Donna's Business Services, LLC

Your Gal Friday - "Let My Fingers Do Your Work!"

Blog

Best CRMs for 2019

by

(Partially written by Business News Daily)

As a successful Virtual Assistant for the last 19 years and also as a Business Owner, I have learned that a good CRM is priceless in order to run and GROW your Business.

For those of you who don’t know what the heck a CRM (Customer Relations Management) software is, it’s software like an online rolodex to “manage” your Clients and sales pipeline.

Successful companies do more than just find new customers, they maximize every interaction, with the customers they already have, too. Doing that requires more than just keeping track of names and basic contact information, though. It means some record keeping effort on the part of your customer-facing employees, and it also requires a database-driven application that records everything your sales people need to know to keep customers happy and most importantly, keep them buying. That’s where a customer relationship management (CRM) app comes in.

Often small to midsize businesses (SMBs) try to mirror CRM functionality with just a large and ever-growing spreadsheet. However, not only is CRM software easier to use than a spreadsheet, it’s what you’d expect if your contact list decided to evolve a brain. It records your customers contact information and remembers the details of your relationship and every interaction – whether by phone or email, and nowadays across other channels such as social media or even your customer help desk. This information is a gold mine of opportunity, letting you identify prospects for up-sell or cross-sell, convert existing customers to new products or services, target new marketing, or even track invoices. Choosing the right CRM software for your business can dramatically improve your team’s collaboration and productivity, increase sales, and heighten customer satisfaction.

Look at this list of the top 5 CRMs to use in 2019 by comparison (by Business News Daily):

1. Zoho CRM

Best Overall – ZOHO CRM. Cost: Free up to 10 users; $12 per user per month. Easy to implement, intuitive to use and inexpensive to adopt. ZOHO CRM is our 2019 Best overall CRM.

2. Salesforce CRM – Best for Small Business

Starts at $25 per month per user

Our 2019 award for Best CRM Software for Small Business goes to Salesforce, because it’s an established full-featured CRM that can meet the needs of even the largest businesses.

3. Hubspot CRM – Best for Very Small Business


We recommend HubSpot as our 2019 pick for the best CRM software for very small businesses. For independent contractors and owners of tiny businesses, this software offers an easy entry into the world of CRM solutions. The free version of HubSpot is a must-try for very small businesses, because in some cases, it may offer enough functionality to improve processes and organization at zero cost.

4. Sugar CRM – Best for Developers

Cost:  Starts at $40 per user, per month

SugarCRM is our 2019 choice for the Best Startup CRM Software. What started as an open source project in 2004 has grown into a leading customer relationship management solution with a reputation for excellent customer service and easy implementation.

5. Less Annoying CRM – Best Low Cost

Cost:  $10 per user, per month

Less Annoying CRM is our 2019 best pick for most affordable CRM software. With just one subscription tier of $10 per user per month, this approachable CRM takes the complexity and expense out of adopting a customer relationship management solution. A newcomer to the CRM scene and the smallest company on our best picks list, this solution lacks the bells and whistles the competition has, but also simplifies the implementation process.

We hope this sheds some light on what a CRM is and does to help YOUR Business GROW! Drop us a line if it has helped YOU! We would LOVE to hear from YOU!

To YOUR Business Growth,

Cheers!

Your Gal Friday,

Donna

How Can You Flex Your Business Gratitude?

by

 

As business owners, we’re normally told by the coaches and the gurus to focus on what’s going wrong—your website needs to be updated, your value proposition is too vague, your sales process is too complex—and on and on until you don’t have enough hours in the day to fix everything that’s broken. As business owners, we’re really good at identifying what’s going wrong and working to fix it.

 

But how much time do we spend thinking about what’s going right? With the season of gratitude and thanksgiving upon us, it’s the perfect time to stop beating ourselves up over what’s falling short and spend some time thinking about where we’re overflowing.

 

Drop a line to tell me: what are you excellent at? What strokes of good luck have you had this year? What one client or customer are you so grateful for?

 

Of course it isn’t healthy for your business to ignore problems and issues in the hope that they’ll go away. But in that same vein, it isn’t healthy to ignore your wins and blessings without acknowledging and celebrating them. This isn’t just a feel-good exercise; knowing where your business excels is an integral part of crafting your strategy going forward. When you know what you’re good at, you can plan to spend more time doing it; everything else can likely be outsourced.

 

That’s what I’m grateful for as a virtual business assistant. Every day I get to help business owners get their to-do lists checked off while they thrive doing the things they do best.

 

What are you grateful for as a business owner? What was your biggest win this year?

Email me at [email protected] and let me know!

God bless.

Virtually yours,

 

Donna

 

 

 

Happy Fall – 3 Outlook Tips for YOUR Inbox!

by

In August, we focused on using your Gmail inbox for increased productivity, so this month we’re going to focus on the Outlook users! (These tips are intended for Outlook 365 users, but some will still apply to older versions.)

 

I’m often asked to help overwhelmed employees and business owners keep on top of their email inboxes as a virtual assistant, so here are a few tips and tricks that will clear the chaos and bring peace of mind, giving you more time and energy to do what you do best.

 

  1. Turn emails into To Do tasks. Many folks are already using their inboxes as a de-facto To Do list by keeping piles and piles of emails meant to remind them to do something important. Instead of letting tasks get buried under new messages, just turn them into Tasks! Simply drag the email and drop it onto the Tasks list icon, which looks like a little clipboard. This will allow you to assign a due date and a time for a reminder. So, for example, if you receive an email regarding a project that is due EOB on Friday, you can set the due date for Friday and make sure that you get a reminder after lunch on Thursday.
  2. Take advantage of the Clean Up function. While viewing your inbox, just click the Clean Up button under the Home tab. What this does is move all duplicate messages that are part of a long thread into the Trash. The feature is quite sophisticated—it won’t delete emails with attachments. This feature is especially handy if you’ve been out of office for some time, and have missed out on long email threads.
  3. Filter your messages using the Rules function. The easiest way to manage more email is to reduce the amount of email you receive in the first place. Unsubscribing can be dicey, as some companies subscribe you to multiple lists without giving you any clear way to unsub from them all at once. What you can do instead is to simply filter these messages out by creating a Rule that automatically trashes all emails from a particular sender, for example. You can also use this feature to create urgent To Do’s out of every emails your boss sends you with a particular subject line, or to archive emails that don’t need any action but need to be kept as a record.

 

Hopefully, these tips will help you create a little more harmony and mental space at work. What other kind of help could you use with your business? Get in touch to let me know!

Virtually yours,

Donna

Gmail Inbox Maintenance

by

 

 

Welcome to my August Newsletter Blog!

As the last beautiful days of summer draw to a close, I’d like to share some tips to keep you organized and spare your sanity by managing your Gmail inbox.

Providing administrative help and keeping email organized is one of the many services that I offer to keep your business running smoothly and cost-effectively, so I’m going to share with you my favorite tips for keeping a Gmail inbox clean and organized. These are some of the same features and tricks that the Gmail power users use!

  1. Use the Archive feature

I recommend you don’t delete any email between you and a client—it’s good business practice to be able to go back and reread any details of a deal you’ve worked out, the deliverables, what you were charging in the past, and the dates that different conversations took place. But, keeping such emails in your inbox as a record is a waste of space and will turn it into a cluttered mess. That’s where the Archive feature comes in. It removes the email from your inbox, but keeps it saved and hidden, fully searchable should you ever need it.

  1. Try a subscription management system like Unroll.me

I can’t recommend this service enough. It’s free to use, and it searches your inbox for subscriptions that you probably don’t even know you have—many companies these days hold on to your email and enroll you in multiple email campaigns, meaning that you can’t just unsubscribe from one, you have to unsubscribe from them all to stop getting their emails! Unroll.me is good for rooting out little tricks like that. It also has the invaluable “Rollup” feature that will bundle together any emails that you choose into a single once-daily email. This is great if you have to keep on top of certain notifications—for example, if you’re buying a house and have subscribed to see new listings, your Rollup can take dozens of emails and display them for you in one tidy message.

  1. Canned Responses

This advanced feature is invaluable for anyone who communicates with clients or subcontractors regularly. If you find yourself typing the same things over and over again to different people, you can create a standard message right in your inbox and drop it in any time! For example, you can created a Canned Response that says, “Thank you for our phone call, it was a pleasure chatting with you. Would you like to follow up with a meeting next week?” This streamlines your business practices and saves you enormous amounts of time in the long run. Here is a good guide from Art of Hustle on how to enable the Canned Responses feature.

Enjoy the rest of your summer, and be sure to get in touch if you want to discuss using Virtual Assistant services to free up your valuable time and keep your inbox tidy.

God Bless,

Virtually yours,

Donna