We have some new features worth noting in saleslifecycle.com.  We just added a much requested feature to our BCC service.  Now when you send us an email from outlook and bcc (or forward) email to us @ bcc at this domain (saleslifecycle.com) and we can’t find that contact in your account we will add the new contact - Great little time saver. Another new feature we added last week was the new Social media search option.  At the moment it is limited to LinkedIn – but as most B2B contacts are in this network it makes sense to start here. So the next time you want to lookup the LinkedIn profile of one of your contacts you will find it surprisingly easier. We will have more news regarding social media next week – stay tuned!

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.

We will be releasing a new update to your saleslifecycle.com account in the next couple of days.  Once updated you will be able to receive daily or weekly reports in your inbox.   You can see a preview of the report in your account at any time by going to the Email Report page.  Hopefully this will give you ‘at a glance’ insight into your account and how you are progressing. By default email reports will be turned on once the update is released.  To turn the reports off or change your preference from daily to weekly just edit your membership record.

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.