Perfessional (This is not a misspelling.)

How can you be personal and professional at the same time when communicating in the business world?

With an emphasis on social media, visual content, and tools that allow the public to develop their own voice and essentially become grass-roots journalists, the way we communicate is becoming more casual. It is likely that we know the ins and outs of our business and we can answer questions when asked by prospective clients or even at a networking event.

However, as business professionals, we often find ourselves in an asking position–we’re negotiating our own salary or hoping to set up a coffee meeting with an editor at a local media outlet; we need something from a vendor sooner than expected, or asking if a prospective client is ready to sign a contract (oh-so-gracefully).

Don’t Know Your Email Recipient? No Problem.

If you think about the ratio of people you know to the number of people you don’t know, odds are that you will often find yourself asking for something business-related from someone you’ve never met who might even be miles away.

The social and physical distance creates quite the challenge to build an in-person relationship before you start asking for what you want or need. This is unnatural. Most people tend to offer what they have or know to those they know and trust. But, communicating with an unfamiliar contact is practical and often business.

So, how do you create mutual benefit with someone you don’t know when seeking something you or your company is looking for? Or, more importantly, how can you make sure they can see the benefit of exchanging ideas or information with someone they don’t know?

Recently, we reviewed our outreach messaging and created new ways to connect, mention opportunities for mutual benefit, then present the “ask”. (See: The Offer Before the Ask) We created an acronym to drive our online and in-person interactions and realized we could apply it to all of our communications regardless of what we’re seeking (a new newsletter subscriber, a business card, a link back to our site or client’s site, or a personal referral for a service we need).

Three letters−a new way of looking at (and spelling) the ask: ASC.

Messaging should be:

• Authentic - Introduce yourself, who you are representing, be open about why you’re reaching out. Make sure the email address you’re sending from is personal, not a general mailbox, address your recipient by name.
• Specific - Use a subject line that describes what you’re writing about versus a general one like ‘Sales Inquiry’. Mention a detail about your audience that demonstrates the value of collaborating, such as a recent blog post that relates to your business, the person who referred you and why, something on their website that caught your eye. Provide as much information about what you’re looking for as possible, and what you are offering. Are you suggesting a guest blog post? Provide examples of your writing and/or topic titles.
• Conversational - Even if you don’t know your email recipient directly, a message that looks machine-generated or lacks personality may receive a negative response or even no response. People want to work with others that are relatable and attempt to make your message the beginning of a discussion versus a one-way request. Avoid generic words or phrases and use this as a rule of thumb: would I speak like this on the phone? If the answer is no, adjust your words to use your natural voice. Be professional but use the vocabulary you normally would in person or on a call.

Here are some examples without using ASC and with it:

Authentic Example

Avoid: Emailing from a general email address like info@company.com.
Try: Asking your client for an email address so you can email directly from your company email address, introducing yourself, and mentioning who you’re writing on behalf of.

Specific Example

Avoid: ”Hello, are you still accepting submissions for your news story on local businesses? – Paul”
Try: ”Hello Steven, I noticed on Website A that you are looking for local businesses that have opened in the past year for a news story. I am writing on behalf of Business A – it seems like a great fit for your requirements as it opened just last summer and has already established an influential footprint in Chicago….”

Note: You don’t have to be wordy, but give your audience a reason to pay attention among all the email noise and an incentive to work with you. Being specific may also reduce the back and forth of email chains to answer basic questions and save you time later.

Conversational Example

Avoid: ”I am reaching out for a quote for your design services.”
Try: ”I noticed your portfolio piece on Company X on your site and the graphical style is just what we’re looking for. We need a logo for print and web – both a color and black and white version. What information do you need from us to provide a quote?”

Find a Happy Medium

No matter the medium (email or phone), there is a happy medium between professional and personal when it comes to outreach messaging to ask for a professional action or service like media coverage, a link from one website to another, or even a sale. We’re using ASC to find that balance. And we’re finding that, as a result, our messaging is more personal, we’re relating more to the person or business on the other end, and we’re build relationships that result in successful interactions.

Firmology Readers: Let’s hear your thoughts!

What have you found useful when reaching out to a stranger in your career?

The CRM space is on fire. Three weeks ago, LinkedIn unveiled its overhauled contacts section with advanced CRM features like notes, reminders, relationship reminder, tags, LinkedIn messages and integration with a member’s calendars and email services.

Not to be outdone by the largest professional social network in the world, relentlessly passionate CRM relationship kingpin Jon Ferrara and the Nimble team have launched version 3.0 of its powerful Social CRM platform. While many of the features and layout resemble LinkedIn’s newly redesigned Contact Manager, Nimble hopes to take CRM and Social CRM to another level with its social media platform agnostic new features and app marketplace.

Nimble Rules Engine

Given the future of technology is all about big data and relevancy, it isn’t surprising that the core of Nimble 3.0 is their Rules Engine. This can be thought of as a relationship algorithm that gets smarter and presents more accurate and fruitful engagement opportunities as it gets feedback from each Nimble user and learns from their behavior and professional network.

Future features include automatic reminders, reminders based on low engagement for in-progress deals, reminders to engage for upcoming events and meetings

Nimble’s Today Screen Out of Beta

After getting feedback on the first version from their community, Nimble has rolled their new Today Screen out of beta. Acting as a homepage, the Today Screen is where Nimble users can find their Top 3 Contact Opportunities of the Day, To-Do List, Top Ranked Engagement Opportunities, Deals in the Pipeline, and Milestones (birthdays and job changes).

The feature that Nimble seems most excited about is Today’s Top 3, which is powered by the above-mentioned Rules Engine. Each day, Nimble users are presented with three of their professional contacts and are asked whether the contact is important or not important and to set a date reminder to engage at some time in the near future.

Other New Nimble Features

Perhaps the most valuable feature that Nimble is launching in version 3.0 is its beta Signals Screen. Similar to LinkedIn Contacts, business owners and professionals can find a piece of information that can open a “window of opportunity  when contacting prospects. The difference is that Nimble combines information from the major social networks, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Signals include birthdays, job changes, new connection invite requests, likes, shares, retweets, mentions, and comments.

Other feature enhancements include search improvements, a new reminder tool, recently contacted is now a saved search, streamlined contact record and refreshed website design and navigation.

Nimble Apps Marketplace

Nimble offers an open API and app marketplace, which features over 100 integration partners including Evernote, HootSuite, Podio, Quickbooks and Wufoo. Through its automatic sync with Cazoomi, new services offered include MailChimp, ExactTarget, Constant Contact, Vertical Response, Act-On and Netsuite.

Firmology Readers: Let’s hear your thoughts!

• What do you think of Nimble 3.0?
• Do you think it will help you strengthen relationships with your professional network?
• What other contact managers or CRM software do you use?

Name: Amit Kumar
Title: Founder and CEO
Company Name: Lexity
Company One Liner: The Developer of Commerce Central, the App Platform for Ecommerce and Marketing Apps to Help Grow Your Business
Location: Mountain View, CA and Bangalore, India

Tell us about yourself and your background.

Before starting Lexity, I worked at several large companies, like Yahoo and Inktomi, as well as a small startup called Dapper. But the thing that struck me was how all the technology we were developing at these companies was helping the big corporations and not the small guys. That’s why I decided to build Lexity.

What does your company do?

Once a small business sets up their store online, it’s hard to know what to do next. Even some well-established small businesses aren’t always sure how to increase their sales and profit. This is where Lexity comes in. We created Lexity to be a one stop shop for our merchants to come in and be able to find all of the tools they need to become a successful store. Our app gallery provides marketing services ranging from search-marketing to setting up a storefront on Facebook. Many of these apps are developed in-house, but we also host third-party apps such as Desk.com and Optimizely, among many others.

How did you come up with the idea for your company?

At the previous companies I worked for, I felt that there was a disproportionate amount of focus on large businesses and not enough on making small businesses succeed. The technology and business tactics developed in the last decade to help large businesses should be available to small businesses, too. Lexity was born from the idea that we can bring those same technologies to small businesses at more affordable prices.

How do you help small businesses?

We’re dedicated to SMBs and are committed to providing simple, affordable, and effective apps for the small businesses we serve. Our app gallery serves as a one stop shop for marketing services where merchants can pick and choose the apps that best meet their needs. The apps range from addressing advertising on multiple channels to setting up a storefront on Facebook to real-time chats. We have something to offer every small business.

What makes your company different from your competitors?

Today, it’s easier to start an online business than ever before with all of the shopping platforms out there—Etsy, Shopify and Magento—you name it. We’re trying to do something that’s never been done before in reaching SMBs and providing these marketing solutions that have previously only been used by large businesses. We’re also dedicated to offering them multiple solutions instead of focusing on one app. We believe this will bring us to the forefront of the SMB ecommerce space.

What are the most important considerations small businesses should have when choosing technology to help them power their business?

I think it’s important for small businesses to recognizing their marketing needs. Whether a business is just getting started or has been running successfully for years, we understand that there are always new needs that arise and new campaigns that can be implemented based on what part of the sales funnel they are trying to target and refine. We established the ADSEL approach here to help businesses recognize what aspects of marketing they would most like to focus on. Based on these needs, small businesses will better know where they would like to spend more of their budget and effort.

What other companies or entrepreneurs within the technology space do you admire and think small businesses should know about?

I really admire Square, who has really transformed the power of small businesses by helping them expand their reach. The American Express OPEN Forum is a great way for fellow entrepreneurs to exchange advice and ideas to help each other succeed. Also, Intuit is a great resource for small businesses. They have a small business blog that focuses on the success of SMBs.

Anything else Firmology readers and small business owners should know? News? Upcoming features? Special deals?

Our free flagship app Lexity Live is the best way to keep track of your business. It offers real-time analytics and visitor tracking so merchants can easily see who is visiting their store, what products they’ve viewed and where they’re coming from. With this information you can also initiate chats with interested customers to close sales. Beyond this, we have created a suite of marketing tools ranging from Google Shopping to Facebook Retargeting, and much more. Come check us out!

Firmology Readers: Let’s hear your thoughts!

1) Have a question or comment about Lexity? Drop Amit a line in the comments below.

2) What did you think of our third SMB Tech Meet & Greet? Are there other questions we should be asking? Are any of the questions above unclear or could be asked in a better way? Let us know in the comments below or email us at contact@firmology.com

 If you’re the founder of a tech company and would like to be featured on Firmology’s SMB Tech Meet & Greet series, please email us at contact@firmology.com with the subject line: Meet & Greet Submission.

Firmology Founder’s Note: I’m excited about this week’s How I Power My Business guest, Rafi Ton, for two main reasons. 1) He runs BannerPlay, a DIY banner advertising solution for SMBs, which is incredibly useful for small businesses. 2) Rafi and his team are based in Israel and  I always look forward to hearing about any tech startup that stems from a country that thrives on the spirit of entrepreneurship.

After working with over 50 Israeli engineers at a startup acquired by a Fortune 100 retailer a few years ago, I was blown away by their sheer output, problem-solving mindset, and relentless pursuit of their goals. If you want to learn more about the incredible culture of innovation of Israel, I highly recommend reading Startup Nation and, of course, read about the technology Rafi uses to power BannerPlay below!

Name: Rafi Ton
Title: Founder and CEO
Company: BannerPlay
Location: Israel
Smartphone: Samsung Nexus Prime
Computer: MacBook Air
Other Gadgets: You name it – I have them all (well, not really – but you get the idea). It’s an illness, addiction and lots of fun.

What’s the story behind the businesses?

BannerPlay was created to give small businesses advertising tools like the big brands use. Small businesses generally do not use banners ads. This is due to a few reasons: 1) production cost of interactive banners is high, 2) banner media is usually provided by ad networks, 3) banner media is more complex to target than search, 4) insufficient simple analytic tools.

In order to create an online banner campaign advertisers need to engage with few different entities: designers, developers, ad networks and sometimes also with analytics service providers. As a result, SMEs turn to Google AdWords.

With BannerPlay you can:
1. Create engaging banners in just a few clicks using our online studio
2. Add interactive widgets to the banners (chat, maps, games etc)
3. Target potential customers by geography and keywords
4. Analyze and optimize the performance

What apps or services are essential to the operations of your business?

When we started BannerPlay we aimed to build the entire infrastructure in the cloud – we don’t have any physical servers. We use Amazon AWS for everything – our servers run on EC2 instances, we use SimpleDB for runtime data storage and RDS for post processing, S3 for storage, Route 53 as our DNS, CloudFront for our CDN. Our entire production, staging and development environments are in the cloud.

We have a love-hate relationship with PayPal. Loving it as users and hating it as developers. But still, it is the most commonly used service. We use Base for our sales CRM, Atlassian services to manage our agile development (JIRA), for bug tracking (Bonfire) and source control.

What apps, services or gadgets do you recommend to other business owners?

Biggest money-saver(s)?
Amazon AWS by far. Whenever I get the monthly bill from them I just remember that we spent more than $300k to build our data center and now with Amazon AWS, I pay merely a small fraction of the amount and get much more.

Favorite mobile app(s)?
Gmail to get access to emails on the go, Base to keep access our sales CRM wherever I am and Waze for navigation.

Favorite personal app(s)?
Pandora. Love music and Pandora is the best. I use Pulse for my daily dose of news and Facebook, well, for Facebooking.

How can others reach you?

Website: http://bannerplay.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rafiton
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rafiton
Email: rafi@bannerplay.com

Firmology Readers: Let’s hear your thoughts!

Do you have any questions or comments for Rafi? Drop him a note in the comments below!

If you have a suggestion for someone we should feature, questions we should be asking, or would like to be featured on Firmology’s How I Power My Business series, email contact@firmology.com with the subject line: How I Power My Business

Web Services to Make You More Productive

Company founders are always on the move. You’re always thinking of new ideas, networking, building relationships with customers, and going over monthly income statements. Not to mention getting new business to keep your own business afloat.

But aren’t you tired of feeling like nothing is getting accomplished?

That’s why I’d like to suggest moving to web applications to get things done and easily manage day-to-day operations of your business. You probably still wear 15 hats of a founder. This means the closest you’ll get to giving up control is web apps (until you have enough hours to hire a part-time person).

While many of these apps are available on mobile and web, I suggest using the web version because you get a bigger picture on a larger screen. It’s hard to quickly make changes on your smartphone when the screen is just four inches. When you’re on your laptop or desktop, I believe you’re more productive because of the amount of screen real estate.

So which web apps should you use?

There are tons out there. It’s overwhelming to pick a couple because you have no idea if they’re going to actually help you. Today, I want to introduce you to five applications I’ve found to help get more done in my day. They’re applicable to any small business owner. Plus, they help you focus on what needs to happen in your business.

I hope you’ll be able to use these tools to increase your own productivity.

Similar to virtual assistants, Fancy Hands is staffed by real human beings – no automation here. With five tasks available to you for just $24.99/month, you can task Fancy Hands employees to do pretty much anything. From selecting the best hotel in St. Louis, to finding the perfect flight out on Monday morning, or even rescheduling your haircut, you’ll save tons of time. With Fancy Hands, you won’t have to deal with the language barrier and time difference of overseas assistants.

Why it makes sense for founders:

Let’s say you value your time at $50/hour – and that’s pretty conservative. That means the lowest price plan, at $24.99/month, would be 30 minutes of your time. You can pay someone to do five tasks (that would easily take you more than six minutes apiece). Free up part of your day to do what you want instead of trying to find a swanky hotel for your mother-in-law.

What I’d love to see:

Integration with TaskRabbit (Yep—bonus application to help you). Fancy Hands handles many of your virtual needs and TaskRabbit handles your real-life needs like donation pick-up, dinner party planning, and house cleaning. Combined, they’d be a powerhouse of help.

Proposals for new business need a face-lift  They’re normally put together in Microsoft Word and then a PDF is created. Shouldn’t these proposals be visually appealing? That’s where Bidsketch comes in. Bidsketch quickly creates beautiful, easy-to-read, web-based proposals starting at $19/month with a 14-day free trial. Now, there are tons of proposal apps out there. For me, Bidsketch is the cream of the crop because of their compatibility with many popular services: Basecamp, Harvest, FreshBooks, etc. Making applications speak to each other is always a benefit.

Why it makes sense for founders:

If you deal with client proposals, they can be a pain to create. Plus, they’re probably stuck in Microsoft Word format. Sending a word document as a proposal could date your company and poorly reflect your company’s credibility. And don’t you want to get rid of that pesky fax machine? Take your proposals to the web and manage them from a useful interface. Clients can approve and sign in one place.

What I’d love to see:

Bidsketch sell pre-formatted proposals. If you’re a founder just starting out, creating your first proposal is quite daunting. Having industry-specific proposals would help smaller companies get more out of the software.

I love this tool. It’s similar to Kanban in that it uses cards to increase project efficiency. With board-specific projects, you’re able to layout everything you need to do, categorize to-dos, and assign them to your team. Then, when you want to know where your project stands, log in and see what’s in progress and what’s been completed. Trello is completely free to get started.

Why it makes sense for founders:

As a founder you’re the chief cook and bottle-washer for the first couple years. Whether you’ve got a team of 20 employees,  you’ve got more on your plate than anybody. While it’s hard to give up control of a business function, Trello keeps you focused on your personal task list and that of others in the company. It’s the best 30,000-foot view money can buy.

What I’d love to see:

I’ve used Trello for personal project management and to-do lists. However, I stopped for a couple of months because I kept on forgetting to log in and move tasks from “to-do” to “done”. Even though I completed tasks outside of Trello, I’d love an email nudging me to get back in and complete a couple of tasks.

Out of every tool on here, this is my favorite. Why? Because email is my biggest time-suck. The solution is Unroll.me. Just sync your Gmail account up to unroll.me and it removes all of those pesky subscription emails, daily deals, and magazine spam from your inbox and sends them to you in a daily rollup. Now, all you’re left with is the important things. The best feature is the ability to unsubscribe from anything in your rollup with one click. But don’t worry. Want to send something to your inbox and not the rollup? You can do that from their easy-to-use interface. Unroll.me is also 100% free!

Why it makes sense for founders:

Who doesn’t want less email? Unroll.me has taken my inbox from littered with daily deals and in-store promotions to clean as a whistle. I now get less than 20 emails a day and almost all of them are important, actionable emails. For any founder, it’s nice to look at your inbox and see emails you need to read.

What I’d love to see:

Better management of emails that get sent to the black hole of death. Unroll.me is the judge of what gets nixed from your inbox initially. However, you’re also able to label what you want sent to Unroll.me. When I come across something I want sent to my inbox, I have to login to Unroll.me and figure out which rollup the email is in—which day, find the sender, and send it directly to my inbox. Basically, I’m asking for a slightly better user experience.

Dropbox launched in 2008 and I’ve just started using it. It’s one of the best tools for traveling workers who have multiple devices. Dropbox can sync up to your phone, tablet, desktop, and laptop, perfect for times when you’re in one location but your files are somewhere else. You get 2GB to start (which is plenty of space for pictures and files), and it’s easy to get free space, too.

Why it makes sense for founders:

You can keep everything in spot – no matter where you are. Need to edit a spreadsheet but you’re at lunch across town? Use Dropbox from your phone. Want to show off your new user acquisition to your co-founders? Use Dropbox. Best of all, you can share anything with a simple link—from folders to individuals files. Biggest cost-savings? No more driving back and forth from your house to your office.

What I’d like to see:

This is tough for me because Dropbox is near-perfect. The only thing I can think of to make it better is multiple-account management. I have a personal dropbox and a company dropbox. Maybe that’s my fault, but it’d be great to merge the two.

These five apps have saved me tons of time, both personally and professionally. From one founder to another, good luck with trying to get as much time back as possible. It’s tough, but with these apps, you’re headed in the right direction.

Image: iStockphoto

Name: Deven Patel
Title: Founder & CEO
Company Name: Cyfe
Company One Liner: All-in-One Business Dashboard
Location: Boston, MA

Tell us about yourself and your background.

I am a serial entrepreneur and web software engineer with over a decade of experience in web software development and internet marketing. I’ve always had a burning passion to create products that solve real world problems. For example, Cyfe was built to solve a specific problem I faced many times in the past.

What does your company do?

Cyfe offers an all-in-one dashboard software that helps businesses monitor and analyze data scattered across all the online services they use, like Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and more from one single location. They can connect their social networks, websites, blogs, email accounts, and so much more to their business dashboards. Our goal is to help companies save time and make better business decisions by bringing all their key data under one roof.

How did you come up with the idea for your company?

When I used to run small web based businesses in the past (e.g. marketing agency, web hosting, social network), I found the whole business performance tracking and reporting process very time consuming and frustrating. I would waste a tremendous amount of time monitoring all these different web services to see what my customers were up to and how different aspects of my business were performing. I would be sitting in front of the computer screen for hours logging in and out of websites and manually putting together spreadsheets to make sense of all the overwhelming data. And as you already know, the web grows at an exponential rate. So I would literally have to monitor a new piece of data almost every month. This is why I decided to build Cyfe. To help small businesses save countless hours tracking and making sense of all their business data that’s scattered across the web.

How do you help small businesses?

Tracking marketing efforts and business performance in general is a must for any serious business. Business is a game with the goal of making money. How can you win at any game without keeping track of the score? Cyfe allows small businesses to monitor every aspect of their business and then some from one single location in real-time. Some companies use Cyfe as a social media dashboard to help them monitor all the social networks they use (e.g. Twitter, Facebook). Others use Cyfe as a business intelligence tool to help them keep an eye on their individual departments’ performance (e.g. marketing, sales, support, finance). The power and flexibility of Cyfe is such that the possibilities are endless. At the end of the day, we’re here to help you grow your business and take it to the next level.

What makes your company different from your competitors?

When we launched, existing products in this space were either too technical (in that they required IT support or programming), too focused on enterprise (not optimized for startups and SMBs), or too expensive ($2K to $100K per month). With Cyfe, businesses can start with a completely free account and upgrade to our feature rich premium offering for as little as $14 per month.

What are the most important considerations small businesses should have when choosing technology to help them power their business?

The market is saturated with solutions nowadays. Make sure you choose the solutions that you really need and will help grow your business. Everyone experiences the shiny object syndrome at least once in their lifetime. If you do, move on quickly.

What other companies or entrepreneurs within the technology space do you admire and think small businesses should know about?

One company that sticks out in my mind is HubSpot. They’re doing some pretty amazing things in the marketing/technology space. I’ve met a couple of their executives in the past, Dharmesh Shah (co-founder) and David Cancel (chief product officer). Both are great people and very inspiring.

Anything else Firmology readers and small business owners should know? News? Upcoming features? Special deals?

I believe the key to success is finding the right balance between marketing and product. That combined with quick market penetration can do wonders. Oh and screw competition; there is no such thing as an unique idea anymore. Someone in the world is bound to be thinking about the same exact thing you are. Keep an eye on your competition but don’t stress over it too much. Be smart, stay focused, listen to your customers and use your resources wisely. Remember, all you need is a piece of the market to succeed. After all, if they can do it why can’t you?

Firmology Readers: Let’s hear your thoughts!

1) Have a question or comment about Cyfe? Drop Deven a line in the comments below.

2) What did you think of our second SMB Tech Meet & Greet? Are there other questions we should be asking? Are any of the questions above unclear or could be asked in a better way? Let us know in the comments below or email us at contact@firmology.com

 If you’re the founder of a tech company and would like to be featured on Firmology’s SMB Tech Meet & Greet series, please email us at contact@firmology.com with the subject line: Meet & Greet Submission.

You’ve spent your entire career building up your network of contacts, but do you actually know what each one is up to? Unless you meticulously use CRM software like Highrise or Nimble, odds are you struggle to keep up to date with the latest happenings within your professional network.

Dunbar’s Number

Make sense as there’s scientific research that contends that the volume of the neocortex region of the human brain can only handle up to 150 friends. Don’t believe it? Check out the theory of Dunbar’s Number by University of Oxford Professor Robin Dunbar. Even an entire social network, Path, was built on this premise, “We tend to have 5 best friends, 15 good friends, 50 close friends and family, and 150 total friends.”

LinkedIn’s Solution: Contacts

If humans biologically struggle to keep up with personal relationships, how is it even remotely possible for business professionals to keep track of hundreds, if not thousands, of relationships with customers, vendors, business partners, or  investors? LinkedIn thinks it has a solution. Since it’s the largest professional social network in the entire world, why would business owners, entrepreneurs, and professionals go anywhere else?

That’s why LinkedIn has completely overhauled LinkedIn Contacts and introduced some amazing new features to help strengthen the relationships between their members.

Sync Your Professional Life

LinkedIn wants its members to sync all of their address books, email services, calendars and contacts. This information is mapped together to complete picture of each one of your professional relationships.

Synced services include:

• Gmail, Google Contacts, & Calendar
• Yahoo! Mail & Contacts
• Yahoo! Calendar
• Outlook Mail, Contacts, & Calendar
• iPhone Address Book

LinkedIn Member Profile Relationship Tab

Once a LinkedIn member’s services are synced, all the information is pulled into the new member profile relationship tab. Notes, reminders, how you met, tags, LinkedIn messages, and email correspondence are organized nicely within this section. It’s very well done and provides you enough information to instantly jog your memory on how you know each other and what you’ve previously talked about. This is powerful and will likely take market share away from other contact management software.

LinkedIn Contacts Manager

LinkedIn has also revamped their contacts section and merged Profile Organizer into the sidebar navigation. LinkedIn members can sort their connections by tags, companies, titles, locations, sources, potential merges (merge two profiles together), and hidden. ‘Your Day’ is a great new feature that acts as a personal assistant, highlighting that day’s birthdays, promotions, and job title changes. LinkedIn crafts a template message that a member can personalize and send as a congratulations. The huge benefit here is that it gives members the opportunity to warm the relationship back up and re-connect with contacts they’ve lost touch with.

New LinkedIn Contacts iPhone App

Last, but not least, LinkedIn has launched a new standalone Contacts iPhone app to help professionals build long-lasting relationships on the go.

Firmology Readers: Let’s hear your thoughts!

• What do you think of LinkedIn’s overhauled Contacts functionality?
• Do you think it will help you strengthen relationships with your professional network?
• What other contact managers or CRM software do you use?

Image: iStockphoto

Like large organizations, small businesses also often have several identity and access management issues, such as ensuring security of systems and applications along with handling password issues. Unlike large organizations, they often do not have the staff and resources to easily handle these tasks, so the tasks either go incomplete or require more time and money than necessary. There are several solutions for small businesses though that easily mitigate these problems and save time and money in the long run.

Ensure Security of Systems and Applications

Employees often have many sets of credentials to login to their applications and perform their jobs. To remember multiple sets of credentials, employees often write down their user names and passwords and store them somewhere by their desks. This puts the organization’s applications at risk and reduces the security.

An easy way for small business to reduce the headache of multiple passwords for their employees, as well as ensure the security of their systems, is with a single sign-on (SSO) application. With an SSO solution, employees only have to remember one set of credentials. Once they enter their single user name and password they will thereafter be automatically signed into all applications and systems once they are opened. This ensures that employees will not use non-secure methods to remember their passwords.

A single sign-on solution also can incorporate two-factor authentication for an additional layer of security to systems and applications used by small businesses.

Two-factor authentication is used by requiring users to present a smart card, as well as a PIN code. This adds additional security to the login process. Two-factor authentication also can be customized to the needs of the organization, such as requiring the computer to remember the PIN for a defined period of time or automatically closing all sessions on the computer after the smart card is removed. Each of these customizations adds additional security to the systems, as well as improving efficiency for the user.

Easily Reduce Password Issues

Integrating simple sign on protocols in your business can cut down on security breaches and streamline employee access.

When an employee forgets a password, or is locked out of an application, they needs to go through the time-consuming process of resetting passwords. In a small business, access to a 24×7 help desk may not be possible. If there is a help desk or IT department available at all times, it may have a small staff and focusing on password resets can take away from their time of focusing on other more important issues.

A self-service reset password solution allows end users to easily and securely reset their passwords themselves. They simply register by providing answers to personal questions, much like a banking website. Then, when they need to reset their password, they simply click the “forgot my password” button, provide the correct answers and are able to reset their password without having to contact anyone else at the company.

This reduces the annoyance of password resets for both the IT department and the end user and allows them to both be productive working on more important tasks.

In conclusion, small businesses have many of the same issues that larger organizations deal with. By implementing one or all of the solutions discussed here they are able to reduce the amount of time the IT staff spends dealing with these issues, and not need to have an employee working full time to handle them.

Name: JM Freuler
Title: Co-Founder
Company Name: Funding Gates
Company One Liner: Receivables management software for small businesses
Location: New York
Website: www.fundinggates.com
Our app is also listed on the Intuit App Center: http://appcenter.intuit.com/fundinggates

A bit about JM’s background

JM Freuler is a Co-Founder of Funding Gates Corp., an online platform that makes it easy for businesses to track, organize, and manage their accounts receivable.

With over 10 years experience in Entrepreneurship, Private Equity and Investment Banking, JM advised CEOs and CFOs of both small-to-mid-sized businesses as well as Fortune 500 Companies on topics such as Mergers & Acquisitions, Cash Flow & Working Capital Management, and Capital Raising.

JM participates in panel discussions, is a speaker in workshops & seminars on business financial management, and has been featured on Forbes magazine, Yahoo Small Business, and Business2Community among others.

JM graduated from MIT with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and lives & works in New York.

What does your company do?

Funding Gates provides an online app that makes it easy for businesses to track, organize, and manage their accounts receivable. The app then allows businesses to take action so they can get paid faster and on a more consistent basis.

How did you come up with the idea for your company?

At Funding Gates we all have extensive experience advising companies on how to better manage their cash flow. Accounts receivable is the largest asset on a company’s books, but it almost always falls to the bottom of the priority list. It takes too much time and effort to manage, especially for a business owner who has to do so many things.

We saw that while Fortune 500 companies use very sophisticated tools to manage their receivables, small businesses manage most of their back-office tasks with excel, pen and paper, and notepads. We wanted to democratize the tools Fortune 500 companies use to the small business space as well, while at the same time making those tools extremely easy and intuitive to use. So easy that anyone at a small business can now manage the receivables at a company, whether it’s the owner, the spouse, the assistant, the CFO, or the controller.

How do you help small businesses?

The Funding Gates app takes the receivables data of a small business and automatically prioritizes the accounts for them. It provides real-time recommendations on what to do with a particular account in order to get paid.

The most time-consuming aspect of receivables management is understanding who owes you what and when, and what you should do about it. This can take hours, if not days. Funding Gates simplifies this task to a few minutes.

Funding Gates also makes it easy for businesses to take an action right there on the screen in front of them. They can send payment reminders to their customers, place a phone call, get a credit report on a customer, or send an account to collections if all else fails.

Our app seamlessly syncs with businesses’ accounting software such as Quickbooks, so businesses get a 360 view on their customer accounts while not having to change their current systems.

What makes your company different from your competitors?

The accounts receivable space is extremely antiquated. Through technology and a user interface that is easy to use, Funding Gates aims to take on a dusty industry that has been slow in innovating, and in the process make effective accounts receivable management far more accessible.

What are the most important considerations small businesses should have when choosing technology to help them power their business?

The technology needs to be:

1. solving a problem for your business: time savings, increased cash flow, or both.
2. easy to use and intuitive
3. affordable

What other companies or entrepreneurs within the technology space do you admire and think small businesses should know about?

Square. I think Jack Dorsey has done a fantastic job in disrupting the payments space through technology and design.

Anything else Firmology readers and small business owners should know? News? Upcoming features? Special deals?

We’re consistently releasing new features that will help businesses save time and money when managing their receivables, so please follow us at:

https://twitter.com/fundinggates

http://www.facebook.com/fundinggates

Firmology Readers: Let’s hear your thoughts!

1) Have a question or comment about Funding Gates or receivables management? Drop JM a line in the comments below.

2) What did you think of our first SMB Tech Meet & Greet? Are there other questions we should be asking? Are any of the questions above unclear or could be asked in a better way? Let us know in the comments below or email us at contact@firmology.com

 If you’re the founder of a tech company and would like to be featured on Firmology’s SMB Tech Meet & Greet series, please email us at contact@firmology.com with the subject line: Meet & Greet Submission.