Carmel Vision Blog

How do you know if you need a contact manager software? Well, there are some ways to figure this out. If your business is dealing with information overload and is looking for a single repository where all information can reside, then you need a contact manager software. The result will be improved information management and increased efficiency in the day-to-day activities at your office.

1. Information Overload:
In today’s era of emails, files, reports and pictures, you can very quickly become overwhelmed with information overload. There are ways to help you control your information and not waste precious time in looking for it. A contact manager software would help alleviate many of the problems associated with information overload as rather than just storing all information on your personal computer or on a shared drive, it would provide a single repository where all information resides. Unlike a shared drive, which can be very time consuming and confusing to maintain, a contact manager software allows users to link information to entities so that one could click on a contact or a project in the system and see all information linked. Many companies believe that setting up such a system is expensive, complicated and time consuming, which is not true at all. In fact, with current technology, contact manager software systems are actually quite simple to install and setup. Moreover, costs have dramatically decreased. For example, the cost of a server computer was in the thousands, now, it’s in the hundreds of dollars, making it extremely affordable. If you are experiencing information overload and are looking for an affordable solution, give InfoFlo a try.

2. Lack of Collaboration
To run a successful organization, your employees must be in constant contact with each other, rather than in separate silos with their own contacts and leads. If they aren’t collaborating on everything, inefficiencies will quick become a norm and sales will dramatically decrease. Contact manager software will help with collaboration as one of it’s core features is sharing all contact and lead generating information. Each employee would be able to see all shared contacts within their own station and if a new contact is added, the contact manager software will notify all other users who are suppose to see this contact that it was added. Similarly, when a collaborative project is created, the software will notify all shared users and now a shared space has been created where all information pertaining to the project can be placed. It is essential to select a contact manager software that includes powerful collaboration tools, such as InfoFlo, to help get your company back on track. The result will be an office where all employees are in sync with one another and nothing, including leads and customer service requests, fall between the cracks.

3. Lead Generation
Sales are what drive successful companies and without a strong lead generation tool, your sales will never reach the level they should. Many organization rely on Microsoft Excel to help them manage their leads, but this becomes inefficient very quickly. A contact manager software should do more than just offer a shared contact list! it should also include a sales workflow that every sales person needs to follow, until the sale is either marked as Sold or Follow Up. Such a workflow should be fully customized to allow the organization to follow the steps they deem necessary rather than force them to follow a workflow. This customization should be easy to do! Also, a contact manager software should inform all sales people when ever a lead is adjusted in the sales workflow and provide a live view of all current leads. With this in place, leads can be efficiently managed and the sales manager can get a better understanding of why a lead was or wasn’t successful and how the sales people are doing.

4. Email Management
Every organization sends and receives emails on a daily basis. Unfortunately, many are using software solutions such as Microsoft Outlook, Gmail and Lotus Notes for just this feature. The problem with these solutions is that they do not link emails to contacts, but rather force employees to create a contact folder and then manually drag and drop information to a contact. A contact manager software should automatically manage these emails by linking them to the contacts while still providing a friendly inbox view of all emails Incoming & Outgoing. Whenever an employee wants to view emails linked to a contact, whether the contact is being shared or not, they should just have to click on a contact and see all emails. The problem is that most contact manager software solutions do not offer email management as they assume that customers don’t want to move out of Outlook, Gmail or Lotus Notes, creating two separate systems for the organization; one for emails and one for contact management. A good contact manager software, such as InfoFlo will offer both of these features together, saving the company much needed time in finding and replying to emails.

Today we’ll be talking about SQL the databases generally found in a client/server contact management software and why InfoFlo‘s database is unique.

InfoFlo is fully integrated with SQL 2005 and up, including SQL express. Now this is not unique because most contact manager software solutions are also integrated with the same but the infrastructure and how we manage this data is unique. Rather than storing data in the traditional sense InfoFlo stores the links to all the data inside a folder structure. Now this might not seem like a big deal but using this technique allows the customer to store an unlimited amount of data. With no restrictions on the amount of data stored a small business can save money on buying an expensive SQL 2008 or 2012 license which can cost thousands of dollars. Instead they can download the free version of SQL Express and never worry about exceeding the space limitation set on SQL Express.

There are many software solutions out there for multiple users but what about a solution for a single user that does not want to download a large piece of software that will significantly slow down their personal computer. Products like Sage Act and Maximizer software can be up to a 5 GB download and will put a large burden on a customer’s personal computer. InfoFlo for a single user is only a 250MB download because it is using a Firebird database which is better from a single user perspective. If you have questions or comments please post them below we would love to hear your feedback. For information about InfoFlo please visit www.carmelvision.com

WHY USE AN INTEGRATED CONTACT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE SOLUTION?

In today’s information technology era, businesses all over the world are inundated with an endless stream of information. Digital Files, hard copy documents and pictures and videos are constantly coming in or out of an office. Collecting, organizing, archiving and retrieving such information is becoming a common challenge for businesses, especially, when critical and immediate decisions have to be made.

CAN YOU AFFORD NOT TO?

By using today’s patchwork approach to systems, including the purchasing of disparate solutions, unnecessarily increases cost, complexity and risk. It leads to redundant content and to a lack of connections among systems and departments, not to mention the hours typically wasted in trying to find and retrieve information.

In addition, companies today expect their current systems to do more with less; however, many systems cannot handle these demands as they only offer subsets of a fully integrated contact management software. Although businesses may be reluctant in allocating funds for such technology, companies must examine their current systems to ensure that they have what it takes to operate efficiently and remain competitive.

Bottom Line: Most companies need to access at least one form of activity associated with an integrated Contact Management Software; whether it be as a scanning solution, document management or archiving solution, document collaboration solution, project management solution and/or email management solution in addition to other specific point activities required to get their job done effectively and effortlessly.

…….Look No Further, InfoFlo which starts at $99 per user, has arrived!! It offers a fully integrated contact management solution at an affordable price. Now you can use a SINGLE solution to manage all of your customer and office management needs.

Unlike our competitors, InfoFlo is a ONE TIME cost for life and includes FREE UPGRADES!! Please visit www.carmelvision.com and take advantage of our FREE 30 DAY TRIAL.

Contact Management Software is usually expensive to purchase, complicated to setup and requires many hours of training. For this reason many companies prefer to remain with Outlook and not deal with the headache of installing a contact management software or CRM software.

For this reason, we have developed InfoFlo which starts at only $99 per user.

Product Overview:

InfoFlo is highly customizable, feature rich and affordable CRM solution that is fully integrated with Outlook. We currently compete with CRM solutions such as ACT, SalesForce and Maximizer and are signing up customers who are frustrated with these solutions on a daily basis.

What makes our software unique is:

1. All contact information is only  a single click away because we link all emails (automatically linked to the contact!!), calendar appointments, files, notes, tasks,  telephone calls and more to each contact. While at the same time we also provide a list of all emails, notes, appointments, tasks created in the entire system offering a 360 degree of an office
2. Features such as email marketing with personalized fields, document management with version control, scanning, project management, calendar sharing, PDF converter and business card scanner
3. Easy to Customize
   1. Our system is centered around 4 entities: Contacts, Companies, Categories, Projects. All of these entities can be renamed
   2. Custom Fields for contacts, companies, projects
   3. Custom calendar appointments, task types, project types
   4. Custom Folder names and Templates
   5. Custom Scanning Workflow
   6. Outlook Sync feature so that users don’t need to change their environment, while still working within InfoFlo: We are one of the few CRM solutions that has successfully created a sync with Outlook. Many CRM solutions claim to have this, but it in fact does not work as advertised. I believe that there are many SMB’s that are using OpenText software and are only using Outlook as their CRM. I see quite a large target market here.
   7. Affordable one-time cost: Infoflo is affordable and is only a one-time cost for life.

InfoFlo is an affordable contact management software that’s easy to setup and is very user friendly.

An efficient contact management software should include some type of email management. Most of these contact manager solutions, such as Act, Goldmine and Outlook’s Business Contact Management offer this type of feature, but make it very complicated to setup and time consuming to maintain. Wouldn’t it be nice if your contact management software could automatically link emails to contacts for you, without you having to do anything?

The best contact management solution would simply check every new email that comes in and automatically link it to a contact by matching the From field and the contacts email address. If there is no such match, then the contact management software should place it in an “Unknown” box.

This is exactly what InfoFlo does! With InfoFlo, you simply click on a contact and you can automatically see all emails linked. If that email is from a contact that’s not added, the software lets you populate it and create a new contact from it.

You can find more information here:

1. http://www.carmelvision.com/email-management.htm

2. Youtube video on how InfoFlo populates Unknown emails:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWe20gurvLc

 

Most contact management software (CRM) solutions include some kind of document management features. Typically these features includes the option to archive/link a document to an entity, such as a contact, company or project and collaborate with other users. This can become very useful as now users can view entity information in addition to all files related.

However, the main problem with these contact management solutions is that they don’t offer complete document management features, such as version control and reverting to a previous version. Without these 2 essential features, most contact management software’s on the market still force their customers to either purchase a 3rd party document management software or manually create new version of a document each time they want to make changes.

for this reason, InfoFlo includes complete document management features. It is the only contact management software on the market that includes all the features: document archiving (document linking), collaboration, version control and revert back to previous version. With this complete feature set users can enjoy all the benefits of a contact manager software fully integrated with all the document management features they would need. There is no need to purchase a 3rd party document management software and all information is stored on one central server, rather then on two separate servers.

You can find more information here: http://www.carmelvision.com/document-management.htm

 

Wouldn’t it be nice if your contact management software automatically linked emails to contacts for you?

Just imagine not having to spend the time in creating rules and filters in Outlook, or how much money you would save not having to pay a consultant to set it up for you.

If you are using InfoFlo as your contact manager, that’s exactly what you get. You’ll never need to link emails again as the software knows to automatically link emails to contacts for you. It does this by checking if an email that has just been downloaded by the system matches a contact that has been added. If it finds a match it automatically links the email to the contacts and marks the email as Known.

At any time an InfoFlo user can see all emails linked to a specific contact, while still having and Inbox view of all Known (emails from contacts added to InfoFlo) and Unknown.

We at Carmel Vision are proud to be one of the few software companies to offer such a feature. Our customers definitely appreciate the time and money that we are saving them.