We had an outage at our hosting facility last night. Our cloud services and most of our website were back up within 2 hours. There are still some bits of our site that are affected. We are working to restore those asap.

We’re waiting to hear from the hosting provider as to what happened.

We apologize for the inconvenience!

Sales cycles can be many different lengths, but every business would like theirs to be shorter. More complicated projects usually take more time to figure out what needs doing before an estimated price can be arrived at. Or sometimes getting a quote for preset services or products is easy, but it takes a long time for the PO to go through their approval process. Whatever the factors are you should now have a much better idea what an average sales cycle is for your business.

So whatever that time frame is, if you can shorten it, you can close deals more often and increase the revenue side of your balance sheet. Here are a few simple things to consider so that it’s not you holding up the sales process.

Ending every interaction with clear next steps.

Whether it’s an initial bump into a stranger at a work conference, or an initial meeting over coffee, or a phone call with a long standing client, try to define what the next steps will be and who is responsible for doing them.

If during a meeting, a potential client mentions that they can send you an example of their existing system, or make some other sort of a promise to you, make sure you end your interaction with reviewing what everyone is planning on doing to keep this process going.

“Okay, I’ll make sure that I send you a link to that case study you were wanting to see, and you were going to check with your support team to see what version you’re currently running and forward that to me. Thanks again for your time, Jim – talk to you soon.”

Now it’s just a matter of recording those tasks down and making sure they’re not forgotten. Taking notes during meetings about all points of discussion, not just actionable items, is a good habit get into. Moleskine or FieldNotes notebooks work just fine for many people. But at a certain point, the increasing number of things need to manage can make transferring those notes and tasks into a software tool increasingly time consuming, and thus less likely that you’ll do it regularly.

If you are an iPhone user, obviously we think Daylite Touch is a great way to quickly capture those things you’ve promised people. But simple text based notepad that syncs, like Simplenote or Evernote, can work great too.

Consistent followups

So, you’ve become a compulsive capturer, and every promise you make gets diligently entered into your system. Now you just need to setup an easy way to remind yourself about when to do things that have due dates, or tasks that are holding up the sales process somehow.

Many task managers can assign due dates and this is definitely a good strategy for things that have specific date based deadlines that can’t be pushed back. If your client’s budget meetings are being held on Sept 17th, you definitely better have your proposal submitted by Sept 15th. But what about tasks that need doing within a certain timeframe but don’t exactly have a particular hard deadline attached to them?

One tactic for dealing with this is using the creation date of when a task is entered into your system. For example, you could sort your task list by creation date so that promises you’ve recently made are at the top. Or reverse the sort to see the tasks that have been there the longest. You should monitor this list regularly to make sure you haven’t let anything you’ve promised to do stay on here for longer than two weeks. If there are really old tasks there, for sales that have long gone cold, or abandoned ideas you had, either move those out to an “archive” list or just delete them entirely.

Or, use the date that you last communicated with your prospects as a guide for when to followup with them. Create a list of the people you’re actively selling to and check on each of them to see when you last sent or received an email. If it’s been longer than 10 days, or however frequently you tend to check in with prospects, go ahead and figure out a way to communicate with them again. Certainly, some clients are busier than others and need helpful prodding from time to time. There is a fine line, but with a bit of empathy and humor, most people don’t mind a followup or two, especially if they are interested, but just busy. Try to make your followups useful for them as well by including a link to an article you found, or a new support article they might find helpful.

Again, none of this is rocket science. But it is a matter of having a system in place to make sure you aren’t letting sales get any colder than they should. It’s so easy to get caught up in your day to day work and let those important follow ups slip a day or two and before you know it, you’ve added a couple weeks to your sales cycle. Your potential revenue for the year is reduced because your total number of deals is less. Or worse, you are stressing at the last minute to close deals because you’ve got payroll or rent due. A hurried timeframe almost always hurts your ability to bargain from position of strength.

In either case, make sure it’s not you affecting the length of your sales cycle by leaving unclear next steps or not following up with your prospects in a timely manner.

Last month, we posted an article about creating an invoicing system that’s easy. We talked about making sure your system kept running totals, tracks your sales taxes separately, and offered expense tracking, for things like mileage, and travel receipts.

We had some great comments from our readers about the process of making invoices look more like your existing brand. Feedback about our products is always welcomed and we appreciate everyone who wrote something.

We wanted to answer some of the questions about making changes to the existing templates in Billings, so we thought we’d put some effort into making it easier to learn how to use certain aspects of the invoice designer tool in Billings & Billings Pro. We’ve started off with the basics and put together a short video that shows how to tweak your invoice designs by:

• changing text alignment
• adjusting line spacing
• changing typefaces
• changing row background colours

We’re also going to be hosting a webinar on March 8th for those that are interested in seeing the design tweaks taught in a bit more detail as well as learning a few more commonly requested adjustments needed for invoices, like adding a custom column or adding a payment link URL.

Joining us on this webinar will be one of Marketcircle’s certified Report Engine partners, the talented owner of daylitehelp.com, Cynthia Shaffer. She’ll be helping us learn how to make simple design adjustments, but will also give us a brief demo of some of the more powerful customizations of Billings Invoices and Reports that she’s made for her clients.

Join us for one of 3 sessions on Thursday March 8th at 10 AM, 2 PM & 6 PM EST:

It’s essential that you have a backup copy of your latest Daylite Backup Snapshot (.dlbackup). Losing your primary customer database could easily be enough to put you out of business. To have a completely reliable and automated backup system you should make sure your Daylite Server has each of the following four things setup:

1) Make sure Daylite Server Admin has Backup Snapshots turned on and functioning properly.

Even though you might have Time Machine running already, Time Machine was not designed to backup databases (such as Postgres which is used by Daylite Server, MySQL, Oracle, etc.) while they are in use. You need to make sure Daylite Server Admin is configured to automatically create backup snapshots on your internal server drive.

1. Go to your Daylite Server Admin (in your Applications folder) on your dedicated Daylite Server desktop Mac.
2. Switch to the backup tab and make sure the checkbox next to your Database is checked.
3. If it is not, unlock Daylite Server Admin by clicking the lock icon in the lower left and authenticating. Check off all databases you want to have backed up.

Scheduling: How often do I need to backup my database?

Unless you have an abnormally large database, choose a backup schedule of “Everyday” and select a time of day during your off-hours. (In addition, manually backing up the database is good practice prior to performing a software update, importing data or doing any type of database maintenance.)

Location: Where do my backup files go?

By default, Daylite Server is setup to place your snapshots into YourHardDrive/Users/Shared/Daylite Server Backups. The backup files that are created will include the database name, and a date/time stamp so that you can easily identify when the backup was created.

Again, it’s essential to have Daylite Server Admin create your Backup snapshots (.dlbackup files) which also verifies your data and creates a running history of your backups) so they can be backed up properly by Time Machine or another automated backup system. You’ll only be able to restore your database in case of a hardware failure from a .dlbackup file.

2) Set up Time Machine, SuperDuper! or a cloud based service to backup those (.dlbackup) files.

Now that you’ve got Daylite Server Admin creating regular backup snapshots, you need to have those backup files copied to another storage medium (external hard drive, Time Capsule or internet based storage) using an automated system. Time Machine is a great option for backing up your Mac because it’s so easy to initially configure. If you’re using nothing currently, definitely enable it on a simple USB backup drive as it’s better than nothing. However it lacks features needed to control how much space your Daylite backups will take up on the drive so be sure to make sure you’ve bought a big enough drive to hold all these daily backup files plus the entire contents of your server Mac.

Setup Time Machine article from Apple Support
SuperDuper! User Guide PDF
Use a cloud based data backup solution.

You must assume your drives could fail at literally any moment; hardware failure, incorrect software update procedures, or human error can and probably will happen to you at some point. Everyone should have a complete backup at any given moment of their critical business files and particularly your sales database. And “at any given moment” means it needs to be automated otherwise you just won’t remember to do it as often as you should.

3) Create an archive copy of your Daylite database on a completely different backup medium in case your primary backups are destroyed by natural disaster.

If you use an online backup medium, keep a second backup on a USB thumb drive and store it off-site. If you use a physical on-site backup, put an archive copy on a secure off-site server or cloud storage provider on a regular, but less frequent schedule. Many people use the daylight savings time change (excuse the pun) as their reminder to change their online passwords. If you can’t automate this process completely, perhaps make these two times a year a chance to create an off-site backup if you don’t already have one. You may want to have a more frequent archive period, depending on your business needs.

4) Make sure you have still have enough space on your backup drive to last until your next archive time.

Take the time now to check how much space you have on your Server’s internal and backup drives.

1. In the Finder (Lion shown), click on Macintosh HD in the sidebar under Devices.
2. Select Get Info from the File Menu (or View>Show Status Bar) and note the amount of space available.
3. Navigate to /Users/Shared/Daylite Server Backup folder and switch to list view and sort by Date Modified to select your latest backup. Note the size of the .dlbackup file (choose File>Get Info if you’re not in list view).

Running low on space

You should have enough space on your drive to hold daily backups for the last 3-6 months or as at least as long as your time between archives. If you don’t have enough space, you’ll have to make your archive period shorter and create an off-site archive more frequently. You could also trim old backup files to save space, or buy a larger backup HD.

How do I trim older backup files?

1) You can either manually remove backups older than your archived off-site .dlbackup when you are periodically creating those archives if doing so manually. In List view, sort by Date Modified and select all files older than your archive period.

2) Or you can automate removing old backups using a great utility called Hazel, which lets you filter files and perform actions on any folder in the filesystem. You can use a rule like this to remove backup files older than [X time period], but please adjust them based on your archive period you chose up in Step 3:

(Big Legal Disclaimer™: Hazel is not our product and so if it chews up any data because of a one in a million bug, please don’t blame us. We’ve seen it working great for many of our customers and the guys at Noodlesoft seem cool too, so we wanted to share it with you. Please make sure you have double redundant backups before implementing any sort of automated scripts that remove data from your system.)

What to do if my Database seems too big?

Each time a Daylite database backup is created, the entire database is backed up, including all file attachments to emails recorded with Daylite Mail Integration (DMI). If you think that large email attachments might be contributing to your database size, you can strip or archive attachments by running the Attachment Archiver inside Daylite Server. This will speed up both backup time, and the time needed to initially add new users or devices to your database.

Daylite Server Backup Best Practices

Whether you are a company of one or one hundred and one, you must set a policy for managing and maintaining your database and server backups. We would highly recommend you make sure you are doing all four things mentioned. And to regularly double-check your system to ensure that backups are being created and managed correctly by the system. Time spent today will save you a ton of time AND headaches *when* your system decides to fail on you.

If anything here is unclear, let us know and we’ll try to clarify in the comments.

Did you spend the last year invoicing your clients with a beautifully designed InDesign invoice template or Word even? Are you dreading having to prepare all of your financial information for your accountant, or doing your own taxes? Maybe you’re just starting out and not invoicing all that frequently. Or perhaps your most pressing concern was having awesome looking invoices, sure to impress your new clients and re-enforce how professional you are.

STOP THE MADNESS!

Spending your time copying and pasting into Excel or using a calculator to total up your earnings for the year is definitely not how you want to be kicking off the new year. Or worse, how you want to be spending late nights in April, or just prior to your tax deadline, trying desperately to figure out how much you invoiced and expensed over the past year.

InDesign is an awesome product for making print layouts. It’s time to make a resolution to invoicing differently in 2012. Consider any option that meets the following three criteria:

1) Keep running totals of all your invoices, categorized per client, automatically.

In Billings, in the source list select Reports and then choose “Invoice Details by Client”. Then choose the date range you’re looking for and click run. You’ll get a report that shows how much you’ve made from each client along with details from each invoice.

2) Give you totals of all sales taxes you’ve collected for much easier tax remittance.

If you collect sales tax, you need to be able to easily total up how much you’ve collected either on an annual or quarterly basis. Even if you’ve tracked the grand totals in a spreadsheet, having to go through each invoice manually to pull out this data, or calculate it based on your totals can be extremely annoying. Again in the Reports section of Billings, choose “Taxes Collected”, set the timeframe to pull data from, and click run. Both you and the taxman are happy.

3) Has some sort of expense tracking capability, preferably one that helps you keep track of mileage and categorize your expenses.

Even if you don’t bill back expenses to your clients, it makes tax time quite a bit easier when you’ve done the inputting all year long instead of spending days on end searching through shoeboxes of faded and wrinkled receipts. In Billings, categories are defined in Preferences which is found in the Billings menu. Select the labels pane and then choose the categories tab. I add in each expense category I use with the prefix “Expense:” so they’re all grouped together when I’m selecting it in the slip entry window. To see how much you’ve spent, look under Reports > TimeSlip > Expenses By Category or Expense Tax Report. Take these to your accountant, or tax software if you’re doing your own and enjoy writing off all your costs of doing business.

What’s Your Time Worth?

Consider what your normal billing rate is and than estimate how much time you spent organizing all of this after the fact. Any solution you choose will pay itself back in no time.

No matter which way you go, having a system in place from the beginning of the year will make the task seem so much more manageable. Having a pile of invoices and receipts three feet tall is just the sort of job that gets procrastinated over and over again until the very last minute. Setting yourself up with a simple system that you make time for once a week, or once a month, becomes infinitely more manageable. In our next article, we’ll look at some easy ways of customizing the invoices Billings generates so your clients will be as impressed with your invoice as they are with your work.