Salesforce.com - a decision (and some help)

I recently wrote about our decision-making process for choosing a CRM system. The same day I wrote that, I got a very helpful email from a guy at Salesforce.com. It turned out that by the time I read it, we had already made up our minds (pending the rest of our free trial going smoothly and not showing up any glaring holes in our plan) to go with Salesforce. We'd made up our minds mainly after trying the free demo a little more and attending a training course ( / sales meeting!) online. If, however, we hadn't yet have made up our minds, that friendly little email would certainly have helped.

Mark Cuban recently wrote a post about keeping saved searches in your list of RSS feeds and I imagine that is how the Salesforce guys noticed when we wrote about them. It's a great tactic and one we're starting to suggest to our clients. It's a great form of pro-active customer service.

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Buy Dermatalogica online - an SEO success story

Michelle Louise asked us to optimise her online store for the phrase Dermatalogica (a common mis-spelling of Dermalogica) because she has a new online shop where you can buy Dermatalogica online (or, with the correct spelling, buy Dermalogica online).

We've been pretty successful so far, she's on the first page of Google, and we're about to run some analysis to understand the next set of keywords we should target.

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CRM solutions

We have been using Sugar CRM's free solution hosted on our test web server for a while now, but the more we refine our sales and marketing process, the more we have been finding that it doesn't quite meet our requirements (particularly in measuring campaign effectiveness).

Salesforce.com vs. Siebel On-Demand

We are now reviewing Salesforce.com and Siebel On-Demand. Both look as though they would meet our needs. I'm awaiting the sales call from the Siebel guys, but have already had a very good experience with the knowledge of the team at Salesforce.com. No decision yet, but I think Salesforce.com is looking like the most likely outcome.

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Busy executive? You need BJB Travel

Sorry if this post reads a little like an advert, but I think it's a great service offered by our latest client to go live, BJB Travel. They offer full travel management for busy executives. Based near Farringdon station in London, they handle flights, hotels, car hire, the works.

Exciting WandD news

There is a lot happening at WandD at the moment, including our biggest and most challenging client project to date. It's very exciting and scary all at the same time. We will be writing more about it, but in the meantime, the sneak preview is that it has to do with Richard Denny, a big marketing campaign and lots of free stuff. The first free thing is going to be an ebook download of The Laws of Motivation, a chapter from his best-selling book, Motivate to Win. You can buy his other great books via our sites as well: Selling to Win, Communicate to Win and Succeed for Yourself.

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Dermalogica online store from Michelle Louise

You already know about our friendly local hair and beauty salon, Michelle Louise hair and beauty. The online shop, where you can buy Dermalogica products online has just gone live.

A milestone for WandD and Michelle Louise

This is a milestone for both WandD and Michelle Louise. It is our first live site with a shopping cart. We have written shopping carts in the past, but decided that writing one with all the features online shoppers now expect is not in our core strategy, so we are using X Cart shopping cart software - see it in action at http://shop.michellelouise.co.uk/.

Dermatalogica

Michelle has noticed that a lot of people say Dermatalogica when they mean Dermalogica, so if you are looking to buy Dermatalogica products online, you should go to http://shop.michellelouise.co.uk/ as well!

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Need some security?

We now know just the guys. Oriel Solutions offer a whole range of services including security management, technical and equipment procurement and consultancy, project management, crisis management and contingency planning and security training.

Good guys to know

Since we don't even have an office as yet, we don't have much need for a security audit, but it's always nice to know you know people as competent as this.

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Customers you don't want

There is a lot of business advice about there being certain clients you don't want. WandD has just had its first experience of turning down work. Up until now, there has been work we haven't won for one reason or another, but this was our first experience of having exact knowledge of both the brief and the budget and choosing not to go for it.

Luckily for him, the potential client has now found someone offering to do all the work in the substantial brief to his budget. We admitted to him that we were a little sceptical, based on our knowledge of our own overheads (minimal - usually leading to our prices being at the low end relative to our competitors).

We've wished him good luck!

The other end of the scale

At the other end of the scale, both Duncan and I spent a full day yesterday with Richard Denny working on a full-blown Internet strategy for his business. It was easily the most exciting thing we have done to date. We don't yet know the full consequences for either business, but watch this space for lots of exciting developments, including ebooks, podcasts and blogs with real insight!

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