbrella and private branding. Apart from that, our Mobile Web service has been given as a complementary solution to new websites that we’ve built so far. So where is all this coming from? Well, just a suckup effort.

While opening his briefcase, I noticed a folder with Mobile Web title on the cover, seemed like a research folder to me.

So he offers and talks about synergy and partnership, and straight away he’s like:

“How do you do it, I mean how do you manage the workflow? I mean we might be working together, can you tell me how you start a project and how you finish it, and could you please briefly tell me about how you charge and how much you charge?”

You know, you really know it when you can work with someone or not from the first five minutes of talk, and he/his business wasn’t our style. Now add the fact that you can actually catch the Fake Prospect in the first five minutes.

He gets fed up of me going round and round about it, so he decided to just ask his magic question: How profitable is it? How much resources does it take to get a Mobile Web department on in a company?

Some people give wrong answers in such situations, I just preferred not answering at all. Actually I did answer this one with “I’m still outlining a book I’m writing about it, when it’s done I’ll send you a copy, that’s if it was published, but wait, I don’t think I could actually include a market study in it, just technical stuff”. That’s the time he got fedup of me giving answers to unasked questions, I enjoyed that moment. The look on his face said “What a moron snob”.

It’s so easy to gather such information, if the person you meet is honest and doesn’t pretend to be a friend while shopping you. If he was honest and actually telling the truth, chances were that we’d like to really have people to work with and give some of our work to, for us to lift some overhead. It ain’t about not sharing, it’s about the way of approaching and making a business relation.

What usually happens is the fact that we at dots and lines are all young people so in most cases we’d be the youngest guys in the room, and that deceives the approachers who wanna easily shop us.

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Huge, yet lacking a Marketing department

Groups n’ Groups of companies under the same belt, 12 and more hours of work time for employees, everyone does everything, everyone has three to four business cards with different designations and representing different companies. And at the end of the day, when the word marketing gets flipped all that gets mentioned are Brochures, Booklets, and yet some more Cards.

Of course, we need a website too, nowadays everybody’s got one and we should too.

So you get enquiries and you and your agency have no clue what is needed, why? That’s because you have no brief sent to you but just a sentence mentioning a website or an online presence, either form an IT executive or some-do-everything guy.

From the first impression, you know that they want everything on a silver plate with zero effort/input. So you come up with all the possibilities that they could benefit from, flexin’ your muscles and stretching horizons for them. And once they’re happy, it’s all good and happening.

And when it’s done, all the creative, development, and planning goes out the window, why? The work flow, the people who have to follow up with the results can’t give it time, and they believe if it’s out there, it should just work, like that.

No Marketing department to follow up, let’s say at least one Marketing Executive or just whoever to see the results. Zip!

What’s sad is the fact that after months of work the work is just put aside and taken as a “we have that” kindda’ asset. Which is fine in most cases since we’ve done our part to the extent of our knowledge and experience and have been blessed with great profitability, but still.

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dots and lines is Hiring

It’s only five days away from celebrating our sixth month of operations at dots and lines. As a young and lively web-agency we’re expanding at our Abu Dhabi office and are in search for energetic, young, and challenging individuals who’d fight to “create” trends and lead in the web arena.

Web Producer

That’s right, a “web producer”, dots and lines is looking for a young web specialist who’s been having his/her hands dirty with:

• Information Architecture
• User Interface Design
• Site Build (XHTML/CSS/Javascript)
• Cross Browser/Platform Testing

We’d love to hire a Web Producer who’s in love with webly trends and everything digital. We ain’t raising the 2.0 tag out here. We ain’t asking for skills in certain software packages, we expect our web-producer to be out there and able to lead and make new ways of doing things, a free person.

If you are down with the drill and got your mind on your skills and your skills on your mind then send out your portfolio URL to jobs at dotsandlines dot com

If you know someone who you think is down for it, kindly inform, we’ll be extremely happy.

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4AM at Office

This quite reminds me of a sample trance song that used to come with Fruity Loops — Tranced @4AM. Seems like the first time I ever stay at office till this late. Feels really quite as all the neighbors have been gone 10 hours ago. Can’t think of anything but a worm bed with a soft pillow. A hot shower would do too.

Whether in college days or during freelancing staying up all night was a mastered habit, now, feels like a disease. A habit loved to have is now a disease and abnormality.

The plus side, you aint got no phone calls to attend to, nor emails that need your priority intention. Just you and the work. No distractions.

And you’d look zombie.

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On Salesmanship

One of the roles I ignored and thought will never be my job at any point is Sales, I always assumed and imagined myself a bad sales person, non-communicating in a business sense, thought I could only make it into technology and design talk. During the time we launched dots and lines ’till the day, many of those fears disappeared, my tech-talk got translated into business talk more often until I’ve reached to the point where I’m doing more of Account Servicing than Technical & Actual Web Work. A complete transition.

Working in a web-startup or better called a small-sized Web agency gets you doing more than just design/development. More of business development and more of phone calls than e-mails. More of face-to-face meetings than a hidden e-mail shot and an online instant-messaging session. More of traveling. More of moving and dynamism, less time in front of code, more in front of Word and Outlook. Less design blogs reading, more News and industry following.

The hot seat is no more your station seat, it’s the presentation seat that gets you sweating. Music is distracting when you’re thinking of a way to craft the proposal that sells, the same music could be inspiring while designing, you stop staying awake ’till late browsing new stuff and doing geeky work cuz you’re gonna’ have to meet a client at 9AM sharp!

And the most painful: You gotta’ shave everyday, you never know when a client’s gonna’ call for a meeting. Compare to time when you’re just a designer at your seat, disconnected from the rest of the first life. It’s really amusing thinking about such stuff, so not melting.

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Middle East and Web Awards

At the end of every working day and for the matter, every night before we blink the last time before we wake up the next day, all that it ends up with is how our works are standing up, and how fairly measured and appreciated. The sense of being ranked and recognized, that is. Whenever I think about it, who’s the judge anyways?

The worst experience is when you participate in a contest and get no feedback what so ever, add to that, yo don’t even get an invitation to the ceremony you participated in given that every entry gets two seats!

Even though you are a participant who did not win, who wasn’t invited to the show too, you still anticipate the winners and wanna’ know who was actually better than you in deserving to win. So you see the list and come to an interesting find out: Only Big Brands’ websites won!(we were new back then, had projects only for small businesses)

Is it all about the lights, cameras and actions? Just a ballroom story? So frustrating!

I’m so keen to know the judges, the score book, and real feedbacks on the awards given. Not keen, burning to find out the details. A little transparency? Well Hello?!

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Sticky Communications pt1

“Information has a sticky nature”, one of the few statements I remember from my final year “Technology Management” subject at college. It’s brighter and brighter everyday that goes by and it keeps getting clear to me how right that statement was.

Another touchy and tangible aspect of communications and information delivery is “Credibility”. Sticky nature of Information added to Credibility measures makes a combination of skewed and distorted messages. Leading to what I call “Sticky Communications”.

Deals could be sealed by Credibility, Proposals get accepted and signed based on the right information, yet the Sticky Communications keep businesses moving forward.

One of the toughest issues to face while running a startup is maintaining credibility, telling your story right, showing your edges, but the questions that pop into minds are: Why should I believe you? Is this another new sales person on the block? Well, everybody’s outsourcing, are you another services sales shop? But, who are you?

So we keep on talk-shop. And talk is cheap. So the time comes to prove what you’ve been claiming by showing current/past work. No matter how good the work is, the image is “New”, your portraying a “Freshy”, a “Junior” in the business block. Which in special cases is a plus. When it comes to Account servicing and heavy clients, that means you are not credible, nor capable of keeping up. Not forgetting sustainability and reliability.

You’re great, I love your ideas, your people sound so fine, but how can I assure that you’re going to exist next year?

Passing the Credibility trap can be tricky, hard to beat and tiring. Time, Achievements, Testimonials & Salesmanship gets it closer to happening until it happens. So you’re the hot guy with hot services out there, how can you Inform? It’s sticky! Hard to transmit new services, new models of servicing and new solutions.

It’s obvious, obvious and ordinary needs are justified and understood. Thus, not that sticky. When it comes to complicated solutions and new services that are being injected to a market or a need has been calling for, that’s the time when stickiness of Information stands out and shows how big of an obstacle it is.

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Playing the Prospect

Hi, My name is “abc” from “xyz” company and we are interested in your Web services. “Can you please tell me how much you charge for one, two, and three?”, the fake prospect says. So you say that every project is different and we have to check out your needs deeply and see what we can do for you first, and then we’ll get down to the figures. So you go and spend so much of your time preparing a good proposal preceded by a questioner, you spend time on it. The next day you hear the same name, but wait, this time he is the Business Development Manager of another Web agency.

On the twist

It’s really unethical to do that so. We at dots & lines take such incidents very seriously. We’ve been having fake prospect for exactly six times since the time of launching. So, six web agencies have tried to exploit our open end communication channels. First through e-mail, then telephone, and yet the worst, I even arranged a meeting and met one of them.

Is that a way of researching a market? Cuz it definitely is a dirty one. Among the six incident of Fake Prospects we gave up really valuable information to two of them, information such as what we could do for their projects and what exactly it takes to make it happen, be it Financially or Timely. We gave up our time, energy, and thoughts, not forgetting that being a start-up Time is really expensive.

Exploiting the Good

So you try to make it easy for the real clients to get in touch as quick as possible, as easiest as possible, but these Jerks have to come down and try to waste your time.

That’s fraud!

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