Run, manage, and grow their businesses with these real WORKetc tips from real users.Be it a minute or an hour, $1 or $1,000;every little bit counts when you’re a small business.
And what better way to learn more about how you can use WORKetc to boost you and your team’s efficiency and productivity than by getting them from real business owners and WORKetc users who’ve already proven their effectivity in real life?
Today we’ve compiled more tried and tested WORKetc tips from real users who have already used them to better run, manage, and grow their businesses.
Check and Manage Tasks on the WORKec Calendar
I really like being able to show my tasks on my calendar so it is easy to plan my week or drag a task (in week view) to a different day if I don’t get it done. – Cindy Glover, Kardia Group
WORKetc’s calendars aren’t just for scheduling calls, meetings, and other events. It can actually be used as a sort of visual representation of your personal activity stream.
It shows events by default, but you can set it to show everything you’ve done in WORKetc. Timesheets, projects, support cases, invoices, and even any deposits or refunds$mdash;everything.
View and manage any type of activity on your WORKetc calendars.Viewing specific activity types, such as tasks, on the calendar makes it easier to reschedule any tasks that don’t get completed, as Cindy mentioned. Just click and drag.
Note that you can only do this on the calendar’s week and day views, but it’s not limited to just tasks. You can also move around any rescheduled events or misfiled timesheets; the start and end dates will be updated but the duration won’t change.
Not only is it quicker, seeing everything on a straight-up calendar can sometimes be a better way for someone to visualize what they have on their plate for the weeks ahead.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel Every Time
I love standard email responses! So many times we send the same information/questions to clients and it really helps to have a template you can just make a few tweaks to! – Christina Kincaid, Sprout Media Lab
When you’re fielding the same questions everyday, a repository of answers for commonly asked questions can be a huge time saver.
That’s what standard email responses are, essentially: phrases, sentences, or whole blocks of text that you find yourself using repeatedly.
Help your customers faster with standard responses.Let’s say you work at a web design company. Your customers are always asking about how to embed videos on their websites.
You can quickly create a standard response that details the steps needed to do just that, and when you get another email asking about it you can just insert the full instruction text into your reply.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single time. Just insert, tweak, and personalize.
Or let’s say your company has a few holiday promos. You can create a response and quickly insert a link to the promo or discount offer that your company is running. The possibilities are practically endless.
Always remember, though: don’t make everything sound too canned. Always strive to personalize your email responses with, as Christina notes, a few choice tweaks.
They are designed to save you time while still giving you the flexibility to respond in a personalized manner focused on the customer’s unique circumstances.
Slice and Dice Data Faster
Custom tags are a SUPREME help, and then making custom smart lists using those tags! – Cindy Glover, Kardia Group
Let’s continue the web design company scenario from the previous tip.
Only this time, let’s say you‘re rolling out a free SEO consultation for all web design clients who have yet to sign up for your SEO services.
You’re also limiting the promo to regular clients, as you have a completely different promo planned for preferred “Platinum” clients.
Filtering on your contact list for all of these variables 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 a smartlist, however, it’s as easy as filtering for contacts that have the “Web Dev” tag while excluding all contacts that have the “SEO” and “Platinum” company tags.
Slice and dice your data with custom tags and smartlists.With just a few clicks, you get a highly targeted marketing list for your team to focus on. You can even drill down further and filter for just those clients who came on board within the past 12 months.
By using custom tags to create highly-refined smartlists, you won’t end up wasting time and resources trying to promote a service to people who won’t be interested.
Manage Your Business From Inside Outlook
The Outlook plug-in is my favorite tool. It makes capturing important emails to leads and projects very easy. – Verity Larsen, Versoft Consulting
We may have been talking more about Gmail in the past few weeks, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only email client you can use with WORKetc.
Just like our Gmail add-on, the WORKetc Outlook plugin lets you manage your entire business from right within your email client’s inbox.
You can use it to turn any email into a contact, sales lead, contact, project update, task, or support ticket without having to open or switch over to WORKetc.
Manage your entire business from within Outlook.Let’s say a prospective client just emailed you that they want to broaden the scope of a redesign project that they want you to undertake.
The thing is, they sent the email to your personal email address instead of replying to the sales agent they’ve been communicating with the past few days.
Without the Outlook addin, you would have to switch to WORKetc, find the correct lead, update it, and finally copy and paste the text and attach it as a note.
With the Outlook plugin, however, you can quickly attach that email to the correct lead and then add a task for whoever is nurturing that lead to update the quote and presentation they’re preparing.
And you can do this all without ever leaving your Outlook inbox.
No context switching, no time wasted hunting down the right lead, just managing your business from within Outlook.
