Highrise helps Inchoo follow-up with prospects

In "Manage your contacts effectively – where have all my post-its gone?", Aron Stanic of Inchoo discusses Highrise.

Let’s say I’ve just received an email inquiry from a new prospect. When sending a response, I can instantly Bcc the email to my Highrise dropbox making the communication transparent and easily trackable for myself and, most importantly, for the rest of the team as well.

I’m able to upload and/or import basic contact information about the new client together with her/his picture (sometimes being good with the names simply doesn’t cut it), corporate information, other notes and – yes – even feed the profile with their Twitter updates so I can see what the client is up to in real time.

While some of these features can strike you as purely cosmetic, there are others that really stand out. I can create task lists for each contact (making sure I don’t forget sending that quote or a follow-up email), add pending and any previous deals to them and tag them accordingly.

It happened a couple of times that I’d make a follow-up on a prospect who needed some small Magento tweak a month ago and decided to go with another developer. He had experienced some problems and was very much relieved to hear back from us and ask for our help with a larger deal that we would then land. Who knows if I’d have remembered to make that follow-up had I not created a task two months ago.

Read the full post.

"Run your home more like a business" with 37signals tools

101 Tools to Run Your Home More Like a Business:

Home life seems to get more and more complicated as days go by. There are chores, paperwork, and lots of maintenance to deal with, but your home doesn’t have to take over your life. By using tools that streamline the work of businesses, you’ll find that it’s easy to get things done. Read on and you’ll find 101 tools that will make your home run like a business.

Included on the list: Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise, Campfire, and Writeboard.

Import Clients, Contacts and Won Deals from Highrise into Harvest

Harvest lets you and your staff track time, log expenses, and create invoices in one simple, integrated workflow. Now you can quickly import Highrise contacts and won deals into Harvest to track time and invoice clients.

Here is a short, 2-minute video to show you how the integration works:

Learn more about Highrise and Harvest integration at the Harvest blog. Sign up for a free trial of Harvest today and give this new feature a spin.

The Star-Ledger: Highrise is a a new breed of CRM that emphasizes simplicity

"New programs can help firms rid themselves of their Rolodexes" [The Star-Ledger] says that while you might think of CRM software as being a tool for mega-corporations (or costing mega-bucks), relatively affordable web-based versions of CRM software are now available. Along the way, Highrise gets a mention.

For many businesses, especially small businesses -- a law firm, say, or a niche retailer -- the idea of embarking on an effort to move to a CRM system can seem like a daunting task. Yet with a new breed of CRM, the emphasis is on simplicity and ease-of-use, as well as helping you run a business without the need to configure and install complex software. You pay a monthly fee, and then you can forget about the technical end of maintaining the CRM software...

Highrise, offers a free plan, for two users and 250 contacts. A $24-per-month plan provides up to six users and 5,000 contacts, while the $149- per-month plan allows for unlimited users and 50,000 contacts. I particularly like the description used by 37 signals, the makers of the Highrise CRM: Highrise is a great way for business to keep track of who talked to whom, what was said and what needs to happen next. The software excels in the way it blends contact management, to-do lists and other features. You look at a contacts page in Highrise, and you have a window into your communications with that person, notes from meetings, background and any tasks related to the contact...

If you're working on your own, you can certainly try to make do with sticky notes, a simple address book and your memory. But if multiple people are working on projects together, maybe even in far-flung locations, then coordination becomes essential. Given that an increasing number of small businesses now operate in a virtual environment, or have telecommuters, the need for tools to know who's doing what is even more important. Just beware: Even these streamlined CRM services won't do much for you unless you actually use and update them.

Read the full article.

Put your Highrise Dropbox address in the BCC field automatically in Mail.app

Want to put your Highrise Dropbox address in the BCC field automatically in Mail.app?
Easy Automatic Highrise Dropbox in Apple Mail offers a hack that will make it so (requires messing with Terminal.app so "buyer beware"):

1. Open Terminal.app
2. $ defaults read com.apple.mail UserHeaders
3. If nothing shows up, you don’t currently have anything set and you should be golden to move to the next step.
4. $ defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"BCC" = "dropbox@YOURDROP.highrisehq.com"; }'
5. Restart Mail.app

That’s it. From now on your email should be automatically BCC’d to your dropbox address and you should get a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Have a neat tip related to a 37signals product? Let us know.

"Create a kick ass intranet app using 37signals"

Travis Vocino, a South Florida based technologist, explains how to "Create a Kick Ass Intranet App using 37signals":

I use three 37signals applications: Backpack, Basecamp and Highrise (go go referral links). With these 3 excellent web apps, I’m able to rock out a seriously awesome complete intranet setup for my business.

Just using them is fine but, as usual, I like to take it one step further into better integration with my desktop workflow. That’s where OpenID and Fluid.app come in.

The article goes on to explain how to use OpenID and Fluid.app to "turn this puppy into a desktop-like application."

Having all of these applications in place really creates a great intranet-type workflow. It’s helpful even when working solo but if you have a small team like me it really shines. I also noticed my people used the various apps a lot more once I introduced them to using OpenID to bring them together — as well as putting it all together in Fluid.app...

It’s great for tabbing to your intranet window, adding a calendar entry, and tabbing back to Photoshop, to give a quick example. This is a process that just isn’t as exciting when you’re stuck in Safari.

Read the whole piece for step-by-step details on how Travis set up his system.

New in Highrise: Twitter integration

Today we're excited to release basic Twitter integration in Highrise.

Highrise is the best way to keep track of who you talked to, what was said, and what to do next. Twitter integration allows you to have an even better view of what's on a person's mind, what they're saying right now, and what their current interests are.

This is especially handy if you check a person's Highrise page before contacting them again. Now you can check your previous communications history as well as what they are tweeting right now. Tweets are great conversation starters that show you're paying attention to what's going on in their world.

Here's a video to show you how easy it is to add Twitter info for a contact:

We really hope you like this feature! Thanks again for using Highrise!

(Be sure to follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/37signals)

Convert password protected RSS feeds to emails with Feed My Inbox

Want to get your password protected RSS feeds (from Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise, or wherever) delivered via email? Benjamin Stangland, Operations Manager at Weber Marketing Group, offers this tip on converting password protected RSS feeds to emails.

I found a free solution that will convert password protected rss feeds to emails that I just wanted to share with you guys. Since this might help other 37signals customers.

Converting password protected rss feeds seems to be a challenge but www.feedmyinbox.com works.

You have to place your username and password into the feed line itself however.
https://[username]:[password]@[domain]/[path]

We use this all the time with Highrise and love it.

FYI: An email will be sent to you each time the feed is updated, but no more than every 24 hours (to cut down on inbox clutter). Whether there is 1 post or 10 posts to the feed in a 24 hour period, you receive them all in one email.

Have a good tip related to a 37signals product? Let us know.

Sync your Ballpark estimates with Highrise Deals

Ballpark, an app that lets you send estimates and invoices, now syncs with Highrise Deals.

Highrise Deals are a great way to keep track of estimates and proposals and take note of which you’ve won and lost. Avid users of Highrise ourselves, we’ve added the ability to sync your Ballpark estimates with Highrise as Deals. Learn more about Highrise Deals

We use Highrise to keep track of incoming RFPs and emails from clients that need to be shared with our team. With Highrise Deals syncing, we can keep the whole team - specifically team members who aren’t in Ballpark - aware of what projects we’ve won and lost, leave notes about what happened, and keep everyone on the same page.

Learn more about the integration and how to enable it at this post on Ballpark's blog.

View your Highrise tasks in your Backpack Calendar (or any other calendar that accepts iCal feeds)

Did you know you can view your Highrise tasks in your Backpack Calendar (or any other calendar that accepts the iCal format)? First, go to your Tasks page and scroll down to the bottom. You'll see a link that says, "Subscribe to your iCalendar task feed."

Copy this link and then add it to your calendar. If you're not sure how to add an iCal feed to your Backpack Calendar, follow the directions at this Backpack FAQ.