The South China Morning Post recently ran a series of my articles in the Job Coach section.

Thanks muchly to the editor for inviting me to contribute to the column!

These articles focus on some popular Team Productivity issues.

Enjoy!

• Mapping Stimulates Creative Processes
• Efficiency is Now Top Priority for Firms
• Don’t Allow Email to Take Over Your Life

Filed under: Address Booking, Business Organising, Email, Focus, HR Buzz, Info-Overload, Mind Mapping, Team Productivity | No Comments »

If there’s one question I’m asked at every party, it’s this: “So what’s the best way to organise my business cards?” The questioner usually presents me with a pick list along these lines:

A. by first name
B. by last name
C. by company name
D. by event where we met

My reply? It’s E: All of the above…and then some. Then my new friend asks, “So how on earth do I do that?”

The answer is simple: Get the information into a database and bin the cards. Voila – searchable, sortable business card data – and no more clutter!

If you’re doing things right, the point of the business card is to enable you to continue the relationship you started when someone handed it to you. This means you need to be able to access all the information and meaning associated with the card’s owner at the touch of a button.

What good are those piles of old business cards doing you where they are? What opportunities have you missed while deciding whether it’s better to buy a little card caddy with a lid or a book with pockets for each card? It’s about keeping in touch, not about storage.

Make sense? Good. Now here’s what to do:

1.  The next time you look at a rubber-banded bunch of business cards on your desk, open up a new Excel spreadsheet.

2.  Across the top of the sheet, type headings for the basic information you see on the card: First name, Last Name, Company Name, Mailing Address, Mobile Number, Website…and so on.

3.  Now add some columns for other things that pop into your head when you’re looking at the cards, such as:

• Mailing Lists (the type of communication you’d like to send this person: Christmas Cards, Monthly Newsletter,
  Useful Articles, Promotional Information, and so on)
• Interest Areas (i.e. which of your services or products the person seemed interested in)
• Lead Source (where you met this person)
• Notes (other details you’d like to remember)

4.  Get somebody to help you enter the data from your cards into your spreadsheet, and discuss questions or enhancements that may come up the first few times information is entered. Tweak your spreadsheet design as you go, but whatever you do, keep it simple!! You must create a system that is quick and easy to use on a regular basis.

5.  Select a list management and communication application that will help you quickly and easily send emails, letters, flyers or postcards to people matching your criteria for a given mailout. Upload your spreadsheet and from that moment onwards, enter all new business card data directly into your new system.

6.  Devise a keep-in-touch routine and implement it, dedicating your time to the purpose and style of the message rather than letting your energy be drained by business-card-guilt or tedious data entry.

7.  Enjoy developing the relationships you’ve created instead of fretting over how to organise those business cards.

(…and don’t forget to back things up regularly! See the post Backing up Your Life Online for more on this.)

Need help with some of these steps?

Contact us to arrange a complimentary consultation with our database organisation and mass communications experts.

Filed under: Address Booking, Business Organising | No Comments »

For the last few weeks I have had some problems synchronising my Treo with my laptop, so I have not had all my telephone numbers with me, nor have I had my appointments from my computer up-to-date and with me at all times.

Here are some of the silly, expensive, time-consuming and embarrassing things I’ve done to cope while out and about:

• Called directory assistance multiple times to get numbers I need
• Called our office manager multiple times to get numbers I need
• Successfully logged into our online contact database through the web browser in my Treo (after a few tries and wracking my brain to remember the password), only to be told the page was too big to be displayed. Called my husband, asked him to log into the database to get the numbers I need (our office was closed).
• Told people our appointments were tentative until I could get back to my computer, then had to remember to email and confirm
• Called people to double-check the time and place of our meeting

This is crazy…and I’m supposed to know better! How many minutes of my own time have I wasted? How many minutes of other people’s time have I wasted? How many times did I skip making a call to move something forward because it was just too much trouble to get the number? How many first impressions have I squandered?

I can’t afford to lose this much time or that many opportunities…so I’d had enough and decided to fix the problem.

Total # of minutes it actually took to permanently fix the problems with synchronising: 46

It really goes without saying that I wish I’d done this sooner.

Now it’s your turn…

What persistent, time-consuming problem could you solve (or get solved by someone else if you don’t have the time/tech skills, etc.) in less than 46 minutes that will improve your ability to function more effectively on a day-to-day basis? What can you sort out that will ultimately save you time, save money or improve your ability to make money?

I urge you to go for it – do it TODAY. Set a timer to see just how few minutes it actually takes. Then enjoy the rewards of this effort!

Filed under: Address Booking, Protecting Your Stuff, Sharing Information | No Comments »

There’s a new word on my family’s lips these days: "Zoho."…as in, “Mom, are ya working on Zoho again?” or, “Sounds like Zoho was just what you needed honey…are you ready to watch our movie yet?” I’m happy to say that the addiction is not mine alone; all my biz-owning friends who I’ve shared with are emailing me straight away saying, “Ohmigosh – I have been looking for something like this forever!!” It’s happening to all of us: we’re getting Zoho-fied, one by one.

So what’s Zoho? It’s Address Booking (contact management) for your business. Well, that’s how it begins anyway…and then you discover everything else the ZohoCRM can do…and then you stumble upon all the other Zoho apps…and then you’re good and hooked. In less than a month of converting our team’s Outlook Contacts, Excel sales management system and a few Google docs bits and bobs to the ZohoCRM, I can measure the improvement in company systems in cold hard cash. In other words, we’ve just closed a bunch of new business that we had sort of forgotten was even in our pipeline!

Our team has been reviewing CRM options for a few months, and we’re pleased as punch with our choice. To save you a bit of time, here’s a look at the features we love and a few we’re hoping for:

Why we went with Zoho instead of others

• It’s web-based, i.e. accessible by our consultants and support staff scattered around Hong Kong as well as our VA in Canada.
• It’s free for 3 users. Additional users are only US$12/month.
• It’s not software. Your membership gives you all the benefits of ongoing development.
• It’s super flexible. How many custom fields does a girl need? Well, it’s a bit like shoes, isn’t it…
• It’s really hard to muck things up. You can undo just about anything…even your data imports!
• The tutorials and how-to Wikis are comprehensive and actually do what they’re meant to do (tell you how-to…)
• The support is incredible. Ask a question and get a friendly, spot-on answer from my new best friends Adam or Gopal within hours – usually within minutes. If they’re not sure what on earth you’re trying to ask (ahem), they’ll jump onto a desktop sharing session to have a look…using Zoho Meeting, of course!

My Zoho Wish List

• Click-through tracking on the Zoho mass emails (hard to beat Constant Contact for this feature)
• Mass email autoresponders and surveys (a la iContact)

I think my family is happy I have now ticked ‘Zoho set-up’ off my to-do list. Little do they know that I’m about to start playing with the marketing automation features! Maybe I won’t mention that just yet.

Filed under: Address Booking, Business Organising | 4 Comments »

In my last post on Address Booking I mentioned the versatility of an online contact manager like Plaxo. If you decide to go this route, there are a couple things to consider:

1. Are you comfortable with your data being stored by a third party? Be sure you are happy with the security set-up.
2. Will you regularly backup your data in case said third party ever goes under?

We use a number of web-based apps to manage personal and business contacts, finances, and photos. In all cases we chose to go with reputable and well established service providers (Plaxo, Zoho, QuickBooks, Kodak). In all cases we also do a monthly backup (export) of all our data, just to be sure we have our own copy on an external hard drive or DVD (or both, for the pix!).

The protection/backup notion also works nicely in reverse: if anything ever happened to the set of data at home/at the office, we’d have duplicates online. Over the top? Well, we have lived through the fall of the Soviet Union in Central Asia, the Great Hanshin Earthquake in Japan and SARS in Hong Kong, so we’re a wee bit cautious about these things. It all kinda happens in an instant…!

Filed under: Address Booking, Protecting Your Stuff | No Comments »