Customer Profiles
Jo and Pam’s Excellent Data Adventure
Data Anarchy Central
Pam and Jo run a successful small business called Green Machine PR, which specializes in growing clean-tech and hi-tech companies. Like many entrepreneurs in America, Jo and Pam cut their teeth in corporate America and then struck out on their own armed with a well-honed skill set, niche market expertise, and a home-based business strategy designed to deliver their clients quality service while saving them money.
Jo and Pam thought their business was lean and mean but it wasn’t. A publicist’s most valuable asset is her press list. Jo and Pam’s list was a mess. But it didn’t start out that way. Jo dutifully created an Excel spreadsheet with columns dedicated to each reporter’s contact details. She then forwarded a copy to Pam. That’s when the trouble began. Each time Jo contacted a reporter, she made a notation in her desktop application but had no way of communicating her press outreach to Pam.
An award winning publicist but one of the more Excel-challenged souls on this earth, poor Pam never figured out a way to track her press communications in Excel. In fact, it wasn’t really Pam’s fault. Who wants to comb through a spreadsheet with miles of columns? As a result, she had to create a new printout for each release so she could write notes in the margins. Ironically, each time a client announced a new green product, Pam cut down another tree.
Their data management continued to spiral out of control. Lists were acquired in Word and in hard copy, never to be imported to Excel—who had the time? Each woman had her own “drawer of shame” stuffed full of business cards from past trade shows, meetings, and networking events. Although they promoted energy efficiency to the world, they were hardly energy efficient in their operations.
Jo and Pam are also moms. Each day takes multi-tasking to a new level. They have become masters at simultaneously typing on the computer, talking on the cell and shoving 4 year olds into princess dresses that induce spasms of gender identity concern. In Pam’s and Jo’s world, time is their most precious commodity and what they seem to have least of.
BatchBook, The Magic Antidote
Having abandoned hope in the invention of an eco-friendly cloning device, Jo and Pam decided it was time to economize their work habits and seek out the type of powerful contact organizer that helped them in their past corporate lives. That’s when they discovered BatchBook—a contact and communication management system designed to control data anarchy.
BatchBook quite literally changed their lives. Easy enough to use (even for Pam!), BatchBook lets Jo and Pam maintain their press list all online so either of them can access it from their home, a coffee shop or a trade show. While other contact management packages exist, none let Jo and Pam customize the data fields to reflect the unique data needs required for press outreach versus sales cycles.
Plus, with BatchBook, they can tag each contact so that they can easily pull up press lists specific to a client, or media category such as financial, environmental, trade or broadcast.
Best of all, Pam can do what she does best—develop game-winning press pitches—rather than waste time rifling through old print outs to analyze past communications to determine the best tack to take with a press contact.
Now, when a client says “jump,” Jo and Pam can immediately call up a customized list, identify exactly which reporters have been contacted and when, determine next steps based on a full picture of the client’s total press portfolio, and create a shared to-do list to help focus their efforts.
One more thing: it’s not just Jo and Pam’s press contacts that live in BatchBook. It’s all their contacts tagged accordingly—event planners, analysts, industry contacts and even babysitters.
Oh, the glory of SaaS!
As a hosted service, BatchBook provides a secure and cost-effective solution for Jo and Pam. Like all small businesses, uniformly remiss in their data backup, Jo and Pam go to sleep at night knowing that their press lists are impervious to the inevitable spilled cup of apple juice on their computers. And, to get up and running, there were no upfront capital costs, clunky hardware or complicated software packages to install, or steep learning curves to master.
Happy Endings
We’d like to report a fairy tale ending for this BatchBook story in which Jo and Pam live happily ever after in a hectic-free world. That’s about as likely as a pumpkin turning into a high-performance hybrid. However, BatchBook has relieved Jo and Pam of a significant source of anxiety generated by the poor state of their highly prized press list that simply was not conducive to an efficient and sustainable workflow. Their lives are still juggling acts, but now they can handle their work with less stress and more time to do what they do best: grow their business. And maybe even catch a movie, though it would probably be Rated G.
The End.