Yep! It’s exactly what you think! We’ve spent a few quid and got some T shirts printed for the team. We’ve been working hard over the winter months. Summer is here so why not do a little “unconventional marketing” while we’re sat in the beer garden celebrating our upcoming second phase of Beta trials.

So, if you spot us out and about, please come over and say ‘Hi’… and just incase you’re feeling extra nice, mine’s a ‘Brains SA’!

Guess what! We’re even thinking of getting some T’s in for our friends. So if you fancy ‘being our friend’, drop a line to hello(at)woosabi.com or even sign-up to our Beta user list. Limited number of spots available.

http://infotech.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-2901611,flstry-1.cms

Interesting article from The Times of India - Small’s big biz: Microsoft’s new goal 9 Feb 2008, 1041 hrs IST,TNN

A couple of extracts below, it could be argued, demonstrate that Bill G + Microsoft still do not see as their priority or focus the majority of UK SMEs (and the world’s SMEs??) who employ 10 employees or less. Thank goodness there are CRM products, including Woosabi.com, that offer SMEs affordable CRM and Business Management Systems that specifically aim at helping the vast majority of SMEs.

Extracts:

“Bill Gates stepped on the stage to flag off the IT giant’s biggest ever mid-market drive aimed at prizing open the new and yet unexplored markets of small and medium businesses for Microsoft’s new products.”

“Mr Gates, Microsoft’s chairman and chief software architect, took the floor…….his CEO, Steve Ballmer, minced no words when he told the ‘Business Summit’ that the company was “looking at huge revenue growth from the mid-market customers.” All those who employed 50 to 1,000 employees and spent anything from $20,000 to $1m a year on IT were the company’s targets.

Yet another interesting article from Forrester.com

http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,44115,00.html

In summary - my view - acceptable, workable, usable CRM systems a must!! for Business users; CRM must……….

be easy on the eye but different (nice design problem for you designer crew out there!)

be understandable immediately - what goes where, what does what and how

be fit for purpose - just get the job done

be flexible enough for New Start Ups to grow and develop to multi-user CRM

We surveyed 74 business and technology decision-makers and influencers to discover their strengths and weaknesses compared to 15 customer relationship management (CRM) technology infrastructure best practices. We found that adopting best practices is a major challenge for many organizations. About one-third say their customer-facing applications lack an intuitive look and feel and easy navigation. Nearly 40% give a similar poor evaluation to their customer-facing applications not being highly configurable. And more than 40% evaluate their applications as poor/below average in terms of strong workflow capability. Robust customer-facing processes are impossible to design and implement without a sound technology infrastructure.

An interesting survey from Forrester Consultancy.

Summary? Purely my view -

CRM is a growing priority for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

A business can spend loadsa dosh on a CRM system - but what a waste if the CRM is not “right” for the business

CRM must fit with business needs - this survey prioritizes the needs of 260 companies as an example (no surprises for the Woo Team)

http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,44179,00.html

January 10, 2008
CRM Best Practices Adoption
by William Band
with Sharyn C. Leaver, Mary Ann Rogan

Organizations continue to spend heavily on customer relationship management (CRM) — $11 billion annually by 2010 — to grow the top line, improve the customer experience, and boost the productivity of customer-facing workers. To better understand how enterprises can get the most value from this investment, we surveyed 260 business and technology decision-makers and influencers to discover their strengths and weaknesses in adopting 11 sets of CRM capabilities consisting of 150 best practices. We found that adopting CRM best practices is a big challenge for many organizations. A significant percentage of the executives surveyed evaluate their capabilities to be poor/below average for all categories: 1) marketing — 37%; 2) customer analytics — 36%; 3) customer service — 35%; 4) indirect sales — 33%; 5) customer data management — 31%; 6) eCommerce — 30%; 7) customer strategy — 25%; technology infrastructure — 23%; 9) field service — 22%; 10) people management — 20%; and 11) direct sales — 17%. Disappointment with CRM is usually the result of poorly conceived strategies that lack a laser focus on improving a specific set of business capabilities to increase revenues or reduce costs.

sources:

The Times, London 14th April 2008, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article

Importance of SMEs to the UK:

4.3m SMEs, 97% employ less than 20 people, 12m people work in SME sector - 500, 000 SME New Start Ups Every Year!

Vulnerability of SMEs to cash flow problems caused by customer late Invoice payments:

Over 10% of SMEs collapse due to late or non-payment of invoices

Mutual Opportunities

A great opportunity for Woosabi to enter this SME Market but equally a great opportunity for SMEs to use Woosabi to help maintain and grow their businesses while controlling cash flow through Woosabi’s built-in Invoice Management system

Nice little “quote” from Nancy of The New York Times

Simple Software Solutions From Those Who’ve Been There
By HEATHER CLANCY
Published: September 26, 2007

“Small businesses need something other than watered-down versions of applications designed for much larger companies by executives and developers who have never been entrepreneurs themselves”.

Square Peg, Round Hole?! http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/business/smallbusiness

$9billion Blimey Charlie!

This CRM Online’ll never catch on!!

From a New York Times article Feb 13th 2008

See if you can spot the deliberate mistake in the second paragraph…….

“Analysts and industry observers appeared split on whether a rumor that Salesforce.com has approached Oracle about an $8.9 billion deal to sell itself to Larry Ellison’s firm may become a reality.

Some said a deal could be attractive for Salesforce given that the company, which sells so-called on-demand software as a service over the Internet, faces mounting competition from Microsoft and SAP, as well as from Oracle itself”

Dew spottit?………….

Well done……yep, “Salesforce mounting competition”….. omitted Woosabi.com!!!!!

Each time I get on to Woosabi now I get more and more excited. At first it was great to see all the hard work take shape but now I login to my account and Woosabi is doing all the hard work for me.

My ‘top tool’ at the moment is the ‘Dashboad quick notes’ I’m able to make notes during a call that are safe and secure and in a click have them converted in to jobs, contacts etc. And best of all with zero distraction to the work I was performing before the call.

With the dashboard and affiliate partnering strategies in mind I read this discussion in interactive media magazine, NMA
on the wider applications of dashboard widgets.

Have a read: Widgets.

http://www.ireland.com/search/?rm=listresults&filter=datedesc&keywords=crm

(…) at last SageCRM.com, the software-as-a-service version of the popular customer relationship management software, is now available in Ireland. Although built and managed by the Sage Global team in Dublin (…) p

Published: Fri 01 February 2008 - The Irish Times - Finance

Athough based in Wales, UK - with a name like O’Sullivan, I still have a “soft spot” for the Emerald Isle! But I think anyone who takes the stereo typical “soft spot” view of Ireland and of its people and economy is definitely looking through “sentimental, rose-tinted glasses”.

The investment by SageCRM.com in Ireland not only shows the Irish awareness of the importance of ICT (esp CRM) to its economy, it also demonstrates that the Irish Govt (http://www.entemp.ie/enterprise/stateaid/regional.htm) encourages ICT investment in a way, it could be argued, that is more positively aggressive and enticing for potential and new SMEs (covering most, if not all, of the bases required by new start ups) than most political regional development programmes based in the UK. Is it any wonder that the Irish are leading the way in ICT and CRM (saas)…vive la Celtic Tiger!!

In my book one of the major perks of working as a creative freelancer is that i can sit at my work station all day surrounded with books, magazines and colour samples slurping my steaming hot mug of tea with iTunes playing my fav songs, with no office politics or guilt for tapping a foot to the beat - bliss! 

Good music helps me, and I have a sound choice depending on the type of work i need to get done. If it’s proposal writing my taste is classical, research and initial concepts calls for a little jazzy swing. This week I’m setting typefaces for some print work and my soundtrack this week is the distinctive guitar picking techniques of Newton Faulkner.

On route to a meeting which tunes motivate you to be at your best?
Does your SoHo have a specific soundtrack? Share your comments and lets discover the music that powers your business.

Read the full article here: How music Affects Us and Why music Therapy Promotes Health