Sonlight has contracted with Sharper Agent to provide a tool for us to use to manage our customer contacts and be able to communicate with them in beneficial ways.
There are lots of possibilities to consider in using this system:
- Create personal touches to send by e-mail. Sonlight has provided a logo e-mail template and there are many templates for creating marketing pieces that look very professional. The system does offer opt-out & tags contact account.
- Provides the option to set appointments for consultations and receive an e-mail reminder.
- You can keep notes concerning your conversations with clients in their individual records.
While Assist processing requires that we submit our Prospect Lists in all caps format, it may be more appropriate to use upper- and lower-case letters in our SCC Connect tool so that when we send out campaigns (particularly direct e-mail campaigns) the customer names will merge and look right. You can use Excel to change your Prospect List to the mixed-letter format with the "Proper" function. Follow the instructions for utilizing the Upper function in the Excel Spreadsheet Helps section, but incorporate "Proper" in its place. Then save the file in .csv format for uploading to SCC Connect.
Updated User Notes (following STC 2012):
- For those using SCC Connect on a Mac … you cannot successfully create marketing materials in Safari. The SCC Connect software (Silverlight) does not play nice with Safari and anytime you use the 'delete' key to update text, it automatically logs you out and takes you back to the log-in page. Mac users need to use either Firefox or Chrome, not the default Safari browser.
- There apparently is an automatic “time out” when working on creating/editing a marketing piece. You must save your marketing pieces every 30-45 minutes or the program will time-out and log you out … thus losing whatever content you have created since your last save. There is no notification of this time-out, so it is recommended that you set a timer when you begin creating a marketing piece and save it in intervals.
Webinar Introductory Training for SCC Connect
SCC Connect is accessed at www.sharperagent.com. Your user name would be your SL e-mail address and a standard password has been set up initially (contact Kelly if you don't know it). It is recommended that you change your password in your profile once you are into the system. Before you can load contacts, you will need to set up your profile, including mailing address, etc. This personal information will show on your marketing pieces, so you are welcome to use Sonlight's mailing address if you prefer not to have your personal details (other than phone number and e-mail address) show on your pieces.
Uploading Your Contacts to SCC Connect
Rather see it demonstrated? Here is the webinar training session
Creating Customized Marketing Materials
Creating Campaigns
And here is the webinar training session for customizing marketing materials and creating campaigns.
Before setting up a campaign, check some of your contacts from the Group to which you intend to send the campaign to ensure that they are properly labeled as part of that Group. If you find that some of your contacts did not get labeled for a particular Group, there is a fairly easy way to correct that by following these instructions.
Managing and Adding Contacts to Groups
Processing Your Assist List
You can work with just your most recent season contacts if you prefer to keep things simpler in SCC Connect. In this case, you would just upload the modified date from your Prospect Lists. If you prefer to have a more complete listing of your customers in SCC Connect, then you can request a listing from Assist of all customers tagged with your SCC code from Barb. Note that if you upload your current season contacts after submitting them to Barb, they will also be included in the spreadsheet that you receive from her (having already been processed into Assist). Duplicate can be deleted before they are uploaded to SCC Connect - the system will prompt you that there are duplicates in your list and you can tell it to omit them.