Efficiency and productivity aren’t just buzzwords when it comes to running a small business.
They could make the difference between you leading the pack and being dead last.
This is particularly critical in an economic climate where profit margins are tighter than spandex.
The only way to stay afloat is to make sure your entire business—processes, systems, and employees—are running at maximum efficiency and productivity.
WORKetc helps achieve this by letting users refine, streamline, and simplify their business processes, leading to tangible gains in efficiency, productivity, and profit.
To help you get even more out of WORKetc, we once again turn to the people who actually use it to run, manage, and grow their business every day.
Read on for some knowledge bombs and tips from real WORKetc users to help you leave your competitors in the dust.
Roll Out New Projects Fast
Use project templates to their fullest. We always make sure that our templated projects cater for anything new that comes in. We’ve now got most of the various project milestones sorted in such a way that they highlight as the milestones which they depend on are completed. – Stan Zaslavsky, Owner / Principal at Eagle Vision Property. Read more about how this 3D visualization company uses WORKetc every day to run their business.
Project templates make it easy to quickly roll out projects that you take on regularly.
Let’ say you run a digital marketing agency whose main specialty is social media marketing.
You know you’ll be rolling out a lot of these projects with mostly the same subprojects and task structure. The main difference between each would largely just be which social media channels your client wants to target.
Creating a template for your social media marketing projects will mean that with just a few clicks your project will be ready to use with the structure you need.
You don’t have to make every single project from scratch every time. All you need to do is assign tasks, set deadlines, and tweak the project according to whether the clients wants Facebook marketing instead of Instagram, or Pinterest instead of Twitter.
Capture All the Info Your Business Needs
Take advantage of custom fields. We use them to keep up with so many things that don’t fit neatly elsewhere. We use it to mark when we last did maintenance service for our clients. We also use them to keep track of our hourly rate for each customer. – Randy Bryan, Owner at tekRESCUE. Read more about how this IT support company uses WORKetc every day to run their business.
One of the big decisions we made during the early stages of WORKetc was to make it highly usable by many different types of business.
To do that, we decided to group data fields that might be industry specific into their own container called custom fields.
We then made this container able to hold different data types, making them 100% customizable for each individual customer, business, or industry.
Let’s say you run a business that sells water coolers. In addition, you also deliver water to your customers’ offices.
Aside from the usual customer info that you need, you also need to know how much each water each office uses on average, the type of water cooler they have, when your last delivery and maintenance jobs were, and even the name of their receptionist.
With WORKetc’s custom fields, you can store all of this information right in your customers’ contact entries. You can also this info to a sales lead when it comes time to win their business again for the coming year.
Stay Up to Date on Everything
Number one tip currently is to use the WORKetc calendar’s All Activities view so we can see all our support tickets and tasks for the day when it’s time to check/write out timesheets. Our team are rarely missing any activities and no longer have to make things up in timesheets. – Malissa Fonte, Director at Atcom Technology. Read more about how this IT firm uses WORKetc every day to run their business.
By default, WORKetc’s calendar always show events such as meetings, client calls, and holidays.
It can, however, actually show any kind of WORKetc activity—from the support tickets you have on your plate today to the tasks you’re supposed to work on next week—simply by using the “Activities” dropdown.
A company that sells and installs routers can then, for example, set the calendar to show tasks so they can quickly get a visual overview of all the installation jobs they have scheduled for the week.
Or you can set it to show only timesheets so you can quickly review how long your third-party contractors are taking on the jobs to which they’ve been assigned.
Note that you’re not limited to showing just one type of activity on the calendar. You can mix and match different activity types or choose to view everything.
Hit the Ground Running with WORKetc
Staff training and continual staff involvement are the keys to using the tools WORKetc provides and getting the most from them. Right now, our company devotes the first 100 hours of time for new associates to training. – Keith Klein, Owner at OnYourMark.
Choosing a CRM may be hard work, what with all the research involved, but it’s in the implementation phase where things really become super crucial.
After all, at that point you’ve already spent money, time, and effort on the darn thing. It’s paramount that you don’t end up scrapping it due to a lack of employee buy-in.
We know that helping your employees get used to and using WORKetc as quickly as possible is critical in keeping your business growing.
Our solution is the WORKetc QuickStart onboarding program, which is designed specifically to get you up and running on WORKetc fast, all while costing essentially $0.
Because the faster you start streamlining your processes, the sooner you can push your business towards operating at peak efficiency and productivity.
And like I said before, an efficient and productive business is the only business that has a chance of surviving in these harsh economic times.
COMMENTS
There are so many ways to do things in WORKetc that we sometimes overlook a simple option. We discovered a neat trick that we now use to track attendees of our public workshops. First, we create a WORKetc project that serves as the central repository for all activities associated with building, marketing and hosting the workshop. From within the project, we create an “event” on our “Public Workshops” calendar in WORKetc. We then add attendees and companies to that event. The event is thus “pinned” to the “activity stream” of each attendee so that we can, at a glance, see what workshops our clients/companies have attended. We can also search our entire WORKetc database to generate a list of people who attended certain types of events.
Brilliant!
I was impressed from your first line: “There are so many ways to do things in WORKetc that we sometimes overlook a simple option.” Ain’t that the truth!
Regards,
Keith Klein
I cannot say enough how helpful project templates are. One thing that works for our company is consistency! We have a over thirty clients and have to track retention for each. In order for multiple people to be able to work together, we had to come up with a consistent way to track these clients the same way. Templates work perfect for this because they are already made and each account manager can go in and create a new project based on that template- creating a consistent workflow across the board
As another tip – we’ve now started using the Customer Portal more actively. Placing documents explaining our step by step processes and providing a constantly update FAQs is very helpful for our clients. By allowing the clients to see into the project tasks also allows them to follow the progress, which brings a level of transparency and comfort for them to know that their project is moving along.
Canned responses are great! We use them for projects when we’ve reached a standard milestone. That way we don’t have to think about words and spend the time penning an email that we’ve written hundreds of times before! Add the canned response, do a little tailoring if necessary and send. So efficient!
Nice not to have to ‘re-invent the wheel’ every time you communicate.
At the same time, you’re not absolutely tied to what’s in the ‘canned response’ – simply type in a personalized line or two, or as much as you want, when appropriate. You still cover the basics of the Standard Response – yet make a deeper connection with a few extra words.
Regards,
Keith Klein
Smart Lists are a very easy way to get specific information needed out of the system. The ability to save these lists and have them at just a click away is super convenient and allows for management to put these list together for team members that are not as comfortable with the Worketc system. Teams can get the information they need quickly and efficiently.
I love SMART LISTS! These are basically saved searches that stay up to date with your current data. We have recently made our first few. We are able to see when our last customer interaction was and make a list going from oldest to newest. Very helpful.
I really like the idea of the onboarding training. **FREE is a really good value also. I am going to consider that next time we hire somebody.
**see post for details 🙂
The project template is a must! We usually put out 2-10 projects a day, we have 30-35 different contractors we work with and thousand of customers. being able to have a a bookmark for regular used project templates is key
I’m flattered! Nice to see a highlighted quote about how we devote time to thorough training of new associates in the use of WorkEtc!
I’m also impressed at the, ‘essentially cost-free’, on-boarding program you have. I discovered it in another of your blog posts…the one my quote came from, I believe. We’ll have to consider your QuickStart program with our next new hire, augmented by further, company-specific training.
Your blog posts produce fresh insights all the time. They show you care about how WorkEtc is used to the advantage of your customers, and the comments from customers bring fresh points of view from a variety of industries.
I have noticed a concentration of WorkEtc users related to the web, from digital marketing agencies to designers to web developers and web hosts.
That’s good for us, because we do all those things and get insights from others in our industry. I believe that’s good for you, too, because many net-related businesses tend to be “early adopters.” When I started our internet marketing business in 1995, lots of people were skeptical about this new ‘internet thing’.
That’s good for you, too, because you have so many other industries to on-board. WorkEtc is flexible enough to meet the needs of virtually anyone, and I would encourage virtually everyone to give your product strong consideration for their business because it covers so many needs, all in a timely, cost-effective manner.
Regards,
Keith Klein
p.s.: Nearly forget to share a Tip!
Stay involved. Read WorkEtc blog posts AND the comments from users to gain insights, tips and techniques. Put another way, learn from other peoples’ experiences, instead of doing it the hard way.
I agree with user tekrescue that SMART LISTS are the way to go! WorkETC’s built-in reports are handy for some things, but mostly we want to see very specific reports that often relate to tags or custom fields, and building smart lists allows us to do that. Another great thing about smart lists is that you can set it up exactly the way you want to see it (with various fields showing or not, and in a certain order) and they are organized the SAME way every time you open it! (unlike the built-in reports).
The downside to smart lists is that there aren’t any totalling options, and no automatic graphs… also, no way to add a column that shows you tags. WorkETC – we would love to have these features!!!
Project templates are a great idea, especially when your projects have any semblance of consistency. Why spend time setting something up if you don’t have to?
My tip would be, in addition to using quickstart, spend some time going through the features yourself. You’ll never know everything that’s there until you look!
We have experimented a bit with Project management in WorkEtc. The concept of templates is great, not only does it save time for me, it’s also useful to train new colleagues in our approach. Will give this a try!
Smart Lists and Custom Fields are probably the two things we use the absolute most. The ability to routinely get to the very specific information with a click of the smart list is a huge time saver. I had my favorite smart lists to my favorites and constantly navigate the system with my smart lists. We share certain smart lists with others and then have very specific ones for my needs. And the custom fields is a huge time saver when getting specific information from our clients information.
Timesheets have a been a life saver for us. We no longer use out dated spreadsheets and old/tired looking invoices. The workect staff help us put together a nice clean simple invoicing template then we took couple steps further for our quoting system. We use the project stages also to keep track of the progress of our projects.
Custom fields changed the way we stored customer specific data – we can drill down to minute customer specific information by creating appropriate custom fields per customer/project or infact any section if the database.
The project template is a life saver when we have a new install. We have over 60 items that have to be completed on each install and with the template we only have to create a new project and adjust a few items. It’s a great time saver. We also can email the new client from the project and keep everyone on task and on time.