Blog

How We Work – managing leads

Posted by Eric on June 10, 2010  |   No Comments »

Highrise CRMby 37signals

For any business, one of key challenges is to learn to manage new leads and client prospects.  This may be especially true for a small business – one that can’t afford to have a dedicated sales staff to follow up on leads.  In business parlance, this is called “Customer Relationship Management” or CRM.  And, there’s a whole field of software dedicated to just this task.

At EH Design & Consulting, we’ve recently started using Highrise from 37Signals to help us respond to customer inquiries, stay on top of leads, follow-up,  etc.

After using the service for just two months, I’ve found it to be a critical component to what we do.

At EH Design & Consulting we’ve found that some of the “simple” tasks regularly set us apart from many other companies.  This includes simple tasks such as responding to all e-mails within 24 hours, returning phone calls and all voicemails, doing what we promised we would do, etc.  It seems like these are the simplest of tasks.  But, these simple tasks have set us apart from other companies – often companies much larger than us.

Highrise, has helped to make these seemingly simple (but often overlooked) tasks much easier to accomplish.  Here’s just four of our highrise secrets:

1.  BCC every e-mail to a client to Highrise

Every time we send out a follow up e-mail, a question, a thought…whatever… we BCC that e-mail to our Highrise Drop Box account.  I’ve put the Highrise Drop Box e-mail in my address book.  So, I just type in the word HIGHRISE in the BCC field.

Now, whenever I go to my HIGHRISE screen (which is every day – many times) – I can instantly see all the e-mails sent to a client.  What we’ve said, when we said it, etc.

2.  Make A New Task When You Create a New Contact

Every time we make a new contact in Highrise, we Immediately make a task that is 1-2 weeks out (depending on the nature of the contact) for following up.  We NEVER, NEVER, NEVER make or import a contact without at the same time immediately making a new task for this contact to follow up.  This helps to guarantee that the follow up happens.

Highrise then e-mails us when this task is due.  We log into Highrise see the task (For Example: follow up on Jason Fried), Click on the e-mail for Jason and send out the follow up.

Since we started the new e-mail by clicking on the e-mail link, There is automatcially a BCC entered to copy the e-mail to Highrise.

3.  Make A New Task When You Accomplish a Task

Every time we accomplish a task (such as: follow up on Jason Fried), we immediately make a new task for the same person.  Typically this task is just to follow up again in two more weeks or something similar.  But, we make it a policy to NEVER cross off a task without at the same time making a new task.

Typically the less contact we’ve had with a client, the new tasks get farther and farther in the future.  We might go from a new task being a couple days in the future to a new task being a week in the future.  Then from a week to two weeks, and then off to a month or two, etc.  We generally don’t stop until we feel like we have closure.

Never mark a task off without making a new taks

4.  Use TAGS to help create a Sales Funnel

We have 9 tags (each one starting with a number 1-9 – so they line up nice) that represent our sales funnel.  The tags are items like “1 – contact” for first contact and “2 – contact” for second contact.  Later we move on to “5 – Quote Sent” and “6 – Quote Accepted Waiting…”, etc.

We have also added a few non-numeric tags.  One in particular is COLD.  We use this when we feel like it is time to stop the Complete a task / make a new task chain (item 3 above).  When we feel like it is time to stop this, we tag a person as COLD.  Once a contact is COLD, we don’t force ourselves to make new tasks.  We complete the task and then leave it at that.

On a loosely regular basis, we look through our COLD list and ask if we need to warm any one up, if we’ve ran into any of these, etc.

There’s really a lot we have learned and a lot we are still learning.  We have other “secrets” we use to leverage Highrise and we’re always learning more – for example, right now we are looking at MailChimp integration.  Simply put, there is no way we could do what we do, without the help of Highrise.  Give it a try and let us know what you think.

An SEO Case Study – Family Care Center

Posted by Eric on April 22, 2010  |   2 Comments »

Search Engine Optimization in Fort Wayne

The topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) is one of huge interest.  In short, it is the process of getting a web site to rank higher in search engine results.  Particularly, it is focused on getting a particular site to appear high in google.

Here at EH Design & Consulting, we’ve been working with many companies on the process of SEO.  And, I thought it would be interesting to give a case study of sorts – AN IN PROGRESS story.

Just recently, we started working with the Family Care Center.  The Family Care Center is a Christian Counseling organization located on the North East side of Fort Wayne.  The Executive Director of the center, Denny Howard, contacted us at EH Design & Consulting, hoping to get his web site to appear higher in google search results.

So, we began the process of working with him.  Here are some of the steps we followed and some of the preliminary results:

STEP 1: Identify Keywords

Often times, this can be the most difficult part of the journey – deciding on exactly what you expect and want people to type in to find you.

For Family Care Center, we came up with the following terms:

  • Christian Counseling Fort Wayne
  • Marriage Counseling Fort Wayne
  • Christian Counselor Fort Wayne
  • Marriage Counselor Fort Wayne

Originally, the client had include the word “OF’ and “IN” – i.e Christian Counseling IN fort Wayne / Christian Counseling OF Fort Wayne.

But, we realized the these words are commonly called STOP WORDS – meaning that Google almost always ignores these words (there are a few exceptions).

After deciding on these terms, we did a little more research and learned the the terms “Christian Counseling Fort Wayne” and “Marriage Counseling Fort Wayne” we much more commonly used terms on Google.  Together, there are over 300 searches a month for these two terms.  While not a huge audience on a national scale, to be able to capture even a majority of these searches would be a huge win for Family Care Center.

STEP 2: Benchmark Current Rankings

After having identified some of the critical keywords for Family Care Center, our next step was to evaluate their current search engine rankings.  Typically, we try to create benchmarks on three major search engines:

  • Google – with approximately 85% of the search engine market
  • Bing – with approximately 4% of the search engine market
  • Yahoo – with approximately 7% of the search engine market

We created some benchmarks for Family Care Center.  In this particular it wasn’t difficult.  Family Care Center did not appear in the top 10 pages on any of the three search engines.

So, our benchmarks were that Family Care Center’s site was non-existant on the search engines.  Nowhere to go but up, right?

STEP 3: On Page Changes

Now that e have keywords addressed and have benchmarked our current standings, it is time to make some changes.   The first step in this case was to begin with “on page” changes.

This involves updating things such at the TITLE tag (what appears in the blue bar for Internet Explorer), META tags, H1 tags, etc.

These are changes you can see.  Changes to content.

So, for Family Care Center – we updated all the title to be keyword rich titles – unique titles that included all their keywords.

In addition, we went through each page and added keyword rich H1 tags, Meta tags (stuff you don’t see and not terribly important – but still worth the time).

Also, we went through images and checked things such as ALT tags and TITLE tags to make sure they were keyword rich as well.

STEP 4: Create Links

After making updates to on page items, the next phase of Search Engine Optimization involves creating links to the Family Care’s web site.  Google sees every incoming link as a “vote” from that website that Family Care’s site is “important”.  The important you are, the higher you appear.

For Family Care Center, we submitted them to numerous directories, created links on our own site, added links on facebook, google local, and other places.  This phase is often (and in this case is) an ongoing phase.  New links are created on a regular basis.

STEP 5: Wait 20-30 Days and Evaluate

Once on page factors are updated and links have been created, it’s now time to wait for Google (and others) to re-index and then evaluate.

In Family Care’s case, we waited about 20 days and then did a new evaluation (just a week ago).

The new results were MUCH more impressive:

  • Google – bottom of page 1 (Number 10)
  • Bing – top of page 1 (Number 3)
  • Yahoo – top of page 1 (Number 1)

Not a bad result

STEP 6: Repeat

The sixth and final step is to repeat.  We do further on page updates (tweak our titles, update images, rename directories to be more SEO friendly), create more incoming links, etc.

After all this SEO, the real question becomes – can we measure the payoff?  DO we have new leads, new contacts, new appointments, etc.?

Interested, want to know more?  CONTACT US at EH Design & Consulting to learn more.

It’s Called HTML 5 and You Should Care!

Posted by Eric on April 13, 2010  |   No Comments »

fort wayne web deisgn HTML5 logo Its Called HTML 5 and You Should Care!There’s a new buzz word going on around the web.  It’s called HTML 5.  And, unless you are a web designer, you probably haven’t heard anything about it.  But, it is rapidly promising to be an amazing way to bring new and exciting things to the web.

Need some proof?  Check out this link that showcases some of the coolest new features of HTML 5, created by the boys at 9Elements Design Studio: HTML 5 DEMO!

Now for many of you – about 32% of you to be exact (according to my Google Analytics) – you saw nothing except the “OH NO” warning.

Wonder why that is?  Well, the simple answer is that Internet Explorer doesn’t yet support HTML 5 elements.

There’s a simple test out that tries to tell us how well any particular browser does at implementing the new HTML 5 standards.  You can find this test at http://www.html5test.com.  I recently went through the test with 6 browsers – 3 Mac and 3 PC.  Here’s the results, starting with the best:

  1. GOOGLE CHROME for the Mac
    Google Chrome for Mac HTML 5 Test ResultsAs you can see, Google Chrome for the Mac scored 137 points out of a possible 160.  A pretty good score.
  2. GOOGLE CHROME for the PC
    fort wayne web deisgn googleChromePC Its Called HTML 5 and You Should Care!Now the real question here is why Google Chrome for the Mac scored 137 but Google Chrome for the PC only scored 118?  But, 118 was still good enough to snag second place
  3. SAFARI for Mac
    fort wayne web deisgn safariMac Its Called HTML 5 and You Should Care!Coming in just 5 points behind Google Chrome for the PC is Safari – Apple’s built in browser for the Mac.  Still a pretty nice score!
  4. FIREFOX for PC and for MAC
    fort wayne web deisgn firefoxPC Its Called HTML 5 and You Should Care!Here we have a tie (the way I think we should).  Bot Firefox for the PC and Firefox for the Mac scored exactly the same score – 101.

    Now, before I move on to last place, notice the above score.  All of them are above 100.  In the grand scheme of things, this is a pretty good result for modern standards such as HTML 5.

    But, now we have last place:

  5. Internet Explorer 8 for PC
    fort wayne web deisgn ie8pc Its Called HTML 5 and You Should Care!A whopping 19!!!! You have got to be kidding me.  This is the best that Microsoft could do?  All the other browsers score over 100 and Internet Explorer – the most recent up to date version – scores only 19?  Obviously something is very wrong here.

So, with all this information about browser scores and HTML 5 comes the obvious question – WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?  Well, the answer is that HTML 5 is going to be the future of the internet and wether you are choosing a browser or, even more important, choosing a web developer, you want someone who is familiar with HTML 5 and can leverage all of its power for your site.  You don’t want someone stuck with old, out-dated technologies designing your site using the same tools, the same tricks that were popular ten or even twenty years ago.

Got questions, want to make comment?  Comment below or CONTACT US today to talk more!