Ridgeworth is gearing-up to send out a mailing called “Roofwatch”. It’s a small brochure, educating customers about roofing, tailored to the season. The last page also provides some background information and capabilities of Ridgeworth Roofing. In the past, our mailing list was maintained by my Mom and Linda in an excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was actually quite good, but there was no connection to Dataforma, which in the past had been used for CRM. There was no easy way to ensure that new contacts were added to the mailing list, which hadn’t been updated for at least the past year. I tried multiple times to pull a list out of Dataforma (ex., by date created), but it wasn’t “clean” and there was no easy way to identify contacts by type of work, who the main contact was, etc. The process just wasn’t working all that well for us.
Long story short, the solution was to pull a list of companies with warranties and manually look-up (and identify) the main contact in dataforma, pull a list of new customers from our accounting software (Peachtree), and use the previous Excel spreadsheet. After ensuring accuracy and manually identifying any duplicates, the spreadsheets can then be uploaded into Highrise CRM. Highrise works well in that once I have the good contact list(s) uploaded, I can add “tags”. For example, I can add tags for contacts that are getting Roofwatch, that are Churches, General Contractors, Homeowners, Property Managers, that have had their roof replaced in 2010, etc. This really helps because than we can pull a list any way we want to and across multiple tags.
It’s been a lot of work up-front, but will be well-worth it down the road.
