Bin the paper-chase! | Andrew Brook-Holmes, Office Product Manager, Microsoft UK
Andrew Brook-Holmes is an Office Product Manager at Microsoft UK, with 25 years’ experience working in IT, of which 10 years have been with Microsoft. He is also a director at the South East Media Network, a South East England Development Agency-backed business providing strategic focus for the region’s digital content sector.
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Question: We’re a small business and we’re stuck in a paper rut with our office admin. In particular, we need a software package that can help us create promotional material and organise email marketing campaigns more efficiently. We also need something to help us process quotes, orders and invoices more smoothly. We don’t want anything too complicated - just some simple office software. Can you offer us some guidance? - Angela, Newcastle
Answer: Hi Angela. Don’t worry, the paperwork catches up with most small businesses at some stage. You’re right to be concerned, though, because today’s customers have high expectations when it comes to the professionalism of their suppliers. And you don’t get that from a sea of paperwork!
In your question, you don’t tell us what sort of business you run, but I’m going to guess that you’re probably experiencing at least one of these scenarios – they’re common to just about every small and growing business:
| • | You’re putting together an email or a printed flyer with a special offer. You’ve got a list of existing customers and prospective customers, but they’re stored all over the place – some in your email, some in your accounting system, and some on bits of paper by the phone... | | • | Your invoices are in one system (or on paper) and you’re spending time every month on reconciling them manually against quotes you sent out from your word-processing program. Oh, and because quotes are done by hand, each of them looks different, too… | | • | You’d like to email your flyer to your contacts, but you don’t have the time to come up with something slick and smart, so you end up settling for ‘good enough’, even though you know in your heart of hearts it could all be so much better. |
If that sounds like you… you’re not alone, so read on!
Programs that work together
Like many small businesses, you and your colleagues probably already use individual programs to help you run the business - like Word for writing documents and Outlook for your email. Wouldn’t it be great if these different programs could just talk to each other – allowing you to manage the process end to end? Of course it would! That would mean:
| • | You could use the same visually appealing flyers for email newsletters, web documents and print - all from one master template, making life easier and your brand consistent. | | • | You could email your brochure to everyone: whether they be existing customers or prospects. | | • | You could turn quotes into jobs, jobs into invoices and invoices into payments - all without copying data from one program to another - cutting out bags of admin effort. | | • | You’ll have a full picture of your customers: what you sent them, when, and who responded. |
Working for Microsoft I’m obviously going to suggest a Microsoft solution! But truthfully, the integrated software packages in Office 2007 let you do all this and more - along with Office Accounting Express, which you can download free of charge. Let me expand a bit on what Office Small Business 2007 can offer.
Office Small Business 2007 - as it says on the tin - has been designed specifically for companies like yours which often have limited resources and need simple solutions to let them get on with growing their business - by doing away with manual systems wherever possible. With Office Small Business 2007 you get the following:
| • | Excel - so you can analyse your business information | | • | Word - provides powerful writing (and blogging) tools | | • | Publisher - helps you produce professional publications quickly and easily | | • | Outlook with Business Contact Manager - so you can track customers, contacts and sales | | • | PowerPoint - create professional, dynamic presentations to impress your prospects. |
Each piece of software also comes with lots of templates to help you get started fast.
Let’s look at a typical workflow, using all the requirements you asked about in your question - you’ll notice that the paperchase completely disappears.
Create quality marketing collateral
You don’t need to be an artist or designer to create professional-looking brochures - Publisher includes hundreds of images and custom-designed templates for newsletters, brochures and flyers to choose from- all at the press of a button. Imagine changing the seasonal feel of a flyer from winter to summer with just one click! You can store content in the Content Library, too, so the job of creating each newsletter gets easier each time you do it.
Personalise and track campaigns
Now that we’ve got a great e-newsletter, we need to get it in front of some customers! Once again, Publisher can help you compile personalised mailing lists for your email and direct mail campaigns by linking to the contacts in your email program.
For instance, click on the icon for Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager (BCM) and Publisher will dive into your contacts to retrieve a mailing list. These lists can also be infinitely customised, so every client gets the perfect message. Having created your mailing list, Outlook 2007 with BCM will help you track the distribution of your marketing materials and monitor its effectiveness.
There’s nothing more exciting that watching for the results of a marketing campaign, so we’ve even created a mobile edition of BCM for use on smartphones and other portable devices, which means you don’t have to be at your desk to check your campaign results.
Make more time for customers
By helping you become more organised, these integrated software packages give you more time to focus on customers and allow you to show the sort of professionalism they expect from much larger organisations - the sort of service which helps you keep customers happy and beat the credit crunch.
If you’d like to try Office Small Business before you buy, click on the link below for a 60-day free trial. Alternatively, a Microsoft Small Business Specialist Partner near you will be able to advise you further and help you get the best possible deal when licensing your Microsoft software.
--Andrew
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