For those of you who haven’t had a chance to check out the great articles my business partner Dave has been writing, stop reading this and go checkout the Meta Hipster sales blog. Seriously. I’ve been sitting about 5 feet away from him for the past 10 days watching him develop the sales process and materials for our local marketing company, and it’s been incredible. In fact, after two and a half days of cold calls, both in person and via phone, we’re up to 5 appointments.

Just about 1 out of every 10 people he talks to agrees to a meeting. Wow.

Not many sales people can boast that kind of rate. And because of that, we needed a CRM app. Bad. Keeping track of people he’s contacted, had success with, and gotten turned down by is quickly becoming too much work for the humble Google Apps spreadsheet. Especially when we’re trying to manage that in coordination with the VA we hired to identify possible leads.

Available Customer Relationship Applications

In looking around for a solution, there were two key choices we had to make…

1. Cloud based CRM, or self hosted?
2. Free or Opensource?

In the interests of keeping our operation costs as low as possible, and to give me a chance to learn the workings of a new app, I decided to go with vTiger CRM, which is both self hosted, and open source. I feel pretty confidant that I made the right decision, but we shall see in pretty short order. My next big project for tomorrow will be to integrate the vTiger lead-gen forms with the main Meta Hipster site. This way any leads that come as a result of the website end up in the CRM, complete with information about which source generated the lead.

Long Term Lead Gen Strategy

Once the lead forms are integrated between WordPress and vTiger (and expect to see a tutorial on how to do this, since I couldn’t find anything useful out there. Heck, maybe even a plugin if people are interested in paying for it!) we plan to aggressively design and develop landing pages for PPC campaigns. In addition, we plan to work in a lot of the video marketing techniques we’ve pioneered over at ThesisReady to increase conversions. That plus a soon-to-be-released feature of the WordPress video manager plugin will allow for pre and post-roll overlay forms right on top of the videos.

That means we can display the forms at key interaction points during the video, so we’re sure that people filling it out will be really interested in hearing from us.

My To-do List

So with all that in mind, here’s a quick run down of my tasks for tonight and tomorrow are thusly…

• Make the crm forms work, and replace the current Meta Hipster forms.
• Link all of my current web properties together to capitalize on the huge amount of traffic several of the sites are getting on a daily basis.
• Start planning possible landing page topics
• Design a couple of mock up landing page layouts and figure how we can make content creation for them scale.

Wish me luck!

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Heh. I’m on a role with cheesy cliches after this post title. Nice.

Here’s my daily update on the new business. Yesterday Dave went out on his first round of cold calls to local businesses to drum up some possible clients. While it ultimately netted zero sit-down meetings, it was a big day in that we hit our goal to have everything launched and ready for the public by then. If you want to learn more about the actual process of cold calling, and how we’re doing sales, check out his sales blog.

In The Mean Time…

While Dave is out doing sales stuff, I’ve still got plenty to do. In fact my to-do list for today looks something like

• Create a wire frame mockup for an eCommerce client.
• Write a new small business marketing blog on Meta Hipster’s site.
• A few miscellaneous design and development tasks for current clients.

I also want to start developing some thesis skins again. I’ve got a few great designs in the bag, but no time to work on them…

Gratuitous Request for Feedback

Since I’m making my first real attempt at chronicling my business ventures, I’d love to hear from you about what exactly you want to know about. Nothing is off limits (that I can think of right this second…) for the inner workings of the new company, so ask away in comments.

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