Columns Visibility - Video Tutorial

Following the latest blog post regarding columns visibility, we now created a Video Tutorial to help you understand better what columns visibility is and how it can help you.
Watch the video below for a better understanding of the Columns Visibility Feature:

Columns Visibility - The New Zimplu CRM Feature

There are a lot of people who need information right away, and clicking on each contact/company from the list to view a specific information is time-consuming and not efficient for them. This need is specific to some kind of businesses, but we found out that there are a lot companies who use Zimplu and they asked us for this feature.

We have now implemented this feature, and from now on you will be able to select the fields that will show up as columns in your list of companies, contacts etc.

How does it actually work?

Lets say you select the company section, so the Companies List from your database will show up. In you Companies List you will see only 5 fields that we considered to be the most important: company name, email address, phone number, mobile phone number, and the owner of the company.

As you can see in the picture above, we added a new button, it looks like an eye. If you click the "eye", a new page will pop-up where you will be able to select the fields you want to see by simply dragging and dropping the field name from the Not Visible to Visible as shown in the picture below.

In this case, we added a new field to visible columns, the State field. If we save, and then we go back to our list of companies, we will now have the State column available, and we won't have to click the company in order to see where is that company from.

In case you made a mistake and you want to go back to the default settings, you can click on the Reset View to Default Settings on the top right corner.

You can remove fields from the Visible Columns anytime you wish in order to keep your CRM the way you want.

Note: If you make these changes as an administrator, it doesn't mean that they will apply to all of your users. Each user is free to make Zimplu show the information he considers to be the most relevant to the type of work he is doing.

This new feature is available for ALL sections in Zimplu CRM: companies, contacts, support tickets, or opportunities.

You Just Signed a Deal, What To Do Next in Zimplu CRM?

You just received a lead from the Marketing Department, you called, you met the prospect, and everything went well. In the end, you signed the contract and the new customer seems happy. Of course you wrote all the discussions in Zimplu CRM, and all the history is there for you and others to see.

But what do you do now? Every contract we sign has an expiration date, and the customer you just signed today must be happy after 1 or 2 years when he has to decide again. Zimplu CRM tasks help a lot reminding you to call contacts, send emails or any other activities you or your co-workers need to do. This feature will tell you when you're getting close to the contract expiration date, and it helps you make sure your customer stays yours.

Your staying in touch strategy
One of the biggest mistakes a salesman can make is focus too much on gaining new leads, new customers and completely forget about their existing customers. You always hear that gaining 1 new customer is 10 times more expensive than keeping a current customer, don't make that mistake, keep your customers close, find out what they think, how happy they are, and very important, find out if other competitors approached them.

Make sure you think about a "staying in touch strategy" for your customers, add a task to make a call after 2 weeks, another one after 3 months, another one after 9 months, and of course, a few weeks before the contract expiration date. Don't assume your customers are doing well, make sure of that, and never let your customer feel like he was just another one buying from you.

Major Change in the Plans and Pricing List

We decided to make a change in the Plans and Pricing which we believe will fit the needs of our customers better. Some may consider this as an advantage, and some may consider it a disadvantage, but when we usually make a change, we are looking to satisfy the general needs of the companies who use Zimplu CRM.

We thought a lot about this change, and we are sure that most of you will be happy with the new Plans and Pricing list. There has also been a lot of effort in making the payment method easy to use and to perfectly match PayPal, and taxes like VAT.

Plans and Pricing

What is the major difference?
As you can see in the image above, the Subscription has changed from paying for every user, every month, to paying an amount for up to 10 users and Storage Space.
We have also received a lot of requests to offer a price per year, as companies consider this a long term investment, and they want a lower price if they decide to stay longer. That is why we now have a Prepaid option for Companies who want pay for the whole year, which brings benefits like having 2 Months for Free.

Right now you can see the Plans and Pricing changes by selecting Plans and Billing option from the Settings section of your account.

As for the future, we are looking forward to adding more payment options besides PayPal.

See Your Companies On The Map with Zimplu

Zimplu CRM released a new feature which enables us to set the location of a Company or a Contact on the map. This is very useful if you want to have a view of how you are standing in contacting leads in certain regions, or it can give you an idea of where you have a strong influence and where you don't.
In the picture below we can see that we have a stronger influence on the west coast, but not so much on the east coast or south USA. This can give you an idea of where you should expand and where to invest more time and money.

How does it work?

We added a new field when you create a company or a contact. Street field is completely new and it is different from the Address field. It is not a mandatory field, but if you want to have the company/contact on the map and if you choose to fill the Street field, you will have to fill the Country and City field.

Once you filled these fields, you will find the location on the map. If you believe this slows you down, you can choose to Mark The Position On The Map by clicking the Mark position on the map button. Once you click it, you will be able to click on the map on the exact location you want.

Where do I see the companies on the map after I create them?

If you created the company and you marked the position on the map, you will be able to see it in the Reports section. If you go to Reports and you click on the Companies report (checking the With Map box will enable you to see the map), you will see all the companies on the map created within a specified period.

You can also click the companies/contacts on the map too, doing this will show you the contact details of the selected company.

If you are asking yourself what map is this, this is the Open Layers Map.

To make it easy for you, we created a video where we add a Company on the map, you can watch it below.

How Zimplu CRM helps you Avoid Unpleasant Situations

-Hi, I'm calling from ABC company, my name is XYZ, and I wanted to talk to you about one of our products.
-Hi, you just called me 3 hours ago, we already talked about what your company has to offer, remember?
-I'm not really sure we talked before.
-Sure we did, you said you are calling from ABC company, right?
.....

This is the kind of phone call that will embarrass your sales agents, and will make your company look bad in the eyes of your customers/prospects. This is one of the main reasons why sales managers start using a CRM system, they want to avoid their co-workers not knowing what others do and who did they talk to. It's like your left hand has no idea what your right hand does, so you lose control.

Zimplu CRM helps a lot avoiding these kind of situations. Every company, every contact has a history of all the discussions your co-workers had with them. By opening a company/contact page, you see all of the information regarding the discussions, something like a News Feed (very popular on Facebook).

However, you will find out that a lot of people are too lazy to read all the story, or they hurry too much, and they may miss some important facts while not doing that. They might not see that you made a task to contact them in the future at a certain date.

In order to avoid this, Zimplu offers you an option to follow that item. How does this work? When you follow a company for example, and someone else writes a note for that company or makes any kind of modification, you will get an email alert telling you that someone wrote something for a company your are following. If someone makes a mistake, you will know, and you might even have a chance to stop it.

To follow an item, you need to press the Follow activity for this item button. You will find a list of all the items you follow in My Account -> Followed Items and you can stop following any of them from there.

How to Manage Sales Pipeline using Zimplu Groups

The way you can group companies, contacts, opportunities, tasks, or opportunities in Zimplu is unique. Every group you create is like a tag, so if you have a company in your database who is a supplier and a customer at the same time, you can assign that company to the Customers group and Suppliers group at the same time. Basically, you insert the Customers and Suppliers tag for the same company. What will happen is that when you will select the Suppliers group, all of the suppliers will be listed, including this company, and when you will select the Customers group, all the customers will be listed, including this company. You may watch this tutorial video on how to create groups in Zimplu.

This is an important feature because you can use Groups to create your own sales pipeline, and at the same time, to organize your companies by role, or however you want.

How to create your Sales Pipeline using Groups?

Lets say your pipeline looks like this: Cold Call - Engaged - Meeting Scheduled - Proposal Sent - Customers.

In this case, you will have 5 Company Groups for every step in your funnel.
If a company goes to the next step, e.g. from Proposal Sent to Customers, all you have to do is edit the company and replace the Proposal Sent group with Customers group.

SCM - Supply Chain Management

Supply Chain Management is the set of methods and techniques through which the tracking and coordination of material, information, and financial flows are made on the provider-organization-consumer path together with the information system who supports it.

ERP systems assures data transfer both within the organization and in its external environment, starting with key suppliers and ending with the customers network.

SCM optimizes three categories of flows : production flows (movement of goods from a supplier to a consumer as a result of the latter's request), information flows (oders sent by the client and updates regarding the delivery), and financial flows (credit terms, payment methods, and payment schedule).

Considering the application features, these include two types of software packages:

• Planning applications usually using complex algorithms to determine the optimal satisfaction of an order. In this category are also the software applications who use algorithms for the breakdown of each product ordered into a tree structure components, determining the necessary products.
• Execution applications that track the physical state of the products and materials, as well as economic and financial information regarding sales and supply activities. However, Zimplu team enourages in using online applications which is the tendancy of the last years. In this case, Internet technologies being developed are:
• eProcurement systems that provide virtual support for most of the supply activities . These systems include an online auction component which allows a real time balanced supply-demand compatibility with the legislation in force.
• eCommerce systems where customers benefit from a range of sales and support services such as online payment facilities

Implementing a SCM system ensures the consolidation of information necessary to support decision making for purchasing, which generates a number of benefits for the organization, among them:

• Reduces material costs by identifying providers with the best quality vs price ratio;
• Simplifying procedures for negotiating and contracting;
• Lower supply personnel costs;
• Reducing inventory levels, eliminate the phenomena of lack of stock or overstocks.

SCM tools are using network technology to connect the organization's  customers and suppliers to generate real time information on the evolution parameters of production and distribution processes. This way the company is able to effectively manage their business activities.

Zimplu CRM Manual

We made Zimplu CRM to be as simple as possible, but there are a lot of people who use Zimplu CRM and still look for a User Manual. No problem because we solved that, the user manual is ready, you will soon have download link placed within every Zimplu CRM account so you can access it whenever you want.

Until we do that, you can access the Zimplu CRM User Manual here

Lead Nurturing - Your Best Friend for Generating Sales

Setting up a Lead Nurturing program will help your sales team generate more revenues for your business using the same amount of contacts. However, not having a lead nurturing strategy will eventually result in sales leads leaking out of the sales pipeline/process and these things happen because managers these days tend to take more time in purchasing and they somehow feel more responsible considering the current economic status. More information helps, because it also provides more security for the decision maker and helps him be more confident when choosing to work with you.

Lead Nurturing is more about staying in touch and paying more attention to qualified leads over wasting time with prospects that are never going to buy. Sales men need to have the ability to qualify the lead and decide if it is worth fighting for or decide to give it a chance some other time when things change.

A few of the most important lead nurturing tactics:

1. Asking to stay in touch with the prospect. You probably experienced annoying newsletters landing in your inbox and not remembering if you ever subscribed to this. You need to provide a nice friendly experience, shoving information down to your prospects throat won't help and it will probably make them repulsive and angry;
2. Educating the prospect to establish comparison points. As I wrote above, decision makers take more time in purchasing, this means your competition will also have the chance in presenting their offer to your prospect and you don't want them to take the "wrong" decision because of some false reasons;
3. Monitoring the prospect progress in the buying cycle. Using your Lead Nurturing program you can see at what stage of the buying process your prospect is by monitoring his actions.

A nice article wrote by Ken Lewis in Forbes is presenting a 12 step program for lead nurturing. A great way to generate leads for your Software is Marks Marketing Toolbox.

Zimplu CRM will launch a new feature soon that will help your business more for gathering leads using an embedded contact form for your website where visitors will fill it so you can get in touch with them. This contact form will be linked to your Zimplu account so the lead will automatically get into your Zimplu database.

What will Nexus Electronics Company present at CeBIT 2013

One of the most important international IT&C trade fair will take place this year between 5th and 9th of March at Hanover, Germany and it is expected to have more than 300 000 visitors. Nexus Electronics SRL will be at CeBIT as an exhibitor and this year we will focus more on launching an update for Zimplu CRM and Nexus GPS Tracking and we will launch one new service called Perpeton and one new product called Nexus Smart Locator. If you were following Zimplu in the last year since it was launched, you can now meet us and learn more about Nexus Electronics products, services and people behind it.

What is Nexus GPS Tracking ?
Nexus GPS Tracking is a fleet tracking system for monitoring cars launched in 2007. It is the most important service provided by Nexus Electronics with over 700 Business Clients who use the system to monitor over 12000 cars every day. Just like other services provided by Nexus Electronics, Nexus GPS Tracking is a also a SaaS. Clients use a web application where they log in using a username and a password, this way the service can be used any time, wherever they are.

Nexus Smart Locator will be the new product launched by our company, a plug&play tracking device that will be easy to use for any consumer without any kind of knowledge about telematics, electronics or other technologies. The regular telematics had to be installed by people who knew a thing or two about electricity as the devices needed to be installed under the car dashboard. On the other hand Nexus Smart Locator just needs to be plugged into the OBD-II connector and it works. After the consumer plugged in the device, it will be able to see all the data about the car (including new data like RPM or fuel consumption) on the Nexus GPS Tracking web application.

Perpeton, the new service provided by Nexus Electronics !
Perpeton is also a web application which in some way is very similar to Zimplu CRM, meaning that it also works online and it shows relevant data for your Business. This time though you will use Perpeton for other meanings instead of sales or customer relationship. Perpeton is a server monitor, if you have an online Business you want to be informed all the time about your server's status and you will always be looking forward from preventing your servers to crash. This is where Perpeton comes and alerts you if there is a problem with your servers, this way you can make an intervention and avoid losing all of your customers trust. Unlike other server monitors, Perpeton goes even further and helps you track the processes that run on your servers, this will help you understand how your servers run and what can you do to improve that.