Applications
Managing sales and service business information is challenging even for the biggest businesses, with IT departments and armies of pen pushers. For smaller businesses it can be a real headache. Typical business software doesn’t work the way small businesses do – it’s not designed for them.
And then there’s the other problem. Entrepreneurs and small business owners don’t have time to waste managing internal systems, and neither do their staff. They probably don’t know the difference between ERP, EPM, EAM, BPM, CRM, PLM, BRR, or any of the other meaningless acronyms dreamt up by consultants.
Small business people, including sales agents and freelancers, in all businesses just want simple ways to solve the problems they have managing business information.
That’s why we built Front Office Box.
Front Office Box doesn’t do anything new. It just does what you would do with an Address Book, spreadsheets, task checklists, and stickies. And by the way it does it in ways which make it easier for you to stay on top of what’s supposed to happen, because we’ve built in the business context. It SIMPLY MAKES SENSE.
Here’s a list of the problems we solve and examples showing how we do it.
Managing My Business Mashup
Like most people these days our business exists in more external relationships than internal – government, banks, business services, social networks, our own sites. These are all web sites of course and our problem starts when we need to find them when we need them. We use External Links to build these connections into our Dashboard, our portal for the Internet.
Email drives my workflow
Email is just the most destructive of systems, interrupting our workflow every few minutes. We forward Emails requiring action to our Dashboard where they sit in a queue until we get around to handling them.
My Problem with Sales Plans
We have a consistent process for planning sales campaigns which is visible to everybody. Its flexible so we can fit the plan to the deal but still keeps everybody on the same page.
Business Planning with Road Maps
For us business planning is a moveable feast. Our markets, opportunities and challenges change every day. We can’t spend months finding out everything before we start planning. Planning with road maps keeps us moving forward in the right direction even though we probably don’t know all the information we need.
Planning and Task Management
Assigning staff to partners, associates, customers or vendors is easy. Remembering who is supposed to do what and when is a lot more difficult. But with milestones, actions, assignments and schedules we have a real time view of what’s supposed to be happening in the business. Nobody needs to remember because the software doesn’t forget.
Seamless Business Process
When a sales deal turns into a customer we don’t have to create another record for delivery or customer service. We just change the category of the plan and the customer history goes along with it. With our setup sales, delivery and customer service are all part of the same system.
Relationships
We can never keep all our relationship information in simple contact lists or email systems. They only do part of the job. So we use Front Office Box to keep all customer, vendor, partner, people records in the one place, complete with addresses, documents, correspondence and notes. And we have Tags to create context for categories and groups.
Prospect List
Spreadsheets are OK for prospect lists, provided all you want to do is add up the numbers, but that’s about where their use ends. Our prospect list is simpler to use, does more for us, and links to our CRM, Sales Plans, Sales Pipeline and our peoples schedules.
CRM
We really don’t need all that complexity and control you get with typical CRM systems. We don’t need to constrain what people do and reports only tell us what we already know. For our CRM we just need relationships, plans, assignments and schedules – sort of CRM lite and that’s what we get with Front Office Box.
ToDo Lists
Checklists on Stickie notes or in spreadsheets, or in Tasks only get us so far. They don’t tie in to our planning. We can’t easily share them and they’re always out of date. We keep our ToDo and other Checklists in Front Office Box because that way we can solve those problems.
Sales Pipeline Management
There’s no effective way of managing sales pipelines without a specialist tool. Forget spreadsheets – they’re not meant for this job, and don’t work at all effectively. We want to manage our sales pipelines, so we need a system – flexible yet consistent, comprehensive yet simple – that just works, and stays out of our way.
Do You Have Other Information Problems?
Let us know and we’ll make videos of how we solve them. There are lots more we solve for ourselves with Front Office Box but we’ve forgotten what they are, because they aren’t problems anymore.
