“John, is that Susan looking for more sales?”

“Get up and give her some Opportunities!”

Wouldn’t Susan be so happy if that was so easy? I call this the sales conundrum.

The title of this post can be written differently. We can write “The Conversation is the Opportunity.” We can also reverse it as, “The Opportunity is in the Conversation.”

In the sales context, the words “opportunity” and “conversation” are synonymous.

Everyone in the room wants to drive up the sales volume. But not everyone understands that the key is in the conversation. If you can drive up the conversation volume, sales volume becomes a by-product.

This leads us to an interesting place. How do we drive up the conversation volume?

I’ll be looking at touch points. All the sorts of strategies and tools that drive touch points. This is where I’d ask questions about my sales organisation, because that’s where sales...

Almost every insurance company with a tied agency force in Singapore have some sort of initiatives to push for Annual Reviews to be done by their Financial Consultants.

So far, it seems to be met with a sort of resistance that’s hard to put a finger on. The short version of the story is that it hasn’t been very successful.

But why? (If you’d like to skip the story and get straight to the designs,
here’s your escape tunnel)

Most Financial Consultants understand that if they don’t conduct the review, another competing Financial Consultant will be doing that job for them. The truth of the matter is quite simple - the failure to conduct annual reviews result in a sizeable leakage of sales commission for the consultant, and loss of revenue for the agency director and the insurance company.

Unfortunately, the motivation isn’t strong enough to overcome the barrier that’s standing between...

Since October 2014, Singpost has increased the postage rates for local mails from $0.26 to $0.30.

As a gesture of goodwill, Heartzmail has absorbed this increase up till November 2015 so you get a little more muscles in your account balance. Hope that has provided a soft gentle breeze on your sails.

From 1st December 2015 onwards, all postage rates shall revert to the official rates charged by Singpost.

Once again, thank you for being with us.

OK, we hit a stone, stumbled a little and almost fell. Well almost.

The past year have seen me and my associate developers dug rather deep into additional tech development for the Heartzmail print queue. The key area of work has been to implement an integration with Ablemedia’s HQ-postcard system. (more on the Ablemedia story in another blog post)

As exciting as it is, the coin always comes with both sides. As systems get more complex, especially when interfacing with different programming languages and technology layers, bad things can happen.

Legacy issues and regression bugs, to name a few.

One of the side effect of this new work got our job completion and transaction system into some troubles. So this is what we did as an interim solution.

1. Remove all duplicate records.
2. Channel the transaction updates to another table for monitoring.
3. Halt the production copy. We need to choose...

Heartzmail users are die-hard regulars. Many of them have been using us for many years. It’s been a joy to see that we’re able to add value to the relationships they’ve been developing with their clients.

Except that for two to three times, I had wished I’m born tomorrow. And it’s nothing more than a nightmare of our own making - caused by collation errors.

This means the front and back of the cards are printed wrongly. And this also means that the wrong card can be inserted into the wrong envelope because we used to print the addresses on the envelopes.

A little about why

We’ve invested in more automation in the past couple of years by adding new machines. Our lovely staff even labelled these machines with names such as “betty”, “nancy”, etc. I thought that was quite an adorable idea - till I realise that storms are named after women too.

These machines needed the very same love...

I’m glad to have accomplished much in this release. Some of the innovations have been lingering in my head for some time and finally they’re seeing the light of day.

Effective from 8th of December 2015, the following are in production;

1. Two new curated design categories. Seven designs now from five before.

2. Different designs for male/female under all age profile groups.

3. Full colour design for the inside of the card. Pink/blue backgrounds depending on the gender of your recipient.

4. Your profile picture is now inside the card instead of behind. This guarantees that all recipients will get to see you.

So without further ado, here are the new designs.

Here are the steps to take to get your batch of Christmas cards prepared for sending.

1. Write to samuel@heartzmail.com. Indicate your preferred design (A, B or C)

2. Sign in to your heartzmail account. In the Activities page, tick under the RG column for those you want to send. Remember to save your selections on every page.

3. Ensure you have enough balance in your accounts for the cards you want to send. Once your cards are sent, you’ll see them in your transactions.

Design A

Design B

Design C

Here to support you
If you have questions or need further assistance, please feel free to call us at +65 6871 8875 or email samuel@heartzmail.com