Build Your Innovation Practice through Your Customers

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If you want your business to innovate with its customers, start by building a customer community that others can vote on and contribute to so that the company can pull the idea through the process, said Mike Fauscette, Group VP, Software Business Solutions at IDC, in his presentation “Leveraging Innovation Management for Competitive Advantage” at the CRM Evolution 2012 conference in New York City.

Once you have a tool that can collect customer interaction, take it one step further and let customers be involved in defining the process. It will open the doors to opportunity that you wouldn’t have had before, said Fauscette. Customer engagement improves dramatically once the customer feels they’re empowered to drive the business.

It’s also important to be visible and transparent. Meaning you want to set up a system that allows customers to contribute and know that they contributed, Fauscette continued.…


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Introducing a Visual Editor for Customizing Website Themes

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Website is one place where people judge by the cover, and are mostly right. That is why a good looking business website has a significant effect on the business. Zoho Sites had already made it easy for anyone to build such business websites easily. Today, we are making it even more friendlier on the design front.

Introducing, a visual editor to customize themes.

Till now, theme-customization could only be done with a bit of CSS. But not anymore. You can now customize visual properties of a theme, such as background image, menu, color, size and font face of text. Without a speck of HTML/CSS, of course. You can preview the changes as and when you make them.

What’s exciting about this visual editor is, using this, you can create umpteen different versions of the same theme. The themes in our gallery are ready-to-use, but you can re-paint them, so that they look just how you want, in every way.…


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Zoho CRM gets even better with Twitter

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We asked a few of our customers about how they use “Twitter for their Businesses”. We got several responses, but I’ll specially mention a comment by Jon Porreca, Sales Consultant at a1energy.net,

What we would love to see is when we access a contact, or lead, within CRM, the ability to see any or all of the communications, comments, likes, follows, etc.. that they have had on social channels. And likewise have the ability to comment, communicate, like, or follow a post we see in CRM. This would allow us to better reach new customers and vendors, to broadcast our brand, and also allow us to always “touch” our current customers and vendors and keep them up to date with our company.

@jonporreca you’re spot on! Zoho CRM for Twitter can now address these scenarios for salespeople!

Zoho CRM for Twitter helps you know your customers even better by connecting with them right from within Zoho CRM.…


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Just Keeping Up with People is Key to Growing Revenue

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“If you don’t utilize CRM you lose everything. It’s so difficult to keep up with people. Not only in your own company but everyone you’re dealing with on a day to day basis. It’s imperative,” said William “Brimstone” Kucmierowski, President and Co-Founder of Hound Comics, a media company that not only publishes comics, but also cookbooks, TV programming, and lots more.

In my interview with Kucmierowski and his partner, Eddie “Luscious” Castillo, at the Small Business Expo in New York, Kucmierowski schooled Castillo as to what CRM actually is. He explained that CRM puts all the people you deal with on a regular basis in one place so you can actually manage them.

Kucmierowski has been a longtime avid CRM user. He was first a devotee of the desktop application ACT, but now he’s moved his CRM operations into the cloud.…


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Are you facing a taxable profit this year?

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Many small business owners have done their best to produce a decent profit and, in doing so, face the prospect of paying more in taxes for their efforts. We all have to pay our share of taxes, however, many businesses are still unstable and are struggling to make a profit. As we all know, there are times that the profit is on paper, not in the bank. So coming up with additional funds to pay Uncle Sam after fighting to stay afloat is not an easy task.

Fortunately, there are some effortless moves you can make that will reduce the amount of profit “on the books” and support growth. Here are four tips you can prepare for in advance.

1. Paying in advance for things you need tomorrow.

The first step is to simply prepay for many supplies and goods that you use to produce your product or service. This serves two primary purposes. It will help minimize your expenses right out of the gate for a very uncertain 2013 and if done properly will give you a quantity discount when placing a higher volume order.…


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Customer Spotlight – Wedding Planner Finds Zoho Books To Be A Time Saver

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Every girl wants the happiest day in her life to be ‘just perfect’. Cathy Akinkunmi decided to don the hat of a wedding planner and decorator while planning her daughter’s 10th birthday ‘Princess’ Theme party.

The result was Beautiful Linen Rentals. She says,

When ‘you’ are responsible for the little details that makes the perfect wedding, you’ve got to be on top of your game every single moment.

As a wedding planner she’s constantly wearing multiple hats. While meeting new clients, discussing decor style, selecting colors and setting up the venue are part of her job description, she also needs to manage her business. When she’s busy ensuring the day remains perfect for someone else, she needs assurance that her finances are being managed well. Returning home to messy paperwork is not what she looks forward to at the end of the day.…


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End the Software Upgrade Cycle with a Cloud Office Suite

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For years, Nancy Williams had been stuck in an aggravating and costly cycle of upgrading her desktop applications. Williams, who just launched InfoZario, an online/offline training business for information management finally decided to dump her desktop applications for cloud-based Zoho applications. She choose not only Zoho CRM , but many of the other applications in the suite as well, such as documents, spreadsheets, projects, and soon the mail client, she said.

For others still stuck in the desktop software upgrade cycle looking to move over to cloud-based productivity applications, Williams recommends starting with Zoho’s mail suite to get comfortable with using applications in the cloud. As soon as you feel comfortable with those applications, start using CRM immediately.…


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