Friends who are ninjas A lot of ResponsiBidders ask us about how to get more traffic to their website. I am not what I would consider an expert on SEO or even website development, but I know enough to be dangerous and I have a lot of friends. One of those friends is Lars Kristensen who I […]
Fall Update
How it works:This update is a significant improvement to ResponsiBid’s “bid-in-person” flexibility. Essentially you can now modify any bid (Commercial or Residential) to allow for any factors that need to be bid in person. You can directly make commercial changes in the call screen or within the customer profile. Also the dashboard now has really meaningful graphs that you can customize to your own preferences to help you see at a glance how things are going.
Here is a formal list of everything included in this update:
1. Commercial overrides after a bid is complete (deluxe & premium users)
2. Commercial overrides from the call screen (deluxe & premium users)
3. Bid in person factor overrides (deluxe & premium users)
4. Improved adjustment area for individual bids— Fixed price overrides. (deluxe & premium users)
5. Smoothed user interface (all users)
6. Faster bid computation (New math engine) (all users)
7. Remove area minimums, house size minimums, and trip charges easily (deluxe & premium users)
8. Improved dashboard (deluxe & premium users):
-Annual graph to show bids/closed bids
– Lead chart to show most leads
– National average comparison for close rate and top 10 performing lead sources
– National average comparison for avg ticket price and top 10 performing lead sources
– Service comparison chart to view how they are performing
9. Mobile friendly dashboard and customer profile (all users)
10. Open certain fine print areas by default (all users)
11. Various stability improvements and functionality refinements (all users)
As you can imagine, we are really excited to roll this out to all users as our Fall release and you can find all of these awesome options in your account right now!Happy ResponsiBidding!
Quick Demo Videos
Learn how to use the new commercial override feature, both within the customer profile and the call screen. This will allow you total control over commercial bids so that you can put your best foot forward when preparing proposals for different commercial applications. Also, see how you can showcase the fine print or keep it out of the way as needed by default.
See how you can now override different elements of a bid that trigger a “Bid in person” response, and how you can fine tune any bid in a really slick and nice way using the package “adjustments” feature… now including a “fixed price” override. See how you can now take off the area or house size minimums, or even the trip charges as necessary.
See the new dashboard features and why you’ll love knowing more about your business than you ever knew before… right at a glance. Understand how your performance has been over the course of the year, and then stack your lead sources up against each other. Who is bringing in the most leads? Who is bringing in the easiest to close leads? Who is bringing in the most valuable leads? Which services are making you the most money? All of these things are now viewable at a glance right on your dashboard!
Canadian Email Marketing Compliance
Going in to law on July 1st 2014 for our Canadian friends is a new rule, that is simply put: “You must have explicit (not implied) permission from the recipient in order to send email marketing to anyone in Canada.”
Unlike the CAN-SPAM act that allows for an “opt-out” option for customers, this new law mandates an “opt-in” system to ensure that you are marketing to people who express they want it… So we will be enabling a new feature on July 1st that you can disable if you’d like, but would highly recommend using. Here’s a video of how it works:
Pricing on your website
Why should I share my pricing on my website? What if my competitors snoop on my website and see what I’m charging?
We’ve gotten that question quite a few times over the last several years, so I wanted to take a few minutes and share some thoughts on that topic.
1. No one can get a quote without giving you their information. Your competitors won’t be able to see your prices, unless they are willing to fill in the form and give you their name, address, phone number and email.
2. If someone gives dummy information, you can “blacklist them.” If you think someone is just messing with you, ResponsiBid has the capability to block that person or IP address from getting anymore quotes.
3. The proposals ResponsiBid generates don’t focus primarily on cost. They sell value. The proposals are really compelling (and totally customizable) so the bid that’s presented is value based (just like you’d give in person), and not cost-centric. So if you have a prospect who is looking to compare prices, the ResponsiBid proposal sells your value, keeping them from comparing you to your competition.
4. The proposals use the same techniques used by some of the worlds foremost authorities on selling. For example, they use: good, better, best pricing— price anchoring— and unique selling propositions to maximize your ability to close more sales and at higher prices. Basically, when you give the customer 3 options, there’s a higher chance they pick one of your options. Win, win, win.
5. Automated follow-up keeps you from becoming a commodity. The automated follow-up emails to your customers ensure that even if you get too busy to call everyone back, you are still looking like a superhero by never forgetting to send an email that you said you would. This keeps your value high, and keeps you from being price shopped as much.
Are you ready to stop being a commodity, and start selling your real value to your customers? Have you ever had a competitor call you and try to get pricing information from you? Once you start to see yourself as offering unique value to your customers, you’ll find that more and more, it doesn’t really matter what “the other guy” charges. Doesn’t that sound awesome?
May 2014 Update
I’m going to say it: This is the most important update to ResponsiBid to date.
We have been working long and hard to build the most flexible bidding interface possible for the administrator side of ResponsiBid. We finally did it!
How the “Call Screen” works: You can do anything you want when taking an incoming call… all from one screen: 1. Finding a past customer (you will now be able to import all of your customers) and autopoulating a quote. 2. Giving anonymous bids without all of the required fields. 3. Collect all of the info ahead of time for a “visit for bid” person (and follow up specially with them) 4. And of course give a traditional quote (even if it includes or is limited to custom items) right out of the gate.
I made you this video so that you could see how it works.
A few other things to note:
1. Proposals now include the property address.
2. You can now directly access customers into the call screen using an icon on the dashboard.
3. You can now access the customer profile, customer proposal link, and the edit labels screen directly from the internal proposal.
4. New contacts area allows imported customers to exist without existing bids, plus a comprehensive search feature.
5. New followup status for “Visit for Bid” customers.
6. New tabs on the dashboard to view anonymous bids and visit for bids.
7. All pages of bids now available on the dashboard.
8. Allow window cleaning quotes to flag “bid in person” if any storm windows are entered.
9. Notification email refinements.
10. Collect company name for commercial bids.
11. Mass update/delete contacts.
Various bug fixes and improvements.
Keep in mind that this new feature is available only in premium and deluxe accounts.
I can’t wait to hear how this helps your business grow! Happy ResponsiBidding!
Brand New Rules for Email Addresses in Automated Sending
Warning/Update: If you are breaking this new rule, your emails to your customers are landing in their spam folders (or not being delivered at all), due to the adoption of a new technical specification by some email operators like Yahoo! that is going into place immediately. This effects anyone using an email service (ResponsiBid, Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, etc.)
The brand new problem: If you are using an email for your automated emailing that is from your Internet Service Provider (i.e. an email that ends in cox.net, cable one.com, att.com, comcast.net, verizon.net, etc…) OR a free email service (i.e. yahoo.com, gmail.com, hotmail.com, outlook.com, etc…) your automated emails will start going directly to spam folders or in some cases not delivered at all. For example, if your emails through ResponsiBid or Mail Chimp are sent from “5starwindowcare@yahoo.com” they WILL not end up being delivered.
The solution: Always send your automated emails from a domain that you own. (For example “curt@mycompany.com” rather than “mycompany@gmail.com”) If you own a domain, make sure to setup your email accounts and start using them. Not only is that an email best practice, but now you will actively be punished if you don’t in your e-blasts or automated email followups.
This is going into effect starting now, so PLEASE… for the love of milkshakes… make sure to make these changes as soon as you can.
Read more about this issue and trend
Click here if you want the super technical stuff
April 2014 Update
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could taylor any of the automated emails you want to match your customer’s situations? Now you can.
How it works: Simply click on any step of a running followup sequence or any sent email in your followup history… Then the magic begins!
I made you this video so that you could see how it works.
Keep in mind that this new feature is available only in premium accounts.
I can’t wait to hear how this helps your business grow! Happy ResponsiBidding!
March 2014 Update
Our users have been begging to get the sleekness and automation of ResponsiBid into other services, and this month premium ResponsiBid accounts can add in a bid to their proposals for whatever they want.
How it works: Essentially you can now modify any bid by adding in an existing module or you can select the new “custom item” module. This will allow you to add things to the proposal that ResponsiBid can’t give automated bids for. Think of it… you could add maid services, garbage can cleaning, or any other items you’d like to a proposal, including any upsell you’d like.
I made you this video so that you could see how adding items to a proposal can now be done.
This video shows you how to add multiple users to your account.
Keep in mind that these new features are available only in premium accounts.
Here is a formal list of everything included in this update:
1. The new add service button found in the bids on file section of a customer profile (premium users)
2. The new custom service module found when adding a service to a proposal (premium users)
3. Increased time zone robustness (all users)
4. Increased “call out” on proposals to ask prospects to select the package they’d like. (all users– editable by deluxe and premium users)
5. Added the left and center alignment options in the email editor within the followup builder (premium users)
6. You can now add multiple users and sub users (premium users)
7. Various new permissions added for sub users (premium users)
8. Various user interface improvements in the lightbox (premium users)
9. Various stability improvements and functionality refinements (all users)
As you can imagine, we are really excited to roll this out to all users as our March release (we were so excited we couldn’t wait for March to come) and you can find all of these releases in your account right now!Happy ResponsiBidding!
January 2014 Update
Today we released a few new things in your account and our beta testers have been loving it!
*IMPORTANT– current premium users require immediate attention, see next paragraph*
We made a change to the email editor that cleaned up the way the followup builder was building the emails… HOWEVER, that inadvertently stripped a bunch of formatting out of your current emails (now found in the “open status” email tab). Please take a moment and freshen up your followup builder “open” emails by putting in the breaks (hitting return) where some of them probably disappeared. Some of you might even have all of your paragraphs look like one big mass of text. We’re so sorry for this, but I promise it will make your emails look so much better in the long run and in all email viewers!
Changelog:
1. Followup builder for every status plus 3 custom*: (Premium users) You must customize and turn on the new emails for this to work, but now you can have a custom followup with every potential customer or past customer to either confirm jobs, ask for a recurring job, or salvage a relationship. You can now create a custom status and whenever a customer is moved into that status you can followup with them however you like.
2. The sidebar search feature: (All users) Now you can search for bids really quick right from your sidebar.
3. Better user interface for followup builder and cleaner email builder*: (Premium users) If you are already using the old followup builder, you will need to ensure that the open status emails, which are your old customized emails still look right… you may need to do some formatting. Also, you can now enable whichever followup emails you would like to followup in all situations.
4. Stop/resume followups: (Premium users) Now when you are in a customer’s profile you can stop a followup and either “re-start” it by changing their status in the regular place, or you can “resume” it by clicking a button where the “stop” one used to be!
5. Ability to send from up to 6 emails*: (Premium users) Now you can add up to 6 emails to get in on the followup process within the followup builder.
6. Ability to bcc yourself on followup emails* (Premium users) Now you can select any of up to 6 email addresses to blind carbon copy every time a particular email is sent out.
7. Ability to manually opt in/out customers for emails (All users) When you go into a customer profile, you can click on their email address and see if there is a green (opted-in) or a red (opted-out) envelope. By clicking on the envelope and saving, you can reverse the email status of that email.
8. Carpet cleaning & upholstery module* (All users) If you offer carpet cleaning as a service, go into your company profile and turn this service on. You will love how deeply we went in making the most flexible and straight-forward module we’ve ever made!
9. Tile cleaning module* (All users) Like the carpet cleaning module, you will be amazed at how this works.
10. Clock in sidebar (All users)
11. Tons of new toggle switches for better user experience (All users) notice how much easier it is where we’ve removed almost all checkboxes or radio buttons… it will be much easier to navigate for you and your customers!
12. Ability to set your own time zone* (All users) Go into your administration page and enjoy the ability you now have to set your time zone, and also the increments of the time picker (for when you are scheduling appointments).
13. Ability to add a scheduled time window to scheduled jobs* (All users) now you can tell ResponsiBid the date AND arrival window of a scheduled job… very handy for premium customers who want the followup emails to let the customer know when to expect the crew!
14. Tons of speed improvements (all users) You are going to love how we were able to speed ResponsiBid up even though we added all of these features.
15. +/- buttons on smartform and lightbox only show on mobile devices and are more elegant (All users) We now made it so that the + & – buttons are out of your way when you are on a desktop, but super handy on mobile devices!
16. Included storm windows in the “zero” check for window quotes (All users) Now you can do storm window only jobs if you want.
17. Better color coding and separation in the customer profile (All users)
18. Adjustment stability improvements (Deluxe & Premium users)
19. Ability to have a printer friendly version of customer profiles (All users) If you want to print out a customer profile it will now fit much better on the page and not destroy your ink cartridges.
20. Replying to the notification email will go to the prospect now (if there is an email provided)– (All users) Go ahead… hit reply now!
21. Reporting and booked jobs now reflect any adjustments made after a booking (All users)
22. Commercial bids can now be converted to residential bids (Deluxe & Premium users)
These changes have added a lot of functionality to you application, some of which you wold have to turn on if you want to use it. Anything marked with an (*) requires your attention to either turn it on, or evaluate how you’d like to use it.
December 2013 Update
Today marks a major release of updates to ResponsiBid users. We have been really busy in the ResponsiBid laboratories! Here is a list of the main changes:
1. The “Smart Form” is now totally responsive for mobile websites. As long as your website is mobile friendly, so is ResponsiBid. (No changes required by users, All users)
2. The Admin area is now totally mobile friendly for tablets. It can be used on a phone too, but it will look like the tablet version. (No changes required by users, All users)
3. You can now track the original page where a bid came from just by looking in the customer’s profile. (No changes required by users, All users)
4. Really slick and simplified way of adjusting prices for jobs without modifying the customer’s specs (No changes required by users, Deluxe & Premium users)
5. Home page graph to see how your company is comparing to the window cleaning national averages. (No changes required by users, All users)
6. No “Save” buttoning the smart customer profile. Everything now auto-saves in the general information area including the notes! (No changes required by users, All users)
7. You can now click the phone or email icons in the customer profile to call or email a prospect (phone works on mobile phones only) (No changes required by users, All users)
8. New “gutter guard pricing” now can be enabled in your gutter cleaning pricing (option is available in rough and exact pricing ares, All users)
9. New “solar panel cleaning module”! Price by the number of panels, Kilowatts or both! (Option to turn on in the company profile– then pricing area, All users)
10. New “blind cleaning module”! You can now offer different kinds of pricing for different kinds of blinds. (Optional changes can be made in the pricing area, All users)
11. Internet Explorer warnings to help potential customers with archaic browsers to understand how to get the best results. (Optional changes can be made in the admin area, All users)
12. Easier search method in the bid archives and reporting areas. (No changes required by users, Deluxe & Premium users)
13. New label editing method for the form and lightbox… way smoother. (Click “Edit Labels” in the test area of the smart form, Deluxe & Premium users)
14. You can now collect the customer’s general information AT THE END of the smart form & lightbox (Optional change in the form builder, general information area, Premium users)
15. New opt-out page is prettier, and incorporates the company logo. (No changes required by users, All users)
16. Proper mobile keypads/keyboards automatically come up in the proper fields. (No changes required by users, All users)
17. Now set any rough window cleaning bid to be a “bid in person” based on house size. (Optional change in rough window cleaning pricing area, All users)