As per statistics, there are 90,796 registered architects in India and the number is expected to rise in the coming years. This has made standing out from the crowd an essential element of your business. And if you are an architect/ interior designer or a builder, then you know how competitive this business has become. Read on if you are looking for solutions to get more online visibility and manage your business better.
As an architect/interior designer you might be spending a lot of time on-site visits, meeting with clients to review a design, writing up meeting minutes and following up on tasks from a client meeting, preparing a staffing plan for how to use the company’s staff time best over the coming week or month, etc. Moreover, the lack of a separate sales team makes it difficult to handle all the tasks together and focus on more important tasks such as preparing a proposal for a new client, preparing materials for a client meeting, developing a design, etc.
With a business management solution like Zenys, you can generate business inquiries, manage customer relationships and sales processes, create follow-ups, assign tasks to various staff, invoicing, collections, access information, and much more with a few clicks.
This blog will explain the most beneficial features of Zenys such as:
- Client management
- Tracking projects
- Task Management
- Meetings and Calendar
- Multi-user accounts
- Invoicing and Collection
- Online Visibility
1. Client Management
Most architects and designers do not currently have an easy tool for managing customers or use excel/ google sheet, which is a crude way and comes with many disadvantages. On the other hand, you may try using a customer relationship management (CRM) software, but for an architect or any other small business, using a CRM might not be the right option as:
- Learning to use CRM takes time and you might need trained staff for this
- You are not going to use the majority of the features, but you will still end up paying for it
- CRM addresses only a part of your needs – most CRM solutions will not even allow you to create an invoice. This means multiple tools, higher cost, and greater effort
This is where a tool like Zenys comes in handy. With Zenys you can have all your customer details in one place and access them from your phone or laptop. And then you can easily do what matters the most to your business such as:
- Prioritizing the customers
- Managing the customer lifecycle by assigning stages, for example, you can classify customers as a lead, opportunity, or client.
- Add notes and information for each customer and share all relevant information with your team
- Attach important documents to the customers profile and access it any time anywhere
- And most importantly, create follow up tasks for each customer so that you don’t miss out on what needs to be done to convert an inquiry to a paying customer.
2. Tracking Projects, Billing and Collections
Okay, so you have converted your inquiry to a client and your next project has started. Now comes the tough part – executing the work and keeping track of all the other things related to it. With Zenys you can store all the details of your client engagement and the tool comes with some cool features to manage your work.
With Zenys’ project/ sales management you can:
- Create multiple sales/ project opportunities for your customer and track the project by stage
- Easily create estimates, quotations, and invoices with your logo and branding
- Track collection against invoices generated
- Assign projects/ sales to your staff so that everyone is clear on the responsibilities
- Store all project-related documents and access them online from anywhere.
3. Task Management
Nothing is more important than meeting your commitments to your clients and delivering on time. Zenys comes with an easy-to-use task management feature that helps you manage all your tasks from the same tool. Apart from standard features such as setting priority and timelines, you can also tag customers to tasks. This makes it a more effective way of managing tasks related to your clients.
4. Meetings and Calendar
Zenys comes with a built-in calendar with which you can schedule meetings and other important activities in your calendar. And your calendar is integrated with your customer and sales, so you can easily create meetings and events tagging your customer, plus there is no need to depend on any other tool separately for this!
5. Multi User Accounts
With a team comes the need to have a robust system within your organization to divide the work and get things done. As the owner of a business, a lot of your time goes towards sharing information and tasks and ensuring that the whole team works together. That’s exactly why your business management system needs to support multi-user accounts.
With Zenys, you can provide access to your staff as well and assign customers and sales to your staff. You can configure what information they can see and access without having any worry about your data security as all data is stored under your account.
6. Invoicing and Collection Simplified
Every document that you share with your customers speaks about your brand and professionalism. It is very important for any business to have a way to create professional documents such as estimates, quotations, and invoices. Still, many businesses still continue to make such documents with excel/ word or similar applications which is time-consuming, error-prone, and doesn’t help in creating professional documents.
With Zenys you can create professional documents easily along with the following advantages:
- With Zenys you can easily create professional documents with your logo and signature and download them in pdf format or print it directly.
- You can save a lot of time as documents are automatically numbered
- You can configure default notes, print your address, account details, etc and add these are automatically added to your documents
- Once your customer pays, you can update the collection against an invoice and the information is automatically updated at the customer and sales level.
7. Online Visibility
Online visibility for your business is more important than ever before with the increase in internet penetration and accessibility to smartphones becoming common. Still, many small businesses lack their own website or do not promote themselves online.
If you are struggling with your online visibility or paying huge amounts for your online classifieds, then Zenys is the right solution for you.
- With Zenys you can create your own mini-website through which you can share your business details, photos of your work, and details of products and services that you provide.
- You can also provide links to your other social profiles such as Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, etc, or to your website and thereby improve the chances of people coming across your website online.
- Apart from this potential customers can directly send an inquiry through your public profile and it will directly appear in your Zenys dashboard.
- Last but not the least, creating your profile in Zenys and getting inquiries through it is completely free!