Raed Bilbessi is the Founder and CEO of Pinnacle, a boutique business and marketing consulting firm. Pinnacle provides Jordanian organizations with practical and results-driven solutions to their business and marketing challenges and has been serving clients since 2007.
We interviewed Raed to learn how Pinnacle uses Daylite to manage email marketing, their sales funnel, and report on projects.
Having been in the market now for eight years, we have built an extensive database of leads, prospects, and clients with whom we maintain continuous contact. Being the owner and in charge of business development, Daylite helps me in many ways; for one, I always know what’s going on, what’s coming up, and which of our prospects and contacts I need to focus on to create new business opportunities.
Having said that, 65% of our revenue and projects are generated from repeat business, so I rely heavily on Daylite to continuously grow and nurture our relations with clients.
I use Daylite primarily for content-driven marketing and business development. By continuously feeding Daylite with data and business intelligence, I can for example, generate Smart Lists. for groups of contacts with whom I share content about topics they are interested in.
This is very important in our line of work as otherwise sharing “everything” with “everybody” would lead to dropouts. I also use Daylite extensively for fund-raising, of which we do quite a bit.
By building on Daylite’s cross-module reporting and data-retrieval capabilities, I can easily compile specific groups of potential sponsors who have a vested interest in the particular event we are promoting.
Personally, I’ve been using CRMs since the early 1990s. For the longest time, I used ACT!, then switched to Zoho CRM for a few years. Both were great solutions, but since I came across Daylite and made the switch, our entire business processes – especially when it comes to marketing and business development – have changed drastically.
With Daylite’s insights, I am now able to focus more on results and outcomes, rather than processes and procedures.
Email marketing has always been, and remains my strongest marketing tool. Daylite’s Mail Merge Tool is one feature I definitely can’t do without. And what’s really great about this feature is that it uses Apple Mail, so I get to know which emails bounced back and so forth, a feature that’s not found in the various online platforms we’ve tried out.
Daylite’s function to attach emails to contacts and other objects has of course become an indispensible tool for me as it completes each contact’s history and track record. And what makes this all so much more effective is – again – Daylite’s ability to build Smart Lists which can then be used to mail-merge content-driven email campaigns.
Another feature I won’t do without now is the Insight View. It’s an amazing visual display of all one needs to know to stay focused and on track.
Smart Lists are one of the most critical features that must be available in a CRM. This is particularly the case when the user relies on his/her CRM for content-driven marketing campaigns. In our case for example, we do a lot of fund-raising for events we manage on behalf of clients.
To build meaningful target lists, I have included several custom-fields in the different modules such as type of company, industry, level of decision-making influence (in contacts), and type of business development (funnel for fund-raising).
By using this data, I can for example create a Smart List that is composed of individuals who are responsible for CSR, and work in organizations that operate in the educational sector and are privately held, and have already funded one of our educational events in the past.
As such, the resulting Smart List is derived from data that originates from three modules; companies, contacts,and opportunities. I then use this list to mail-merge a letter that starts with “Hey Kristie, as an organization that previously supported last year’s Teacher Skills Forum, I though Marketcirle would be really well positioned to …”
This produces not only emails for individuals that are more likely to be interested, but also messages that are very personalized and grab the recipient’s attention.
I’ve used Daylite’s standard options to add custom-fields, built a number of forms, and also built a number of sales funnels which we use for varying purposes such as our own business development process and fund-raising for client events. I’m also getting more and more familiar with building custom reports which I not only use for my own purposes, but share with clients as well.
This is particularly important for fund-raising projects, whereby I can email my clients summaries or detailed reports about how we’re progressing at multiple fronts.
In regards to reporting, I use the Insight View extensively to maintain a high-level overview about where I stand with different projects. By using “Pipelines” as filters to create Smart Lists for opportunities, I can easily drill into the details of a particular fund-raising project or our own business development efforts.
I also appreciate how lookups of companies or individuals can easily be printed into PDFs. As an example here, I have a Smart List for Pinnacle “clients”. I then use this to generate a quick report about who our clients are and attach that to proposals and such.
Primarily for managing tasks and logging notes during and after meetings. Sometimes, I also use it to create records of companies, contacts, and opportunities when I’m on the road and have multiple consecutive meetings. This way, I have all my fresh data in the system once I get back to the office.
What I really love about Daylite is how “Macish” it is. It truly reflects Apple’s philosophy in “computing”.**
