JoomConnect Blog

We ran into a little problem. As it turns out, so many MSPs are taking advantage of our marketing solutions we often get sales requests by our clients' competition. I suppose this isn't a bad problem to have!

We are implementing a solution right now to combat this and prevent locally competing MSPs from marketing with the same content. We call it GEO Protection.

In the computer business, the days are hectic, it's easy to miss an email or not check your voicemail for too long, or even forget to enter your time for the day. To prevent this we created what we call "Tech Dailies".

With ConnectWise you can setup service templates that can kick off tickets on a regular basis. So what we did is create a service template for each staff member with a set of tasks to complete every day. It's pretty simple to setup and really enforces following up and not letting tasks fall through the cracks.

We are adding a feature to manage the code and URLS needed to track opens and clicks with the ConnectWise Marketing API for the email blasts that get sent through the ConnectWise marketing manager.

In a nutshell, JoomConnect's Quick Campaign will create all the code and URLS you need for your email blasts and gives you a centralized place to manage them in JoomConnect with no coding required. Lot's more on the full feature set later.

HOWEVER, today we are making a FREE Lite version of the tool available to all ConnectWise Partners, even if you don't run JoomConnect.

The way it works is; You fill out the form on our website and it will give you the files to download, then you just upload the files to your website. It will also auto generate the URLS you need for the email campaign and you can just copy and paste them.

Login or Register, watch the video and give it a try! Click Here

I'm really starting to get excited (yes even more excited) about JoomConnect 1.1. Over the next few weeks while in beta we are going to leak some of the new features. Hopefully you will be as excited as we are. Keep reading to learn how we are sharing how to do this for free.

You can use ConnectWise to run your entire referral campaign, “Quick Referral” for JoomConnect 1.1 is coming soon - MSP Website Marketing Infrastructure at its finest!

• Automate the collection of referrals from your clients.
• Referrals are injected directly into ConnectWise as a Prospect.
• ConnectWise Tracks & Marketing Groups can be applied to both referral and referee.
• Tickets automatically generated for both referral and referee.
• Track the referral process entirely with your ConnectWise Service Boards from start to finish!
• Your Clients can see the status of their referral right from their CW Client Portal.
• We can setup the entire process from referral to payment in your ConnectWise Service Boards or you can do it yourself.
• Quick Referral "Directives" from Directive. Everything you need to setup your campaign including emails, tracks and ticket status messages.

Put your ConnectWise Service boards to even more good use. Quick referral can be used for other applications such as:

• Dealer Lead Registration (with territories) (*Thanks to Phoenix Ortho)
• Job Applications (tracked on your service boards)
• Membership Applications (*Thanks to HTG Peer Groups)

If you don't have JoomConnect but still want to run your referral program in ConnectWise then you're in luck because we are sharing the entire process with our fellow ConnectWise partners for free!

Register on our site and sign up to our newsletter to know when Quick Referral and the free materials are launched.

We grew a lot in 2009.  This is a great thing but it has also exposed a lot about our company that we want to improve on. It's pretty obvious what we need to work on to support the growth we expect in 2010 and beyond.

While this isn't a complete list, here are 10 of the things we are going to focus and improve on this year. They are in no particular order:

1. Shift and define company roles and accountability.
2. Resolve the quoting and proposal bottle neck.
3. Improve project management.  Better communication with clients and ON-TIME completion of projects.
4. Utilize ConnectWise more effectively all across the board.  This includes Marketing, Sales, Time Sheets, Billing, Help Desk and Dispatch.
5. Formalize our internal training processes.  We plan on conducting more personalized training with staff and internal mentoring.
6. Launch our new website.  Implement our own marketing campaigns. Dive deeper into our vertical market with JoomConnect.
7. Spend more time listening and visiting with clients, get feedback, and continue to improve relationships with current clients.
8. Commit to and join a Peer Group.
9. Improve Cash Flow and Accounting Processes.
10. Lead by example and more execution.

Directive has had the pleasure of working with David Mann for over 10 years. David owns Alta Log Homes in Upstate NY. Alta is a leading manufacturer of Log Homes. David is an expert in building Green, Energy Star dream homes and a great guy. His website is http://www.altaloghomes.com We set him up with the Ultimate Social Media Rig a few months ago along with some coaching services to get him started. He's been pretty religious about posting and using it.
He sent me an email asking what recommendations I'd have to get more out of it now that he's "warmed up" and has a little more experience with Social Media. These 14 tips were plucked from my response:

Just wanted to give you guys a sneak peak at something coming in 1.02 shortly (less than two weeks).

You can now assign marketing groups and tracks to prospects when they register on your website!!

Recently, I was asked to speak at a breakout session called Jumpstart Social Media for your IT Business with Erick Simpson (Managed Service Provider University) and Mary McElwee (ConnectWise) at the 2009 ConnectWise Partner Summit. What a great event, we learned so much for our MSP practice, we are still implementing!

Some of the power point slides from the breakout show our ConnectWise Project Plan for rolling out our "Ultimate Social Media Rig". We promised to get the project plan posted on the site. Rather than post just screen shots, we made it easier for you to get started and typed it up too, copy/paste ftw.

It's been two weeks since we launched JoomConnect. We agreed internally to always blog about the good AND the bad. So...

I've been very pleased with the sales and responses we have gotten, even though our website launch sucked!  Getting to talk with so many partners and learning about their businesses has been amazing and overwhelming. Loving it!

Why did I say it sucked? Things we've learned:

This is officially my first blog post, I mean ever. Directive currently manages about 25 Social Media Accounts for clients on a weekly proactive basis. So we've helped a bunch of clients write blogs and we've integrated them to their Social Media circles and refrigerators, but I never wrote one for my own company. If you consider Facebook and Twitter and social media in general mini blogging, as I do, then I guess I've mini blogged.

Being the first post I feel a little pressure. I feel like I must say something amazing. Since I'm not personally much of a writer, I figured it's best to talk about something amazing. So I'm going to share what has gone on today as I think it's pretty exciting. I don't mean that JoomConnect finally launched after a year of development either. Instead I'm talking about what's to come.

We cannot believe today is the day; the launch of JoomConnect.  The Directive JoomConnect Team has been burning the midnight oil to ensure a smooth launch of our website. It's going to launch with some content we really wanted to get done like some videos and a few other things, but we'll get them up a within a couple days after the launch.

We'd like to extend our thanks to all of the partners who've encouraged us to launch JoomConnect, the beta testers who were willing to put in the time to check for bugs, and all of the coverage and publicity we've been offered over the past months.  It's almost unreal to think that a little integration we wanted to set up on our own site has exploded into such a huge project, and we hope that we don't disappoint.

We're not even close to done yet either.  Yes, today's the launch of 1.0, but we've got a whole lot of plans on the drawing boards that we'll be continuously developing.

Fellow ConnectWise Partners, we don't need to explain to you why we chose ConnectWise for our MSP practice.  The PSA has been powering our business for two and a half years, and giving it credit for a major amount of our success and tenacity would be an understatement.

Apart from our IT branch (and our software development branch), we've been working with the web for well over a decade, designing sites and integrating web solutions for our clients.  It was a little over two years ago that we stumbled upon Joomla, the award winning CMS.  We've experimented with many others, but the hugely supported open-source web application has become a way of life for our web team.  For CW Partners who are still using static HTML sites and want to switch to Joomla for JoomConnect, you're in for a treat that includes cost effective updates, user management, and literally thousands of plug-ins, modules, and components.

Thank you for all of your interest and support.  We hope JoomConnect can work for you.