With that said, it’s imperative that a small business use every tool they can to, as closely as possible, mimic some of the essential steps that major corporations do to stay out in front of the game.  One of the most neglected functions in the small business world is their tracking and full working of every single lead, prospect and customer within a company’s portfolio.

The reasons are fairly simply why this sis neglected.  It’s costly.  In most cases, small business simply can’t afford the cost of implementation of a CRM system into their business.  Most respectable CRM systems do require a lot of expense.  You have licensing fees per user, server costs, administrator costs to keep it running, and the cost of a technical  expert to program it so it best suits your company’s sales process.  Being honest, it has been expensive…until now.

In today’s world, there are several CRM options out there for a small business which can handle some, if not all, of a small businesses’ needs.  Our recommendation for a small company would be to implement a product known as VTiger.

VTiger.  We have to say that we are most impressed with VTiger, and use it ourselves as a small business.  Formed as a branch of SugarCRM originally, VTiger provides most of the functionality a small company would ever want or need.  They offer two versions, but our thought is that the average small business (1-10 employees) will be more than happy with what you can accomplish with VTiger’s free service.

The following features come standard with VTiger:

1.  Sales Force Automation – VTiger comes resident with all the bells and whistles needed for lead management, account and content management, opportunity management aand sales quotes.

2.  Inventory Management.  Companies can easily maintain their inventory through use of the products catalog, pricebook and more.  Included in the infrastructure is the ability to create and monitor purchase orders, sales orders and invoices directly into  the system.

3.  Customer Support and Service.  Too us, this is one of the key features where VTiger shines.  VTiger comes resident with a customer portal that can be turned on, configured and enabled for specific customers at the drop of a dime.

4.  Calendaring and Activity Management.  All the bells and whistles of a traditional CRM calendar are packed into this robust seetup.

5.  Email Integration.  Not only does VTiger have it’s own email client built in, but it also has plugins available to it to enable it for use with Outlook, Office, Thunderbird and even the customer portal.

6.  Marketing Automation.  Handle your campaign manage, emailing campaigns and more with their fully automated Marketing tools.

7.  Cloud/Web Based.  VTiger is set up much like a content management website would be.  All you really need is some webspace and a MySQL database and you can be up and running in no time.  VTiger can be installed by the most average of techs simply, as it walks you through the step by step of installation once you upload the files to your web space.

In reality, the biggest expense you will have is hiring someone to configure it for you and your users.  Depending on the depth of setup you require, the range of pricing may vary somewhat, but for most businesses, it’s conceivable that the actual setup of VTiger would be around a few hundred dollars, total.

You can find out more about VTiger CRM HERE.

If you are interested in having VTiger installed and configured for your company, please consider Akin IT Services to be your company to take care of this for you.  You can reach us at (888) 257-3801 or at info@akinitservices.com.

The question always emerges with these three venues – how important are they to driving business? The first one is simple enough. It’s a little more than an afterthought these days that if you don’t rank well with Google, you are destined to to drive very little web traffic to your site.

Facebook and Twitter though…these are far more complex issues to flesh out for a business. It’s literally been years now, and the same questions arise from both services. How are they useful to my business? How will people find me on them? Am I taking away from my actual business by focusing more on social media sites? The questions are perplexing, and have no real definitive answers to them. I have a friend who is in the world of Digital Marketing, and he’s a literal study for both sides of the story. He, like so many of us, hates the whole social media aspect of doing business today. With that, he simply does not use the kingpin of social media, Facebook, at all. He doesn’t see it as a valuable tool, and feels that it does little more than distract and waste time that could be spent growing his business. That said though, his wife recently emerged in a major publication within her industry as the recognized “queen of social media”; the person putting a personal spin on their industry through the use of social media (in this case, Twitter). As you can see, even between two people that work together closely, the usefulness of social media is simply not cut and dry.

Weighing things objectively, I’ve come up with what I would consider to be some answers to the question of social media. They aren’t necessarily the right answers, and they aren’t necessarily wrong. They are, at best, a blueprint for consideration when evaluating inclusion of social media to your online profile.

1. Your “friends” are using social media to shop. With social media shrinking and personalizing the web, Google searches have now been replaced in part by “friends” simply posting questions for goods and services on their Facebook or Twitter. As recently as two weeks ago, I had a casual friend post on his Facebook wall, “does anyone know a good web designer for a small business?” If nothing else, that was an opportunity I would never have gotten before. It’s this kind of interaction that simply doesn’t exist outside of social media circles in 2011, so for that reason alone, maintaining Social Media can lead directly to sales.

2. If you are selling a product or service that people shop around for, then you should be using social media. As recently as 10 years ago when people started shopping online for virtually everything, Google, AOL and Yahoo were the methods most commonly searched out. That’s not the case anymore. With everyone integrated to the online social communities, more and more people find vendors and manufacturers directly from their social media groups or trending. Twitter trends, Twitter news and Facebook groups may not be the most publicized features of the social media environment, but they are effective for consumers looking for people in your industry. From a strictly ROI standpoint, what is more effective – a Google Adwords campaign that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars, or being found in a relevant Facebook group where you spend 5 minutes a week posting to once or twice? The answer seems simple enough when put in those terms.

3. Your habits online are not everyone’s habits. In my estimation, this is the NUMBER 1 mistake people make…particularly older businessmen and women. So many customers that I talk to answer the social media question the same way, “I don’t use Twitter, so I don’t see the value”. While I get the thought there, it’s foolish. “The Rush Limbaugh Show” is the number one radio show in the country. Using the same analogy as spouted above, it would be foolish to advertise there if you weren’t a regular listener to his program. It’s important to keep in mind that use of these systems in your life is a personal decision, but it’s one that people outside of your circle of friends, collegues, board of directors have chosen to make. To most busness professionals, if they were told they could be given free newspaper, radio or television advertisement that reaches an audience of 750 million people combined, they would stop everything they were doing to pursue it. That’s exactly what I’m telling you here – you have that opportunity.

4. The “less frugal” generation uses social media. Being completely honest here, I’m in my mid-forties now, and I’m much more likely to think and evaluate a decision to spend money than I might have been when I was in my 20s. This said, that group of “twenty somethings” that’s out there and will make decisions without as much evaluation is on Twitter and Facebook. It may not compute to many of you, but this generation of consumers defines the coolness factor in businesses by their availability and presence on their mobile devices. In many ways, it’s equivalent to 20 years ago when a car dealership would draw huge crowds simply by offering free hot dogs and the chance to meet your favorite local football hero just by coming out and checking out the new cars.

5. Today’s consumer wants everything to be easy. Social media is about laziness, plain and simple. I know, that’s not politically correct, but it’s true. The reason social media has gotten huge is because it makes things easier. You no longer have to keep one on one relationships with “fringe friends” going anymore. You no longer have to visit people from time to time to keep relationships alive. You click a single button to add a person as a friend, and from then on, everyone interacts with each other based on random thoughts instead of developing personal relationships. That may sound sad, and being honest it is. From a business standpoint though, that’s kind of the relationship most people have with their vendors. While it’s not always true, most people’s relationship with their grocer, their mortgage broker, their car dealer, etc. is very impersonal and casually focused on the purchase at hand. Additionally, these relationships almost universally develop from the ease of connecting. Social media makes that connection even easier because it provides a personalized feeling without having to waste time on a personal interraction. Again, it’s sad but it’s reality. The easier it is for the Twitter/Facebook generation to interract without having to look up from their phone, the more opportunity you have as a business to make a sale.

So, the reality is that for most businesses, social media may not directly relate to sales like a sales team or a good CRM system might. That said though, it’s important because it provides opportunity and convenience to the purchasing public most businesses are trying to reach. Is it this “wonderful tool”? That depends on your perspective. It’s wonderful that you can reach hundreds of thousands of people with just a few keystrokes. It’s not wonderful if you are trying to “know” your customers. The bottom line though is that it can be effective and should be considered. Think of it this way. If you are looking to buy a car and you are driving down your local “auto sales row”, you will see several dealerships with lavish showrooms, bit expensive signs and nice, clean cars. You will also encounter lots with dingy looking cars, an office that looks like it was a converted gas station, and maybe even lacking a sign completely. Which one will you shop at? Think of Twitter and Facebook as being that sign in front of the business to many. The question is, do you want to have it or not?

The latter is interesting to me because…well…it’s me and my work. I met with the customer, had what I thought was a good grasp on the project, and designed accordingly. That said though, he didn’t feel it represented his business the way he wants it to. The interesting thing though is that he decided not to tell me because he “didn’t want to hurt my feelings”. I found it fascinating that he felt like this, because he’s the person spending the money, and he’s also the one that will benefit the most from having the site built to represent his image.

This leads to some really key points that are, in some respects, pet peeves of mine at Akin IT Services. Here’s an overview:

1. It’s my impression that companies do not hire my company to, in essence, buy “art” from me. They are purchasing an online representation of their business, band, service or company.

2. Web designers are, by and large, not artists. Speaking for my company, we’re hired guns who’s job it is to see the vision of the customer, and recreate it as best we can to a web format. I think in many respects, our job is similar to that of a database developer. It’s there job to make the data flow properly to meet the needs of the application it’s designed for. The same with web design. It’s our job to make the page flow to meet our customer’s needs. Should we guide a new customer? Absolutely. We know the technology, what it can do, and what it’s not made to do.

3. Websites are not done simply to make the designer’s portfolio look better. Having a small portfolio of great, cutting edge sites and no new customers is not appealing…at least in our business model.

Our philosophy is very simple, and we tell every customer the same thing when we start a project. “If you don’t like something, tell us immediately because it’s YOUR SITE.” This may not be the case with every designer or company, but at Akin IT Services, success is measured solely on if the customer is happy. I’ll be honest – we’ve put forth sites that, personally, we didn’t like the look of. Our customers did though, and when all is said and done, that is why we were hired.

One last point…my customer that didn’t like the work. What did we do to remedy his situation? Well, as of today we’re starting over from scratch and taking another swing at it. More conversations and more fleshing out of his image. It’s OK to miss the mark in development…that’s why it’s development. It’s inexcusable to publish a site that the customer doesn’t like though. Let your designer know where you stand with his or her work.