David Paull (left) is President/Founder of Dialsmith, the developer of the Perception Analyzer®. That’s the dial tool that’s used for advertising and TV program testing as well as audience feedback in meetings and events. It’s also the system used on-air by CNN during the 2008 presidential debates and 2010 State of the Union Speech to create the focus group line graphs at the bottom of the screen. David and his partners also co-develop ISX – Instant Scoring eXperience™, for scoring of sporting and reality events. Below he explains how his team uses Highrise and Basecamp.
In December 2009 I acquired the business unit I’ve been running for 9 years and spun it off into my own company. I previously ran it for a large company that had us on all their systems. For CRM we used to use GoldMine, then Microsoft Dynamics. For project management we used an in-house, home-grown tool.
When I stared the new company I knew we’d be much smaller than my previous parent company and I also wanted to be much lighter and more nimble. Not only didn’t I like the pricing structures of the other available tools, but they were all too big and seemingly inflexible for my needs. I’ve been a fan of 37signals for years (your books, blogs, etc.), but never had the pleasure of actually using any of your tools. I decided to give them a shot as they seemed to fit what I was looking for.
We’re now seven months into the new company and the entire team and I are thrilled with how Basecamp and Highrise are meeting our needs. For us, they are the perfect blend of features, simplicity, and price. Anyone on the team can access them from anywhere, they are easy to use, they do everything we need them to do, and the $100/month for the two combined doesn’t break the bank. In short, we are loving these tools. They also made the migration of records from our other tools as simple as possible (still a pain, but more so due to the export from the other tools, not the import into these tools).
Here’s some additional info on how we use Basecamp and Highrise.
Highrise
Dialsmith uses Highrise as our CRM system to track all of our client contacts.
As for features, we make most use of the Deals feature to track all open proposals and opportunities. Each week we’re able to sit down as a team and easily review and update all open deals and make sure none have been missed.
We also use the Dropbox feature to be sure all client correspondence is linked with the deal so there is never miscommunication.
We use the Background section within each contact to record the software version they are currently running and to track the inventory of equipment they own.
We regularly export our contacts as a .csv file to manage our mailing lists in Excel and through our email newsletter provider.
Basecamp
Dialsmith uses Basecamp for three main purposes – to track all open projects with clients, as our timekeeping system, and to manage the product development cycles of our various products.
Project tracking and timekeeping: We use Basecamp to assign a unique project number to each sale or consulting project we work on. We use the Messages feature to add important notes about the project. We use the To-Dos feature to add tasks that time can be directly assigned to and we use the Time feature for time tracking that’s not assigned to a particular project.
Our product team uses Basecamp to manage our product development schedule. Here are the words of Eric Alzuhn, Director, Projects and Marketing:
Part of my responsibility is managing the development and marketing deliverables for our new software release. With hundreds of deliverables and multiple team members to manage, I need a tool that’s as simple, intuitive and efficient for me to use as it was for everyone on the team. Basecamp has everything that we required. Every morning, Basecamp provides the team with an automated email progress report outlining what has been accomplished and what’s next on the list to tackle. This in itself saves me countless hours of time! The web interface allows me to view the status of deliverables in multiple formats, giving me greater ability to anticipate bottlenecks and proactively realign priorities and responsibilities to keep all aspects of the release moving forward. And since I travel frequently, being able to do it all online and not having to run software with a large overhead load is important to me. Basecamp keeps us all on track, on schedule and connected.
