WikiJob is the UK's largest graduate job website. Below WikiJob's Chris Muktar explains how the team there uses Highrise:
We deliver several million pages a month worldwide and a have huge number of bluechip clients, including banks, law firms and technology companies. We need Highrise to manage our relationships with our customers, where they are in the buying process, and what needs to be done next. Highrise is an integral part of the business, and we use it all day, every day. It's the ultimate team productivity tool- it makes you work smarter, which means you make more money.
Before Highrise, we had no system for managing our relationships with clients. It was ad-hoc, which meant that leads that were hot could often go cold – we needed a system that helped us organise contacts and collaborate on leads, and keep track of who said what and what needed to happen next. Highrise fits the bill perfectly. We have literally thousands of business contacts now. We could have never managed them before.
Highrise runs on our computers all day. It doesn't require any software, servers or consultants, which means it costs less than anything else. We use the tags to classify leads by salesperson, whether they're hot leads, and where they are in the buying process. Everybody can see what everybody else is up to, so anyone can take a phone call on behalf of somebody else. Because it runs in the browser, it means we can access it from anywhere, on any computer, which means all our staff regularly work out of the office with it, and can access it even on evenings and weekends. It's liberating to use it on our iPhones at tradeshows too, and has saved us by gett the phone number or address of a client when we're on the road.
Top features
The most useful features of Highrise are tags, tasks, dropbox & deals. Highrise is very malleable. Unlike other CRM's, using these basic elements, Highrise can be bent around almost any relationship management process. This means you don't need to ever 'set it up'. Some companies have a rigid process because they don't want to change their software; this defies all common sense. That's no problem with Highrise. Task management is one of the best things about Highrise. It is reminiscent of the 'Getting Things Done' philosophy. In the morning, sales staff can get straight to work on their to do list, without having to waste time figuring out what to do next.
Highrise does not keep adding unnecessary features. It keeps it simple. There is no 'version 2'. This means we are never left scratching our heads – it looks the same every day – and when non-tech people are using it, this is essential.
Why we choose Highrise
At WikiJob, we looked at SugarCRM mostly Salesforce and a couple of others. All of them required complex set up, and most required servers and technical people to maintain. They couldn't be accessed from outside the office and would require a huge investment in training time and consulting. They end up costing a lot more. Highrise was free to get started so we couldn't go wrong, and it's grown with us, so we've signed up to bigger and bigger packages as we've hired more staff.
We have recently completed our single largest deal ever (over £30,000) with a well known accountancy firm. This has required the collaboration of eight people, both inside WikiJob, at the client, and at the client's advertising agency. Many documents had to be assembled, meetings had, calls made and emails followed up. Using Highrise, Ed, our sales manager, managed to orchestrate the deal from his computer, assigning tasks to other people to provide documents or follow up, to check on the progress of their work, and to see what the client needed next. While at home, the evening before sales person Alex's visit to meet the ad agency, he reviewed all the notes from previous meetings with the client (including those he didn't attend), and was fully up to speed the next day. This lead to a number of extra documents having to be created – we made tasks for these and assigned them, and everybody followed up.
As we had a constant stream, everybody was always fully aware of what was happening, and as we could assign tasks, it meant nothing could be forgotten about, and everybody was accountable for getting stuff done. The deal took over a year to come through, which meant a lot of notes, keeping track of what was said and when, and referring back for current communications. Highrise makes us ultra organised, which is key. We do all this while managing approximately 1200 other leads simultaneously – it's how we do business.
Tips
On our desktops, we have it hooked it into our VOIP phone system so we can just 'click-to-dial'. It's fast and easy. Using the iCal feeds, our tasks appear on our Google Calendar's and iPhone calendars, so we're always aware of what to do next. Integration with Mailchimp means we can see who received our newsletter and whether they opened it, right in Highrise. The export functions & API are very simple for extracting data, so we use these to make extra reports and spreadsheets when the need arises.
A WikiJob team member uses Highrise.
