Why Good IT Security Is Important For Small Businesses.

Why do small businesses need to worry about IT security? We all understand why banks need to have good security … they’ve got our money, and if they get hacked they are probably out of business. What’s the worst that can happen if you don’t have good security as a small business?

The truth is that the damage caused to a small business by poor security may not be as catastrophic as a bank getting hacked, but the consequences of poor security are still painful .. and costly. 

The first thing you’ve got to realise is that security isn’t just about getting your web site hacked. In fact, a good proportion of what we do in managing IT support for our customers involves managing network security. 

How does IT Security impact small businesses?

The problem for small businesses is internet malware. Malware is “bad” software that is unintentionally downloaded from hacked web sites that seeks out bugs in software that is installed on your PC. Unless your PC is kept updated with the latest security updates, malware can use these bugs to upload malicious software which can turn your PC into a spam sender or steal your internet passwords. The first you are likely to know that you have malware on your PC is when things start to grind to a halt, and this is the point at which bad security starts to cost you money. 

Few things are more frustrating than a PC on a go-slow because of a malware infection. It gets in the way of doing your work and causes frustration. You can try running applications such as Malwarebytes to lean it up, but you then lose your PC for the best part of a day while it runs a full scan of your system. Critically all of this is taking place when you want to be getting on dealing with your clients, costing you money with every minute that goes by … and you haven’t even called your IT support company yet!

How to keep internet malware at bay.

The answer is to make sure that your PC’s and servers are kept updated and maintained on a regular basis. If you’re a small business without a dedicated IT Manager that can be a tall order. In reality you are better off outsourcing to a managed service provide who will use automation software to run manage and update your systems remotely. Using automation cuts the cost of keeping your PC’s properly updated and in good working order. More importantly, it’s not your problem!

So don’t discount security just because you’re a small business. It’s just as important to you as it is to bigger businesses. You just see the benefits a different way. For you, IT security translates into reliability of your PC’s and servers.

How Can Online CRM Help Your Company To Communicate Better?

Given that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers, you clearly need to take good care of your client base. Yet sales, customer service and finance functions within a company fail to join up, and this can be bad for business. Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to customer relationships, and installing a CRM provides a simple means of sharing relevant information about your customers that will help your employees to do their job better. 

Let’s take three hypothetical situations to demonstrate my point:

• A salesman is chasing a customer for a new order, but is unaware that the customer has unpaid invoices that are more than 90 days overdue .

• An engineer arrives on site to perform an installation, but has no knowledge of discussions between the customer and his salesperson on the detail of the work to be carried out so the work is completed incorrectly.

• An accounts administrator is chasing for payment of an invoice that has been issued, but is not aware that the contract has not been able to be completed because the goods are being returned as faulty.

In each case these people may have acted differently if customer communications had been joined up using a CRM system. The salesperson may have insisted on cash in advance;  the engineer wouldn’t have had to revisit an installation, and the accounts administrator may not have lost a customer for appearing incompetent.

What Else Does A CRM Do?

Of course there is a lot more to a CRM than providing a central point of reference for customer communications for everyone in your company. A CRM can join up your entire business process including:

• Gathering web  and social marketing leads directly into your sales process.
• Generating documentation for quotations, orders, invoices and customer service.
• Producing business pipeline reports  to assist in business planning.
• Analysing the relative profitability of all of your products / business .
• Measuring the performance of your sales staff.
• Evaluating the return on investment of your marketing campaigns.

You can of course do all of this by extracting information from multiple sources and crunching numbers through a spreadsheet, but at a far greater cost over time. It is the integration and automation of your entire business process that is the true prize of a successful CRM deployment.

Online CRM Part 4 - Managing your sales opportunities with Workbooks Online

Are you finding it difficult to manage your sales process using Microsoft Outlook, Word or Excel? It’s not that you can’t use these standard tools to organise your sales process, there are just better tools available. If your time is precious to you, then you can work more productively and make life easier for yourself by installing a proper Customer Relationship Management (CRM ) system such as Workbooks Online.

CRM Essentials

For me, there are a number of essential activities that I need to be made as simple as possible:

Company / Contact Search

Any CRM system that doesn’t allow you to find the company or person quickly wouldn’t even make it off the starting blocks. Workbooks provides a search box that allows you to perform a “Google-like” search for whatever it is you are looking for. You are presented with a list of matching search results and you simply click on the right one to go to the record you need.

Recording Notes and Activities
Excel Spreadsheets and Outlook fall short for contact management because they don’t provide a simple-to-use way of recording telephone call and meeting notes. Knowledge is power and your staff will be better informed and provide a better service to your clients and customers if they have access to meeting and conversation notes when talking to your customers. Workbooks allows you to record details of every interaction that your employees have with your clients / customers and make them available to everybody.

Activity Scheduling
A CRM needs to help you to plan your time by allowing you to schedule tasks telephone calls and meetings with your existing and prospective customers and provide you with reminders for these activities. With Workbooks, you can schedule events together with notes to remind you of the purpose of the call / meeting etc. You will be presented with a schedule of reminders of your pending tasks when you log into Workbooks.

Quoting
Whilst you can use Excel / Word Templates to generate quotes, by storing your product / service book within the system, Workbooks simplifies the process of drawing up quotations by eliminating the need to search for product information in separate databases / spreadsheets and pre-populating the quote with the right contact information.

Pipeline Management
Pipeline Management is a critical activity for any business, but without an effective CRM tool, they can take a long time to produce manually. Workbooks automatically provides sales people, managers and business owners with complete visibility of all business opportunities as well as where they are in the deal process.

The video below provides you with a quick overview of how you can use Workbooks CRM to manage your customer / client data:

If your current customer management tools no longer meet your needs, then let us know. We would love to be able to help you to implement the right tools to help you grow your business.

Online CRM Part 3 - Saving Web Leads Into Your Online CRM

Before we implemented Workbooks Online CRM, one of the prerequisites that we had for a new CRM system both for our own use as well as a system to install for our customers was to have the ability to capture details of enquiries submitted via our web site directly into the CRM system. Before installing Workbooks, we were using a Formmail system hosted by our ISP that simply sent an email containing details submitted from the web form to a specified email address. As a system it worked, but it meant that we had to manually copy and paste details submitted into our old CRM system.

Automatically Web Leads Into Your CRM

Installing Workbooks Online has allowed us to automate that process. We simply use the Workbooks form scripts to capture enquiry details as part of our web pages. We specify the information to be collected, and the lead information is automatically collected by the Workbooks system and allocated to the appropriate person.

You can see one of the forms that we use below:

Enquiry Form Screenshot

You can also see a brief overview on the Workbooks.com Web-To-Lead capability in the video below:

Automate Your Sales and Support Processes

Apart from sales leads, we are in the process of deploying the Web Lead Capture capability to capture support / customer service requests. For customer service / support applications, Workbooks will automatically generate a support reference that can be used by our customers to track progress on support cases raised.

Deliver Better Customer Service

If your company runs both sales and support operations, one of the resulting benefits of installing Workbooks is that it will provide your sales and support staff with visibility of all contact that your sales, support and customer service staff have with your clients and customers. Everyone is therefore fully informed of everybody else’s discussions, which can result in the ability to provide a better level of service to your customers.

Is your company’s productivity suffering from the need to re-key information between one business process and another? If so please let us know. We would welcome the opportunity to find out more about how your business works so that we can establish whether we can help your company to work more productively by implementing Workbooks.

Online CRM Part 2 - Turning Leads Into Profits More Efficiently

Sales people are hungry for success, not paperwork! They want to turn sales enquiries into orders with the minimum of effort. By automating your business processes using Workbooks.com’s online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, you can maximise the amount of time that your sales staff have to devote to serving your customers, helping them to work as efficiently as possible.

Before and After Workbooks.com!

Let me give you an example of how Workbooks Online CRM changed the way that Clearview Data Systems works. Before switching to Workbooks.com, we used Act! For Windows as a sales contact management system alongside a "home grown" order processing system. Customer support was a fairly manual affair which used Microsoft Exchange Public Folders to store customer emails and licence keys. There was no integration between any of these systems or with our web site, so web leads arrived via email and needed to be re-keyed into the system. As there was no integration with our order processing system, quotes were individually created as Excel spreadsheets by poring through our supplier price lists for current pricing and manually entering this information into the spreadsheet.

How Workbooks.com Has Made Us More Efficient

Today things work very differently. Web leads no longer need to be entered manually since they are captured directly into our Workbooks system from our web forms. There is no need to search for product pricing and descriptions since our product book is integrated into Workbooks for sales and order processing. We can also see details of all of our customer’s equipment that we are supporting as well as any contact that our engineers have had with our customers by way of support. In addition, Workbooks can automatically produce all of the sales pipeline reports that we need to monitor and predict revenue streams as well as plan expenditure and resourcing requirements.

You can see an overview of how you would manage your sales process using Workbooks.com in the video below:

Workbooks.com has cut out a huge amount of inefficiency in the way that our sales process works. Do you feel that your sales processes could be improved but don't know who to turn to for advice? If so, let me know what the issue is that you need to address and I would be happy to let you know if we can help.

Please come back next week when you will learn more about how Workbooks can help you to automate further areas of your company operations.

Grow Your Profits With Online CRM - Part 1

Even when times are tough it makes sense to spend money where it will help your employees to work more efficiently. The right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is an essential tool to streamline your business processes. It will help you to “sweat your assets” and extract every last pound of profit from your employees and customers. A good CRM system also helps to answer a number of key questions:

• How can we generate more business from our customer base through better customer communications
• How can we efficiently track leads that are generated to maximise revenue.
• Can we simplify the processes to turn quotes into orders and invoices
• How do we provide better customer service to improve engagement and encourage customer loyalty.

With the right implementation partner to manage the implementation, you will also get the right training and support to help you manage the transition to your new system.

The Benefits Of Installing A "Joined-Up" CRM System

A properly implemented CRM system will:

• Join up sales, marketing and support information with customer transaction data to measure your return on marketing expenditure and track every customer interaction.
• Provide you with better sales pipeline management and forecasting information.
• Automate your cash management processes to reduce payment cycles.
• Provide management ready reports that allow you to measure key performance indicators .(KPI’s) across your entire business.
• Make your business more profitable.

Why We Chose Workbooks.com

Eighteen months ago, when we went looking for a new CRM system to support both the needs of our company as well as those of our SMB customers, we settled on Workbooks.com. You can see an overview of Workbooks in the video below:

Our needs will I’m sure be similar to the majority of small and medium sized businesses. We had a very specific “hit list”:

• A system to help us to track and plan interactions with prospects and customers.
• A joined up process to produce quotes, order and invoicing documentation.
• A way of capturing leads from our web site straight into the CRM database.
• Integration with Google Apps for Business for email and transaction documentation.
• Customer Service management for support cases raised by our clients.

More than Just Customer Management

Workbooks has proven itself to be more than capable for our needs, and provides a number of additional features that are very valuable including integration with Mailchimp for customer newsletters as well as well as Google Analytics integration to help measure the returns from Google Adwords campaigns.

Come back next week when we will begin to look into how Workbooks.com can help you to join up your business processes in a little more detail.

How To Cut The Cost Of Running Your IT

Have you ever wondered why you still get viruses / malware on your company’s PC’s even though you have purchased security software from a reputable vendor? It’s a good question and one that you need to understand if you want to minimise the operational cost of running your business. After all, every time you need to call an engineer it costs you money, and not just in terms of cheques that you write to your IT support company. In addition, there is the cost of lost employee productivity caused by degraded performance as your system becomes unusable, as well as the time lost while your employee waits for their system to be rebuilt. So what should you do to ensure that you don't waste money on engineer call-outs and lost productivity?

IT Security Is A Process

You have to recognise that IT Security doesn’t just involve installing software. You have to make sure that you perform necessary housekeeping on a regular basis. Specifically, it is essential to keep your systems updated with the latest updates and patches for Microsoft Windows and common applications such as Adobe and Java to protect you against the latest security issues that are discovered.

The reason that regular maintenance is so critical is that newly discovered software bugs (also known as vulnerabilities) are used by hackers and fraudsters to plant malicious software on your PC’s. These are the cracks in your defences that allow your security to be breached even with security software installed.

It is likely if not inevitable that you will suffer malware infections at some point if you allow your employees to access the internet. Hackers and security companies are locked in a constant battle that is played out on your IT systems on a daily basis. When a new bug is found, hackers move quickly to write and distribute code that allows them to exploit it before the security companies react with countermeasures to identify and foil their attempts. Each time a new bug is found, a number of PC’s are infected before the new updates are installed.

To give you some idea of the scale of the problem, in 2012, Secunia (the industry reference point on IT security) issued 124 “Security Advisories” for Windows 7 covering 237 vulnerabilities, of which 5% remain unresolved at the time of writing this article. Internet Explorer 9 was the subject of 14 security advisories covering 70 vulnerabilities of which 7% are not yet resolved. These are just two of the most common items of software installed on your PC’s, yet we are already talking about a new security threat being discovered almost every day.

How To Keep Your Systems Up-To-Date

Your PC’s should prompt you to update Microsoft Windows, as well as applications such as Adobe and Java on a regular basis. If you ever see a message that an update has failed to install, you need to do something about it. The reason that the update has failed is very often that you have unwittingly downloaded some malware from a “hacked” or malicious website. If this is the case, malware can be silently gathering your login credentials and feeding them back to a hacker without you realising it. Very often your PC will start to run more slowly as the malware starts to take up resources. To make things worse, once malware finds a victim it will often send out for its friends, which themselves take up more resources until your PC becomes unusable and needs to be rebuilt.

Do It Yourself Or Call In The Experts?

It is understandable that many small business owners still take a reactive approach to IT security. Taking time to make sure that the latest Windows updates and patches have been successfully applied, or making sure that antivirus software on your workstations hasn’t been disabled by malware takes time and takes you away from running your business. The problem is that unless you do spend time making these checks, you are far more likely to suffer a malware attack.

If you are happy to maintain your own systems, you can buy PC Audit software which will identify systems that aren’t updating properly, or that show other signs that they have been infected by malware. Otherwise, you may be better off outsourcing the process of regular auditing and updating your IT systems to a Managed IT Service Provider who will be able to use automation software to manage the process more efficiently and cost effectively than you are able to do yourself. They will also be able to undertake a number of other essential housekeeping tasks at the same time such as clearing out temporary files and making sure that PC Hard disks are defragmented on a regular basis, which will also boost your system performance.

If you would like to know more about the IT Support or Managed IT Services that we provide, please download our Managed IT Services White Paper, visit our web site, or contact us by telephone on 01707 255060 or via email at info@clearview.co.uk