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About this lesson
You could run your business using only Evernote even without upgrading to paid levels.
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For Small Business Owners.docx55 KB For Small Business Owners - Solution.docx
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Quick reference
Topic
Evernote for Small Business Owners.
When to use
You could run your business using only Evernote even without upgrading to paid levels.
Instructions
1.Whip Through Your Tasks
When it comes to managing tasks, it’s essential to have a single place to add, store, search, and get notified about items that are due. Evernote meets every one of those requirements:
Add: You can install Evernote on your computer and on practically any other mobile device, which makes it super easy to add tasks on the go.
You don’t even have to have Internet for that. Your notes are synchronized across your different devices the moment you are reconnected to the Internet.
Search: Creating a separate notebook (called Task List, Action List, or whatever you’d like) for your tasks is a super easy way to quickly find your tasks.
Adding tags—ideally a combination of them—will make finding whatever you’re looking for even easier.
Here’s how your tagging system could look:
●Use “task” tag for all to-do items
●Use “task” and “follow-up” tags for when you need to remember to check in with someone
●Use “task” and “waiting” tags for projects that involve collaboration
●Use “task” and “project-name” tags for action items related to specific projects
●Use “task” and “client-name” for items that require you doing something for your client
Run general searches to get an idea of what’s in your pipeline. Do more specific searches to figure out whom you need to follow up with or what’s outstanding for a specific client or project.
Use a reminder feature where you can set a reminder and have the system notify you when an item is due.
2. Nurture Relationships
Relationships are the lifeblood of every business. Nurturing your network is easy with Evernote. All you need to do is enter details about them and set up reminders to follow up and check in with them.
I recommend creating a separate stack called Contacts or People. Depending on the nature of your business, you’d put in that stack notebooks like:
●Prospects
●Clients
●Partners
●Industry Leaders
●Competitors
●Referrers
Here’s a simple template for the kind of info you can track:
Name
Website
E-mail address
Mailing Address
Social Media profiles
In the notes for specific people, you might:
●Save web clips with interesting details you found about those people online
●Add highlights from your last conversation
●Schedule a reminder for when next to follow up
●Forward your email exchange (see lesson about forwarding emails into Evernote)
This can become your own sales pipeline.
3. Manage Clients
The way you manage your clients and client work depends on the type of work you do for your clients and how you work with them.
It will save you massive amounts of time down the line if you create templates for every type of collaboration. This way, every time you get a new client you simply copy your template, add the client info, and start going through the steps.
Templates for short-term commitments can look like this:
Business: [website]
E-mail: [e-mail address]
Industry: [name of the industry]
Service bought:
Possible upgrade? Yes/No
My notes:
Templates for long-term projects can look like this:
Business: [website]
E-mail: [e-mail address]
Industry: [name of the industry]
Service bought:
Client’s goals:
Timeline:
Milestones:
Contract returned: Yes/No
Payment made: Yes/No
Welcome packet sent: Yes/No
Initial consultation scheduled: Yes/No
To track the progress of your long-term clients, you might want to expand your template to include additional information.
For example, after each session, you can enter a short update in the client’s Evernote note listing:
Client’s wins since we last spoke:
Client’s struggles since we last spoke:
Today we discussed:
My observations:
Homework for next time:
Next time to discuss:
Having information about your clients, especially long-term ones, in the same place, easily accessible and retrievable, will make managing them a breeze.
4. Make Projects Happen
The most important tools you need to manage projects are a timeline, an information hub, and a central place for communications.
Timeline: To keep track of due dates and create a calendar for your project, integrate Evernote with your Google calendar using Zappier, which will create a calendar item out of any note that has a scheduled reminder.
Information hub: We’ve already established how you can turn Evernote into the most amazing information hub. Just make sure you create a new Project Name stack (or notebook for smaller projects) and continue uniformly tagging notes.
Besides web clips and PDFs you can also add into your project notes Google Drive and Dropbox documents, which is really convenient because all links in Evernote are live, so you won’t have to download the same files over and over again!
Communication hub: Evernote is also great for collaboration. You can share individual notes or whole notebooks with one or several people. Since the information lives on Evernote, you don’t need to worry about synchronization—once one of the collaborators makes a change, that note is automatically updated across all collaborators’ accounts.
As you can see, Evernote is one mighty tool. If you put it to use, you don’t need much else to run your business.
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