We are excited to announce that we are rolling out a new SMS feature in saleslifecycle.com. SMS messages are great for sending reminders, keeping in touch with existing customers as well as offering some unique marketing opportunities. Starting from tomorrow, you will be able to send SMS messages as part of your usual contact plans as well as from ad-hoc actions. We are giving your 20 free SMS credits to give it a trial and additional credits can be added as per the usual subscription mechanism. You can read more about the SMS features here. As always we welcome your feedback and any comments you may have.

Well it was nice to have such great weather on the long weekend here in Adelaide.  We took advantage of the extended weekend to push some new updates and improvements to saleslifecycle.com   What’s Changed? Advanced Search now supports ‘Saved Queries’.  If you find you are constantly running the same search over and over again you can save time by saving your search query.  Simply build the search you wish to save and after running it enter a name in the ‘Saved Queries’ box on the LHS and click on ‘save’ Another change to the Advanced search is that it now supports the back button in your browser.  If you clicked one a search result and then wanted to get back to your previous search you can simply click on the back button in your browser and we will pull the previously run search.  Another Great time saver! Likewise we now support ‘Saved Queries’ in the Deal Reports.  Now you can build and save repeated reports with a simple one step process.   System Improvements The other big change is one we hope you won’t notice.  We overhauled the database infrastructure over the weekend significantly improving the throughput and stability of our service.  We hope you won’t notice any difference and just take for granted the service quality.   What’s coming next? Tim and I are currently in discussions regarding future directions and features for saleslifecycle.com.  We have some exciting new ideas that we are getting impatient to get ready for production.  I promise to write a new post soon regarding the future for saleslifecycle.com   P.S. Don’t forget to check out our videos on youtube

Well another update has been released – Deduplication!  What the heck is that?  Put simply: it is a new tool for removing duplicate records in your account.   Duplicates crop up over time, especially in large accounts, so from today you now have a new option for dealing with this issue.     As part of the update we have run an initial auto-duplicate check across your entire account.  When there is a high enough certainty that a company or contact record is a duplicate we now mark these as potential duplicates. Finding these is as easy as running an advanced search with the new ‘Has Duplicate’ option.   You can select the two duplicate contacts and choose to merge these straight from the search results. Or click on the contact to find more information about the duplicates detected.   Performing a Merge Once you have determined to merge the contacts (two or more) you will be presented with the Merge Contacts page. This page lets you select which pieces of information you wish to retain and which company to contact should reside in.  The discarded contacts will be deactivated (not deleted) and any deals, actions and message history will be moved across to the merged contact. The merge process can be lengthy and is run as a background task.  Also I should note that although the auto detection feature does a pretty good job it is not perfect – so make sure you check out suggested merges before making any changes.   Duplicate Companies Duplicate companies are also handled in a simular manner.  A advanced search can also be performed for duplicate companies and the process is the same as above.  Contacts from both companies are pulled into the ‘Winning’ company and the duplicate companies are made inactive.

Contact databases often suffer from a common issue - duplicate contacts.  They creep in, they are imported in and are made all the time through inconsistent naming or incomplete information.  No one is really safe from the pain of duplicate contacts and it can cost a company significant embarrassment when duplicate contacts are both treated as the actual sole record.  To date we have not had a good solution for dealing with duplicates beyond manual intervention. So I am pleased to announce the next major feature to be added to saleslifecycle - de-duplication! Detecting Duplicates It all starts with detecting if a duplicate contact record exists. Our method is a rather brute force approach of comparing all of your active contacts with each other.  Matching contacts are made by comparing their company name, last name, first name and primary email address and measuring the similarities. From this we build a probability score out of 100 to determine if they are in fact duplicate records. For example: John Smith at ComWire International Jonathan Smith at Commerc International Would be given a probability of around 70% of being a duplicate. If the score is greater than 80% we will add a warning on the contact page of a possible duplicate contact.  Contacts with a possible duplicate will be searchable via the new advanced search option 'Has Duplicate' Resolving Duplicates If you believe that the contact records are not duplicates then you can choose to 'ignore' the match and it will not be suggested again.  If you believe that they are duplicates then you have two choices: Merge or Delete one of them. When will this be available? The final design is being worked on now and we expect to see this new feature rolling out in the next week or so. Until next time.