You can now store and share documents in PlaybookIQ.  This makes for a convenient place to store coaching documents, product sheets, proposals, invoices, or any documents that relate to a contact. 

Attached documents are shared with everyone on your team (unless the contact is ‘private‘, then only you can view the document).

To use this new feature, simply click the ‘attach’ link in the contact’s ‘Document’ section. Find out more at the PlaybookIQ help center.

To try it out, sign into your Playbookiq account or sign up for an account for free.

Heres a simple new feature that can make your work a bit easier.  To get daily email reminders of your tasks due simply click ‘Edit’ in the top right of the application to open your user profile.  There, you will see a new profile item, “Email Reminders”.  This was a highly requested feature that we think you will find useful.

You can now mark a contact private so that others on your team cannot view it.  By default, contacts are private to your company and others in your account can see all contacts in your account.  

To mark a contact private, simply mark the “Private” checkbox when entering or editing a contact.  Only the contact owner can mark a contact private.  (The person who first creates the contact is the contact owner.)  The private setting extends to comments and tasks on the contact as well.  We hope you find this new feature useful.

The best way to see what a software product can do and to tell if it’s a fit for your needs to see it populated with data.  In some applications you get “preview” screenshots which are sample data presented as static images where your real data will eventually show up when entered.  The preview screenshots are better and more helpful than looking at a blank-slate.  But, they don’t let you get your hands on data and see how the app actually functions.

So, instead of static screenshots to fill in the blank-slate, we now provide each new PlaybookIQ account will sample data.  When a new account is created, you will see a sample contact.

That contact will be assigned to a sample playbook, sample tags and a sample task.  Go ahead and click around in the sample contact.  Complete a step in the playbook to see how 1) the contact is automatically moved to the next step, 2) a comment is automatically added to history and 3) the user responsible for the next step will see it due on their dashboard and calendar.

We hope you agree that sample data is a great way to get hands on experience with PlaybookIQ.

PlaybookIQ help is now available the new PlaybookIQ Help Center.

There, product information is organized in what we think is a helpful and informative way. You’ll find a new “Getting Started” section that should help you get up and running in no time.  We hope you agree this is a helpful addition to PlaybookIQ and, as always, we welcome your feedback.

You can find the help center at http://help.aboutplaybookiq.com.

Here is how to segment your contacts and export a list the segment as a list. You may want to do this in order to create a mailing list from which to invite VIP contacts to a special event or to create a list to send to your bulk email provider.

1.) Enter criteria on the search page
On the search page, you can enter criteria for your list. Every contact field, including tags and custom fields, can be used for searching and basic segmentation.

2.) Export search results
When you click “Find” on the search page, all contacts matching your criteria are returned. Click the “Export these” link and follow the web browser prompts to save or open the newly created file.

Demonstration

In this 15 second video, we create a list of our contacts from Colorado that are tagged “Gold”.

There’s more:
Tagging, untagging, tasking, and assigning to playbooks.
Besides exporting all contacts matching your criteria, you can select contacts on which to perform bulk operations. The operations currently supported are add a tag, remove a tag, create a task, and assign to a playbook. This feature is a powerful way to manage groups of contacts.

Besides the detailed search options on the search tab, PlaybookIQ also offers a quick search on the contacts tab. As you type in the search box, your contacts are filtered to all contacts with first name, last name, or company name starting with your search phrase.

Type sm … and as you type…

… smi …

This search box is also a quick way to find everyone in a given company.

We’ve made it faster

With recently improved indexing strategies, this search box is the quickest way to find someone when you know their first name, last name, or company. If you receive a phone call while at your desk, you can quickly find their PlaybookIQ CRM record, open it, and be ready to read through their comments and history all within a few seconds.

Give is a try at http://playbookiq.com. We think you’ll enjoy how quickly you can find and open a contact.

What is CSV?

Comma-separated values (CSV) file format is the most common and easily understood way to manage generic data. A CSV file is simply a straight text file in which each row of text is a contact (in our case). Data in each row is separated by commas and optionally enclosed in quotes. A simple CSV file looks something like this:

“first name”, “last name”, “company”
“John”, “Jackson”, “ABC Inc.”
“Mary”, “Smith”, “Widgets LLC.”

Microsoft Outlook, ACT, Excel and just about every other software application can export its data in CSV format. More detail about CSV can be found “here“.

How does PlaybookIQ support CSV?

Because CSV is so common and flexible, PlaybookIQ supports import of contacts from generic CSV files so you can quickly move contacts from another application to into into PlaybookIQ.

Here is what it looks like:

Step 1: Prepare your data for import.

The import feature leads you through the process step-by-step. The first step is simply to review your data file to ensure it is a valid CSV file. Step 1 describes what a valid file is so that you can visually review your file before proceeding.

Step 2: Select your import file.

PlaybookIQ imports files from your local computer. In Step 2, you simply tell PlaybookIQ which local file you want to use.

Step 3: Upload file for parsing and inspection of field names

In this step, PlaybookIQ reads your file and attempts to match data to PlaybookIQ fields. The process of matching your data to contact fields is called ‘mapping’.

Step 4: Map fields

For fields that PlaybookIQ could not automatically map, you are prompted to determine the mapping. For data that you wish to exclude from the import, you simply leave the mapping field blank.

Done!

From here, you can now perform the standard bulk-tasks to the newly imported contacts:

add a tag, assign to a playbook, add a task

We are excited about this new, flexible import feature.

PlaybookIQ has always had a comprehensive search that lets you find and filter contacts by almost all contact fields, including custom fields. Today, we enhanced the search results screen with some new functionality and a new look.

Here is the new screen, that has a more pleasing look and some additional functionality.

The new search results screen:

Shows total number of contacts returned from the search.

Shows number of contacts clicked, in real-time.
As before, you can then take action on each contact checked. The new feedback as you check and uncheck contacts simply makes it more clear what impact you will make when taking an action on the checked items.

Allows for mass management of all contacts in the search result.
Previously, you add a tag, remove a tag, assign to playbook, or add a task to up to one page worth of results at a time. Now, you can click “Show all” to change from page view to complete list view of your results, allowing you to perform tasks on all contacts ‘with city of Denver’, for example.

We think these changes make creating lists and segmenting your contacts a little bit easier. Find out more at http://playbookiq.com.

SSL for all! All PlaybookIQ accounts, including free trials, now get the protection of secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption. SSL is the Internet standard for secure, encrypted transmission of your data.

All major web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera automatically recognize and authenticate SSL certificates so, as a PlaybookIQ user you do not need to do anything to be protected. When you log in, you will see a lock in the corner of the web browser that indicates the connection is using SSL.