This article was included in the January 17th, 2017 issue of the LACRM Newsletter.
2020 Update: LACRM now supports multiple subcalendars, and that's what we'd now recommend for managing multiple calendars!
Timelines keep businesses on schedule, and regardless of whether you have 5 or 500 clients, having a clear idea of when everything needs to be done keeps you organized. The obvious way to manage a timeline is with a calendar, but what if you have so many different schedules to manage that just one isn’t enough?
In her business, Cathy Cain-Blank, President of CC Marketing and Communications, deals with deadline-based projects. She has a number of things she needs to have on her calendar for each client: billing dates, deployment schedules, specific project events -- all of this just for a single client. To manage timelines for all her clients, she makes use of different users’ calendars to sort them out:
“It is absolutely critical for us to have an organized calendar. I have one user account for my own private tasks and events, one for production details that my production manager keeps track of, and another general calendar for everyone to use in case someone is out of the office. This contains billing notes, client events and such. Finally, we have two additional calendars to track planned mail dates, and scheduled jobs.
This lets us clearly see the different types of timelines on our calendars, and lets us know when a job is done and when we no longer need to worry about it.”
-Cathy Cain-Blank, President of CC Marketing and Communications
Tip to try: Cathy creates a user account for each of her calendars so that they are entirely separate and this method is most efficient when you are dealing with a lot of different schedules. But if you don’t have as many timelines to manage, or would rather not add additional users, another method that works would be to use prefixes in your event names.
By adding a prefix like ‘BILLING’ or ‘PROJECT ABC’ to the start of your event names, you can essentially ‘tag’ different types of events. This way, you can easily see which timeline each event corresponds to, and if you’re working in a team, this allows someone to continue following along on the calendar even if you are out of the office.
Furthermore, the CRM sends out an agenda email at the start of each day that includes all your tasks and events for the day. When you ‘tag’ your events with these prefixes, the agenda email will let you quickly see the number of client events, production notes, billing invoices etc. that need to be taken care of that day right from your inbox! Click here for a tutorial on how you can use prefixes to organize different types of events.
Staying on top of your deadlines makes sure that nothing falls through the cracks. It keeps you on track each day which in turn makes you a reliable business for your clients to turn to -- all of which will help you continue to build your customer base! If you have any questions at all, just contact us!
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