Delegating Tasks and Managing the Flow

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This is a guest post by Sandra Faleris of SmBizWinningTips. 

How does your business get from A to Z on projects, expansion efforts, and on-going tasks? After they are complete, what’s your method for tracking, reporting and reviewing? Managing tasks and work flow helps your employees, and the business, achieve goals and accomplish projects in a gratifying and efficient manner. There are positive side effects to becoming and staying organized.

It is one thing to delegate and quite another to ensure project responsibility and accountability.

Effective task management includes all aspects of a task that are important to track, such as its daily or weekly status, time spent, steps required to finish the task (internally or externally) and more.

5 primary groups of activities that can be tracked in nearly any business:

  1. Functional: These activities include everything that pertains to sales, employees, quality control, and customer delivery and satisfaction.

    2. …


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Using Zoho to Teach Students Project Management

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“Ahem, class, are you paying attention? Your first assignment is to find a project management tool that’s easy to use, friendly, and can work well with a CRM application.”

Believe it or not, that was the first assignment Robert Braathe of Braathe Enterprises gave to his students. Braathe runs a virtual internship program that gives college students real experience. And teaching project management is critical for operating in the real world, said Braathe.

“If you don’t have a project management tool in place, you’ll just throw a lot of spaghetti on the wall,” Braathe said. “With a project management tool you can keep things on track and do more things at once.”

At the Small Business Expo in New York, I spoke with Braathe about why he and his students chose Zoho. He said that Zoho met their comfort level. It was user friendly and most similar to Google Apps.…


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An update on Zoho Sites

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We have made enhancements in three different areas on Zoho Sites. These minor updates have been made for better functionality before we bring out some really major changes that we’ve been working on.

  • Thumbnails in File Manager
  • One-click protection of all pages
  • Generation of sitemap

File Manager gets a Facelift

The collection of images you uploaded will be listed on the file manager, as thumbnails. This makes it easy to pick the one you want to include on a page. Other files will be grouped based on file type.

Password Protection

Password Protection has had a change of philosophy. You already could protect all pages on your site using one password. Now, you can do it in one click.

SEO gets better with Sitemap

Another area of change is SEO. We’ve added sitemap generation. Sitemaps are to inform search engine bots about the hierarchy of your website and how each page is connected to the others.…


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The Critical Need to Integrate All Customer Information

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The more knowledge a salesperson has about a particular customer or group, the better decisions they can make and insight they can gain, said Paul Greenberg, Principal of The 56 Group and Chairman of the CRM Evolution 2012 conference in New York City where I spoke to him about the importance of integration.

Companies are gathering information about their customers from a variety of sources such as the social web, traditional communications, and the commerce transactions captured in their CRM.

“You’re much better off knowing all of that, than just a part of that,” said Greenberg stressing the importance of integration. Yet Greenberg knows that companies aren’t necessarily going to dump their investments in their web, financial, and CRM systems just for the sake of integration. Rather, they’ll look for ways to tie existing systems together.…


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A Tax Break Ending Soon – Internet Sales

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One of the most compelling tax breaks is coming to an end in the near future. Internet sales are booming and the incredible tax savings that comes from buying supplies or equipment off the internet might soon be over.

Before legislation speeds up this process, it is important to take advantage of this huge loophole and the overall savings that can be realized.

Products purchased from the Internet often cost less.

Buying just about anything from the Internet offers not only a break in paying sales tax, but often a cost savings over local retailers with hefty leases and greater operating costs. So it’s often a double savings from buying local.

Think about purchasing higher quantities to take advantage of large volume discounts and be prepared to be surprised at the savings.

Internet shopping often saves on shipping.

Many Internet retailers can even offer free shipping, while simply absorbing the cost and still bring in a higher profit margin than a retailer that runs out of a brick-and-mortar storefront establishment.…


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Common CRM Pitfalls and Misconceptions about Customers

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Despite the plethora of advice about pitfalls and best practices, people still make tons of mistakes, said Scott Rogers (@jayhawkscot) of thinkJar.

The clearest evidence is the language companies use when they’re trying to describe success with customers. The vast majority of companies are not using the words that show they are focused on the end results of their strategies. They use company-centric words like retention, loyalty, and lifetime value rather than customer-centric words such as experience, satisfaction, and customer centricity.

Perception gap between customers and companies

What the customer thinks is important is very different than what the company believes the customer thinks is important as IBM discovered in its CRM Study in 2011.

The study asked companies why they think customers follow them on social sites.…


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Short-circuit evaluation enhances Zoho Creator performance

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In plain English, “Short-Circuit” is the intelligence of an algorithm to skip processing the remaining part of a condition, if the desired results have been achieved mid-way and the rest of the condition will not have any effect on the result.

Executing scripts unnecessarily can exhaust resources. Short-circuit ensures that the results are achieved by executing scripts the minimum number of times possible.

Consider the following expression that has two operands, A and B.

If A is True, (AND) B is True, then execute script.

It means, the script has to be executed when both A and B are true. To find that out, both A and B have to be tried. But what if A is tried first, and is found to be false? Regardless of what B turns out to be, the script will not be executed because one of the two (A) has failed. There is no point in trying B. Short-circuit is responsible for skipping B.…


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