Alternative Marketing Connections

In the late 1990's, Mac OS X, ushered the Macintosh into a new era. With its UNIX core, Mac OS X brought a new breed of reliability, flexibility and compatibility to the Mac platform. More and more businesses are reconsidering Macintosh as a viable platform for their computing needs.

MarketCircle Daylite Sales Forcasts and Sales Pipeline charts
provide a graphic overview of sales performance
across a sales organization.

While there are plenty of options for business and productvity software on the Mac, the one area that has been consistently weak is sales and marketing software. There have been a number of Personal Information Management (PIM) applications available for the Mac (Palm Desktop, Now Contact, Chronos Organizer), but these are not suitable for more advanced marketing needs, such as networkability, data mining and integrated sales and project management.

This has changed dramatically with Marketcirlce Daylite.

An Example of Daylite's versatile viewer window -- a drill-down view of a contact, related companies and projects, and activities

MarketCircle Daylite

MarketCircle Daylite is written exclusively for Mac OS X. Daylite is the most comprehensive sales management solution developed for the Mac platform. It’s also far less cumbersome and more elegant than common Windows counterparts such as SalesLogix, Outlook, and ACT!, and much less expensive to deploy.

Unlike PIMs, which are essentially glorified address books and calendars, Daylite is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application. This class of application is designed to go much further than simply keep track of contacts and appointments – it is built to manage all aspects of customer contact in a way makes it easy to associate individuals, organizations, groups, tasks and projects in an integrated environment.

This depth of information requires a highly relational organization of information. Contacts (people) can be related to one or more companies, organizations, groups, or events. A project can involve many people, appointments, correspondence and research. And all of these can be connected to numerous related documents created in other applications, such as word processors and spreadsheets, as well as website references.

Daylite is organized in such a way that all of these related pieces of information can be easily and logically linked to one another, making it so that everyone in your office – from the receptionist to the CEO -- has access to the information they need to get their work done efficiently.

Daylite also summarizes all this information in easy-to-view, graphic charts. Using a data analysis method called "pipelining," Daylite can show a sales manager at a glance how many sales opportunities each salesperson is generating at at what stage in the sales cycle they are. In addition, the application can show win/loss ratios and projected sales, all updated in real time.

In order to perform these tasks, Daylite is built on a robust industry-standard SQL database engine. Daylite is networkable, which allows multiple users to access the same information from multiple computers simultaneously. It also supports an off-line mode, whereby a portable user, such as a salesperson, can take a copy of the database into the field, make updates, come back to the office, and synchronize the changes with the master database.  In addition, Marketcircle offers Daylite Touch, an iPhone app that will synchronize all Daylite information right into an iPhone!

Yet, with all of these capabilities, Daylite costs about the same per user as standard PIMs (such as Now Contact/Now Up To Date on the Mac). And unlike Windows solutions, such as Outlook, Lotus Notes, and SalesLogix, Daylite and its server component both run Mac OS X. In addition...

THERE IS NO ADDITIONAL COST FOR THE SERVER SOFTWARE – JUST A PER-COMPUTER COST. This makes Daylite an incredible bargain!

Marketcircle also offers a Daylite Mail Integration Tool (DMI) that seamlessly links e-mails from Apple Mail to Daylite. When a user receives or sends an e-mail the DMI automatically integrates the e-mail into the Daylite database, linking it to the appropriate contacts, organizations, projects and opportunities.

If you think you might be interested in Daylite, please take a few minutes to visit the MarketCircle website for an overview of the Daylite application. They have much more in-depth information than I have here, and there is also a free 30-day demo of the product available for download.

Alternative Marketing Connections is an authorized reseller of Daylite, and is certified and trained as a Daylite Partner.

Alternative Marketing Connections can help you successfully deploy Daylite and revolutionize the way your Mac-based business manages its customer relations, sales, marketing and project management. They can provide on-site setup, installation, and training throughout  Washington, Oregon, and the rest of the Pacific Northwest. They can also provide cost-effective, remote installation, training and support across North America using secure, encrypted screen sharing technology and telephone conversation. 

The Daylite Mail Integration Tool (DMI) automatically transfers your
incoming and outgoing e-mail in Apple Mail into notes attached to your contact records in Daylite.