A list of tips to help you be more productive in Highrise.
Highrise: Tips and tricks
May 13, 2011
May 12, 2011
Highrise tip: Filter your contacts by different categories
In your contacts tab, you’ll see an option to change the view of your contacts list at the top of the screen. You can filter your contacts by name, title, email, city, state, country, zip, phone, or background. Or you can create custom fields now too. More details.
May 04, 2011
Tip: See Highrise tasks in other calendars
You can subscribe to your Highrise iCalendar Task feed to see your tasks on your Backpack Calendar, Apple iCal, Mozilla Calendar or any other program that supports the iCalendar format.
To add the iCalendar of Tasks to Google:
- Go to your Google Calendar
- Look in the sidebar
- Under ‘Other calendars,’ click the link that says “Add”
- Click the option to add by URL
This is where you will paste the URL of your Highrise iCalendar feed. To get that URL from Highrise, click the "Subscribe to your tasks in iCalendar format" link at the bottom of the Tasks tab in Highrise (see right). Then copy the link that begins with “webcal://…” — this is the URL you’ll then paste into Google calendars.
April 29, 2011
Track your job search with Highrise
John Gannon (below) is an Associate at L Capital Partners and he recently offered up "4 tactics that worked for me in my recent job search." One tip: Track your activities and follow up tasks in a systematic way. Gannon recommends using Highrise to get that done.
I’m a firm believer that the job hunt is very much like a sales process, where you’re prospecting (finding potential opportunities), conducting a needs assessment (interviewing), following up, and closing (negotiating your compensation package and signing on the dotted line). Any professional salesperson is using a CRM of some sort (even if it’s just a spreadsheet!) to track and plan their activities, and a professional job seeker should be doing the same.
For my most recent job search, I used Highrise from 37signals to track relevant contacts as well as specific tasks related to job opportunities. Their system helped me stay disciplined about following up and staying on top of specific job opportunities. (BTW, has anyone used the Highrise APIs to develop a job seeker focused app? I think this would be really cool and useful.)
April 14, 2011
Paying in advance
If you’d prefer to simplify your billing, you can pay for 37signals products in one lump sum. We’ll then pull from that credit instead of charging your card every month. We’ll email you when your balance runs low so you can recharge it.
To set up lump sum payment, click the “Account” link at the top of any screen. Then click the link for lump sum payments.
You’ll still get an invoice each month. When your lump sum is running out, we’ll send you an email to let you know.
March 28, 2011
Design a marketing workflow system that uses Highrise
"Reduce 'Getting it All Done' Content Marketing Anxiety: Create Your Own System" [Content Marketing Institute] is a guide to help marketers design their own workflow system. Highrise is one of the recommended tools mentioned.
Instead of running to yet another time management book or tool, I began to look at how I work, what was causing problems, and finding ways to reduce or eliminate them. Here’s the process I used that any marketer can use, too, whether you’re a consultant, freelancer or corporate marketer...Highrise is marketed as a CRM app, but it has this really cool functionality that lets you manage tasks by client (or “contact”) and by due date. I customized it to how I work and now I know when I need to make follow-up phone calls or emails and when a task is due. I now see my task list by day and by week, which helps me stay focused.
March 03, 2011
NY Times profiles consulting firm that tracks emails with Highrise
"A Small Business Made to Seem Bigger" is a NY Times article that discusses people who run a business alone but want it to appear bigger than it really is — as if it has teams of employees and lots of resources. One of the article's subjects, Peter Sorgenfrei (below), uses Highrise to keep track of his email.
Peter Sorgenfrei, founder of a product development consulting firm, Sorgenfrei L.L.C in New York, uses a Web application called Highrise to keep track of his e-mail, so he knows when he last communicated with a client and what was said. Whenever Mr. Sorgenfrei sends an e-mail, a blind copy of the message is sent to his Highrise account, where it is archived. “I come across as completely buttoned-up and in-control,” he said, “because I have all the information, files and discussions in one place and can access them before talking to the client.” Recently, when an automotive manufacturer he works with couldn’t find some legal documents it had sent him, Mr. Sorgenfrei located them in his Highrise archive. It took him just minutes to send the documents back to the client.
Read the full piece or learn more about Highrise's email dropbox.
Sorgenfrei's use of Highrise and ShoeBoxed
Sorgenfrei also discussed Highrise at his blog, in the post "Tools of the trade: How to be a successful solopreneur."
Highrise: A customer relationship management platform from 37signals in Chicago. In addition to functioning as an address book, Highrise allows me to list tasks, assign tasks to project colleagues, and track deals and ‘cases’ for things I am working on. But the real genius of Highrise lies in the tracking of conversations. I have an email address from the system that I bcc every time I email a client or a potential client. If the addressee is not already in Highrise’s address book, the system creates an entry. The genius part is that it then saves the content of the email, including attached files, so that I can always check on past conversations before emailing again or before making a phone call or entering a meeting. That way, clients see that I am completely on top of their business, even when I’m handling 10 projects at any given time.
And he talks about using ShoeBoxed to get contact info from business cards into Highrise.
ShoeBoxed: Instead of having to enter receipts and business card information manually in FreshBooks and Highrise (see both above), I send an envelope with all my collected receipts and business cards to ShoeBoxed. The crew at ShoeBoxed then scans and verifies the information and provides me with an online record that my accounting program and contact manager can import. ShoeBoxed keeps me organized for tax season and ensures that I always have phone numbers and addresses with me when I’m running to meet a potential client.
Read more about the tools Sorgenfrei uses.
Sorgenfrei L.L.C home page.
November 22, 2010
November 01, 2010
SaveYourCall.com lets you record phone calls and add them to Highrise
SaveYourCall.com is a call recording service that works with any touch-tone phone (no hardware required) and integrates with Highrise. Below, Eric Anderson of SYC answers a couple of questions about the service:
How does Save Your Call integrate with Highrise?
A user records a call with our service. If Highrise integration is enabled and if the contact they are calling is already in their Highrise account we attach that recording as a note to the contact with some call meta data (call time, duration, called from, etc.).
What problem is this trying to solve?
Although Highrise is great for keeping notes and emails, if you want to track what was said during a telephone conversation you are forced to make text notes while trying to carry on an intelligent conversation.
Our integration solves this problem by recording the entire conversation for you as an audio file. You can go back and listen at any time and no details are missed. You can fully engage in a conversation since you do not have to worry about writing down the details.
Since the recording is automatically copied to Highrise after the phone call is done it is easy to find at a later time and requires no effort for the user. It is also easy for other people in your organization to access if they need to hear the details (i.e. now the developers will be able to know exactly what the sales guy promised!).
