Got “funny characters” in your Open Leads Emails?

Blame Microsoft Word. For most offices, MS Office and its component appications represent the standard for all things work-related. Unfortunately there are some things that these apps do not do well. One of these is creating plain text documents in MS Word. A lot of Open Leads users compose their email messages in Word and then copy and paste them into Open Leads to be sent.

The “Smart Quotes” function in MS Word inserts no-standard ASCII characters in to documents to replace straight quote marks with typographers curly quotes. Unfortunately these do not translate well in a plain-text or HTML application like Open Leads’ email module. When composing your messages in Word and then copying and pasting into Open Leads, it is very important to clean up the formatting.

To disable “Smart Quotes” in Word:
1. On the Tools menu, click AutoCorrect Options, then click the AutoFormat As You Type tab.
2. Under Replace as you type, select or clear the “Straight quotes” with “smart quotes” check box.

Alternatively, you can copy your entire MS Word document over to a non Microsoft text editor (EditPlus, UltraEdit, TextPad, etc) and do a simple search and replace. Search and replace the smart quotes into standard quotes, apostrophe’s, dashes and dots if applicable.

A third option is to copy and paste your message body into a utility that removes Word special characters – like this one:

http://www.boallen.com/clean-up-word-special-characters.html

Happy Holidays!

As 2009 draws to a close, we are offered the opportunity to reflect on the year that was. It has been a year that has seen challenges, for sure, but it has also given us the opportunity to regain our perspective, focus, and ultimately remember what is most important in our lives.

Happy Holidays from the entire Open Leads Team to all our customers, partners, friends and families! And best wishes for 2010!

Analyzing your data: Views and PDF Reports

How many new leads did you receive last month?

How many sales were closed?

Does one of your sales staff have way too many “No Sales?”

The answer to these types of questions are easily found using Views. Views are a combination of filters, and displayed data that users are able to save and load upon demand. In order to effectively create these Views to use as “Reports” for your account, a basic understanding of the filters that are available in your account is essential

Because Open Leads is based on an extremely powerful database, your account can contain a substantial amount of data that you can be extracted using filters. From your Lead List, filters are available to sort by the data contained in any of your fields, along with Type, User, Lead Source, Lead Grouping, Read/Unread, Date Added, Date Modified, Opted out (of email), Bounced (email), Active and Completed tasks. Take some time to add and remove some filters to get an idea of how you can best sort data. By combining filters, you can retrieve specific lists of leads. For example, adding the simple filter for “Date Added” then choosing “is in this month” you will display all new Leads entered into your account for the current month. Adding an additional filter for a Type, such as “Wiget Prospect” will show just those new leads that were interested in Widgets.

Customizing the columns displayed on your lead list adds to the functionality of your Views. Name will always be the first column, as it is used by Open Leads a key search and sort field. The next two columns can be customized by clicking on the blue asterisk icon in the header row. Once clicked, you can choose the data you wish to display, e.g. email address. Any column can be sorted alphabetically, or chronologically by clicking on the column header label. Clicking once for an ascending sort, and twice for descending. You can toggle between the date added and date modified fields, and you can elect to display or not display the assigned user, and can choose to display only the first Type assigned to your leads or all of the Types assigned to the leads on your list.

Once you have the data displayed, you can save this view, give it a label, and it will appear in your Current View dropdown. You can change back and forth between views at any time by selecting from this menu.

Saved views can be printed using the PDF Reports option in the Apply to menu. This dropdown menu appears just above the Types column on the right side of your Leads List – this is the same menu where your mass email and other mass apply options appear. Choose “PDF Report” then choose your display options, and you will be able to print a nicely formatted “report” from your view. From this menu you may also choose to export this data to a CSV file for use in an external application such as a spreadsheet.

Populate your Open Leads account with data directly from your lead gen sources

Open Leads supports many popular lead generation sites via direct XML data input. Our current list of supported sites includes:

Autobytel.com
AutoTrader.com
builtstronger.com
cars.com
communitiesnet.com
CreditJockey
Dealermade
Dealix
eBizAutos
eCarList
fmha.org
Ford Direct
FranchiseOpportunities.com
New Home Guide
New Home Source
RetireNet.com
SmartPillars.com
UsedCars.com

Don’t see your lead gen source listed? Contact them to see if they offer XML leads. Then let us know and we can get them added to this growing list of providers!

Change is never easy – and the Tasks Tab proves it

In adding more functionality to the Task system within Open Leads, it was necessary to make some changes to the way that Users were assigned to tasks. This is most apparent when a Workflow is used to assign Tasks, but not a user. The result is that any tasks attached to leads that are created by that Workflow will be assigned to “No User” (since no user was selected by the Workflow). In these cases, when users are assigned after the Lead is in the Lead List, users must open their Lead Detail to see tasks. It is a good idea to have them go ahead and edit the Tasks for new Leads assigned in this manner, and assign the Tasks to themselves. Tasks will then appear on the users Task Tab.

You will also notice a new selection menu on Tasks that are set up to trigger another Workflow upon completion, or Tasks that trigger Workflow Branching. This selection menu gives you the option of choosing the user to be assigned to the next round of tasks – either a specific user or the “User Assigned by Workflow.” This is a much stronger model than the previous options, which made it possible to assign a single Task to multiple Users assigned to the same Lead. This lead to some confusion and a lot of times the task not getting completed properly.

An additional function of these changes – all tasks now have a single user. Only one person should be responsible for any one task, and this ensures enforcement of this rule. This greatly increases the practical application of user Task Lists in the Task Tab section. Now it functions much stronger as a To-Do list.

Another Tasks Update

In the Task editor where tasks are created and assigned by a Workflow, the user selection dropdown has changed a bit. “Default User” has been changed to “User assigned by Workflow” – we think this change will make it clearer to users what is happening with the user assignment.

Minor Tweak to Tasks Tab

We made a slight adjustment to the Tasks Tab yesterday. It now defaults to “active” Tasks in all instances. Users must check box to display completed Tasks on the list.

New User Guide Available

We have updated our User Guide for Open Leads. Download it from Table of Contents on the online help section or click here.

Tasks System Update

We’ve just launched the latest update to our Tasks System. With this update, we have fully moved the process of managing your tasks over to the Tasks tab. Perhaps the first thing experienced users may notice is that the Task list is now gone from the Dashboard Screen. The “Today’s Tasks” from the dashboard was limited in its functionality, with that process moved now to the Tasks Tab. Clicking on any day on our Dashboard Calendar on which there is a scheduled task will bring up the tasks over on the Tasks Tab.

A major update to Tasks is the ability to create a Task which is not attached to a Lead. This gives a user the ability to schedule a task inside Open Leads for non-lead related tasks – an example would be a Doctor’s Appointment. Scheduling these tasks adds them to your Task List and also includes them in your iCal and 30 Boxes feeds.
What’s New in the Tasks Tab:

Another change you will see is with the method of assigning a user. All new tasks created in Open Leads can now be assigned to a user, whereas previous versions had Tasks inheriting the user(s) assigned to the Lead. When adding a new task, simply choose the user you wish to assign to that task from the dropdown list. This defaults to the user logged in, but gives the added flexibilty to assign a specific task to any of your available users.

We have also made some changes to the functionality of the Task Tab.

What’s New in the Tasks Tab:
Add Task – You can now add a new task directly from the Task Tab. Click on the “Add Task” link in the blue header bar, and then enter the new task. If a Task is to be assigned to a specific lead, click on “Attach a Lead to this Task” and then search and select the appropriate lead. You can also elect to assign a user, or no users to this Task, and schedule it or leave the Task open-ended. Newly assigned tasks will show up on the assigned users Task Tab instantly.

Complete or Delete Task – Users can elect to complete or delete any Tasks directly from the Task List. Click the green checkbox icon to complete the task and enter a comment, or click the red icon to delete the Task.

Edit a Task – Click on the task name on the Task List to open the editor – and from there, change the name of the task, the user, or the scheduled date and/or time.

Access the Lead Detail – if your Task is to call or email a Lead, for example, simply click the Lead Name from your Task List to be taken directly to the Lead Detail. This is where you will find all of your up to date contact information for that lead. You can complete the Task from there.

Popup Calendar Added

You asked for it and you got it! Open Leads users requested a popup calendar to use when scheduling tasks to make the process a bit easier and we added that code to the application this morning. Although Open Leads had always used “Smart Dates” – allowing you to type in “tomorrow” or “2 weeks” on the date field when scheduling upcoming Tasks, it was not entirely intuitive when you needed to schedule a task “two weeks from Thursday” – assuming that today is not Thursday, of course.

Now when you schedule a new task you will see a small calendar icon next to the date field. Clicking on this calendar opens a popup with a graphical calendar. Clicking on any date will select that date for the Task, and it will then display a time selector. The time selector works on a scroll wheel in 24 hour time which may take some users a bit of time to adjust to. However, by only having to fields to select from (hour and minute), it ultimately makes the selection of time very quick and easy – in keeping with our goal of being an easy-to-application. The default time is the current time on your computer, but a quick scroll and you can set the task to any time you require. You can also click on each field and enter a hour and minute. Once rendered into Open Leads your time will appear in standard 12 hour formatting.

A simplified, date-only, version of the popup calendar has also been added to any data fields you have created that contain Date information.

For those of you who have mastered the “old” way of entering dates for scheduled Tasks – all of that functionality remains the same and will still work as it did before.