January 27th, 2009 by Brian Cors
In the beginning, SalesDoc Architect was an all-or-nothing proposition that required a substantial up-front investment of time to set up and customize the application. The trade-off was between two extremes: don’t automate anything, or spend a substantial amount of time adding the content and customizing the application to obtain a high degree of automation.
Over the past several months, we have added numerous features to SalesDoc Architect that enable our clients to fine-tune how much time they wish to spend on setup and customization to achieve various levels of automation. These features also allow our clients to fine-tune their approach by vendor, so that they can more fully automate SalesDoc Architect for their major vendors while providing a lower level of automation (thus reducing the time spent on customization and maintenance) for their lesser vendors.
Now, our clients have a “smoother curve” of customization effort vs. automation options from which to choose.
We have written a series of articles on The Productivity Edge to delve into each level of automation. We recommend starting with the ideas mentioned in the article entitled “Customizing SalesDoc Architect with Basic Automation” so that you can get SalesDoc Architect up and running as quickly as possible, enabling you to immediately realize SalesDoc Architect’s benefits to your organization and differentiate your company from the competition.
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January 14th, 2009 by Brian Cors
Most people view “procrastination” as a negative term. Usually, the word is used to describe the act of delaying or deferring to another day an action that should be accomplished today.
But in many cases, procrastination can actually be a good thing
How many times have you delayed taking action on something, only to discover at a later date that the action has taken care of itself or is no longer necessary? What appears to be urgent today often takes on a less urgent priority with the passage of time.
In fact, procrastination – when properly practiced – can help us to differentiate between what’s important (and maybe not so urgent) and what’s urgent (but not so important). Often, our perspective of the importance of completing a task changes after we’ve set the task aside to “percolate,” allowing us to view the task more objectively within the context of our entire task list.
Below are some thoughts about how you can use procrastination to your advantage.
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January 1st, 2009 by Brian Cors
Do you look forward to receiving and reading any e-newsletters or other “mass” emails? I have a few e-newsletters that I enjoy, particularly those that provide me with tips on how to get more out of the products and services that I’ve already purchased. As a result, I’ve become more loyal to these companies, and usually end up buying more products and services from them.
When it’s done right, email marketing can be a boon to both sender and recipient. For recipients, email marketing enables them to receive information that is:
- Timely, since they don’t have to wait for hard-copy materials to be developed and distributed to them.
- Customized for them. Email content can easily and inexpensively be customized to recipients, as compared to “hard copy” communication vehicles where it’s much more cost-effective to produce large quantities of the same thing.
- Linkable to other online resources and information.
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