Marketcircle Daylite Sales Management and Marketing Solutoins

With the advent of Mac OS X, Apple Computer 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. As a result, more and more businesses are reconsidering Macintosh as a viable platform for their computing needs.

But of course, a computer is useless without software to run on it. Vital software applications for business include office suites (word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software); accounting software; and sales, marketing and project management software.

Microsoft Office, the standard office suite in the business world, is available for both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, and its files are directly compatible with the Windows versions of Microsoft Office. In addition, there are Office-compatible alternatives, including ThinkFree Office, OpenOffice for Mac OS X (both running in the X11 compatibility environment and an OS X native version called NeoOffice).

MYOB (Mind Your Own Business) AccountEdge, a popular accounting package, is available for the Mac and is also available for Windows. In fact, MYOB is networkable between Macs and PC’s – a Mac can serve an MYOB file to PC clients, and vice versa. In addition, Intuit offers QuickBooks for Mac OS X.

The one area that has been weak on the Mac platform for years, however, has been sales and marketing software. There have been a number of Personal Information Management (PIM) applications available for the Mac (Palm Desktop, Now Contact, Chronos Personal and Group 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. I have seen a lot of off-the-shelf contact management and marketing solutions, and Daylite is best application I have ever seen written in this vein for the Mac platform. I would put it up against anything written for Windows, too – it’s far less cumbersome and more elegant than common Windows counterparts such as SalesLogix, Outlook, and ACT!, and much less expensive to deploy.

Daylite contact card. A contact can be linked to multiple companies, organizations and groups, and even linked to other people through relationships.

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.

	Daylite Won/Loss Sales Graph shows an overview of closed sales.

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.

Alternative Marketing Experts is an authorized reseller of Daylite, and Russ Alman, the owner of AME, is certified and trained as a Daylite Partner. Russ is active in the Daylite community and is a beta tester for new versions of their products. Alternative Marketing Experts uses Daylite to run manage its own business and use it in the real world on a daily basis.

Russ can help you successfully deploy Daylite and revolutionize the way your business manages its customer relations, sales, marketing and project management. He is available to travel throughout the Washington, Oregon, and the rest of the Pacific Northwest to implement Daylite solutions and provide on-site, individual and group training. He can also provide cost-effective, remote installation, training and support across North America using secure, encrypted screen sharing technology and telephone conversation. (For more information on this option, please see our Remote Support page.)