4 Time-Saving WORKetc Tricks for Power Users

WORKetc power users know more than a few tips and tricks to shave precious time off of their business processes and workflows. Here are four more little tricks that will make you even more efficient and productive.

Every minute and second you save, every dollar and cent that you bill—everything counts when you’re running a small business.

This is a lesson every entrepreneur needs to learn quickly if they want to stay in business.

WORKetc already helps streamline business processes and workflows by integrating CRM, projects, billing, support, and more into one central business management app.

And if you’re a WORKetc power user, you’ll already know more than a few tips and tricks to shave precious time off of your processes and workflows.

Today we’re teaching you about four more little tricks that will make you more efficient and productive.

1. Use Company Tags to Create Highly-Refined Smart List Results

When you need to find something in WORKetc, the global search is usually the first thing you’ll use. When you want to find very specific information, however, you turn to smart lists.

A few months back, we added the ability to use company tags to further refine the results of smart lists that filter for person-type contacts. This means you can now set even more specific criteria to slice and dice your contact list any which way you want.

Let’s say, for instance, that your company sells water coolers. You’re cooking up a marketing campaign for a new type of water cooler that you’ll be selling soon, and so you want to get a list of people to send marketing materials to.

You’ve already tagged all decision makers in your client companies as “Admin / Exec”, and you have preferred clients tagged as “Platinum”. You’ve also separated your clients into service zones numbered 01 to 10.

You have a completely different marketing plan for your preferred clients, however, so you need to make sure none of them are on that list. For this specific marketing copy, you also only want to target those companies who are located within service zones 3, 5, and 10.

Doing all this on your contact list would mean you’d have to input each tag yourself into the search box, plus you won’t be able to exclude preferred “Platinum” clients from the search results.

By using smart lists, however, it’s as easy as creating a smart list that shows results for contacts that have the “Admin / Exec” tag and the company tags “Service Zone 03”, “Service Zone 05”, and “Service Zone 10”, while excluding all contacts that have the “Platinum” company tag—as you can see in the screenshot above.

With just a few clicks, you get a highly targeted marketing list for your team to focus on. You won’t end up wasting time and resources trying to sell your new product to people who either won’t be interested in it, or who are in no position to decide whether or not to buy it.

2. View Any Activity Type on the WORKetc Calendar

WORKetc’s calendars always show events such as scheduled client meetings or sales calls by default. You can, however, actually view anything from projects, tasks, and timesheets to support tickets, emails, and discussions on the calendar.

With an overview of everything you have scheduled — whether it’s a client meeting, a project you need to work on, or an email you need to send out — you can manage your time more efficiently.

Using these different calendar views, a digital marketing firm, for example, can use the WORKetc calendar as a content calendar simply by creating tasks for blog post publication dates and setting the calendar to show only tasks.

You can view all those post publication tasks on your WORKetc task list, of course, but a real calendar view is more effective in letting you visualize your upcoming tasks (and how they affect other things you need to do) compared to a list.

To view activities other than events in your calendar, simply click on the down arrow next to “Activities:” at the top right hand area of the calendar, as shown in the screenshot above. This will open a menu where you can select what type of activity you want to view on the calendar.

You can mix and match which activities you want to view; if you want to view everything you have scheduled on the calendar, simply click on the checkbox next to “Everything”—the last option in the drop down menu.

3. Control Access to Knowledge Base Articles on the Customer Portal

When your customers have access to information that lets them resolve small issues by themselves, your support team can bring more focus to bear on bigger issues and emergencies. To help your customers better help themselves, you can share knowledge base articles with them via the WORKetc Customer Portal.

The trick here is to provide only those articles that are relevant to your customers in the first place. It gets even trickier when you’re offering multiple products and services.

Let’s say your company does web design, hosting, and content marketing. You tag each customer according to which services they’re currently paying you for. Web design clients have the “Web Design” tag, for instance, while content marketing clients have the “Content Marketing” tag.

Now, you don’t want to show your web design-only clients a bunch of FAQs about your content marketing services since it’s not relevant to them. That just wastes both your and your customer’s time.

You can control exactly what your customers see on the knowledge base by only allowing access to specific articles to users who have the proper tags.

You can show articles and FAQs about your web design services only to clients with the “Web Design” tag. Content marketing clients, meanwhile, will only see those articles about your content marketing services.

You can even share articles only to specific people. If your web development company, for example, is handling web hosting for Company A, you can choose to share client-specific knowledge base articles, such as cpanel and CMS logins, only to those contacts who work for Company A.

To do this, simply open a knowledge base article by going to Documents > Knowledge Base and clicking on an article title in the tree view to the left of the page.

Next, click on the pencil icon next to Customer Portal access under the article’s title, as shown in the screenshot above. You’ll then see four sharing options, with the first one making the article inaccessible from the customer portal and the second one making it available to all customer portal users.

The final two options let you share knowledge base articles with either specific customers (great for when you’re sharing specialized KB articles with only a handful of people) or customers who have specific tags (better for sharing articles with more people).

4. Create a New Lead, Company Contact, and Person Contact All at Once

When you’re creating a new lead in WORKetc, you’ll also want to create new company and person contacts for that lead.

Now, speed is essential when you’re trying to lock down a sales lead. Fortunately, you don’t have to waste precious minutes creating them one after the other—WORKetc lets you create all three at the same time.

Simply open the “Create Lead” dialog from anywhere in WORKetc then click on the “Client” tab at the top of the dialog box. There, you can see the options “New Company contact” and “New Person contact”.

Clicking either will let you create these new contacts along with your new lead without having to navigate to another WORKetc page or launching the Create Contact dialog.

This very same process also works when you’re creating a new lead via the WORKetc Gmail or Outlook add-ins.