If you’re not already gearing up for Christmas there is no time to waste. With the clocks changing, Halloween and Guy Fawkes night gone by there is no escaping Christmas will be here before we know it. Even if you still have Thanksgiving to go it’s still definitely high time you are getting prepared. Taking the time now to get ready will put you one step ahead of the competition so you will be riding high in the New Year.

A good stock control strategy will help with this but you’ll also be seeing a much higher volume of buyers, particularly if you have been marketing your company well. With this high flow of products going out, mistakes are inevitable so you need to be ready to combat any negative feedback. Which is why it is important to make sure your customer service is in tip top shape.

Know your policies

Forewarned is forearmed as they say. Make sure that you and your customer service team are aware of potential issues and know how to deal with them before a customer gets angry. By instigating a set of policies for how to solve issues you will arm you customer service team with the best tools for doing their jobs. If an item gets lost in the post or needs to be refunded having a clear policy on the matter clearly stated at the point of purchase will help both customers and your customer service staff to ascertain what to do, it will also cut down the number of calls being received by customers asking what to do.

If it is clear that a failure has happened at your end then be quick to recompense and then some. Make sure the customer is given special treatment and make sure you apologise for your mistake. These customers might have had a bad experience with you company but don’t just write them off. They could still be turned into an advocate for your brand if you quickly follow up your bad service with some great service.

Availability of information is key

Providing customers with key information on your website will really help you and your customer. By providing the information customers are likely to need in a clear, legible and accessible format customers will be able to understand what they need to do if things don’t go to plan. You will need to think about what information your customers will need to know in relation to things like delivery information, returns, damaged goods, wrong items received, lost in transit and how they contact you should they need to.

Man the phones

Make sure that customers are able to get in touch with you. There is nothing more frustrating than for a customer than not be able to report an issue that they have, or indeed not getting a response to the one’s they do report. This is particularly pertinent at Christmas time when a customer’s urgency for a response is high. Have your phone number clearly stated on your website as well as an option for customer to contact you by email or a contact us form.

Make sure you have the basics covered so at least if you cannot always be on the end of the phone customers can leave a message. Make it clear what the response time is likely to be and then stick to it. Again it is important that you don’t make promises to your customer you cannot keep. Better to manage expectations and exceed them than to disappoint again.

Have a help desk

An easy way for customers to log an issue if they cannot contact you by phone is by implementing a helpdesk system. This way they can log a ticket and will be able to see the progress of any resolution. This also takes the burden off your support team to be in constant contact with the customer so that they can get on with helping people out.

Having a helpdesk also give customers the impression that your company is professional which in turn makes them feel you are more trustworthy. This gives your customer service team extra building blocks for them to be able to deal with customer issues and grow confidence in your brand.

So that’s it…?

Well no not really, there are always more ways you can improve your strategy for the Christmas period. Every business is different so you will need to constantly tweak and refine your processes to make them as optimal as they possibly can be. However, by getting these basics right then you will almost certainly find that this Christmas you will see increased sales and happy customers who will be coming back to you for their next purchase.

So you’ve just come back from a trade show with a hangover, an excel file of email addresses, a stack of business cards and a daunting task ahead of you; how do you turn all this lot into paying customers?

The first thing you should do is get them all into some kind of contact management system. If the thought of hand typing a hundred business cards gives you the heebie-jeebies then use an automatic scanning or digitising service (like shoeboxed.com). Get all your contacts into a spreadsheet, and if needed sort them into segments. Ideally you will have scored each contact during the show; “hot”, “warm”, “cold”, and scribbled a note on the back of the business card with information about what they wanted. It’s almost impossible to remember this later down the line!

So how do we turn this spreadsheet of contacts into paying customers? First of all we need to send a follow up email; “Dear James, it was good to meet you at the show this week …”. It’s important to put yourself in front of them whilst the show is still fresh. But before we send that mail, let’s get some housekeeping done first.

We want to follow an efficient process for each lead all the way to deal closure, and it’s important to track communications so that other people in your team can pick up if you need to leave off. This is where a CRM system comes in.

What is CRM?

It means Contact Relationship Management; in other words, staying in control when you have lots of people talking to each other! There are a whole range of systems available to help you handle the processes; ranging from lightweight, free apps all the way through to enterprise systems like SAP.

If you already have a CRM system, then the next step is to import all the leads. All decent CRM apps have import routines, with de-dupe capabilities so that you don’t get duplicated records. De-dupe usually happens using an email address. If your list is large or is full of messy data then you can actually pay data cleansing companies to tidy it all up and fill in the gaps; particularly useful if you’re planning to send a mail-out in the post where address accuracy is important.

Set up lead sources

Fast forward 12 months to the point where you’re planning the next show. Was last year worth it? How much did you spend? How many leads converted to customers? You can have this kind of information at your fingertips, but you’ll need to plan ahead. When you import your contacts into your CRM system, make sure you tag them as coming from the relevant trade show. Some CRM systems use Tags, some use “lead sources” – there will be a way.

Communicate

Now that you’re all set up, you need to talk to these leads! As you work through the list, make sure you add notes into your CRM system; this makes it much easier when you next come to talk to them. Book some time aside to focus on this, since it’s easier to get into the swing of it if you’re not getting distracted all the time.

Alternatively, you can send a batch email out as a first touch. Mailchimp (www.mailchimp.com) is a brilliant, free email marketing system and of course it integrates with Brightpearl CRM too. There’s heaps of help out there on the web to help you build a successful mailshot: our quick tip is to give the user some free nugget of information on a web page, and make it the most prominent link in your mail shot. You can then see who clicked, and focus on these contacts during your follow-up process.

Nurture and follow-up

You’ll probably lose a lot of leads at this first touch point; trade shows are full of tyre kickers. Picking out the important ones is key. If you get a positive response, then mark them as warm, or nudge them along one step on your pipeline. Don’t forget to keep communicating! After a trade show, it’s very easy to get distracted by “the next big thing” in your business and miss out on the new contacts you’ve made. It’s all too common for businesses to just sit and wait for leads to come in themselves. Be pro-active. Engage with your potential customers.

Hopefully you’ll soon be sending out quotes and taking orders. Keep chasing. Be hungry! And perhaps most important of all, be strict with yourself about following processes, especially if there are a few of you in the team. Sharing information in a centralised, online system makes everything much much simpler, so you can work through your lists quickly and turn more leads into happy paying customers!

Brightpearl today announces that we have secured an additional $5million in Series A funding from Notion Capital and Eden Ventures. The investment follows spectacular growth that includes tripling both our customer acquisition and monthly revenues in less than a year. The investment will enable us to expand faster in the US and other markets and further develop our cloud-based solution for SMEs that includes accounting, CRM, inventory and ecommerce.

Since June 2010, Brightpearl have hired a new CEO, grown our business by more than three times and successfully launched in the US, where we are now adding customers at a rate that mirrors our success in the UK market. We are now planning to further build on this early success in the US market where we see a huge potential.

Salman Malik, our CEO, says: “The last year has seen explosive growth for Brightpearl as more and more businesses see the value in moving to our cloud-based solution. Our inbound leads have sky-rocketed to unprecedented levels. To accommodate this growth, we have moved to larger offices and expanded the number of datacentres running Brightpearl worldwide. We also have some major distribution deals in the pipeline so 2011 looks to be a pretty exciting year for the business.

The investment and support from both Notion Capital and Eden Ventures has really helped us to succeed in this fast moving market and we are really pleased to further extend our partnership in this way. The new round of funding is a great boost for us and really validates all the hard work that the team has put in.”

Chris Tottman, partner at Notion Capital comments: “We were very confident in our investment in Brightpearl from the start. It has a great product backed up by a very strong team. Brightpearl is a fantastic example of a British company succeeding and growing internationally, especially when you consider that the company is just four years old.

There is real momentum now to solidify its presence in the UK and expand further into new markets. We are really happy with the progress the Brightpearl team has made over the last year – the first steps on what I expect will be an incredibly successful journey.”

Charles Grimsdale, partner at Eden Ventures says: “Brightpearl is a fantastic product and the feedback from customers clearly shows that it is helping to transform business performance. The customer testimonials show that it provides uplift in revenue, and helps drive improved operational efficiency in many areas of the business, reducing cost and increasing profitability.”

Hundreds of small business from around the world sign up for Brightpearl every month. Recently a charity from Central America that pays for disadvantaged children to have facial surgery started using Brightpearl to help them to manage their amazing work. After speaking with them, we were so impressed by their venture, we thought we’d share their story.

Smile With Me is a non-profit organisation founded by the parents of Darkito Moskovitz, a child born with a cleft lip and palate; their mission is to help children with cleft lip and/or palate all over the world to repair their genetic malformation and in doing so “giving back smiles to entire families”.

Made up of a multidisciplinary team of 18 professionals, including plastic surgeons and paediatricians from United Kingdom and Sri Lanka, they implement their “Smile with Me” protocol using Dr. Brian Sommerlad´s techniques to reconstruct lip and palate muscles with only two surgeries at 3 and 6 months old, meaning that children with cleft lip and/or palate can have their malformation repaired at an early age with only 2 surgeries. This gives these youngsters exceptional speech, mobility, and cosmetic results that they could not otherwise have afforded.

As well as providing free of charge surgery they also offer special feeding bottles, hygiene and feeding guidance, support to families, and training to Doctors from Latin America and around the world.

Sandra at Smile With Me talked to us about their decision to move to Brightpearl and their organisations use of our software: “We moved to Brightpearl last year from a financial application called Track Via, as we needed something more cost-effective and with more useful features for operating our organisation. Brightpearl attracted us because it has more of the tools which we needed to manage our organisation and clients as well being very easy to work. Navigation on the platform is very intuitive.

With accounts, CRM and our website in one business management system we can now manage our entire organisation with just one piece of software. We have more 1700 contacts, 800 of which are patients, and we have to keep track of treatments, communications and service. Brightpearl has simplified our contacts management, staff administration and their labour; as well as improving our communications with our customers, contact searches and database security. Brightpearl works great for us; it does 70% of our work. That speaks for itself!!

When moving to Brightpearl we used the contact import tool to upload all our clients and medical records making it incredibly easy to add our client information and organise it with tags and status. This great Cloud software allows us to personalise our contacts profile to include medical questionnaires, legal information, operations information and other such essential information to our organisation. And as we need to be in constant control of our patients and their treatment, Brightpearl allows us to assign reminders, tasks and follow ups to ourselves and other team members with means we get to better manage our time. Whilst the tags in Brightpearl let us keep track of our patients and their status such as first contacts, wait list, need requirements, and treatment complete. This saves us a lot of time.

We find the timeline tool very useful too, as we can keep track of all the email communications with clients and users can make notes against the client’s records. So all communications are saved and no vital information gets lost. The SMS and email options are very valuable as we need to be constant contact with our clients and this option makes it a lot easier, just select contact, ‘send email’ and it’s done. Plus the e-mail templates work very well for us; most of our communications are generic (contact information, send requirements, please call us, etc.), so with this option we just need to choose the template and send it. Yet again saving us more time.”

Brightpearl are extremely pleased to be able to help such a worthwhile  cause to succeed. Having the chance to assist in a situation like this reminds us of how something as fundamental as business software can have an positive impact in the world. Of course Smile With Me is not the only great organisation that we work with and we will be highlighting some of our other clients in future blog posts.  So if you’re a client and you think you have a story to tell please let us know and we will get in touch.

If you would like further information about Smile With Me you can go to their website or you can contact them via their contact us page.

We have decided to merge our US and UK websites to become one single domain. Why? You might ask. Well for a few reasons…

Brightpearl’s business management software caters for customers in many different countries without the need to have any different features that are specific to one country or another. We think that if a system is well designed then it can be practical and useful no matter where you are from. And we think the exact same thing about our website.

In the post-Internet world people are no longer restricted to doing business in their immediate vicinity. Businesses can communicate, network, purchase and sell to people all over the world virtually instantaneously. And whilst those in different places may speak a different language ultimately when we do business together across countries and continents we all have the same goals.

Therefore we think it is important that we get any business messages to you in a clear and concise manner. By doing this in one place we make sure that our offering is consistent across the board whether you are in the UK, US, Europe or anywhere else. Everyone gets the same because you all need the same things when you’re running a business – to make money as efficiently (and enjoyably) as possible.

Merging the two domains means we won’t need to spend as much time and energy on our website so we have more time and resources to concentrate on our product. And by having only one design, one set of content, one support portal we can keep all these things even more up-to-date. All of this intended to help you the customer to access new information easily and to get a better product at the end of it.

However, we very much value our customer opinions so we would really like to know what you think (whether for or against the change). So if do have a view on this the please let us know by posting something in the comment section.

Our partners MarketMeSuite have put together a special offer for Brightpearl blog readers to get a discount on their social media management software – you can choose from one month free on their monthly payment plan, or 20% off their yearly payment plan.

More than just a dashboard

MarketMeSuite allows small businesses to manage their social media, and create targeted leads. You can use this software to actively engage with your followers and turn them into customers! Build client relationships and organic, targeted leads via social media from the word go. You can schedule posts to Twitter and Facebook, source local users in your niche and automatically tweet RSS feeds: So explore what this powerful system can bring your business today.

And remember you can track any leads that come in via Twitter by using Brightpearl’s lead source domains and store any social media information you gather against their contact record. Giving you the ability to use and track yet another channel in which to promote your business.

So to take advantage of this offer go to http://marketmesuite.com/brightpearl and select the plan that best suits you!

Vote for Pearl Software in the Software Satisfaction Awards 2010!

The whole team at Pearl has been working hard to ensure that we continue to listen to what out customers want and to provide an excellent ongoing level of service. Well now is the chance to have your say!

Pearl has been nominated in two categories at the Software Satisfaction Awards 2010. Previous winners have included Salesforce.com and Smartpoint, with the focus of the awards having very much shifted to software-as-a-service (i.e. web-based software) and cloud services over the last few years.

If you believe that Pearl has given you access to excellent web-based capabilities as well as a high level of customer support, please complete the survey below (it should only take a minute of your time).

Thanks for your support and we look forward to continuing to support you. Click here to vote in both categories*

Pearl (Accounting and Finance)

Pearl (CRM and Customer Management)

The survey closes at 5.00pm on Wednesday 14 July 2010.

* The customer survey is very straightforward, with every entrant having their own unique survey. The survey consists of five simple questions, all on one screen.

Further to our post back in December about the VAT rate increases, we’ve made some changes to all our UK client accounts.

We originally thought that the automated rate change should be opt-in, ie all your items would stay 15% VAT unless you manually changed them yourself.

Even with blog posts and a direct email newsletter, we only had 9 people that wanted their products changed for them. OK, we thought, everyone is on the ball, they’ll take care of it themselves. Looking at the logs this morning, we see that lots of you are still selling items at 15% vat. You can’t do this now that the rate has changed!

The repercussions of having lots of incorrect sales on your system would be a bigger headache than having to tweak your prices, so we’ve updated all T5 15% items to be T1 17.5%. This means that your gross prices (including tax) have gone up by about 2%, but your net (ex tax) prices have not changed.

If you want to update your prices, use the powerful spreadsheet import tools in Pearl. If you’re running on the latest version, you can use the data manager, otherwise use the price list import tool.

Multiply your current net prices by 0.9787 to keep your gross price the same as it was before.

Pearl is now even easier to use.
Web based accounting and CRM in one system. Anywhere, anytime.

One company using Pearl Office is Doug Richard’s School for Startups, the leading provider of business training for entrepreneurs in the UK. Doug’s team work in several offices and spend a lot of time on the road, so Pearl allows all of the team to access information about their contacts (such as customers, partners or suppliers) and manage their money when out and about. “Most small businesses take little advantage of the software that they have, usually because it is difficult to use. Pearl is the newest, freshest and most simple Accounting and CRM package available on the web.” Doug Richard, BBC Dragon’s Den.