All posts by Krista Garver

I am a passionate inbound and content marketer. My goal is to create content that educates, engages, and helps people do their jobs better. In my offline life, you can almost always find me attending live theatre.
karmaCRM News and Updates

New Features for March: Redesigned Emails, a Zapier Integration, and More

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This month, we launched a massive project to refresh karmaCRM’s interface, starting with app emails. We’re pretty excited about it. We think you will be too. Read on to learn more about what’s new at karmaCRM this month.

Enjoy redesigned emails

No one should have to look at an ugly email, especially first thing in the morning. That’s why we redesigned all of the emails coming from our app, including daily task reminders. All emails from our system now share the same template and will appear consistent whether you’re viewing them on your mobile phone or on your desktop.

Stay tuned for future installments of our interface redesign.

Integrate with thousands of platforms via Zapier

karmaCRM now has an official Zap in the Zapier store. With this Zap, you can easily transfer your contacts, companies, deals, and tasks between karmaCRM and thousands of other apps, instantly streamlining your operations.

Add relationships to your list

You can now add your relationships as a column to your list for contacts, companies, and deals. Thanks to a few customers for pushing this one!

Share saved, filtered lists

Finally, you can share your saved, filtered lists with everyone on your team. Simply click “Switch to another saved list” in contacts, companies, or deals, and then press “edit.” Once in the Manage Your Lists popup, check the box “shared” next to the lists that you want the rest of your team to see. Collaboration and standardization win!

Want to see all of these features (and many more) in action for yourself? Schedule a personalized demo of karmaCRM today.

Krista Garver
I am a passionate inbound and content marketer. My goal is to create content that educates, engages, and helps people do their jobs better. In my offline life, you can almost always find me attending live theatre.
Featured Customers

Featured Customer: Green Dot Bioplastics

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The folks at Green Dot Bioplastics are no strangers to innovation. The bioplastics company created the first compostable elastomer, the kind of flexible plastic that you’ll find in toys for your kids and the soles of your shoes. Dedicated to creating sustainable alternatives to traditional plastics, Green Dot works to create a little more good in the world.  

When they first started out in 2011, Green Dot began searching for a contact management software that would allow them to focus on helping customers make smart, sustainable choices. “Our primary goal was to find a CRM that was intuitive, user-friendly, and cost-effective. We shopped a lot of different products and chose karmaCRM because it met all of our needs, right out of the box,” says Sarah Harbaugh, Sales Manager at Green Dot.

“It’s powerful enough to perform all the tasks we need and affordable enough for a small company budget,” adds CEO Mark Remmert.

The bioplastics firm prizes karmaCRM’s customizability. As a small company that interacts with many different kinds of contacts — from leads to vendors — it’s crucial that their CRM is responsive to the way they do business. “From the sales perspective, the most valuable feature is how customizable karmaCRM is. We can add or adjust categories, reorder drop-down menus, and tailor data to how we interact with our contacts. It’s been very helpful for us.”

“I can’t imagine what I would do on a given day if I wasn’t able to use karmaCRM.”

karmaCRM has also improved Green Dot’s internal processes. The shared calendar feature doesn’t just facilitate appointment setting and meeting planning. It has also become the command center of operations, allowing them to coordinate production schedules, inbound and outbound shipments, and other company-wide activities. “We can color code all our calendars so that it’s very easy to see at a glance what’s happening when. We’d be lost without our shared calendars,” Harbaugh says.

Green Dot integrated with karmaCRM just a month after their company launched. “karmaCRM has really grown with us. We’ve enjoyed watching features being added over the years. They are obviously working to constantly improve the software and offer more and more robust features. We can’t wait to see what they come up with next.”

And we can’t wait to see what Green Dot comes up with next! Perhaps a luggage tag for the fan club of an iconic 90s band? Oh, wait. They already did that!

About Green Dot Bioplastics

Green Dot Bioplastics is a bioscience social enterprise headquartered in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas. Our mission is to advance the unique characteristics of bioplastics to help designers and manufacturers create inspired products that empower consumers to contribute to a more sustainable world. In everything we do, we strive to minimize the use of petroleum-based chemicals, maximize the use of renewable materials, increase the value of reclaimed and recycled materials, and enhance the performance of biodegradable materials.

Krista Garver
I am a passionate inbound and content marketer. My goal is to create content that educates, engages, and helps people do their jobs better. In my offline life, you can almost always find me attending live theatre.
karmaCRM News and Updates

New Deals Tools, Browser Notifications, and More: What’s New at karmaCRM This Month

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You’re busy. Your whole team is busy. Who hasn’t had a few things slip through the cracks? This month’s updates focus on tools to make keeping up with your sales activities as simple possible.

New deal-tracking tools

We love deals. After all, deals are what sales is all about! That’s why we’re super excited to have just launched karmaCRM Deals v2. You can now get a visual deal pipeline as well as tools to measure your deal progress and deal stats. It’s pretty cool.

Learn more here.

Browser notifications

Keep everyone in the loop with our new browser notifications feature. This means you don’t have to be actively working with the CRM or obsessively checking your email to know what’s going on.

When you turn browser notifications on, you’ll see a notification on the top right-hand part of your screen whenever:

  • a user is assigned,
  • a task or event is due, or
  • a user is added to a note.

Learn more here.

Business card scanning

Forget about spending hours entering business card information after your next networking event. You can now take a photo of a card with your phone, and your contact will automatically be loaded into the CRM.

And don’t worry about mistakes. All cards entered this way will be scanned and verified by humans.

Learn more here.

Autoimport files from Wufoo

If you’re using Wufoo to collect information on forms, karmaCRM will now automatically import any files that were sent along with the submissions.

As always, we’d love to hear what you think of these features, as well as what else you’d like karmaCRM to be able to do. Hit us up on social media (links below) or send us a message via our contact form.

Krista Garver
I am a passionate inbound and content marketer. My goal is to create content that educates, engages, and helps people do their jobs better. In my offline life, you can almost always find me attending live theatre.
karmaCRM News and Updates

Email Formatting Options, PDF Templates, and More — What’s New at karmaCRM This Month

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Can you believe it’s already the end of January? At karmaCRM, we’ve started the year off strong with a host of new features and improvements. Here’s what’s new.

Bulk task creation and contact editing

Save time by creating tasks in bulk! Now you can bulk create tasks for contacts, companies, and deals. You can also add and remove contact buckets in bulk. Available on the per user pro plan.

Oodles of new email formatting options

We’ve added all sorts of fancy new formatting options to the email composer. You can now change the font and font size, add bullet points, and much more. To make formatting more convenient for you, we also moved the editor toolbar to the top of the email pane.

Printable PDF templates

Need to quickly create PDF-based contracts or print letters based on data in your contacts, companies, and deals? karmaCRM now has printable templates so you can generate standardized PDFs at the touch of a button. Learn more about this feature, which is available on the per user pro plan.

Personalized side widgets

Make karmaCRM your own! Now you can individually customize your side widgets — change the order, hide widgets you don’t use, bring the most important ones to the top. It’s like having a sales software built just for you.

New deal funnel report

Dig into your deal funnels to see how effectively you’re moving prospects from one stage to the next. This report will help you optimize your sales stages and see how your team is performing.

New referral program

Finally, this month we launched a referral program, where you can get 20% recurring commissions on referrals. Learn more and sign up here.

Krista Garver
I am a passionate inbound and content marketer. My goal is to create content that educates, engages, and helps people do their jobs better. In my offline life, you can almost always find me attending live theatre.
CRM Software

Our Top 5 CRM Articles of 2016

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Well, it’s finally here! That scary-exciting time of the year when we look back at where we’ve been to see what we can learn from it…and forward to where we’re going with anticipation of what’s to come.

This year has been big for karmaCRM. We’ve launched several new features based on customer feedback (see examples here, here, and here), made a commitment to living up to our name, and started adopting mindfulness practices in our day-to-day operations (learn how you can do this too).

We’ve also launched a new content initiative focusing on sales strategies, customer engagement, and, of course, CRM. Here are the 5 most-read CRM articles we published this year.

The One Thing Everyone Gets Wrong about CRM

Over 60% of CRM implementations fail. As a CRM company, that’s not a fact we particularly like. But it’s true. And the most common reason is that businesses fail to define a CRM strategy. They simply expect the software to solve all of their problems.

Things just don’t work that way. Like any other technology initiative, CRM requires planning, processes, and optimization to succeed. In this article, karmaCRM founder John Paul Narowski describes a six-step process to make sure your company is one of the success stories.

Read more.

New to CRM? Here’s What You Need to Know

If you’re like many of our customers, you’re making your first foray into the world of CRM. Depending on how your business operates, that could mean a pretty big adjustment. If you don’t have a clear grasp of exactly what CRM is and what it brings to the table, the whole prospect can be a little intimidating. This article aims to clear up any confusion and provide you with the knowledge you need to start your CRM journey with confidence.

Read more.

Why “Ease of Use” is the Most Important Feature of CRM Software

You have many choices when it comes to CRM software, from systems that are so simple you can master them in under an hour to those with so many features you need to take a certification course to understand them all. But, do you really need all those bells and whistles? According to 70% of senior executives, the answer is no — they would happily trade functionality for a system that was easier to use. This article explores what ease of use means in the CRM context and why it’s so important.

Read more.

The #1 Reason CRM Implementations Fail

Earlier, we noted that most CRM implementations fail due to a lack of strategy. But it goes deeper than that. One of the major consequences of not having a strategy is that you’re unlikely to pick the right tool to meet your unique needs. This article looks at a few factors that make a particular CRM a poor fit for your organization.

Read more.

Must-Have CRM Features for Small Businesses

Finally, as a companion to the previous articles on this list, this post identifies the CRM features that are most important for small businesses. From predefined email templates to the ability to customize your data and dashboard, these functionalities will help you better engage with prospects and customers — which is exactly what your CRM is supposed to do.

Read more.

If you like this content, and would like more of it, sign up for our newsletter. We’ll send you a monthly round-up of the best CRM, sales, and business content from our blog and from other sites we love around the web. Thank you for reading in 2016. We look forward to continuing the conversation next year!

Krista Garver
I am a passionate inbound and content marketer. My goal is to create content that educates, engages, and helps people do their jobs better. In my offline life, you can almost always find me attending live theatre.
karmaCRM News and Updates

Track, Filter, Save – The Latest karmaCRM Features and Updates

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The end of the year is upon us! Here are the updated features that will help you meet your quotas for 2016 and plan for 2017.

Email reply tracking

Your #1 requested feature has been implemented! You can now track all of your emails and send automatic reply reminders if you don’t hear back within your specified time range. To learn more about this powerful feature, read the full blog post.   

Engagement tracking

November marks a major milestone in our history.

As you know, our primary goal here at karmaCRM is to help you nurture personal relationships at scale. This month, we took a big step in that direction with our new engagement tracking feature! With engagement tracking, you can find and sort your contacts based on the number of interactions you’ve had or the dates of those interactions.

This was the #2 requested feature in our most recent relationship survey. Read all about it.

Easy history filtering

Now every record with history can be filtered by the specific history type, so you can see only emails, or only phone calls. This is a huge time saver when you’re looking for that specific note, or a phone call you had recently.

Better column sort saving

If you’ve sorted a column in any of your CRM lists, you’ve probably noticed this sorting didn’t stick. Well now it does! So, you can keep the order you want as you work through your list.

Start 2017 firing on all cylinders — sign up for a free trial of karmaCRM today.

Krista Garver
I am a passionate inbound and content marketer. My goal is to create content that educates, engages, and helps people do their jobs better. In my offline life, you can almost always find me attending live theatre.
Featured Customers

Featured Customer: HSI Trust

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Bruce Boguslav knows that unexpected financial disasters can upend a life. Though he was a successful businessman, Boguslav almost lost his home during the mortgage crisis. Believing no one should have to endure what he and his family did during that time, Boguslav started HSI Trust, a consumer advocacy nonprofit dedicated to helping people save their homes and recover from debt.

Boguslav needed a reliable, flexible tool to manage his clients. HSI Trust went through a strenuous, detailed vetting process, trying out more than 20 different systems before settling on karmaCRM. “We were impressed with karmaCRM immediately,” said Boguslav. “It met and exceeded all expectations we had for a customer management software.”

With karmaCRM, Boguslav found a tool that operates just how his business works. The dashboard accommodated their workflow precisely, from the very start. “It just flows. It’s very easy to understand. karmaCRM was functional almost immediately — it took us very little time to set up.”

“karmaCRM is hands down the best software package I’ve ever seen.”

Boguslav also prizes the cloud-based functionality, which HSI Trust has implemented without a hitch. “With karmaCRM’s seamless mobile interface and cloud functions, you can work from anywhere, without any hiccups, which is phenomenal.”

When questions do come up, Boguslav found that karmaCRM’s customer service went above and beyond. “It’s really unusual to see a support team as responsive as karmaCRM’s. They reply instantaneously to emails, and they make a real effort to make sure things work just as you want them to. We were thrilled by their engagement.”

In previous work, Boguslav has worked as a technology consultant. “I’ve looked at a lot of tech tools for clients and analyzed what worked and what didn’t for their needs. karmaCRM is hands down the best software package I’ve ever seen.”

Do you think karmaCRM is awesome? Share your success story with us!

About HSI Trust

HSI Trust is a nationally-recognized nonprofit consumer advocacy organization. It is comprised of experienced financial, business, and real estate professionals who are skilled at navigating the often choppy waters of mortgages, foreclosures, student loan debt, and other financial difficulties.

Krista Garver
I am a passionate inbound and content marketer. My goal is to create content that educates, engages, and helps people do their jobs better. In my offline life, you can almost always find me attending live theatre.
karmaCRM News and Updates

New Features and Updates: Site-Wide Search, Phone Number Formatting, Custom Labels, and More

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Once again, we’ve been hard at work making improvements to karmaCRM, largely based on customer feedback. Here’s what you can now do with karmaCRM.

Search everything

Improving the site-wide search function was the #1 most requested item on our recent customer survey. This one’s so big that we wrote a whole blog post about it.

But if all you want are the CliffsNotes, here you go: the search function now works exactly like you need it to.

Save typing time with address autocomplete

Tired of typing in addresses? Now you don’t have to. For users on the per-user plan, autocomplete will now help you out for U.S. addresses.

Our customers created 34,000 addresses last month, which probably took about a minute each. That means this simple feature could save almost 567 hours of data entry every month.

View company info in the contact record

This is part of our push to bring all your data into one place. Now you can see more information about the company record within the contact.

Automatically format phone numbers

The software will now automatically applying formatting to U.S. phone numbers. This doesn’t change the underlying data, but will make numbers a bit more readable.

We currently support the following formats:

  • 5551212  formatted is 555-1212
  • 7345551212 formatted is (734) 555-1212
  • 5551212 x111 formatted is 555-1212 x111
  • 7345551212 x111 formatted is (734) 555-1212 x111
  • 734.555.1212 formatted is (734) 555-1212
  • 734 555 1212 formatted is (734) 555-1212

Add custom labels for addresses, emails, numbers, and websites

In addition to the default “work,” “home,” and “other” label options, you can now customize your own labels. Maybe you have a “shipping address” or an “office phone”? Just type it in, and you’re all set!

Sort emails, phone numbers and addresses

You can now drag and drop emails, phone numbers, and addresses in the form view, so you have your primary info at the top. Look for the little gray drag handle.

Filter your deal list by a contact or company

Using simple filters, you can now narrow down your deal list by a contact or a company. You can also view probability percentages to understand where your deals are in the funnel.

That’s all for now, but stay tuned! We’ll announce another round of features and updates next month.

If you’re ready to try the simplest CRM available, sign up for a free trial today.

Krista Garver
I am a passionate inbound and content marketer. My goal is to create content that educates, engages, and helps people do their jobs better. In my offline life, you can almost always find me attending live theatre.
Featured Customers

Featured Customer: PlanOmatic

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In 2005, PlanOmatic began as a scrappy start-up focused on real estate plans and continued to grow through one of the biggest real estate crashes in U.S. history. Today, the company serves more than 20,000 zip codes in 30 states.

Aaron Rose, Co-Founder & Vice President of Corporate Accounts for PlanOmatic, knew just what his company needed to grow. He was in the market for a lightweight sales tracking system that would help his team manage daily tasks, outbound emails, and other everyday sales processes. He knew from the outset that an enterprise-sized CRM would be overkill.

With karmaCRM, Rose found the streamlined system he was looking for. With its reasonable price point, essential features, and user-friendly interface, “karmaCRM was a perfect fit.”

Rose was also impressed with how customizable the system was. “Everyone on the PlanOmatic sales team uses karmaCRM slightly differently. It helps us all mix and match features so they make the most sense with the way we each work.”

“karmaCRM is our sales guidebook for the week.”

Daily reports from karmaCRM guide PlanOmatic’s sales plans. They keep everyone on track, show what tasks need to be completed on a given day, and provide a snapshot of team and individual progress. “My team absolutely loves it. They can see the progress they’re making every single day. The dashboard has become indispensable.”

One member of the PlanOmatic sales team set up over 350 presentations in one year. Rose credits karmaCRM with helping him succeed. “Without karamCRM, he’d be clueless about how to manage his day. He lives, eats, and breathes karmaCRM every day. ”

Are you one with karmaCRM, too? Share your success story with us!

About PlanOmatic

PlanOmatic was established in 2005 after its founders had been working extensively with floor plan creation software. Their full-service platform sprouted from a mission to provide high-quality marketing products created with cutting-edge technology and supported by exceptional customer service. Agents across the nation rely on PlanOmatic to help brand themselves professionally and exceed their marketing goals.

Krista Garver
I am a passionate inbound and content marketer. My goal is to create content that educates, engages, and helps people do their jobs better. In my offline life, you can almost always find me attending live theatre.
karmaCRM News and Updates

New Features and Updates: Scheduled Emails, URL Support for Custom Fields, and More

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You asked, we listened! And we’ll keep on listening…

A few months ago, we sent a survey to all of our customers asking what they thought about karmaCRM and what we could do to make it better. We received a treasure trove of information, and, over the past several weeks, we’ve been hard at work putting that feedback into action.

We’re very excited to share the first round of new functionalities with you today.

Without further ado, here’s they are!

Print the calendar as a calendar

One of the bigger feature requests we is the ability to print out the calendar in calendar format.  Now you can do just that!

Schedule emails to send later

Drafting that perfect email at 3 am, but don’t want your prospects to know you’re neurotic? You can now use the “Send Later” feature to schedule your emails to go out at a more reasonable time.

This feature is available to customers on the per-user plan. (If you’re not on this plan, contact us so we can set you up with a demo.)

Have a clickable URL as a custom field

You can now insert a properly formatted URL within a custom text field, and it will automatically become clickable.

Export more task info to your CSV

When you create a task export or backup, you’ll now see completed_at and completion_notes included in the exported CSV.

Access MailChimp and email templates, even if you’re not an admin

In the past, only the admin who added the MailChimp integration could use it. Now, all users on an account will be able to see MailChimp information.

Similarly, all users can access and create email templates. If you’re a user, you’ll just see your own, but if you’re an admin, you’ll see all.

Wish your customers “Happy Birthday”

OK, so this one isn’t from the survey, but everyone likes to feel special on their birthday. Simply add the “Birthday” field to your contact form, and the system will even auto-calculate your contact’s age.

(This is just the “birthday” beginning. We have secret future plans to help make you the hero on your contacts’ birthdays. Stay tuned!)

_______________________________

Thanks to all of our customers who requested these improvements. We hope they will benefit all karmaCRM users.

We’re continuing to develop our software based on user feedback. Be sure to check back in a month for the next installment.

Not a karmaCRM user yet? Give it a test drive for free.

Krista Garver
I am a passionate inbound and content marketer. My goal is to create content that educates, engages, and helps people do their jobs better. In my offline life, you can almost always find me attending live theatre.