SuiteCRM

OK, I Have A New Commercial Cleaning Business. Now What?

  1. Build a website: A professional website is a must-have for any business in today’s digital age. Your website should have information about your services, pricing, service area, and contact information.
  2. Claim your Google My Business listing: This will help your business show up in local search results when potential customers are looking for commercial cleaning services in your area.
  3. Create social media profiles: Social media is a great way to reach potential customers and build brand awareness. Create profiles on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and post regularly to showcase your services and expertise.
  4. Network with other businesses: Attend local business events, join your local chamber of commerce, and reach out to other businesses in your area to build relationships and generate referrals.
  5. Offer promotions: To attract new customers, offer promotions such as discounts on the first cleaning or a free consultation.

By taking these initial steps, you can begin to build your brand and attract new customers to your commercial cleaning business.

Marketing Automation and CRM Case Studies Reveal An Average Revenue Increase Of 175.5% Following Implementation

I recently read the book,  “Marketing Automation – Automate Your Business through Marketing Best Practices such as Email Marketing and search engine optimization,” by George Pain.  It’s not a long book but it provided some great insights and everything covered in this book can be implemented using SuiteCRM.

 

Pain detailed several case studies to illustrate how implementing CRM and marketing automation processes can dramatically improve business operations and profitability.

Of the ten case studies examined, six cited the impact to the revenue of the business. Four were expressed in percentage of revenue increased; one was expressed in a dollar increase in revenues to the business; one was expressed a percentage of company revenue attributed to the new CRM campaign.

Four Businesses Average 175.5% Increase in Campaign Revenue

1. One stationary specialist wanted to provide a more customized and personalized response based on customer behavior on their website. Their automated email campaign directed to landing pages with customized triggers realized a 244% increase in click rates and a 330% increase in revenue per mailing.

2. A software company utilized a lead scoring system to distinguish which leads to push to the sales team and which to cull. The volume of quality leads to the sales department increased by 55%, pre-qualified leads went up 30% and revenue grew by 178%.

3. A company that sells creative and artistic lifestyle products online to university students used CRM automation to better segment its young and diverse clients based on behavior.  An customized email campaign brought a 42% increase in duration of site visits, 20% more site page views and a 19% increase in email revenue.

4. An international news outlet saw potential leads lost from its sales funnel. The implemented an automated lead management system that better qualified leads, leveraged intelligent analytics and enabled a higher conversion rate, yielding a 23% increase in quality leads, a 72% drop in conversion time and a 175% increase in revenues attributed to marketing leads.

$2 Million Increased Revenue

5. A specialist in online registration, payment management and ticketing service implemented an automated lead nurturing solution to increase its visibility. Their email campaigns directed leads to customized landing pages cut marketing costs by 70%, time by 60%, netted a 350% increase in marketing ROI and a 100% growth in the automated sectors and an increase in gross revenue of $2 million.

$2 Million Increased Revenue

5. A specialist in online registration, payment management and ticketing service implemented an automated lead nurturing solution to increase its visibility. Their email campaigns directed leads to customized landing pages cut marketing costs by 70%, time by 60%, netted a 350% increase in marketing ROI and a 100% growth in the automated sectors and an increase in gross revenue of $2 million.

Percentage of Company Revenue

6. One mobile software company that provides B2B cloud mobile solutions, SmartBear Software, implemented an automated campaign that was scalable, integrated with the CRM program and easy to use. With email campaigns launched and lead management in place to handle the increasing volume, they cited a 200% increase in lead volume and 85% of revenue was generated by the downloads in the campaign.

There Are No Excuses: Get The World’s Number 1 Open Source CRM Today

Everyone in business knows that a website is a key marketing component, and most also understand that they should also have a customer relationship management system of some kind.

The fact is, businesses should have and integrate both into one seamless marketing system.

Everyone in business, regardless of how large or small their business is, should have a Customer Relationship Management system.  There is no excuse.

  • I have been told that staff won’t use a CRM system.  They like to do things their way and a CRM interferes with their process.
  • I have been told that a CRM system is too expensive or takes too long to learn.
  • I have been told that they have tried CRM and it just sat there.  They paid their fees but never got anything out of it.
  • I have been told many things but when it comes down to it, those are just excuses because CRM is not difficult to implement and it doesn’t have to be expensive.

So what exactly is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is designed to manage your organization’s relationships and interactions producing greater control, predictability and profitability.

CRM began with a focus on relationships with leads or prospects and customers with the simple goal to improve customer relationships. But CRM has evolved to encompass much more. Now, more comprehensive CRM programs support several business areas, including:

  • marketing and sales management,
  • inventory management,
  • personnel management,
  • supplier/vendor management,
  • marketing and business intelligence management.

You can select which area(s) are the most suitable for your business.

Automate Communications and Processes and Increase Profit

An effective CRM system assists in staying connected to customers, automating and streamlining processes, and ultimately improving your bottom line.

SuiteCRM is at its heart a tool that handles contact management, sales management, productivity, workflows and automation of processes more efficiently and effectively than humans.

I specialize in the world’s number 1 ‘open source’ product, SuiteCRM because it is equal to or better than any branded products and it’s FREE.  SuiteCRM enables you to focus on your organization’s relationships with prospects, customers, service users, colleagues, friends and family, vendors or suppliers, as well as business processes.  If they’re people, SuiteCRM can manage your relationship with them.

Christine Ely – WordPress and SuiteCRM Consultant from Christine Ely on Vimeo.

There is a cycle that is at the heart every CRM system.  It’s your life-cycle with people and that includes all aspects of the relationship from finding new customers, winning their trust and business, to providing support and additional services throughout the relationship. Every interaction is recorded and logged so the whole relationship from the first contact is in the system.

SuiteCRM serves everyone in the organization.

From the person at the top to the new recruit, SuiteCRM serves the sales department, marketing, customer service, opportunity management, business development, personnel, recruitment, dispatch and every other area in any business.  It also serves external interactions through customer portals and ticket management.

SuiteCRM is vast but so intuitive.

It is the place where you store customer and prospect contact information, identify sales opportunities, manage and record service issues, and of course automate and manage marketing campaigns.  Every successful business has a system in place and most of those systems are just manual practices.  SuiteCRM puts those practices into one place and it makes available all of that information to anyone in the company that has a need for it.

SuiteCRM is the ultimate collaboration tool. 

As SuiteCRM stores all interactions with your customers, and everyone in your company has access to the information they need from it, collaboration and productivity naturally increases.  When a customer calls, no matter who takes that call, he or she can see how the customer has been communicated with, see their previous purchases and when they purchased, whether they have had prior support tickets, whether they paid on time and so on.

SuiteCRM helps your business drive growth.

If you want a business that will grow and last, you need a sustainable strategy; one that can handle growth.  You need a system that will run the business whether you are there or not. You need a system that will take your business into the future.  You need to set goals, sales targets and business objectives and of course, you need to ensure that your business makes a profit.

SuiteCRM system features reports and dashboards’

SuiteCRM offersa clear overview of how your business is doing and again, all that information is in one place.  You’ll see the status of leads, orders, customer service issues, the sales pipeline, notes, outstanding tasks, status of projects and much more. You’ll be able to simultaneously monitor multiple campaigns, know where your prospect is in the funnel and what’s coming next.

SuiteCRM’s Superpower! Automated workflows.

Workflows schedule series of events to take place when certain actions are triggered.  A SuiteCRM workflow can take action whenever a contact form is completed on your website.  When a lead is created SuiteCRM will trigger actions. These could be to email back the potential customer thanking them for their contact and informing them that someone will be contacting them soon (as well as suggesting areas of the website to review) but then also emailing the relevant department, creating action tasks for appropriate personnel.  That lead will be managed throughout the workflow from first order and every interaction in the relationship into the future.

SuiteCRM Essentials – Web Forms

Every website has a contact form but for the most part, that form just sends an email to the website contact with the information from that form.

SuiteCRM is different in that it creates a record in SuiteCRM and that records can be acted upon but Workflows.

SuiteCRM has 3 modules that can be used to receive information from webforms.  They are:

  1. Leads
  2. Contacts
  3. Targets

We will go into more detail on these modules in a later lesson but for now we’ll create the webform for ‘Leads’.

SuiteCRM has a set of standard fields for all of these modules but you can add additional fields through the use of user-definable fields.

I always like to have a little bit of extra information in a webform to find out what type of interest my visitor has in visiting my website so I’m going to add a drop-down list to the webform; which will later be acted upon by a workflow.

First thing to do is head to ‘Admin’, note, you need admin rights to access the admin area of SuiteCRM.

From Admin, scroll down to the Developer Tools and select Dropdown Editor.

You’ll notice there are already a lot of dropdowns in use within the system so it’s worth taking a look at some of them to see what there.  Every dropdown can be used multiple times for user-defined fields.

We’re going to add a new drop-down called Inquiry Type:

I want to know from the visitor what their interest is so I’m giving them a choice of Maximizer CRM, SuiteCRM. WordPress or Other.  I am also adding a ‘blank’ response.  This is added by clicking on ‘Add’ with nothing in the ‘Item Name’.  Adding a blank field prevents another field from being the ‘default’ response.

Once we have created our new Dropdown list, we should head over to the ‘Studio’ to add this to the ‘Leads’ module.

From the Developer Tools, select Studio

Then from Studio, select Leads.

Click on Fields,

Then Add Field:

Select Data Type, Dropdown and from the dropdown list select the dropdown you just created.

Name your field (Note, field names cannot have spaces so use the underscore).  The Display Label can have spaces.  Let’s make this a required field, then…

Save the new field.

Now head back to Leads.  We have to make that field available to the record itself.

From Studio/Leads, Select Layouts. From there, select Edit View.

Now click the ‘Sync To Detail View’ check box.  That ensures that any changes we make in Edit Mode also update the Detail View; which is what you actually see in the record.

Editing records in SuiteCRM is a breeze.  Everything is ‘drag and drop’.

To add our dropdown field, we want to add an extra row to the record structure so grab the record object and drag it down to where you want to field to appear.

Once in place we can drag the newly created field to a slot in the new row.

Now click ‘Save & Deploy’

That field now appears in the Leads Module:

Now that we have all of the fields we want for our webform, we can create it.  Webforms are created from the Campaigns module so from the menu, select Campaigns.

We are going to create a campaign but not put any details into it for now.  We will be going into more depth on campaigns in a later lesson.  We just want the campaign name for the webform.

Click on Create Campaign, select type ‘Email’ and name the Campaign.  This will be used for the workflow in the next lesson.

Click Next to save the campaign then click on Create Person Form (Webform)

This presents us with a drag and drop screen that allows us to literally drag and drop the fields into the columns we wish to include into our webform.

Now we add the headings and details to the form:

Including the Form Header, Description, Redirect URL (where to direct the visitor once the form has been completed) and which Campaign we want to attach the webform to.  This is important for the Workflow and to identify the source of the record

This will take you to the editor where you can tweak the form and makes some last minute changes to how the form appears to your visitors:

When everything is as you want it, click Save Webform to generate the code for your website Contact page.

You can now embed this code into your website page.  If you’re using WordPress, click on the Text Tab, then paste the code into the page:

Publish the page and your new Webform will be active:

Completing the form and clicking submit will create the record in SuiteCRM

In my next lesson, we will create a Workflow to take action on this new record.

 

SuiteCRM Essentials – Cron Jobs [VIDEO]

SuiteCRM is the world’s number 1 Open Source CRM system and Cronjobs/Workflows play a big part in why.

Workflows are automated processes that trigger on changes to something within the system.  They can be triggered by a change of field status in a record or by something like a new record being added.

Cron is a Linux utility which schedules a command or script on your server to run automatically at a specified time and date. A cron job is the scheduled task itself. Cron jobs can be very useful to automate repetitive tasks. … Scripts executed as a cron job are typically used to modify files or databases.

So SuiteCRM Workflows can be triggered by a field or status being updated but what if you want to make a change or say send an email to a client that has not ordered anything for a period of time.  This is where the scheduler and cron jobs come in handy.

A cron job can be scheduled to ping the system say every 2 minutes or just once per hour.  On busy sites, I tend to run them every 2 minutes.  I will cover cron jobs and scheduled Workflows in much more detail in a later lesson.  For now, lets setup the cron jobs.

Cron jobs can be setup in your hosting CPanel but I find it much easier and more manageable to setup cron jobs through the ‘Easycron’ service which handles the scheduling for a very small fee.  Believe me, it’s worth it.

For those of you who want to learn more about SuiteCRM scheduler and cron jobs, head over to the SuiteCRM website and look for ‘Scheduler Jobs in SuiteCRM in Linux – the Definitive Guide

To setup cron jobs, you need to have access to an FTP client.  I use Filezilla.  You will need to make to small changes to the cron.php and config.php files in your SuiteCRM root directly.  These are of course, services I can offer you if you are not confident of doing them yourself.

To make changes to a php file you will need to use a text editor like Notepad or an HTML editor.  For simple changes like these, Notepad works just fine.

Just follow the simple steps below to configure cron jobs for your SuiteCRM.

Note:

Click image for Easycron support page

Using the ‘All Files’ option in Notepad, first open cron.php and then change the following code from:

if (substr($sapi_type, 0, 3) != ‘cli’) {

    sugar_die(“cron.php is CLI only.”);

}

to :

function easycron_get_ip_address() {

    if (isset($_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_REAL_IP’]) && !empty($_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_REAL_IP’])) {

        return $_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_REAL_IP’];

    } else if (isset($_SERVER[‘HTTP_CLIENT_IP’]) && !empty($_SERVER[‘HTTP_CLIENT_IP’])) {

        return $_SERVER[‘HTTP_CLIENT_IP’];

    } else if (isset($_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR’]) && !empty($_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR’])) {

        return $_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR’];

    } else if (isset($_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’]) && !empty($_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’])) {

        return $_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’];

    } else {

        return ”;

    }

}

$easycron_ip = easycron_get_ip_address();

$easycron_ip_is_from_easycron = false;

if (!empty($easycron_ip)) {

    $easycron_bot_ips_in_json = file_get_contents(‘https://www.easycron.com/ips.json’);

    $easycron_bot_ips = json_decode($easycron_bot_ips_in_json, true);

    if (filter_var($easycron_ip, FILTER_VALIDATE_IP, FILTER_FLAG_IPV4)) {

                if (in_array($easycron_ip, $easycron_bot_ips[‘ipv4’])) {

            $easycron_ip_is_from_easycron = true;

                }

    } else if (filter_var($easycron_ip, FILTER_VALIDATE_IP, FILTER_FLAG_IPV6)) {

        if (in_array($easycron_ip, $easycron_bot_ips[‘ipv6’])) {

            $easycron_ip_is_from_easycron = true;

                }

    }

}

if (!$easycron_ip_is_from_easycron) {

    if (substr($sapi_type, 0, 3) != ‘cli’) {

        sugar_die(“cron.php is CLI only.”);

    }

}

Then save.

I always rename original files that I have edited so before reuploading, rename cron.php in your SuiteCRM folder to old_cron.php

Now upload the edited file.

The true significance of what you are doing now will become clear as you run through my lessons and as your experience with SuiteCRM grows.

Now let’s make the changes to the config.php file as per the instructions on the Easycron support page.

Access the Easycron support page (from here)

Run through the same process as you did with the cron.php code following the instructions in the Easycron guide.  You will be adding your FTP username to the config.php file.

Rename the old file in the SuiteCRM root and upload your edited file.

Now update your Easycron dashboard with your credentials:

Open your cron job dashboard, click on ” Cron Job” button and enter the relevant details for your installation.

In field “URL to call”, enter http://www.example.com/cron.php (set cron job to run every minute)

(replace www.example.com with your install location). Checkout below screenshot:

Your suiteCRM cron job should now be able to get triggered successfully from EasyCron.

 

 

 

 

SuiteCRM Essentials – Email Settings [VIDEO]

When you start SuiteCRM for the first time you will need to setup your outgoing email.  The outgoing email is essential as it handles all of the automated messages as well as Workflow based emails, Email Responders and direct emails to your Contacts.

Head over to Admin, scroll down to Email Settings.

As you can see from my Outgoing Email setup screen, I have added my,

From Name: Christine Ely

From Address: chrisely@pacificcrm.com

I then entered the SMTP Mail Server credentials.  For my email I use Dreamhost but all hosting providers will provide instructions for the specific Mail Servers.

Ensure that you select ‘Enable SMTP over SSL or TLS?’.  For most users, SSL will be the preferred choice which automatically selects the default SMTP Port of 465.

Once you have entered your credentials, it is a good idea to send a test email to confirm everything is working.  You can see the result of that in the email receipt screen shot:

When you get that, you know that you have correctly setup your Outgoing Email.

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