I was rebranding my Pinterest page this weekend when I received a notification from the social network that I could upgrade my account to Pinterest for Business. I came across this very interesting infographic titled “12 Ways to Increase Productivity”. As a content marketer, I was immediately inclined to share it with my readers:

 

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Browsing through the methods for increasing productivity, number seven was the first one to stand out from the crowd. I am a proponent of the Pomodoro Technique and this technique is at the heart of my strategy for staying productive at work everyday.

 

What is Pomodoro Technique?

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management technique that assists users, like me, with maximum focus and creative freshness, thereby allowing them to complete projects faster with less interruptions and little exhaustion.

The process is simple. For every project throughout the day, you allot your time into short intervals and take breaks in between. Essentially, you work for 25 minutes, then take break for five minutes. Each 25-minute work period is called a “pomodoro”, Italian for tomato. After four “pomodoros” have passed, (100 minutes of work time with 15 minutes of break time) you then take a break (15-20 min). The technique encourages its users to use a timer to ensure maximum productivity.

Every time you finish an interval, you mark your progress with an “X”, and note the number of times you had a tendency or push to switch gears to work on  to another task. Your goal is to eliminate  or reduce those tendencies as time goes by.

Try it for yourself or perhaps you want to know more about InfoFlo’s Task Management feature?

InfoFlo’s Task Manager allows you to create and manage your tasks or ‘pomodoros’ as the Italians like to call them.  Users can easily attach files, set email and pop up reminders, share tasks, set priority levels, tag by type or status, and more. Check out our video for more information on task management.

 

About Carmel Vision

Carmel Vision, a Toronto based CRM software development company, is focused on delivering a powerful management infrastructure that is designed to collect, search, and archive all content, contact and communication activities that take place in a typical office. We understand and listen to all of our customers’ needs and strive to give excellent quality at affordable prices.

Our flagship product, InfoFlo – is a central management system specifically designed to combat one of the biggest technical challenges facing any professional organization, how to efficiently organize, archive, filter and search the vital information that bombards our desktops on a daily basis. Our infrastructure allows all office activities to coexist together under one umbrella, making all critical information readily available at your fingertips.

One of the best ways to succeed at owning a business is to acquire top-notch presentation skills.  Use these tips to get your next stellar presentation well underway.

1. Creatively Transfer Enthusiasm

It goes without saying, the boring presentations are often the ones that convey the least enthusiasm. Presenting a monotone, or overly wordy Power Point can leave an audience feeling their valuable time has been wasted. If you’re thrilled about your business strategy or product, find creative ways to transfer that enthusiasm to your audience, so that they can be, too.

2. Use Impact Stories and Anecdotes

Of course, this doesn’t mean spewing lengthy historical run-downs or sharing company quips that really only make sense to employees and co-workers. What it does mean is submitting relevant background that makes powerful impact and succeeds at bringing presentation points home.  These will serve to illustrate your position in a practical and down-to-earth way.

3. Bring in Meaningful Props or Statistics

That perfect photo or even a product prototype never hurts to spruce up an otherwise mediocre business presentation. Props give presenters a chance to be creative and to give their presentation personality. They also help visual learners in the audience identify quickly with the subject matter. Plus, they lend a degree of variance to what the audience eye beholds, keeping things interesting and on-point.

4. Use Natural Delivery Techniques

Relaxed body language and simple diction convey a sense of everyday charm to audiences – even in business.  The corporate world is full of formal stiffness and robotic sound-bites. Make a difference and stand out with a delivery style that’s both natural and professional. By rehearsing several times before the presentation, this style can easily be mastered in no time.

 

Unlike with search engine marketing, Windows desktops and laptop computers are equipped with hundreds shortcuts. Unfortunately, more than 50% of Windows PC users don’t use them. Some just don’t remember the keys they need to press, while others are so used to doing it manually that changing habits is often harder than reducing two to three clicks.

Whatever the reason may be for not using shortcuts, we are here to educate you about them and how they offer you an easier and quicker way of navigating and using computer software programs, such as CRM Tools. For instance, did you know that highlighting text with the keyboard and pressing Ctrl + C is much faster than taking your hand from the keyboard, highlighting the text using the mouse, right clicking copy from the file menu, and then putting your hand back in place on the keyboard? Below are top 14 keyboard shortcuts we recommend everyone print out and use with their Windows PCs and laptops.

Shortcut Keys	Descriptions
Ctrl+z or Ctrl+y	Undo or Redo previous text change
Esc	Close a record, dialogue box or cancel a command
Ctrl + (+)	Zoom In
Ctrl + (-)	Zoom Out
Shift+F10	Display the Right Click Menu
Tab or Shift+Tab	Move to the next or move to previous option or option group when working in a dialogue box
Ctrl+s	Save a record
Ctrl+Shift+s	Save and then open a new form (Save and New)
Shift + Arrow Up orShift + Arrow Down	Select multiple rows in a list sequentially
Tab + Space Bar	Select multiple rows in a list non-sequentially
Ctrl + Backspace	Delete full work instead of a single character
Ctrl + Home	Move cursor to the beginning of the page.
Ctrl + End	Move cursor to the end of the page.
Ctrl+Shift+5	Minimize ribbon

Using the above mentioned keyboard shortcuts can significantly increase your staff’s productivity, reduce repetitive keystrokes, and help keep you focused on the important tasks at hand.

About InfoFlo

Did you know that Windows Shortcuts is not the only thing that can improve the way you run your business, streamline your operations, and enhance your service offerings without the need to hire more resources? Let’s us introduce to you InfoFlo, the most powerful, affordable, and user-friendly CRM Software on the market today. InfoFlo offers more than 40 integrated features including automatic linking of all emails to contacts, document management, collaboration, social media integration, email marketing and much more. By providing users with 360 degree visibility into all activities linked to specific contacts and shared projects, users can easily improve the efficiency of their customer facing processes, while decreasing their software costs through InfoFlo’s revolutionary pricing model. You’re just 30 Seconds away from your free 30 Day Trial of InfoFlo! Download your free trial here.

Do you find it hard to find quality prospects on Twitter? Do you want a better way to engage you followers in order to increase your Twitter ROI? Twitter is an ideal social media platform that gives you access to a targeted audience and relevant conversations but first you have to cut through the line. Collectively, its home to more than 500 million active users and 1.6 billion search terms every day. That’s a lot of people and some of them simply have to be potential buyers.

Why use Hashtags as a Prospecting Tool

Twitter is a noisy platform that relies on real-time news and information for growth and engagement. As a business owner who wants to stay afloat in an ultra-competitive industry, you know how important it is to have conversations with the right people. But finding the right people and starting those meaningful conversations on Twitter is challenging when there are millions of tweets being sent every hour.

The principle of hashtags is to create a clickable link to a threaded conversation around a certain topic. They also are used when searching social networks, so you can track such things as conferences and events. By using Twitter wisely, you can take part in the most relevant conversations as they happen, spot opportunities before your competitors do, build relationships, deepen customer trust and make a name for yourself.

Finding Relevant Hashtags

There are as many hashtags as there as tweets but the difference is that you can use hashtags to filter out the tweets that aren’t relevant to you. How do you know which hashtags to use and follow? Does your research using quality Twitter marketing tools, such as HashAtIt.com and Hashtagify.me .

Spend some time talking to experts who know your customers best; that is customer service reps, sales representatives and account managers who have Twitter accounts and are actively using it to find prospect. Make a list of the most commonly asked questions or challenges voiced by your customers and other individuals interested in your services/products. If you notice that your current customers and prospects have the same set of questions or challenges, create an FAQ page on your website and share it on Twitter. It is likely those issues are common throughout your industry. It is a safe bet there are more than a few Twitter conversations around those issues.

With your list of pain points typed up and pinned to your office wall, you are ready to find relevant hashtags. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. There are hundreds of hashtags already in place that you can watch and use. To discover relevant hashtags, search for keywords related to the conversations, questions and issues you want to find. The easiest way to do that is by using the search function at the top of your Twitter homepage.

Carmel Vision, a Toronto based CRM software development company, is focused on delivering a powerful management infrastructure that is designed to collect, search, and archive all content, contact and communication activities that take place in a typical office. Customers are drawn to our InfoFlo software because they are tired of spending effort trying to “figure out” the complexities of traditional Customer Relationship Management software products. Traditionally customers are stuck deciding between an overpriced, feature rich CRM or a cost conscious CRM with very limited functionality. With InfoFlo contact management system you can have the best of both worlds and get a feature rich CRM at price point that is fair and also includes free upgrades for life.

Share this article on Twitter by hashtagging #CRMSoftware. Don’t forget to also follow us on Twitter.

Yesterday, I was talking with a good friend of mine about email marketing and our conversation wandered into the topics of email, spam and why people don’t read your emails. Now sitting at my desk writing this blog it got me thinking… what would change this?

Here are 6 tips, tricks and points of advice to reengage your bored and tired email marketing recipients.

1. Stop speaking about your list. Stop speaking about who is subscribed to your lists. Write as if you’re emailing one person only. It instantly makes your email marketing campaigns more personal.

2. Be practical. Don’t email only when you need something from your readers. Be helpful. Be generous. Be friendly. Offer them tips, advice, and anything that can help them become informed decision makers.

3. Be trustworthy. Let people know what to expect. Yes, sales messages should be part of your email marketing, that’s fine. Just be clear about it what happens when they sign up. Many times businesses include these messages in the fine print and customers often learn about them after they’ve signed up; frustrating them as a result.

4. Establish success criteria. This is an important aspect of an effective email marketing campaign. Write down a couple of goals you would like to achieve at the end of the campaign. Monitor these goals using metrics and analytics. Before you send the next email marketing blast, go over the success criteria of the previous blast, see what has worked and what has not, and adapt your future campaigns based on the results.

5. Give, Give and Give More… without Expectation of Return. Members of your email list have gifted you with their attention. Honor that attention. Your responsibility is to ensure they receive value from your email. When you focus on giving useful, relevant and actionable advice you’ll be gifted with more of their attention in the future.

6. Think about mobile. If a campaign doesn’t show up on mobile devices, it’s not going to perform well and you will not be able to attain your success criteria. Everything you send should be mobile-friendly. According to the study, 63 percent of Americans and 41 percent of Europeans would either close or delete an email that’s not optimized for mobile. Might be time to start using a responsive template, if you have not done so already.

Create, Run, and manage email marketing campaigns with the click of a button. InfoFlo CRM Software will allow you to drill down into each email campaign and provide you with real-time analytics.