Dealing with New Business
In the agency world, you deal with projects that are all in constant states of motion. You are working on acquiring some projects. Others you’ve been working with for a certain amount of time. Some projects are winding down.
With everything on the move, how can you stay organized and on top of things? Especially with multiple people working on different stages of the project at any given time?
Matthew Bischoff helps run a six person software studio in New York City called Lickability. They’ve built mobile apps for such prestigious clients as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Meetup among many others.
The company was started as a side project in 2009 as a venue to release apps they were building for fun.
They eventually decided to go full time with that side project, and realized that client work was going to be the best way to fund the next chapter of the company.
Matthew knew even before they really started working with clients that they were going to need a way to manage all of their leads, follow ups, and communication.
“We didn’t even wait until we had the problem, so we never had to worry about people being on different pages. We knew that if we were going to do any client work at all, that we were going to need a CRM.”
There are many different ways a business can approach how it wants to organize and handle processes and communication. The team at Lickability decided the best way forward for them was to turn all of their business as Deals in Highrise.
“Everything that could potentially be a Deal is created as such in Highrise with an expected value and who the internal stakeholders are.
“That way, anyone in the company can see what we are trying to sell at the moment deals wise.”
With Deals, the Lickability team can see what company the Deal is with, who on their team is responsible, any details or notes, the monetary value of the Deal, create and maintain custom fields for their specific data, and even keep track of pertinent emails by forwarding them to the Deal.
“Seeing how many open sales conversations we have at once is really useful so we don’t take on too many projects at once.”
At an agency, communication is everything. Knowing who spoke to what client when, and the context of their conversation can be the difference between winning the business, retaining the client, or losing them.
Highrise was built to be a repository for all communication for anyone to access at any time. With a unique email address we call your dropbox address, you can get any email to Highrise for the rest of your team to reference.
“We also aggressively use dropbox. Every non internal email is added to Highrise. If somebody ever needs to pick up a conversation, they can see the entire history of it.”
In our “always on” culture, it can be really hard to take much needed breaks from work. Not just vacations, but other life events such as births, deaths, illnesses happen, potentially leaving our teammates and clients high and dry when it comes to information and communication.
Taking the time to gather context on a project to pass along to a teammate can take hours and hours out of your day, and for an agency, those are billable hours.
“Last week I was on vacation and my business partner had to pick up the conversation with clients for me. If I had to find a bunch of emails and forward them to him, it would’ve thrown off the actual time I was able to spend away on vacation.”
“Highrise is our entire database of conversations, the contact information, and deals. It’s simple, keeps us organized, and allows us to collaborate.”
Seeing leads all in one place as well as the entire life of a deal keeps work at Lickability on track, and on time.
Need to keep track of potential business? Check out Highrise and Deals with a 30 day free trial.
