Having spent the past week or 2 with 9 spread sheets full of supplier, customer and all our past order data and no where for them to go. I set about selecting a new piece of software for us to use as a CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

The term CRM is used very broardly in the tech world to describe a whole maner of things.  Usually anything to do with tasks and opportunities and project management etc is scooped into the term CRM.

Something we have been careful not to do with our new order process system is bulk it out with loads of features that go beyond what we originally designed it for.

ProMart is brilliant for managing orders start to finish and knowing where everything is upto.  However we needed to look at a database system that could look after customer interactions and was fast and easy to search for contacts and viewing all the extra information about a client that can be stored. 

Over the Past 3 Months Promo Gifts has moved onto a custom built order system, we have developed ProMart specifically for our company and the way in which we work.

It’s so far taken us 3 years to get to this point and the project has snowballed into a highly automated user friendly system that can provide quotes to our clients far faster than we have ever been able to do before.  

I recently had a bit of a rant on linkedin that I though would make an interesting blog post.  Some names have been removed to protect peoples identity. And some extra bits added for theatrical effect.  My intention is not to degrade what was an amazing olympic games.

I loved the Games.

What a fantastic display of British Hospitality. What an amazing buzz around London. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing from start to finish. I was glued to the TV for most of the events we were competing in and my fingers were regularly hopping to that red button.

But seriously… good for our industry?

Why are Locog so intent on stopping anyone from printing or displaying the olympic rings? It’s ridiculous. How do they even own the rights to this? It was originally designed in 1912 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games. I’m sure he would have not been happy with the way the logo is guarded. Particularly as he designed it as the coming together of continents.  Hardly sounds like the “olympic spirit” we hear so much about.

Just found this on a guerrilla marketing blog and I thought I would share it.  This is an image of a printed pint glass that was used for a new Guinness marketing social media stunt.

The idea is that it tweets, updates facebook, checks in on 4square and downloads various coupons and promotions that you can use to either buy guinness or win prizes.

However when you actually scan the QR code the link takes you to a holding page on godaddy.com.  I’m not sure if the domain is not yet active or if they forgot to actually buy the domain in the first place.

I don’t want to point any fingers as the Guinness marketing department could one day be one of our clients  But clearly something went wrong somewhere.

Well we have been using our new quote system for 2 days now.  After one initial embarrassing bug where clients were getting charged VAT twice when they tried to pay, we have nailed down the quote time to roughly 20-30 mins.

Standard products are quoted in 2-3 Mins. Having over 13,000 products on a website can make it a real tough job to maintain and update prices.  None of our suppliers follow a set format when sharing their data so we have to manually update prices every time we either get new prices from our suppliers, or when we get an enquiry from a client.

We have added a publicly viewable “Last Updated” line above all product prices. Unfortunately I did a large import on the 01-04-2012 that has set all the last updated dates to this date. However whenever we get an enquiry for a product we update the product and then fire out a quote using those prices.  Then if we get a subsequent enquiry within 2-3 months we tend to use the same prices which brings our quote time down to 2-3 mins on our popular products.  

When you request a quotation from us we will always ask you if you want us to make you a PDF visual so that you can see how your logo looks on the product you are enquiring about.

We Do Not Charge for This Service!

All that we ask is that you reply to the quotation email with the artwork in an Outlined Vector Format EPS file.

PDF or Illustrator AI file is also ok, so long as the artwork is vectored.  We can also in some cases accept hi resolution JPG images.  It depends what you are printing onto and how you are printing.

We have had a lot of interest in our data standardisation and promotional products portal.  I’ve outlined on linkedin the various features that we are looking to incorporate.  After discussions with various suppliers we have altered some of the initial specs and data fields.

As per my last 5 posts we are looking to rebuild our database to incorporate a standard set of fields that will be used in all the data feeds, XML, CSV and a HTML version of product data. What this means is that we are set back slightly while we rebuild the database it’s self and remap all the fields on the product pages and within the quotation system it’s self.  

I have decided to start accepting random pitches for guest posts on this site. We have a lot on content on our Blog that is useful, but at the same time some that is not so useful. Over the next year or so I intend to remove the not so useful articles and replace them with excellent content. I will continue to post my own blogs on the site.

Since I know the way many bloggers think, I am going to set down a few guidelines that I ask you to adhere to. Failure to adhere to these will result in me rejecting your post. Also, I reserve the right to not publish a post if I do not think that the quality is up to par with the other articles on this site.

CONTENT

Your post MUST be around the topics of…

Well without further ado I present to you the new website template and overall layout improvements.  A big thanks to Alledia for the use of the Bolt template for the past 2 years.

I did change the whole template a year or so back but suffered a huge loss in traffic due to load time.  Since then I have learnt a great deal about all things speedy. I’ve managed to compress and speed up the site down to a 2-3 second load time. I’m rather obsessed with fast websites, and we have spent a lot on money on some of the best resources available in order to achieve this.

We have been developing for the past 2 years a new system for doing quotations.  Whilst we really wanted to have a full e-commerce system we felt it was not always that feasible to maintain stock levels and maintain 100% accurate pricing on over 13,000 items.  I always did like the idea of a coming into work in the morning and seeing that the website has earned us £XXX.XX Pounds in the last 24 hours.

Wouldn’t that be bliss?

It would be so much easier to quantify your actions and judge success if everything was automated and you could base your next marketing choices based on the figures you saw each morning…  but the Sales Team vetoed my excessive love of automation.

They prefer to be able to spend more time speaking with the customers, trying to educate them about print specs to get the job done right.