CRM Software

Make your blogging effort pay off

Make sure you have an easy way to capture prospects once they’re at your blog.  You’ve peaked their interest, now make the contact  and potential sale.

Add PlaybookIQ Web Forms to your inbound marketing programs

Use a PlaybookIQ web form to capture inbound marketing opportunities at your website.  Web forms are free with PlaybookIQ and require no coding or programming.  Set up is easy, and within minutes, prospect information - name, email, address, and phone)  -  is captured in PlaybookIQ.  Prospects can be instantly assigned to a playbook so you know of their interest and can respond immediately to their inquiry.

According to HubSpot’s latest report: “Marketing Data: 50+ Marketing Charts and Graphs”, small business owners find inbound marketing to be much more effective than outbound marketing.

Inbound marketing has a 60% lower cost per lead than outbound marketing. Respondents also reported shifting more of their overall marketing budget from outbound to inbound efforts.

100% of business owners who blog multiple times a day have acquired a customer from their blog. Blogging is the key component to inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing has become more important to respondents.
A majority of people said that social media, natural search, and blogs have become more important while the number of people finding paid search important has dropped from 32% in 2009 to 22% in 2010.

I recommend you check out the full report for free at http://www.hubspot.com/Charts.

We are happy to announce the launch of the PlaybookIQ affiliate program.  If you like PlaybookIQ, we want to reward you for recommending it to friends and colleagues.  We know there are people that are happy to recommend it to others without any expectation of compensation.  Still, we think recognizing your contribution to PlaybookIQ’s growth is the right thing to do.

For each Paid Referred Subscriber who subscribes to a PlaybookIQ Monthly Plan you will receive a Referral Fee equal to 50% of the first month paid subscription and 15% for every succeeding month.   All the details of the affiliate program are found in the PlaybookIQ affiliate agreement.  If interested, you can apply to become a PlaybookIQ affiliate by filling out this simple form.

Thank you again for using, and now for recommending, PlaybookIQ.

Printable dashboards are now available at PlaybookIQ.com.  Simply click on the printer icon on your dashboard, and take a printout of your day’s activities with you.

Last week we implemented two user suggested enhancements to PlaybookIQ.  One enhancement involves the steps shown on your dashboard.  Previously, multiple steps within the same Playbook may have appeared on your dashboard if one or more of the steps were past due.  Now, only the current step is shown.  Second, the contact title and contact company have been separated on the contact screen for clarity.  Simple changes that we hope will make a difference for our users.

You can now get a quick overview of recent activity across your entire sales team, with the new ‘Recent’ tab in PlaybookIQ.  You have told us that an understanding of what happened over the last hour, days, or week is critical to team communication.  It helps you get the big picture and is a very easy way to see what has been accomplished between the last time you were in PlaybookIQ and now.  From here, you can click on any of the contacts listed to open that contact for more detail.  As expected, contact privacy settings are honored in this new view as well.

Here is what it looks like.  We hope you like it and thank you for using PlaybookIQ.

With Web Forms, you create publicly accessible web-to-lead forms to capture prospect information from a web page hosted by us. PlaybookIQ hosts the web page and creates contacts out of each response entered on the page.  For example, here is one we created for people interested in more information about PlaybookIQ.  Let’s see how it works.

Admin / Web Forms

First, we need to create the web form.  In the admin section of your account, you will notice a section called ‘Web Forms’.  Click ‘Manage’ and then ‘New’ to build our new form.

Form Title

First, give your new web form a title and description.

Customize Form Messages and Links

After creating your web form, customize its title, message and links.  Include a ‘Thank You’ message that will be displayed after someone submits your form.

Playbook Assignment

This is an important step.  When someone submits your web form, a new contact record is created.  That contact will appear on the first step of the playbook you specify here.

Your Web Form URL

After you save your new web form, you will see your new web form URL.  Use this web address in your emails and on your website to easily capture leads into your PlaybookIQ account.

Try it Out

Go ahead and click on your new web form URL.  Fill out and submit the form.  Now, go to your dashboard.  If the fist step of your playbook has “days: 0″, then you will see the newly entered contact in your PlaybookIQ account, ready for you to take action!

We really hope you like this new feature and thanks again for using PlaybookIQ CRM.

This weekend, PlaybookIQ received some system tuning and additional hardware.  These improvements have resulted in faster application response times and less waiting for you, especially in the areas of searching and opening contacts.  We thank you for your patience and hope your experience with PlaybookIQ is improved.  As always, let us know through email, Twitter, chat, or phone (contact information is at http://playbookiq.com) if you have any issues or questions.

Recent performance monitoring on PlaybookIQ has resulted in the launch today of a faster system.

With the addition of multiple playbooks, a contact’s playbook and step information can get much more detailed.  The newly tuned contacts screen handles display of this additional information without impacting response time.

All changes in this release are behind the scenes.  You will not notice any UI changes but you will notice a faster, more responsive CRM system.  We like how the speed improvements have turned out and hope you do too.

We are adding a new feature to PlaybookIQ.  With this new feature you can assign more than one playbook to a contact.  When you apply a playbook to a contact, any existing playbook assignments remain unchanged.  For example you can assign the ‘Seminar attendees’ playbook to ‘West Coast Supply’, even if they are already on the ‘Prospect’ playbook.  ’West Coast Supply’ remains a ‘Prospect’, while also receiving the additional treatment of ‘Seminar attendees’.

This new feature appears on the details screen for every contact:

Assigning a playbook

The previous version of playbook assignments allowed for just one playbook at a time:

In the new version, you can apply multiple playbooks:

Removing playbook assignments

In the previous version, you removed a playbook from a contact by assigning the ‘blank’ playbook choice:

In the new version, if you wish to remove a playbook, you do so by simply clicking ‘remove’ and confirming.  As always, each time you apply or remove a playbook, that action is captured in the contact’s comments and history.  We hope you enjoy the new multiple playbooks feature in PlaybookIQ.