WooHoo

Well managed and prepared teams are ready to attack but can also defend

June 24th, 2010

To be topical, I thought it might be appropriate to include a football analogy in this blog. The World Cup is well underway in South Africa – most of the best teams in the world are battling it out on the pitch to win the FIFA World Cup Trophy.

Months of meticulous planning have taken place by the individual managers to make sure they select the best players, implement the most appropriate training, choose the best backroom team, book hotels etc etc. Lots and lots of information needed to be collected, analysed and actioned before they even got on the plane to South Africa.

Its very similar in many respects to starting and running a business. Before you begin trading you need to research the market, identify potential customers and your competition, liaisie with suppliers, find premises and then most importantly putting systems and process in place to keep on top of everything to effectively manage this information, maintain customer and competitor information, invoice customers, communicate and market to them and have monitor your expenses

Thats a lot of work and will require a huge investment of your time and available resources.

We know that Woosabi can help you. Our simple to use, highly effective software enable you to do all of this from one place. Its been designed and built especially for small and start up businesses and includes all the functions you will need to help you get your venture up and running and many more.

It’s only costs £7.50 per month, is used daily by businesses throughout the UK, endorsed by busienss enterprise agencies and most importantly is a proven business tool.

We love it, our customers think its great and we look forward to welcoming you as a user.

Posted in About Us, Business, CRM, Misc, News, PR, Selling, Woosabi.com | No Comments »

Simple CRM software – You tell us what you need and we’ll do the rest.

April 23rd, 2010

Good afternoon.

We’re being asked by an increasing number of enquirers about what information we need from them for us to prepare a non-obligatory proposal to build a unique simple CRM software solution.

I’ve included below as an example using a live project we dealt with a short while ago. (Client details have been removed for professional reasons.)

Example of a Customer Query/Specification/Quote Request

Woosabi CRM

Proposal for

A N Other Company Ltd

16th April 2010

Customer Brief:

Marketing Manager, Donna W, has described the main need for their simple CRM system solution to provide the following:

Utilise current contact database which are split in to several excel spreadsheets relating to contact type
Provide seamless ‘contact us’ website widget that will capture website visitors and insert them into the simple CRM system database
Contact Widget to email staff (one or more) notifying of new lead – probably of type web-lead
Simple CRM system Dashboard to provide a clear and immediate view of current lead to customer activity
Marketing Mailmerge to automate the creation of multiple letters to distribute to recipients within the simple CRM system database
Marketing Mailmerge to provide the simple creation and delivery of email newsletters & post campaigns – recording recipients
CRM to automatically profile the simple CRM system database and list contacts that are in need of contact (e.g. it’s been more than 3 months)
Simple Leadflow reporting to show the conversion from leads to sales (and what products were bought)
Indexing and searching of contacts to provide flexibility for different contact types with industries (e.g. Private,Trade,Trade/Architects, etc)
Provision for 3 users at present, with one administrator
Top level screens of the simple CRM system database must be quick and simple as team are doing multiple jobs in a busy business and have no time for wrestling with software
Need to provide this process as soon as possible
Provide support and capability for additional requirements over time.

Proposed Solution:

A 3 user custom solution that eliminates ‘learning’
Service Level Agreement for support and maintenance which can be altered for your support needs increase or decrease
Woosabi Phone Support team available 9-5 (e.g. How do I do this? You can just call us)
Script based styleable web contact widget – this will be a single line of code for the designer to place on screen
Import of existing contacts and setup of any custom fields that may be required
Focus on main custom dashboard that always display the following (i.e. without having to search)
- New web-leads which require responding to, this will be created automatically from the web contact widget
- Existing contacts which have not had any contact for a certain period of time (changeable per contact)
- Current marketing activity (i.e. email or postal newsletters, mailmerge, etc) and conversion figures
- Marketing area for the creation and sending of letter based or email based newsletters
- Leadflow area showing progression leads, prospects and customers tracked with activity notes by staff
- Outstanding tasks – can be visible, shared and assigned between whole team for items that require action

Interested? Do you think our simple CRM systems will be of benefit to your business? Please get in touch and let us know your acquirements and we will do our best to help. hello@woosabi.com

Wishing you a great weekend and lets hope the sunshine continues!

Posted in About Us, Business, CRM, Development, Marketing, News, Technology, Woosabi.com | No Comments »

Cloud based CRM solutions not affected by volcanic ash or parameters.

April 19th, 2010

As of Spring 2010 we are only making Woosabi CRM available through our professional services team (Tony, Matt, Eds & Dan – you can email any of us directly for more information @woosabi.com!). The reason for this relates to our development and the feedback we’ve collected throughout our three year journey (together with some 400 businesses so far, yes, we’ve been going now for 3 years!)

Cloud computing

We want to address what we see as a growing problem regarding the perceived problems with having your data “somewhere” in “cloud-based” CRM solutions, and the ability to extend beyond to the products core functions when your business needs something else. What happens if these companies and products just disappear overnight, what about your business?

Also, let’s be honest, it’s also because there are now so many “web based CRM” products available, many of them are quite brilliant (such as Salesforce, Highrise, et al) and we want to differentiate ourselves even further. Trying to offer great support to your users with a very low price means that it’s all about the bottom line and that’s when signups just become figures on a spreadsheet and corners inevitably get cut. These leads to a high churn rate where the company spends more time trying to get new signups than it does making sure the existing ones are happy.

That’s where we come in, we set up Woosabi to solve one big problem in particular and that was to make CRM safe and simple for businesses to engage with. And that is still our number 1 priority: To provide a great service for your business that doesn’t represent a huge risk by using it. In all sincerity, we want to add value to your business, not risk, or not bother at all.

Woosabi Professional – We want to work with you!

Woosabi Professional is based on our powerful online CRM framework, only now we get the chance to work with you in a more direct way. We can make sure that Woosabi runs on your servers for example, so if we suddenly disappear, your tools and data do not. We can build bespoke applications that are modelled solely on your business and no-one else’s. We can also be on the end of the phone when you have a problem.

We’re really excited to be able to work more closely with you, and you hope you will be too! Our team have been developing web-based applications for business for over 15 years, so you’re in safe hands!

Ok, that’s all great but how much does it cost?

Well everyone’s different, but our core professional product will start from £250.00. If you drop us a line with a little description of your business and what you really need Woosabi to help with, we’ll give you an honest and detailed reply, usually the same day! Interested? Let’s get going then, we’re on skype: woocrew, we’re on email: hello@woosabi.com and twitter: @woosabitronic & @woosabi.

Woosabi Professional is only available to UK based customers at the moment.

We look forward to hearing from you.

The Woosabi team

Posted in About Us, Business, CRM, Development, Marketing, Media, Misc, News, PR, Product Launch, Woosabi.com | 1 Comment »

Willy Wonkas Golden Ticket – Woosabi’s Cream Envelopes

April 16th, 2010

Your invitation for a simple CRM system

Have you received your invitation to work with Woosabi yet? Would you welcome the opportunity to meet with us to find out more about our simple CRM system and learn more about how our business software can help you?

We’ve started to contact companies primarily in and around the South Wales area that we know we can help. We’re sending letters and emails to them to introduce Woosabi and encourage them to reply and arrange a meeting.

The online marketing function is allowing us to write the letters, input the contact details, monitor their preferences and the date we mail or email and then remind us to make the follow up phone call to book a meeting.

We’ve been using our new Leadflow function to monitor and track the progress of our new contacts as they develop from leads to prospects to customers. All of the team can see who is working with which of our customers to avoid duplication or confusion. Very simple but effective CRM that can be adapted to serve any industry.

We’ve also been posting our blogs onto our Linkedin group page, Facebook page and linking to the Twitter accounts. Again, these are functions available to our customers to do themselves for their own business. There is still some scepticism about the benefits social media provides for business but believe us – our last blog generated a lot of interest and drove a lot of traffic to our site.

Are you involved in software development and do you have clients who you think might benefit from Woosabi – get in otuch if this is the case because we are expanding our network of resellers and there are quite a few ways we can work together the benefit of you and your clients – hello@woosabi.com

Something else you might be reassured to know – Woosabi is secure and private. The only people who can see your data are those you choose. And with all your data stored by us on secure servers and backed up regularly, even if your laptop were to be lost or stolen your data is safe. The secure servers are stored off-site and volcanic ash proof!

We hope you have a very pleasant weekend and if you’re planning to fly anywhere – spend the time having a look at Woosabi, your own CRM system if you have one and then get in touch on Monday to request more information about our simple CRM software that can be tailored to suit all of your operational requirements.

Posted in Business, CRM, Development, Marketing, News, PR, Product Launch, Selling, Woosabi.com | No Comments »

Web Based CRM – what the bloody hell is this all about?

April 8th, 2010

Web based CRM, simple CRM, Small Business CRM – what on earth does this mean? We pride ourselves on being user friendly, easy to use so we thought it might be a good idea to explain our thoughts about CRM.

First things first – CRM or in full Customer Relationship Management. To read an external definition click here to view the Wikipedia entry.

Management by Exception

Customer Relationship Management is as the title suggests managing relationships with your customers. It helps you make notes about your customers, communicate with them, understand their product/service requirements, purchasing patterns, organisational structure, organise meetings with them, prompt you to get in touch with them – develop a relationship and enable you to provide a better customer service amongst many other functions.

Advanced CRM software like Woosabi (we like to refer to it as CRM++) is proactive and has been designed to prompt you into action by the method that works best for you be it SMS text, email or for a fee we’ll even mail you reports in the post (joke).

Good CRM software will connect/integrate and communicate with the majority of all the software you might use. Instead of having to log into your Microsoft Outlook account to read and send your emails, then log into an accountancy package to send invoices and chase payments, then a sales database to obtain client details and then email or send a letter to them to arrange a meeting before entering the details into your diary/planner or calendar – Woosabi can provide all of the above in one, easy to use and access package.

Your company logo, colours and styles can also be incorporated using Woosabi Professional!

You can also manage the access for individual users, send messages to your Woosabi account from your mobile phone, tweet to your Twitter account and even play Pac Man!

Not only that but because it is online, you can access your account from wherever you are in the world 24/7 as long as you have internet access.

Would you like to find out how our CRM software might be of benefit to your company? please send us an email and we will our best to be of assistance: hello@woosabi.com.

Customer Relationship Management, don’t let it scare you. Embrace it and find out for yourself how Woosabi, a simple crm, a web based crm, a small business crm can be of benefit to you and your business.

Posted in Business, CRM, Development, Marketing, Misc, News, Web 2.0, Woosabi.com | No Comments »

Woosabi Professional – great response. Tell us more so we can help you.

March 29th, 2010

Wow, thanks for the great response to our recent blogs about Woosabi Professional.It seems that there are a lots of companies and individuals who are very interested in finding out more about how we can customise the Woosabi CRM engine for their specific benefit.

To further entice you to contact us to find out more we can tell you about some of the new features Woosabi Professional will offer:

* Customised invoices – let us know how you want them to look and our designers will create beautiful looking invoices just for you.

* Customised interface screens – need something extra on a page (or something taken away) no problem

* Branded screens – we can remove the Woosabi logo of the product and use your own logo, great for when your clients login so they have a seamless experience for your brand

* Online help desk – allows you and/or your clients to create new work & support items from a safe public interface that integrates into your Woosabi CRM

* Tighter social network & sms integration – for those clients that want to connect to other protocols for their data

* Automated email integration with desktop clients like Outlook.

To help us to help you, when you contact us, please will you include a brief overview about what systems you currently use, how they intergrate and what you want Woosabi to do for you.Do you have some examples of the customisation you’re after? – if so, please describe or send these.

The more info you provide us with the better. When we contact you, we will already have a knowledge about what we can do for you.

Please send your initial enquiry to hello@woosabi.com.

Thanks and we look forward to working with you.

Posted in About Us, Business, CRM, Design, Development, Geekery, Marketing, Media, Misc, News, PR, Product Launch, Selling, Technology, Web 2.0, Woosabi.com | 1 Comment »

Woosabi Professional

March 23rd, 2010

We have been asked by a few of our clients to use our Woosabi engine to build customised software for their specific business needs and requirements.

Due to the flexibility of the Woosabi software and the fantastic knowledge of our technical team we have delivered a range of software packages and found that we are incredibly competitive on price but most importantly we are able to deliver all the features requested.

How does it work?

Well, initially a member of our team will visit the customer to undertake a fact find. (We are limiting the trial area to South Wales at the moment). After finding out more about your company and what you need, we will then prepare a proposal outlining what we can do, how long it will take to build and develop and our fee.

To date, we have worked with an art gallery, an online residential property publication, a firm of accountants, a firm of private detectives, a marketing consultancy and a few others – we can adapt Woosabi for just about any industry.

The bespoke software has included advanced versions of the Woosabi functions and additional applications including:

job tracking & alerts for overdue items

- shared calendars

- billing, recurring invoices & alerts for overdue invoices

- online help desk

- job workflow/process management

- automated email integrated into workflow

- customer relationship management & monitoring

- mailing list generation

- sales lead tracking

- email marketing

- website content management

- 2 way sms (e.g. create new notes within the system from a text message)

- Inventory management

- Social network integration – twitter & facebook

We have also developed applications enabling accountancy packages like Sage to access invoicing and expenses data so both the client and company accountant can have 24 hour access to real time figures – helping companies keep a very close eye on their business performance. The application includes cashflow forecasts, profit and loss, balance sheets – all great stuff and essential for businesses.

Do you think Woosabi could help your business? if so, please get in touch: hello@woosabi.com – we’d welcome an opportunity to meet with you.

Posted in About Us, Business, CRM, Development, Geekery, Marketing, News, Product Launch, Technology, Woosabi.com | No Comments »

March 11th, 2010

The technical brains behind Woosabi have been hard at work developing additional software and add-ons that enable data entered by our users to be accesses by some of the leading accountancy software packages.

This is work in progress but a nationwide chain of accountants have already expressed a strong interest in using this new version of Woosabi. The new extra dimension will open up a whole new market for us to target and when the accountants and bookkeepers find out that we have made allowances in our costings to reward them for introductions well, we expect to receive a lot more enquiries.

Sage and Wasabi - a combination working well

Sage and Woosabi – essential business software stuffed full of great benefits for business start-ups!

So, if you are an accountant or a bookkeepers and would like to find out more, email hello@woosabi.com and we will be happy to help out.

Many thanks

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Time Management – an essential skill for most business owners

February 19th, 2010

You have the skills and knowledge about the products and services you provide. You have plenty of ideas about how you can grow and develop your business but have you got the time to communicate and implement these?

Many small business owners start up their business brimming with energy, enthusiasm and are full of great ideas. I have likened it in the past to standing on the top board of a diving platform and looking over the edge at the water below. It’s going to be an exhilarating experience as you leap from the board but how are you going to enter the water – smoothly without injury to yourself or out of shape, belly first leaving you winded and uncomfortable?

Managing your time is a key element to making sure you enter the water as smoothly as possible. As you fly through the air you spend the time adjusting your balance and body position.

When starting your own business, it is essential that you make sure you have put systems in place to help you manage your time efficiently. There are so many tasks to do, people to meet, forms to complete etc it can be difficult to keep on top of things.

Signing up to Woosabi can help you manage your time and enable you to focus on growing and developing your business. The simple to use business functions we provide as part of the package will integrate with each other help you to MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS.

We are still offering a FREE NON-OBLIGATORY 30 DAY TRIAL and a monthly fee of just £7.50 per account (includes up to 3 members).

Interested? Visit www.woosabi.com today to find out more about how Woosabi can help you and your business.

Posted in Misc | No Comments »

Has your business roared back to life after the festive break or has the cold weather given you a stuttering start?

January 13th, 2010

The first two weeks of 2010 have certainly been interesting. Some of us (in the UK) have had extended holidays due to the snow and ridiculous Health&Safety rules that cause schools to close whenever the S word is mentioned, ( I probably should add here that this is a personal opinion and nothing to do with Woosabi!) .

It is very frustrating for many start up companies and small business owners who have spent the Christmas period planning for 2010, catching up with their admin and recharging their batteries to launch into the New Year with aplomb.

Hopefully with the milder weather taking hold, the business world will start waking up from its hibernation and we can all start moving forward again (hopefully on more solid ground).

Did you carry out any of the suggestions we made during the break? Is the ‘Contacts’ section of your Woosabi account now fully updated with accurate customer/supplier records and information? Have you set your business objectives and reminders to phone customers at least once a month? Most importantly, have you changed the VAT amount in the invoices section back to 17.5%?

The heating has been on in Woosabi HQ during the break and further development work has been completed. We’ve already had a few more meetings with parties interested in working with us and there are a couple more due to take place shortly.

We’re very keen to strike up relationships with private and public sector organisations responsible for providing business support to start-ups. If you are involved in this sector, we would welcome an opportunity to speak/meet with you.

On behalf of the Woosabi team, we wish you a healthy, happy and successful 2010.

Posted in Business, Marketing, Misc, News, PR, small business and freezing weather | No Comments »