• TwentyTen CRM, running in its own WordPress installation (mine is crm.billerickson.net).
• Registered Users Only plugin running on your CRM install, to keep it private.
• Gravity Forms and Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types plugins installed on your CRM.

Build the form

Using Gravity Forms, create a contact form with all the relevant fields you want to collect. Out of the box, GF let’s you create simple posts using your form. Using the GF + CPT plugin, you’ll be able to link the fields to meta and taxonomy fields. Here’s the fields I’m using in my form:

• Your Name = Post Title. This field also has all the extra post data on it. I’m publishing it as a Draft post (I publish it once I’ve responded) in the “Prospect” category.
• Your Email = Post Meta field for email (_crm_client_email).
• Your Phone = Post Meta field for phone (_crm_client_phone)
• URL = Post Meta field for url (_crm_client_url)
• How did you find me = dropdown populated by the Source taxonomy
• Message = Post Body
• [Hidden] Sales Status = Post Meta for ( _crm_sales_status) setting it to Inquiry
• [Hidden] Inquiry Date = Post Meta for ( _crm_date_inquiry ) setting it to current date

I wasn’t able to have a hidden field that sets the value of a taxonomy, so I added the following code to my functions.php file in TwentyTen CRM to set a default value. If you don’t specify a value for the Point of Contact taxonomy, it sets it to “Email Form” when you publish the post (thanks Michael Fields):

Create Contact Page in CRM

Once you’ve created your form, it’s time to create a contact page. Go to Pages > Add New, create a page called Contact, then add the appropriate shortcode to it to add the form.

But we want the contact page on our website, not on our CRM. Let’s strip this page bare so we can embed it to your actual site as an iFrame.

I created a very simple page template in a file called template-form.php (update this with your proper gravity forms code):

Make the Contact Page Accessible

So now we have a functioning (and bare) contact form page that looks something like this. But because we have the Registered Users Only plugin, only logged in users can access the form. Luckily the plugin provides us a filter to specify certain pages that are open to everyone.

Use the following code in your functions.php file to make the form page accessible. Change ‘form’ to whatever the page slug of your contact page is (mine is ‘form’).

Finally, Add the Contact Form to Website

On your public website, create a contact page and embed the CRM contact form as an iFrame. Here’s what my embed code looks like:

Now you’ll have a contact form that will auto-populate your CRM with the contact’s information. They’ll show up as Drafts, and you can click “Publish” once you’ve responded. This was hugely helpful for me on my recent trip.

• Before your trip, give yourself a few weeks or a month in which you don’t take on any new work. This will give you the time to appropriately wind down existing work, even if it was supposed to be finished earlier (there’s always last minute requests). I only took on two new projects at the beginning of May, although they were pretty large ones. Even though I could have squeezed in a few smaller projects, I didn’t want to push it. My last week of work was hard, working from 8am-10pm finishing up the projects (Dans Hamptons and Eat Life Whole), but they came out great and I didn’t have to work on them while traveling.
• Use a CRM (TwentyTen CRM or Salesforce) and have your contact form connect to it. You should be doing this already, but coming back to 50 emails from prospective clients is unmanageable. Get everything in your CRM so you can work your way through it when you get back. I’ll be posting a tutorial soon on having a contact form update TwentyTen CRM, but here’s a quick summary.
• Make sure your contact form mentions that you’re on vacation, so they don’t expect an immediate response. Also update your voicemail. In my voicemail I said I’d be out of the country and wouldn’t be back until the end of June, and asked them to please use the contact form on my site or email me. When I got back I only had 2 voicemails that weren’t already in my CRM.
• Check in periodically to filter your email. I did about every 5 days. For projects that weren’t a good fit I sent a list of recommended developers, and those that were I reiterated that I’ll be back at the end of June and will get back to them as soon as possible. In my CRM I closed the ones I forwarded away and marked the ones I didn’t as “after trip followup”. I also added prospects that just emailed me to the CMS (30% of my inquiries come from email, 60% from email form, and 10% from phone).
• Give people a fuzzy date of when you’ll be back. I said “end of June” instead of June 21 so that I’m in control of my schedule when I get back. If everyone knows the date you’ll get back, you’ll get flooded with emails and phone calls that day.
• When you do get back, give yourself a few days to a week to catch up. I landed on a Tuesday but my first official day back in the office was the following Monday. During those extra days I went through my CRM and followed up with everyone, scheduling phone calls throughout the following week.
• Only let meetings and phone calls take up half your day when you get back. I scheduled phone calls from 8am to noon for the first few days I’m back. I was then able to work during the afternoon. During my “extra” days before I got back to work I was able to land a few small projects to do this week. This will keep me feeling productive because after a full day of phone calls I feel drained and unaccomplished. I love working, not talking about working, so I’m organizing my calendar accordingly.

And because of TwentyTen CRM I was able to keep it all organized and (relatively) stress-free.

I read a great post about how in this economy, we’re all entrepreneurs. Our educational system is built to print out mass quantities of specific “student templates,” like Accounting major, Finance major… and restock the large institutions.  While this works in a growing economy, when the Big 4 just hire all the Accounting majors, it doesn’t prepare them for a competitive job market. For the most part, graduating students have been commoditized. How do they compete with all the other Accounting majors when they are exactly the same in all relevant respects?

What our educational process needs is a dose of entrepreneurship. It needs to teach students to sell themselves, find a unique niche in the organization to serve (NOT a mass-produced, interchangeable cog), and establish a personal brand (or unique identity if you think the phrase “personal brand” belongs to those with scents). But most of all, students need to pursue something in which they’re interested. Too many have gone the Accounting/Finance track because it’s well defined  and makes good money (see Brittany’s post).

Those who followed the easy path straight into a career they didn’t really enjoy will most likely be the first to get cut. They aren’t passionate about their work, and don’t provide more value than they cost to the firm in the downturn.

Those who follow what they love make a job for themselves, either by working for themselves (startup, freelancing or consulting) or by convincing others to create a job at a company for them. When a company creates a job for you, you get to do exactly what you’re passionate about (by design), and there’s no competition for that position – who is more qualified at being you than you?

While the financial organizations might be “too big to fail,” the individuals at those organizations aren’t. When you work for someone else, there’s not much you can do to prevent yourself from getting fired – it’s mostly out of your hands.

Howard Lindzon came up with the term “too small to fail.” When you’re self-employed, you can’t fire yourself. If you need more money, you work harder or find different things to work on.

This is the entrepreneurial spirit, and a lot more people are going to need to find it if they want to succeed in this environment.

Great post. This should be required reading for all graduates, not just marketing majors.

I think an important but overlooked topic in college is managing your personal brand. In this digital age, we’re all building our own brands through facebook, flickr, twitter, and personal blogs.

In our junior or senior year, we’re all told to clean up our online personas to make sure you’re hire-able. For some this means deleting drunken photos, but for many they simply remove all digital references to themselves by deleting their facebook profile.

In our increasingly digital economy, a lack of an online persona is comparable to a drunken photo – a reason for not hiring someone. In a time when <a href=”http://englishcut.com/”>English tailors</a> have a blog, if you don’t show your digital competence by maintaining your personal brand online you’re much less valuable to a business than someone who does.

This doesn’t just apply to the tech and marketing sector. Many businesses are using their new hires to help them understand social media – if you have net natives inhouse, why hire a social media consultant?

Next time you’re up at A&M, you should give a talk on this subject.

In the first seminar of the Business Ethics series, the professor introduced us to his definitions of Morality and Ethics, which would form the basis of his discussions. While I disagree with the definitions, for the sake of argument I will accept them to see where it leads. First, the definitions:

Morality – one’s internal belief structure of what is good and true
Ethics – the core values defined by a community of what is good and true

You can probably see the problem already. What is ethical is whatever the community (either as a whole or just a majority) believes is right. The guys at Enron were ethical because they were doing exactly what their community (Enron) believed was right. To determine if they were moral, one must look to see if there was an internal conflict between what he did because of Ethics, and what he wanted to do because of his Morals.

You can counter this with the notion that the Enron community didn’t align with the larger community (our society), and that our society is where Ethics are truly derived. But this is wrong – by deriving Ethics from a community and not from universal truths, you recognize that there are multiple communities with differing ethics. Because Ethics are derived from that community, members from one community can’t say the Ethics of another community are wrong.

This leads us to one of the biggest problems in modern philosophy today – the concept of relativism. I won’t go deep into the philosophy behind it, but basically if you follow this line of thinking to its end, you reach a point where you find a community that represents any possible combination of Ethics. I can murder people as long as I associate with a community that believes murder is right.

The existence of a practice does not entail its being ethical. We must use our intuition to determine if it is truly right.

Is whistleblowing right or wrong? According to this definition of Ethics, it is always wrong because it always is in disagreement with the core values of a business (whether those be lieing, cheating, stealing…). In my mind, this fails the Intuition Test.

Which leads me to my argument: We shouldn’t be taught “Business Ethics” if Ethics is defined as principles which the business as a whole says is right. We should be taught “Business Morality” in order to question the norms in a business to ensure they truly are right.