About Best Practices:

This is a series about using Heap CRM in a way that is most productive for your business. No new features are introduced, but new concepts, and introductions to 3rd party applications are par for the course.

E-Mail integration is one of Heap’s great strengths. However, most people don’t use it to it’s full potential. This blog entry is focused on two scenarios.

Scenario One:

You’re trying to schedule a meeting with a person. Maybe you’ve passed the e-mail back and forth a bit, but at this point you have an agreed upon time and date.

Scenario Two:

You’ve just been e-mailed by a new prospect and you want to forward their info into your Heap account. Maybe you’ve also given the prospect a call and you have a bit more info than is contained in the e-mail alone.

Scheduling the Meeting:

Here is an e-mail from someone I’m trying to meet:

Ok, so I could just forward this into Heap and go in and make an event at later time; but that isn’t that efficient. Ideally I would like to schedule it as part of the forwarding process. So I add:

[event:04/26/2008:Lunch with James at 12:10pm->My Calendar]

Truth is, I didn’t type all that. I use a program called TextExpander with the Heap bundle that allows you to produce large amounts of text by typing something shorter. So I actually typed “[e". Which gave me:

[event:04/23/2008:->My Calendar]

Then I typed in the event and modified the date (by default TextExpander places the current date when this snippet is expanded).

Some interesting things to note:

1. If this person is a lead, opportunity, customer or archive, both the message and the event will automatically be associated.
2. This event is tied to this message. So when viewing the calendar you can quickly click on the message icon and see the message that relates to it.
3. You could have many of the “event operators” in a single message (setting up many events). This is more common when you are setting up a list of tasks that you need to complete.

The new Prospect:

Here is an e-mail from someone who is interested in a product of ours:

I have some additional info (because I talked to them on the phone), specifically their phone and website. So I’m going to add the following operators to the top of the forwarded e-mail:

[phone:000-000-0000]
[website:www.acme.com]
[category: Real Estate]
[template:Real Estate Lead]

First, just like the event in the previous scenario, every one of these has a snippet in the Heap bundle for TextExpander. So, this is what happens when Heap receives this e-mail. First, it creates a person named “John Doe” that works at “ACME” (subject line), then it fills in the phone and website. Then it creates a lead from this new person, places that lead in the category “Real Estate” and runs the event template “Real Estate Lead” (in this case creating a half dozen or so follow-up events that automatically send out e-mail).

I hope these two scenarios gave you some ideas on where you might make your input process more efficient; next in best practices, “categories, find and reports.” Hope you stay tuned.

Questions? Contact support@wbpsystems.com

We’re publishing our TextExpander and Texter bundles for an upcoming series on best practices with Heap CRM. These bundles make it faster to give special instructions to Heap over e-mail.

To Install Heap CRM Bundle with TextExpander

1. Click “Apple”->”System Preference”->”TextExpander”
2. From the “+” menu, Select “Add Group from URL”
3. Type: http://heap.wbpsystems.com/heap.textexpander

To Install Heap CRM Bundle with Texter

1. Download the Texter Bundle
2. Click the “Texter” icon in the tray
3. Select “Bundles”->”Import”

“vCards over RSS” is a proposed system to allow automatic updates of contact information.

The Problem:

While contact data can be exported from web applications, in forms such as vCards and CSV, there is no mechanism to receive continual updates. Instead users are forced to either abandon their desktop address books or continually download vCard or CSV files.

Proposed Solution:

Using the existing RSS 2.0 standard, we can use enclosures (typically used for podcasts) to reference a vCard. This provides a number of advantages:

1. The date and time the contact was updated is included in the feed, thus the downloading program will only download cards that have been updated
2. Servers will only have to generate a small percentage of the cards as the downloading program will only ask for cards that are actually new or updated (compared to what is already in their internal database)
3. RSS is already a well known standard that can easily be generated and parsed

Example:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>People - All</title>
<description></description>
<link>http://wbp.crmondemand.biz/people.php</link>
<lastBuildDate>Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:37:07 +0000</lastBuildDate>
<item>
<title>John Miles - Apple</title>
<link>http://wbp.crmondemand.biz/person.php?peopleid=208391</link>
<enclosure url="http://wbp.crmondemand.biz/vcardrss.php?id=208391&amp;token=[REMOVED]&amp;loginid=1″ type=”text/x-vCard” />
<pubDate>Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:10:45 -0700</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Jane Winkle - Cisco</title>
<link>http://wbp.crmondemand.biz/person.php?peopleid=208390</link>
<enclosure url=”http://wbp.crmondemand.biz/vcardrss.php?id=208390&amp;token=[REMOVED]&amp;loginid=1″ type=”text/x-vCard” />
<pubDate>Wed, 26 Mar 2008 08:44:05 -0700</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Barbara Tora - USA Today</title>
<link>http://wbp.crmondemand.biz/person.php?peopleid=189150</link>
<enclosure url=”http://wbp.crmondemand.biz/vcardrss.php?id=189150&amp;token=[REMOVED]&amp;loginid=1″ type=”text/x-vCard” />
<pubDate>Sat, 1 Mar 2008 14:00:18 -0700</pubDate>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

Conclusion:

There is nothing in this idea that the majority of developers don’t already know how to do. In fact it isn’t really a new standard, just a new use of an existing one. To show our commitment, Heap CRM already supports vCards over RSS. This means any desktop application that understands this system will immediately have potential customers from Heap CRM Hosted, OnSite and Enterprise.

We’ve made a number of enhancements to the dashboard. First you can now move uncompleted events from the previous two weeks to the dashboard calendar. Also you will notice that we now show the five most recent messages for each prospect.

We’ve just released a massive enhancement to our search system. You can now search:

1. Only in a specific category (or on a specific calendar)
2. Only on items associated to a particular prospect
3. Only for items with a specific tag
4. Some combination of the above

Learn more here >

There is this annoying bug in Leopard’s iCal called the “calendar cache” bug or the “stuck” bug. It’s an issue with iCalendar feeds. Sometimes when an event is edited or modified in an iCalendar feed, Apple iCal doesn’t properly update the event.

This is a problem for many web based applications (like Heap CRM) that provide iCalendar feeds. The reason this is sometimes called the “calendar cache” bug is because this problem is all about the “calendar cache.” Apple iCal has cached the event, it just doesn’t think there is any reason to look to see if it has been updated. By simply deleting the calendar calendar cache, it forces iCal to update the event.

Obviously, to delete the calendar cache on a regular schedule by hand makes no practical sense. So I wrote what I have to assume is simplest Automator script ever written.

I also have this saved as an application, so that I can run it in the background. What I personally do is have the application run every time I login. So at least once a day the iCal feeds are forced to update. You can run it as many times as you like, or assign it to a schedule.

iCal Fix (Application)
iCal Fix (Automator Workflow)

Ever want to put all of your search results in a category; now you can with save search to category.

Here’s how it works. When you search people or leads, opportunities, customers and archives just click on the “save to category” button and all of your search results will be added to that category. You can even create a new category right there on the fly.

If you are searching messages or events, when you click one of the “save search to category” buttons, all of people associated with your search results will be added to that category.

With this tool you can now create temporary (or permanent) categories very quickly.

Heap CRM »

Ever needed to take a note when you only had a phone? Now you can with Jott. Jott is a service that converts voice messages to text and either sends them in e-mail or forwards them to a web 2.0 application (like Heap).

Here’s how you set it up.

1) Sign-up for a Jott account at Jott.com (it’s free)
2) Go to the tab labeled “Jott Links”
3) Click on the “Add it Here” button on the right
4) OK, fill out this form like so:

Setup URL:http://www.wbpsystems.com/jott/login.php
Link URL: http://www.wbpsystems.com/jott/api.php

5) Enter your e-mail password to your Heap CRM Account.

6) Select your account

That’s it! Now you can send messages to Heap directly from your phone.

Next time you have an address in an e-mail, message, comment, etc. you might notice a small globe similar to this.

This is a data detector (Heap’s newest) and if you click on it, it takes you to the location on Google Maps straight away.

Text fields in Heap are extremely smart. They of course detect things like e-mails and websites, but they also detect more exotic items such as UPS numbers and chat clients.

Ever want to create a to-do list within a message? Sure you could use follow-up events, but that’s probably an overkill for something like a shopping list. Instead let’s use this little trick.

Here’s my shopping list:

Ok, one of these I need to draw attention to (with @highlight), because we are completely out and one I already purchased, so I can mark that off (with @done).

Heap CRM >