Today we’ve gone mobile, shooting from the mountains of Banner Elk, NC! It’s appropriate for today’s theme (we’re still drilling deeper into CRMs) about the mobile side of CRM.
Ideally, whatever platform you decide (or chose) will have a great mobile application as well. It can truly make a major difference with not only efficiency, but also with maximizing the program’s value. My go-to’s have great mobile apps of course (Zoho, Salesforce.com, HubSpot) but plenty of others do too.
It helps to be able to add notes/updates immediately after a coffee or lunch meeting, or after discussing an actual deal. I haven’t always been great at it either, but getting all the pertinent and timely data in the system ASAP really helps to ensure you don’t forget any of the crucial, and sometimes subtle details and information gleaned from those meetings. Further, being able to pull out your phone (when appropriate) to recall a key piece of intel can be valuable as well.
Why rely on your memory when you have a supercomputer in your pocket?
The WIMS Guide Video Edition will focus on business topics such as Entrepreneurship, CRM, Marketing, Sales, B2B, Business Development, Web Design, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, and much much more. To learn more about Mike Simmons and his company WIMS Consulting, click here.
If you’re following along (if not that’s ok too) today we’re talking about what you do as the next step in launching or redeploying your CRM. You’re going to focus solely on the A players for now. The main thing that is going to create momentum and keep you using the system is achieving ROI as quickly as possible. That’s the main benefit you want out of this and thus its the primary goal.
The quickest way to get there is prioritizing the A players first, aka your best clients and prospects. So after you’ve got the data, context, and all the other appropriate information about them in there you’re then going to focus on doing something about it.
You’re going to pick these people and go through them and schedule/pre-plan your out reach and follow up strategy. You’re going to leverage the task list, the calendar, reminders, etc. to layout the timing and content with which you’re going to conduct your outreach. And you’re going to leverage the CRM to systematize/automate it and take out the human element (somewhat, but not entirely).
By now you should have some sort of script that articulates your value proposition well along with a deck or brochure. Pre-schedule your follow up, and do between 3-7 touch points to make sure you see it through. Once you close the deal you can eliminate the subsequent steps as they’re convert. Put the email script in there, add some customized talking points, context, recall a funny joke or something they care about and set the entire campaign up in one shot.
The feeling you’ll get knowing this has been accomplished is going to propel you forward and create an invaluable supplement to your day to day activities. Give it a shot and let me know if you need any assistance.
-Mike
The WIMS Guide Video Edition will focus on business topics such as Entrepreneurship, CRM, Marketing, Sales, B2B, Business Development, Web Design, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, and much much more. To learn more about Mike Simmons and his company WIMS Consulting, click here.
Wow! You’d be surprised how fast you can get a solid streak going. Seems like just yesterday I started on this (ok so it wasn’t THAT long ago but still) and already we’re on the 5th video. I also completed day 11 of my fitness streak today too. There’s definitely something to be said for just starting where you are, and taking massive action. Before you know it you’ll have some serious momentum to continue building off of.
Today we talk about the CRM ABC’s. This is the next step you want to take whether you’re just starting out or have an existing database. It can be overwhelming trying to clean up a massive database of thousands of contact records. So we’re going to start with your A players. As they say 80% of your business is generated from 20% of your clients (I’m paraphrasing to make a point). Rather than trying to maintain the whole database right off the bat we’re going to focus on your top clients and prospects and making sure that their records are dialed in, up to date, accurate, and that all appropriate context is in the system.
The number of A’s is going to vary based on your situation. It could be 10, 25, 50, 100, etc. It’s mostly arbitrary but you want it to be the people who really matter. Whether they’re existing clients, or companies on your “wish/hit list” that’s up to you to decide.
After you make that decision, get to work making sure the necessary and relevant data is in the system. This will include contact information for the specific people/decision makers you want to track, prior communications (if applicable), potential referral sources or champions who can help, insight into their problems/needs that you can help solve, etc. Anything that might be helpful with continuing to serve them well, or to help you close the deal should be included.
Once you get these done you’ll have some serious momentum to continue charging through the rest. But no matter what, these should always remain your priority.
The WIMS Guide Video Edition will focus on business topics such as Entrepreneurship, CRM, Marketing, Sales, B2B, Business Development, Web Design, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, and much much more. To learn more about Mike Simmons and his company WIMS Consulting, click here.
Today we’re going to cover a brief intro to CRM (Customer Relationship Management) for those who don’t know what it is, and for those that do, I just go into some quick initial steps to consider taking if you’ve been apprehensive thus far. I know it can be tedious to set up and maintain but the ROI is incredible if deployed correctly.
It’s really mind blowing to me how much resistance there still is out there. Frankly, it’s like turning down a superpower. If you want a little help or guidance please reach out! Whether you’re starting from scratch, converting an Excel File/Google Sheet, or you’ve been using a CRM for a while but are stuck in a rut, WIMS Consulting can help you take it to the next level.
In summary, my favorite/recommended platforms are:
Track your leads and prospects from website/marketing, intros from referral sources, lead generation, sales cycle, your existing customers and deal flow, etc.
Sync email, whether Outlook/Gmail
Sync Email Marketing: MailChimp/Constant Contact
Sync Social Media Accounts
Card Scanner app to streamline uploading business cards and converting them directly into contacts.
I’ll make sure to keep adding more and more value on how to continue leveling up your CRM and sales game throughout the year. Much more to come!
-Mike
The WIMS Guide Video Edition will focus on business topics such as Entrepreneurship, CRM, Marketing, Sales, B2B, Business Development, Web Design, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, and much much more. To learn more about Mike Simmons and his company WIMS Consulting, click here.
It’s Friday! Already got day 7 of my gym streak knocked out, got it in early today as opposed to the 10pm sessions I’ve been pulling off lately.
Today’s client work was mostly related to government/military contracting as well as the legal industry. Fascinating stuff. I try to bunch project work together by themes/industries as much as I can in order to maintain a consistent and appropriate mindset. It doesn’t always work out that way, but when it does I find it helps create more efficiency as you don’t have to transition from say a law firm to a restaurant instantaneously.
Most important however, I wanted to use today’s post as more of a call to action to all of you. If you’ve got the goal of creating more written and video content surrounding your business I’d love to do some guest posts/collaborations moving forward. I just have a few small stipulations that I list on here. So please reach out to me so we can make this happen!
PS, yes I’m a pacer, rocker, fidget-er even (again media training on the way), it comes out especially when running on pure adrenaline after a wild week too haha. (Man watching these playbacks is awkward…)
Enjoy the weekend everyone!
-Mike
The WIMS Guide Video Edition will focus on business topics such as Entrepreneurship, CRM, Marketing, Sales, B2B, Business Development, Web Design, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, and much much more. To learn more about Mike Simmons and his company WIMS Consulting, click here.
First of all, thank you for the feedback from Day 1, it means a lot and I appreciate it! There were a lot of you savages still grinding long into the night of January 1st checking LinkedIn/YouTube and I love to see it. Secondly, my wife has agreed to give me that media training refresher after all. So, when that happens, I’ll record it for you all as she’s a legit pro – and talk about META AF content am I right?!
For today’s message I went in a bit of a different direction as I wanted to highlight some of the other content I launched. I wrote a blog post specifically about Charlotte and offered some tips for how to grow your business here in 2020. Then I also wanted to highlight the newsletter we launched today that goes out to the company list and includes a ton of content. It’s the original The WIMS Guide that typically pairs with the blog and includes some additional content such as event calendar and travel advisory. Check the blog site (wimsguide.com) if you’d like to subscribe and get it, or you can email/text me or comment and I can add you to the list.
On here I give a rundown of some of the content from the newsletter, and rather than be redundant here I’ll just throw some links and let you listen to the rest. If there’s anything I can elaborate on or something you’d like me to talk about in the future, please let me know. Onward!
-Mike Simmons
The WIMS Guide Video Edition will focus on business topics such as Entrepreneurship, CRM, Marketing, Sales, B2B, Business Development, Web Design, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, and much much more. To learn more about Mike Simmons and his company WIMS Consulting, click here.
Happy New Year and welcome to the new decade! After about 50 takes I figured what the heck, let’s just launch this thing. It’s raw and vulnerable, warts and all. Clearly I need a media training refresher from my wife who is a former TV reporter. But that’s ok, the polish will come later with practice and reps.
Without further ado, coming to you from the WIMS, Inc. War Room it’s The WIMS Guide video edition! I’ve procrastinated for years now on doing video content as surprisingly, it may be the one area I’m a little self-conscious. But that’s also why I needed to just put myself out there and DO it already. So here we are.
I definitely cringed a little (ok a lot) watching the play back, but I will absolutely get better. I’ll begin conveying my thoughts my clearly and concisely. But if you could give your boy a little grace here in the beginning, I’d appreciate it. Or don’t, feel free to roast me too I can take it.
As the blog this is meant to be about the never ending/ongoing journey of business, entrepreneurship, professional development and much more. I’m going to try to provide you with as much value as I can through the insights gained from running my companies, WIMS Consulting, EolianVR, and ARRE (along with perspective and experience gleaned from dozens of clients across a variety of industries and sizes). But I also want to learn more from you too, and even build a community around our shared insights and experiences.
My goal isn’t to build a Gary V or Grant Cardone or Ed Mylett style vlog. It’s to just force myself to get better, get out of my comfort zone, and try to serve my community in any way I can. That’s really all I can hope for. It could last a week, or a decade, we’ll see…
Here goes nothing!
The WIMS Guide Video Edition will focus on business topics such as Entrepreneurship, CRM, Marketing, Sales, B2B, Business Development, Web Design, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, and much much more. To learn more about Mike Simmons and his company WIMS Consulting, click here.
We at EolianVR know that the health care industry is fascinatingly complex, multifaceted, and one of the most vital pillars that holds society together. The implications of its direction, evolution, improvement, are paramount to us all.
Regardless of how quickly firms, researchers, scientists, and front-line providers can innovate, the inevitable counter-punch strikes as new diseases emerge, political and administrative bureaucracy bogs down progress, or the sheer volume of humanity’s growth tips the scales in the other direction. Nevertheless, we must persist and never relent in this noble pursuit of progress.
Absolute magic is performed every single day, in countless ways, across the entire globe as professionals in the space manifest modern miracles on demand to save lives and treat their patients. However, the magnitude of how far we’ve come is often diminished and unappreciated as there simultaneously is still so far yet to go.
Just because the road ahead is difficult, and at times downright overwhelming, doesn’t mean that we should simply accept the status quo and settle for the way things are. On the contrary, the hard problems are the ones truly worth solving.
These ideals and sense of duty are what inspired our team at EolianVR to make the commitment to the health care industry. We want to do anything and everything we can to help contribute, even if just in a small way, to our firm’s primary mission: to help save lives.
We pursue this mission by leveraging technology to build customized software platforms for our clients in the health care industry. Specifically, we build these new worlds primarily using augmented reality/virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Then, we maximize the value and exposure of these platforms by ensuring that they interface with the more prevalent and widely available technology of today, such as mobile/tablet devices and personal computers.
We are currently working with some of the most world-renowned and innovative health care organizations on the planet on a variety of use cases ranging from patient treatment, clinical research, training and education, surgical demonstrations, to even creating a virtual walk through of a children’s hospital to make it less intimidating for future patients before they arrive.
Not only do we have a vast amount of experience in the health care industry, but our patent pending platform is being built for several other high level industries as well (more to come!). Again, our mission of saving lives was the motivation and inspiration that lead to its creation and we’re only just beginning to perceive the widespread implications of its potential
Due to the fact that the sky is the limit with respect to what we can assist organizations with, we typically try to start by identifying one or two of the primary objectives that exist and use those as an initial pilot project. We work with the appropriate stakeholders to determine the most appropriate problems that need solved and build a project plan around the desired outcome. We lay out key goals and metrics, establish the appropriate budget and deadlines, and collaborate to track progress along the way. Each engagement is customized in this way and ensures that at the end our clients are pleased with the result.
As a firm we make sure to stay on top of the latest technological innovations in our space and remain device agnostic in our development so that we can always make sure our platforms and software work on the best hardware that the industry gets to market. This agile and dynamic approach allows our clients to remain confident that the solutions they invest in will always maintain value and effective regardless of what comes out next.
It’s truly our honor to do our part in helping the health care industry continue to innovate. We would love the opportunity to partner with your organization and build new worlds together to help save lives. Just reach out to [email protected]!
Industry altering advancements in the augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and machine learning space continue to be released at a rapid clip. It’s almost impossible to keep up, even for tech nerds like ourselves. Because of this, the team at Eolian decided it would be worth taking the time to highlight some of the most earth-shattering updates, curate those that are the most relevant in our area of expertise, and even add a little insightful context so you can convert them into action items when appropriate. We’re calling it “The Eolian Report”. This is the first of hopefully many editions and we hope you find tremendous value out of it.
The industry is moving so fast and adoption along with it. It won’t be long before you look around and notice how widespread and rampant AR, VR, AI, and ML use cases are being implemented all around you. Don’t blink or you might get left behind. We would love to convert everyone into believers but for the purpose of this we will do our best to remain objective and hope that the facts and trends will speak for themselves.
Full disclosure: we are also working on developing some incredible applications and have launched a few in our core verticals of military/defense, healthcare, and real estate. So, we may share some of our major milestones as well.
While we are biased on the subject and feel that everyone should at least be exploring the potential implications and use cases for their own businesses we completely understand the delay and skepticism. Because of this we’d love to hear from you all to see where your mindset is on the matter, whether positive or negative. Perhaps you’re a hardcore skeptic. Or maybe you have tried launching an AR strategy and it fell flat or never made it off the ground. Maybe you have been thinking long and hard about it but have yet to pull the trigger. Better yet, hopefully you’ve built and launched a program and it’s been achieving a lot of success and on the way to massive ROI. Either way please reach out and let us know!
-Mike Simmons, CMO
Now without further ado, time to check out some of the latest developments in the space:
General Business
Tesla Patent Application Mentions Augmented Reality Safety Glasses
Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality Market: Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecasts 2018–2026
http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/4060124
Global Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) in Healthcare Market Extensive Study of Future Value Chain on Regional, Drivers and Technological Advancements Outlook 2018–2027
Technology Innovation in Virtual Reality in Healthcare Market to See Rapid Growth in Coming Year — Leading Players Are Google, Microsoft, Daqri, Psious Industry Analysis
http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/4053337/
Commercial Real Estate
With Augmented and Virtual Reality, Tour Your Office Before It’s Built [We have a platform called ARRE (Augmented Reality Real Estate) out that can help you do just this and so much more!]
Landlords Look To Curate Tenant Mix So Companies Can Financially Benefit One Another
Meet IntellyDoc (website/platform is going live this week): The platform designed specifically for lawyers that serves all your end-to-end contract management needs, and will soon leverage artificial intelligence (AI) technology as well. IntellyDoc easily solves every lawyer’s greatest problem – time management.
You can manage your contracts – from start to finish – without having to leave the IntellyDoc platform. IntellyDoc empowers you to leverage and take back the greatest commodity in the practice of law – your time. Which means you’ll draft contracts, automate document review and approvals (including e-signature functionality), gain critical insight with contract analytics, and close deals faster and more efficiently than ever before.
On the IntellyDoc platform, you get access to the following powerful capabilities:
Smart Contract Template Design
Automated Contract Review
Custom Workflows
Collaboration
E-Signatures
Data Analytics/Reporting and Extraction
The Real Benefits of IntellyDoc:
Less email traffic
Less legal grid-lock and pressure
Less time in the weeds
More time to practice high value, meaningful work
More efficient workflows
More metrics to inform decisions & ensure compliance.
Here’s how it works:
Create, review, negotiate, execute, and store a document without leaving the cloud-based platform.
The built-in, smart workflows automate document review and approval, enhancing speed and accuracy of your workload.
Collaborate securely within the platform to edit and track changes, manage several versions of documents, and execute documents with electronic signatures.
Gain powerful insight into your contract repository with real-time reporting and analytics.
Why it works:
Our simple set up with on-going, hands-on support means zero installation rigmarole but on-boarding training support is here, if needed.
The platform supports various file types you interact with daily on Macs or PCs including: doc, docx, and pdf.
The secure and compliant cloud-based approach delivers metrics and transparency.
The website is being finalized this week, but if you’re interested in learning more about the platform, please email [email protected] or click here to schedule your demo today.
