Firstly, I hope you all had a great Christmas and Have a prosperous and healthy 2010.

But, looking back to the run up to Christmas, how much time did operation Christmas cards cost you this festive season?

Did you order printed Christmas cards?  Did you buy some and write on each one personally?  Did you decide to be environmentally friendly and send an ecard perhaps donating the money you would have spent on Christmas cards to a charity?

However you sent your yuletide greetings, you would have had to have decided which contacts to send the cards to.  Did you trawl through all your outlook emails / contacts to find contacts to send cards or ecards to?  Did you check through all of your paper records e.g. Invoices, Delivery notes, Purchase Orders and manually pick out your contacts?  Did you ask all your staff to provide you with a list and then collate it into one big list?

The issue is there are often hidden costs of the amount of time you spend collating all of this contact information which prevents  you from selling more or delivering services.

With a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) product, you can have all your contacts in one place, contacts are added straight into the database when you make contact with them throughout the year and there can be a simple tick box that says "Xmas Card" which you can tick if you want to send that contact a Christmas Card.

Now Operation Christmas Card just got easier.  You run a simple lookup for all the contacts that have "Xmas Card" ticked (which you and your staff have been ticking through the year).  If you are sending ecards, you go into the CRM's HTML editor and create your own card if you wish, or you import one thats been designed for you.  You carry out an email mail merge and hey presto, in about 5 mouse clicks, you are sending out 200 individually addressed emails to your contacts.  If an outside agency send your cards for you, then you simply carry out the same lookup and then click the export to excel function and you now have a list of contacts with their email addresses which you can send to the agency.

If you decide to send traditional Christmas cards, a CRM system will be able to produce labels for you.  It's easier if you use Avery standard labels as these are usually preset by CRM products, alternatively you can spend some time designing your own label template.  Again, create the lookup for "Xmas Card" then select the label template and print them.  200 labels are sitting on your printer ready to stick on your envelopes.

I know of some of my clients who have saved days of time just by implementing a simple cost-effective CRM system which has paid for itself already.

If you want to discuss how to improve your office efficiency with a CRM system, then contact Steve Crombie at Bridgehouse Solutions Ltd for a free consultation on 01462 450444 / 07931 580241 steve@bridgehousesolutions.co.uk  or visit our website at www.bridgehousesolutions.co.uk