Maximizer Tracks Status of Corporate Relationships
It’s easier to keep track of prospects, customers and vendors with customer relations management software and Internet services.
Some are quite expensive and complicated. But modestly priced products are out there too, and some are actually easier to use.
Maximizer 6.0 from Multiactive Software Inc., for example, costs $149 if you download it from the Web (https://www.maximizer.com) or $199 if you order it on CD-ROM. Competing products Act and Goldmine are similarly priced.
The premise of Maximizer is that your contacts are your most important resource. The program allows you to maintain a database of existing and potential clients and associates. But more, it helps you understand possible sales scenarios with each person as well as maintain a history of all contacts with them and colleagues from their organization.
Your salespeople can use it to keep track of someone’s interest in a product or service, an upgrade or a follow-on product. Your customer relations and support staff can use the same database to track their contacts with the customer. By logging all contacts, everyone who interacts with the customer can get an overview of the relationship, including any problems, pet peeves or idiosyncrasies.
The program also helps you better understand relationships between people in your database. You can, for example, enter contacts individually or group them by company. If one customer referred another, that data could be part of each customer’s record.
The program has a feature designed to help you track opportunities for each contact. When looking at a name in the contact list you can press the “opportunities” icon that takes you to a place where you can enter information about your objective with this person, any comments and a summary of your strategies for this lead.
The program also can be used to help you plan all your contacts with a person, including making and receiving phone calls, scheduling meetings, writing e-mail, letters or faxes. Any contact planned for the future will be posted to the calendar to remind you when it’s time for a follow-up.
Unlike Goldmine, the program doesn’t have built-in e-mail functionality, but it does link directly to your e-mail program.
A new feature in version 6 is the OrderDesk function that allows you to log and track all orders from sale to fulfillment and collection.
There also is an e-commerce element to the program. The program comes with a copy of ecBuilder software that allows you to build an e-commerce Web site with a 10,000-item catalog, a shopping cart, real time credit card transaction processing and order integration back into Maximizer. Although the Web building software is included, you’ll have to pay fees to your ISP for hosting the site and processing payments.
I was impressed by how easy it was to get started using Maximizer. The only thing that bothered me about the setup is that it doesn’t import data directly from Microsoft’s popular Outlook personal contact manager program. You can go into Outlook to export data and then import it into Maximizer, but that involves several extra steps.
Although Maximizer’s user interface is relatively straightforward, plan to spend several hours learning to use its many functions and don’t expect to be productive right away.
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Lawrence J. Magid can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web site is at https://www.larrysworld.com.
