You can now post webform data to your custom data fields. Simply add another text field or hidden variable and use your custom field name as the name of the field or hidden variable.
For example, if you have a custom field called 'Favorite Food', you can add a text field:
<input type="text" name="Favorite Food" />
or you can do the same thing with a hidden variable:
<input type="hidden" name="Favorite Food" value="Cheeseburger" />
The newest feature of Big Contacts is the ability to send cards to any of your contacts. Just pick a card and a message and we do the rest for you. There is a wide selection of cards available - Birthday cards, Thank You cards, Sympathy cards, and more. You can also send a gift with your card. We have Starbucks, AMC Theatres, Blockbuster and many more gift card options.
This is a great way to stay in touch with your family and friends and business contacts without having to go to the store and pick out a card and mail it yourself.
To send cards, you must first preload your 'card account' with money. Click on the link on the upper right part of the Big Contacts page: 'Renew/Add Users/Card Account'. From here you can add money to your card account using a credit card or paypal. Then after you have selected a contact, click on the 'Send a Card' link. Pick a card, enter a message, and select the card format. If you want to include a Gift Card, select that option and choose the gift you wish to include. It is that easy! We take care of sending the card for you. Postage is included and the return address is your address you used to create your account - go to Admin/Company to verfiy that it is correct.
Cards are only available for Professional users, we have not extended this to Free users yet. Also, we can currently only mail to addresses in the US.
Send a card. Stay in touch!
There are many times where it would make sense to divide a task up amongst different members of your team. Let's say you have a process for signing up new clients. Maybe a sales assistant has to draw up new documents. Then a account manager needs to send the docs to the client. Then a sales assistant follows up to retrieve the docs. Then an office manager files the new docs and does the system setup. Finally an account manager makes a phone call to welcome the new client. This type of thing can be very easy to mess up.
With Big Contacts you can create a multi-step task template and assign different steps to different members of your team. Go to 'Admin' and look for 'Tasks'. Then create a new task and 'Edit Custom Steps'. For each step, set up who on the team the step is to be assigned to.
Now, when you have a new client, simply click on 'Assign a New Task' and select the task template for new clients. This will properly set everything up. Whoever is responsible for the first step will have the task assigned to them. When they complete the task, the system will automatically re-assign the task to the next person in line.
Build a workflow for the things that you do and never let complex processes fail and slip through the cracks!
One of our users asked if the letters that they send to contacts can show up in history. A great idea! I'm surprised we didn't think of that when we set up the letters section. Anyway, it is now added. When you send a letter, it appears in the contact's history. Use the feedback box and keep those terrific ideas coming!
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.
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.
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.
| 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.
This week we released Big Contacts Table View. With the contacts table view, you can edit a group of contacts, delete multiple contacts, or merge several contacts into one. You can also assign a task to several contacts at the same time. This is not something you will use all of the time, but is a great way to maintain your contact data.
Update: We now have a flash video you can watch to demonstrate how the Table View works. Click here to see the demo
We get asked all the time how to handle duplicates. Let's say you have three identical John Smith contacts. Pull up the contact table, type Smith into the last name filter and John into the first name filter. You will then see all the contacts named John Smith. Click the checkbox next to each of the contacts that you want to merge and click the Merge button. They will be combined into a single contact preserving any meetings, notes, history or sales opportunities that you have created for each of them.
Maybe you want to delete a bunch of contacts at a company that you no longer do business with. Open the contact table and type the company name into the company name filter. You will then see all the contacts for that company. Click on select all. Maybe you want to keep a few, click to uncheck the box next to their names. Then click on the Delete button.
Here's another common problem. You wish to change the contact type of a group of contacts. After opening the table view, select the contacts that you which to change the contact type for and click the checkbox next to their name. Next, below the contact type header, select the new contact type from the dropdown. Then click replace. All of the selected contacts should now show the new contact type in their contact type field. Finally, click save and all of the selected contacts will have the new contact type.
One more great use for the Contact Table. Maybe you want your assistant to call each of your clients and thank them for their business. Click on Display:All and sort by Contact Type. Then next to each contact with Contact Type equal to Client, check the box next to their name. Then click the link Assign a Task to Selected Contacts. Enter the details of the task, making sure to assign the task to your assistant, and then click assign task to selected contacts. Each contact that you selected will now have this new task assigned.
We hope this new feature will help you to better manage your contacts and make Big Contacts even easier to use.
Here is a feature you rarely see on web sites or web services - Keyboard Shortcuts!
In Big Contacts, instead of looking for and then clicking on the link that says 'Add a New Contact', you can instead use a keyboard and simply type CTRL-SHIFT-N. This will bring up the 'Note' popup. Then just start typing the note. Tab and enter details. Tab again and type 'Enter' and you have added a note without ever leaving the keyboard.
If you're like me and would rather use the keyboard as much as possible. This will really save you time.
To see the list of keyboard shortcuts at any time, just type the CTRL key.
