Uncle Ted forgets your name and was last seen passed out at your wedding. Aunt Katie was ecstatic to be at your graduation. She never misses a card for every birthday and Christmas. She calls you often just to see what is new. You like and trust Aunt Katie because it is obvious she cares about you. So you care about her.

Most businesses treat customer relationships like bumbling Uncle Ted, showing up and calling only when it's expected. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could be Aunt Katie to your clients?

In a perfect world, you would deliver personalized letters to your clients on a regular basis. Your individualized attention would create a positive image for you and your company. Open communication would quickly establish a friendly rapport, keep your product front-of-mind and gain clients' trust. This isn't about teddy-bear hugs; people are inclined to buy from someone they remember, like and trust and to you that's cash in the bank.

It’s not a perfect world – but you have two options to nurture client relationships. You can:

1. Hire all those punctual and personal aunts out there
   
   
2. Use Solve360’s scheduled email feature to automate much of that personal interaction

Before you post job openings for “Communication-Savvy Aunts,” look at what Solve360’s new Scheduled email feature can do for you.

A Simple and Automatic Follow-up

Lets say you just made a sale or completed a project. While the ink is still wet, create a Scheduled email activity that will be delivered to your client exactly one month from now to thank your client for his or her business, confirm everything worked out and request a referral.

It really is that simple, it scales and it does make a difference.

Multi-Step Lead Nurturing Campaigns

Lets expand on the first example by using the Scheduled email activity to manage a company-wide personal lead nurturing campaign. Let’s say you've established an ideal ten-step process for handling each new lead:

That continuous “personal” follow-up would do an amazing job of converting leads to clients, but just before your keyboard-bound fingers fall off from fatigue, your head would explode from the stress. Solve360 will systematically type and send those eight personal emails at exactly the right time and set up the three events in your calendar. It’s simple to do:

1. On a new contact record, create a set of Scheduled email messages and events according to the sequence of your nurturing campaign. Insert fields such as "First Name," "Last Name" and "Job Title" to personalize your Scheduled email messages. This simple step prevents you from using the over-used, generic “Dear Valued Customer" opening. Have you ever met Valued Customer? Imaginary friends are only OK when you’re a child.
   
   
2. Save this set of activities as a template with its own name so you can attach a copy of the same set of activities to each new lead with one, simple click.

Solve360 templates are blueprints of your work that you can reuse later. A template stores a set of scheduled email messages that can be applied to new prospects. When you follow the same steps repeatedly, templates save you a lot of time by simply plugging and chugging new information.

Combining the scheduled email’s field names with a template adds value to your sales and marketing efforts. Your emails will have personal appeal, provoking those fuzzy feelings with your prospects and clients, yet all you did was insert a template of pre-defined activities.

Continuous contact without the continuous labor. Solve360 gives you more time to spend doing... err... Facebooking counts as work these days, right?

Some Background on Effective Lead Nurturing Campaigns

To create sustainable customer relationships, lead nurturing (aka CRM Drip Marketing and autoresponder) campaigns are your best friend. Why? They work. Consider this: 80 percent of all sales occur after the fourth interaction. Shocking, especially considering that 90 percent of all salespeople quit after four interactions. (They were so close!)

You don’t want to pester your prospects. Effective lead nurturing campaigns are always carefully planned. Some things to consider:

• Keep a consistent message throughout and point to benefits. The same theme should be present in all emails. Drive one point home instead of a bunch of pop flies that get you OUT.
  
  
• Provide value to your prospect by helping them understand the benefits of working with you through relevant examples, recent news about your company and industry, similar case study and answer frequently asked questions. Make your messages to-the-point and useful to the reader.

Lead nurturing campaigns must be carefully articulated to have maximum benefit. But, with Solve’s new template and scheduled email features, you only have to perform the labor once! When you have a campaign that works, put it on autopilot by telling Solve when to send your messages. It’s like having your own communications assistant, typing away vigorously at the keyboard to boost your brand image and increase your sales through personal messages.

Show Uncle Ted the door and embrace modern business practices and systems to give your customers the attention they deserve.

Your business is broken

No application or service can fix flawed business processes or team trust issues. We're not going to miraculously cure your toxic work environment. We're good, but we're not magicians. Solutions require:

1. PEOPLE with the right attitude and competency,
2. PROCESSES that get the job done and
3. SIMPLE TECHNOLOGY that delivers expected benefits

You will continue to try and drive your business hiding behind Outlook

If you think emailing spreadsheets and documents is “sharing” and with some synchronization magic it could work even better; good luck with that. If a tool works for you then use it, but don’t be dogmatic. Keep your unrelenting focus on the value you and your team create for your clients. It’s not just about you.

Solve360 creates network benefits just like the fax machine and social networks. Benefits are exponentially correlated to number of users and total use. The more your company utilizes the features and potential of Solve360, the greater the impact it will have on your business.

You need to be sold on the benefits

You can't be serious? Staying on top of your clients is a no-brainer. If you need a sales pitch to get you onside the doubt in your heart will turn Solve into the next marginalized idea. Solve360 is at the vanguard of a simpler and better way of working and addresses the most important elements of your business:

• It destroys bureaucracy and administration
• It improves transparency and coordination
• It facilitates relationships and connection

For most companies, this means change. If you are afraid of change then we can't help you.

Of course we'd love to have you as a client. After all, we've worked pretty damn hard to make Solve360 not just a good product, but an amazing one, and we'd like a chance to work with you and your team to demonstrate that. But it's only worthwhile if there's a chance that you will become so excited at the performance improvements in your organization that someday you'll tell everyone who will listen how well this nifty service you found is working out.

The Solve360 External API is implemented over HTTP and is RESTful. Every item has its own URI and is manipulated in isolation.

You will normally send your Request data in XML format, but we understand JSON and form encoded data just as well. If you want to use a non-XML request format simply set the HTTP Content-type header to either application/json or application/x-www-form-urlencoded. conversely, we will normally send response data in XML form unless you set the HTTP Accepts header to application/json.

Remember, access to features and data is limited to the actual user account being used to access the API.

Interface Summary at https://secure.solve360.com

Methods

https://secure.solve360.com/report/timetracking/?start=2009-08-02&end=2009-08-08

Or

Or

Example using XML, JSON, Form Encoded

Every kind of item can be created, updated or destroyed with three supported Content-Type formats: XML, JSON and Form-Encoded.  The following example of creating web site activity for a contact demonstrates each format.

XML

JSON:

Form-encoded (provided by html form):

Example of Batch Processing Activities

This example demonstrates filtering Project Blogs by category tags then adding six new Section activities for each one if they don’t already exist.  Most of the example code is for handling communication with the server; the actual API logic is at the end and is fairly small.

Preamble

The Solve360 External API is implemented over HTTP and is RESTful.  Every item has its own URI and is manipulated in isolation.

You will normally send your Request data in XML format, but we understand JSON and form encoded data just as well.  If you want to use a non-XML request format simply set the HTTP Content-type header to either application/json or application/x-www-form-urlencoded. conversely, we will normally send response data in XML form unless you set the HTTP Accepts header to application/json.

Remember, access to features and data is limited to the actual user account being used to access the API.

Reference

The API methods and parameters are the same for Project Blogs as they are for Contacts.  While this API documentation is in a preliminary state please refer to the Contacts page and simply replace the segment name /contacts/... with /projectblogs/...

Preamble

The Solve360 External API is implemented over HTTP and is RESTful.  Every item has its own URI and is manipulated in isolation.

You will normally send your Request data in XML format, but we understand JSON and form encoded data just as well.  If you want to use a non-XML request format simply set the HTTP Content-type header to either application/json or application/x-www-form-urlencoded. conversely, we will normally send response data in XML form unless you set the HTTP Accepts header to application/json.

Remember, access to features and data is limited to the actual user account being used to access the API.

Reference

The API methods and parameters are the same for Companies as they are for Contacts.  While this API documentation is in a preliminary state please refer to the Contacts page and simply replace the segment name /contacts/... with /companies/...

Methods

The Solve360 External Application Programming Interface or “API” provides clients who have access to some basic programming experience the ability to add, edit, delete and report on data in their Solve360 accounts without having to go through the Solve360 web interface. With the API, you can integrate Solve360 with your web site and other applications you use and create some pretty spiffy custom reports. This level of customization is provided so you can meet your team’s specific needs and automate as much of your work flow as possible. The API is probably easier to use and way cooler than you might originally think. It's also quite powerful; you’ll be working with some of the same tools that we use here everyday. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

Authentication

Your code will authenticate to the API as a real Solve360 user account and will have access to everything that particular account has. However, instead of logging in using the user's password your code will use the user's “API Token”. The API Token is enabled on the Workspace, My Account, API Token page and is different for each user account.

Often when authenticating using HTTP Basic Authentication (the method we use) you will be prompted for a username and password. In these cases you would enter the user account’s email address as the username and the API Token as the password.

Just like your user account's password your API Token provides unlimited access to your account so be very diligent in keeping it secret and remember that the API Token can be removed or value reset at any time from the same page you first activated it.

Giving it a Spin

Creating a new contact in Solve360 directly from your website’s “Contact Us” form

Lets start by setting up the script that will receive the completed form from the website visitor and update Solve360. The good news is we've already done the hard work for you. You only need to edit two lines with your own account information and save the file on your server. Everything else stays the same. This file contain your API Token so it needs to be secure i.e. not readable by visitors. Note to the inclined: We've chosen the to use only native PHP functions for this example so clients don't need to worry about installing special libraries on their server. You may prefer to use CURL and send data in XML format.

http://yourServer/contactSave.php

Next, lets create a simple web form to capture the data from the website visitor. The only change here is to set the form action="contactSave.php" attribute to the URI where you saved the file in the previous step.

http://yourServer/contactForm.html

Now lets test it out, open the form created in you created in the previous step in your web browser, fill in the values and click Save. If the test worked as expected you will see a response page which would be look like:

If the response was "success" you just created a contact so login to Solve360 and enjoy the result of your work. If there were any errors with the transaction, for example posting nonexistent fields to the system, you would receive information about them between tags in the response.

What's next? Try expanding on this example by adding additional fields to your form and enabling the category tags option in the ContactSave.php script above. To help you get going quickly lists of all Field Names, Category Tag IDs and Ownership IDs specific to your organization are provided within your account under: Workspace, My Account, API Reference.

Conventions used in the External API Documentation

Content that has been elided for brevity: ...

Any text that should be replaced by your own data: {text}

Reading Data Using the API

The API has two types of actions for reading data: List and Show. List returns a collection (e.g. a list of contacts) and Show returns a single record (e.g. all information related to a specific contact). These actions are done through the GET verb, which also means that they're easily explorable through a browser. We recommend using Firefox for this as it's renders the XML response in easy-to-read format. The response to a successful read is "HTTP/1.1 200 OK".

Writing Data Using the API

Creating, updating, and deleting items through the API is almost as simple as reading, but you can't explore it easily through the browser. We recommend using CURL to evaluate the methods first. It's a very easy way to explore the API and it's perfect for scripts too.

When you're creating and updating items, you'll be sending XML into the API and including the XML content in the body of your request. If you prefer to send regular form-encoded data just let the system know that by adding the header "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded".

The response to a successful creation is status code "HTTP/1.1 201 Created". You can read the URI of the new resource in the Location header which is handy if you need to refer to your newly created item. Since you can create a new item with less than all its regular attributes the API also returns the complete XML for the newly created item in the response e.g. new Id and created date.

Updating an item is done through the PUT verb and against the URI of the resource you want to update. The response to a successful update is "HTTP/1.1 200 OK".

Finally, you can delete items using the DELETE verb. Here you don't need to pass the content-type header because you're not sending any data. The response to a successful delete is "HTTP/1.1 200 OK".

Dealing With Errors

If a request fails, the error information is returned with the HTTP status code:

• 400 Bad Request: The request was invalid. An accompanying error message will explain why. This is the status code will be returned during rate limiting.
• 401 Not Authorized: Authentication credentials were missing or incorrect.
• 403 Forbidden: The request is understood, but it has been refused. An accompanying error message will explain why.
• 404 Not Found: The URI requested is invalid or the resource requested, such as a contact, does not exists.
• 406 Not Acceptable: Returned by the Search API when an invalid format is specified in the request.
• 500 Internal Server Error: Something is broken on our end. Please contact our support team to investigate.

API Limit

Clients may request up to 12,000 API calls every 24 hours. Requests for more than the limit will result in a reply with an error status code of 400 and an empty result in the format requested.

Pursue every potential sales opportunity

• Maintain daily call lists for your Sales Reps and follow their progress
• Send email newsletters or direct mail to customers and prospects and improve targeting of marketing campaign activities by pre-qualifying prospects
• Improve cross-selling and up-selling
• Share detailed client history between employees and departments
• Differentiate and stay close to your high-value customers

Improve and measure staff performance across the company

• Keep track of all communications between your business and customers, be aware of every targeted marketing activity, question, complaint, and the complete sales history before picking up the phone
• Anticipate customer needs based on previous experiences
• Improve customer service responsiveness when handling customer questions or concerns
• Reduce the cost of handling customer orders
• Access client contact information and history on mobile devices
• Have a secure system in place for “all corporate memory” in case of loss or theft

So what’s it going to take to make CRM work? We were taught in kindergarten that sharing is good and the same principle applies in business, at least when it comes to managing customers. Share information between staff and departments so your team can provide feedback to each other and respond to your customers in a consistent and efficient way – your customers will notice. Have reasonable expectations – not everyone is going to use the system in exactly the same way or to its maximum potential. That’s still okay. In hindsight you'll notice you are much better off with it than without it.

Getting Started with Solve360's CRM Features

Setup user accounts for all team members that need access. If you need to, separate your contact database between groups of users and setup work groups.

1. Import contacts from your existing systems. Our team is standing by if you need help with this. When you import, you are given the option for the contacts to be shared by default (recommended) or private.
   
   
2. Quickly take care of any customization you need in the system, including:
   
   
   • Add tags to describe your contacts as you work with them so contacts can be grouped into lists. For example you could use categories such as: Lead, High Value, Qualified Prospect, Customer, Vendor, Contractor, Conference Attendee, etc.
   • Add new fields to the forms to track unique information
   • Remove standard fields from the forms that you don’t need
     
     Don’t worry you can come back and tweak this at any time!

Plan the Day-to-day CRM Routine

Although Solve360 allows you to work the way you see best by not imposing its own predefined processes, quite often sales revolve around the following tasks:

• Entering and qualifying new leads
• Making new calls and scheduling follow-up calls
• Creating and following-up on sales opportunities
• Delivering on promises (tasks to be completed)

Essentially the entire day-to-day process revolves around two simple concepts:

1. Create contact records for all new leads then call on the prospect to gather information and qualify them. For each lead select the tags that describe the status of the prospect e.g. Qualified, Hot, etc. Record what has happened in the contact’s activity section by adding a call log, documenting requirements in notes, attaching files, adding tasks to complete, scheduling follow-up calls and attaching all email correspondence to the page for future reference.
   
   
2. Each day open the Activity Dashboard and review what tasks needs to be completed, meetings you need to attend and opportunities that should be followed-up on or updated. Then return to the Contacts window, filter your active prospects by their tags and work through your list again. Review prior conversations, call on prospects, send them helpful information and continue to qualify them. Remember it takes on average twelve interactions with a client to make a sale so establish a simple system to ensure the work gets done and get busy.

Responding to Prospects

When the phone rings anyone can quickly and simply open the caller’s contact page and BAM!, there they have a complete 360-degree view of the caller in front of them with the detail about all prior discussions. They instantly continue the process with the prospect exactly where it was left off. Just outline what needs to be done next and record the outcome of the call. That’s personal and attentive service!

Tell Your Team How They Should Be Using the System to Support Your CRM Routine

• Explain the tags/categories you are using and why
• Outline your lead qualification process e.g. the sequence of “helpful information” you have to send your prospects
• Describe what should be documented (call logs, notes, tasks, future events/meetings, email correspondence, etc.

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