Now that Christmas is over, there are a lot of great deals to be had on items you didn’t find under the tree. I used to use regular search engines to search for products, but this past year I started using ShopWiki to find the lowest prices on products.

A few things on my 2011 Wish List:

Sunglasses – I hope to have these by the time the crazy-bright UK sun comes out around June. Now that we have a nice big garden to tend and play in, I’ll be spending a lot more time outside and my eyes will need to be protected. For me, the style is more important than the brand, so I use ShopWiki to narrow my search down (to sporty style, in case Santa is reading this).

Woman’s Watch – I’m kind of a sucker for watches anyway, but I’ve been looking for something a little more rugged than the watch I currently have. ShopWiki can narrow down my search right away so I don’t end up looking at products that don’t apply to me.

ShopWiki also has fabulous shopping guides written by real humans (!) on a variety of topics, so if you know your crazy Aunt Mildred loves her fashion accessories but you don’t quite know where to go from there, the guide gives you tons of ideas and links to cool products. And I can’t stress enough that, even though ShopWiki is a shopping search engine, they’ve spent a significant amount of time putting these guides together and making them relevant for consumers. I wish I could write for them (hire me, please!).

I’ve worked for many companies, from a large subsidiary of Viacom to a suburban mom-and-pop retail shop. The jobs were all sales oriented, to an extent, and relied on relationships with customers to keep the business afloat. Yet strangely, the one thing all of these businesses – the large and the small – had in common was that we never used a CRM.

Why the aversion? Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are great for organising sales information. For example, look at Flightdeck CRM. Their website spells out quite plainly exactly what you can do with a CRM; everything from lead sheets to contact management is fair game. Yet the businesses I’ve worked with have used a variety of other methods to accomplish these goals, from good ole pen and paper to massive Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that were just begging to be corrupted.

So what’s out there in the land of business management software systems? I like the Flightdeck CRM, and their website for that matter. The language on the site does require a certain degree of understanding of business management, but that’s par for the course – you’re talking about high-spec company software here. But what’s great is, although there’s some jargon, the site has a very matter-of-fact approach to their sales pitch. The menus are clearly laid out (and colourful!) in a “Tell me this” way (“Tell me why Flightdeck is different”, “Tell me how Flightdeck can help me”, etc). Plain English is a wonderful thing. Read the rest of this entry »