Big Contacts

Using Big Contacts for Lead Generation

Did you know that you can add contacts to Big Contacts directly from your website? Many people use their web site to collect sales leads. Others use their web site to have people sign up for newsletters or join a new service. You can take this cusotmer data directly into Big Contacts without having to retype it. And it is extremely easy. Just configure a few settings on the 'admin' page in Big Contacts and POST the data from your form to Big Contacts.

You can also create a task for someone on your team each time the form is posted. Maybe you want an inside sales perosn to follow up. Or a marketing person to mail a brochure. Set it up one time and forget about it.

You can also create a new sales opportunity when the form is posted. Use this to track sales leads.

More information is available on the Big Contacts support wiki.

Sales Plans/Quotas added to the Sales Manager

You can now enter a sales budget or quota for each user and track progress on the sales manager. Set a monthly quota for each user that you want to have one on the 'admin' page in the 'Sales Opportunities' section. Then look at the Sales Manager. In the sales projection area, you will see the projection, along with the quota for the period and the percent to plan.

Another improvement to the Sales Manager is that you can now look at the sales opportunities and sales projection for any member of your team. Just click the circle next to the team member and the data will be updated to reflect only their oportunities and their quota/budget.

One more change that may be helpful. When you configure your 'Products', you can enter a 'Price'. Then when creating a new opportunity, you can enter a quantity and the size of the opportunity is calculated for you.

Let us know what you think of the changes and how we can continue to make the Sales Manager work better for you.

Sending Letters with Big Contacts

Do you like to regularly send letters to some of your contacts? Maybe a thank you letter? Or maybe a cover letter for your brochure? Do you wish it was easier to create and print these letters?

With Big Contacts you can upload and save your favorite letters. When you wish to send a letter, first search for the contact. Then look for the dropdown list of your letters you have uploaded next to the Word icon in the business card. Select the letter you want, click the Word icon and the letter will be downloaded as a Word document.

You can use the 'formal name' and 'salutation' fields for the contact. If you save a formal name such as 'Dr. and Mrs. Joseph A. Smith' and/or a salutation such as 'Joe and Nancy', those will be used. Otherwise, the contacts first and last name will be used.

It is easy! Try it out.

Big Contacts compared to Highrise

Here are some of the things that we have noticed about Highrise compared to Big Contacts.

(It is certainly possible that this is not 100% accurate. And features do change over time.)

Highrise
Contacts	Users	File Storage	SSL	Price
250	2	None	No	Free
500	3	250MB	No	$12/month
5,000	6	500MB	No	$24/month
20,000	15	3GB	Yes	$49/month

 

Big Contacts
Contacts	Users	File Storage	SSL	Price
500	2	500MB	Yes	Free
1,000	3	1GB	Yes	$12/month
10,000	6	10GB	Yes	$30/month
25,000	12	25GB	Yes	$70/month

With Highrise, you have to pay $49/month just to get SSL. Highrise does not think you need security if you're not paying a lot for their service. ALL plans including the Free Edition of Big Contacts include SSL. Your data is encrypted when sent over the Internet. Not so with Highrise.

Highrise is a wiki for people data. It is not really a contact manager. It is free form, Big Contacts is more highly structured. Highrise is not very well organized once you have a lot of information,  files, tasks, notes, etc about a contact. Highrise does not have any reports. Big Contacts has extensive reporting capability and integration with Excel. With Highrise, there is no way to get information into an Excel spreadsheet for mail merge or any other need.

Basecamp can only import contacts from Outlook, ACT9, vCard and Basecamp. You cannot import custom data. With Big Contacts you can import data from a CSV file, a Tab delimited file, Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Palm Desktop, Mac Address Book, vCard, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and GMail.

Highrise does not have a calendar. You cannot see when you have met with a contact or when you have upcoming meetings with them. With Big Contacts, you get a full team calendar and can schedule meetings for anyone on your team. You maintain a full contact history including all your meetings.

Highrise is limited in the area of tasks. In Big Contacts, tasks and to-dos can be assigned to a specific person.  You can see all of the tasks assigned to you in the 'My Tasks' section  of Big Contacts. Big Contacts has multi-step tasks. Big Contacts allows you to quickly add asks by letting you create common tasks in advance (including multi-step tasks). You can track in a contact's history when a task was completed and who completed it. None of this is available with Highrise. 

You can also track your team's activity. Big Contacts 'Recent Activity' link lets you see everything that is going on with your team or narrow it down to a specific person or time period. There is nothing like this in Highrise making it diffcult to manage a team.

With Big Contacts, you can view tons of contact details in the "business card" in the center of the screen - it is quite easy to find a phone number or email address. You can also save tags, interests - all sorts of data about a contact. You can have multiple user-defined contact types. With Highrise you have to dig around for basic stuff like a phone number.

Big Contacts is all about having a well organized approach to running a  business or sales team and tracking all of the people and events and tasks that make your business run well. Unlike Highrise, Big Contacts allows you to track sales opportunities and define your own products and your own sales pipeline with a sophisticated sales manager.

Hihgrise and Big Contacts both let you upload files and attach them to a contact. In Big Contacts, you can add a file description and we track when you uploaded the file any information you saved about. All the files are in  one place in a table. With Highrise you have to scroll down the page looking for files. If you send an email with Big Contacts, any attacments are saved with the contact's file area.

We will keep adding to this list as we learn more about the differences between Big Contacts and Highrise.