The professional photography thread is very interesting. I'm wondering if any other video production/interactive media companies are using Daylite and how they've set things up.

We've just migrated from Now Up to Date, and we're very interested in the opportunity and job tracking possibilties.

Chris

What market do you cater to? This may help to get the ball rolling. I'm sure opportunities are pretty much the same across the board. But explain a little of what you're trying to track in the jobs.

We don't cater to any particular niche. A large percentage of what we do is corporate video - marketing, sales, training. But we also do commercials and interactive pieces (CDs, DVDs, interactive for the web).

What we need to do here is the called the 'interview process'. The first and optional part of Daylite is the 'getting new business' which is done with the contacts and opportunities area. We then move to the 'delivery of what was promised' and we end up figuring out the sharing though this - i.e. calendars and what not.

So let's start with the first questions:

How do you get new customers?
How do you classify your contacts/leads?
Do potential customers call or email you? (i.e. after seeing a banner ad or yellow page entry)

How do you determine that a 'lead' is serious enough that you invest time in getting their business?

Once you've determined they are serious, what are the steps that you typically go through to 'close' the deal?

When you send them an estimate, what kind of line items are typically in the estimate?

Typically - why do you win a deal? why do you lose a deal? why would a deal get cancelled or suspended?


Remember - this is the 'optional' part. You can go straight to the project implementation stuff. If you are more interested in that - let me know.

Along the same lines, what would be nice is to have some templates that are industry specific. For example, in Video Production, a template that lists all the various steps involved in doing a project: covering Pre-Production, Production, Post-Production. Is there something like this available for Daylite? That would be extremely helpful.

We've found that it's easiest to make our own pipelines. Once I got my head around it, we were able to make opportunity and project pipelines easily. Figuring out the milestones takes some thought.

We're constantly tweaking them. We have a few different ones for different types of projects.

I would like to see additional information on film/video production setups. Are there companies who are providing Daylite templates for our industry?

Hi everyone,

Marketcircle is working on a template that is specifically catered to the Film & Video Production industry. We would like to gain some insight into this industry (ie. workflow, interaction of business) in order to make these templates as useful as possible.

Would anyone be interested in participating in this template creation process by answering some production related questions and critiquing the templates?

Please send me an email at cwong@marketcircle

Thanks for your help!

Candy

I would highly recommend that you research the current players in the field, primarily the Sales Rep systems (as opposed to the VERY custom backoffice scheduling systems).

http://reptools.com
http://inentertainment.com/
http://www.englishcomp.com/products.html

These systems are niche developed and have all been around for years and years. What they do well is industry specific labels and pages - terms like "Call Sheet" are important to a busy sales rep. When I show Daylite to Executive Producers, they want to know if they can change the Opportunity label to Boards. When I say "No," I see the light turn off in their heads. The systems also cost several thousand per user and take a long time to custom integrate.

This is a great thread! A major part of our film and video production business is providing camera equipment and crews to productions - mostly television - like ESPN, History Channel, PBS, etc. and commercial/corporate shoots. We have been using Daylite for about a year now, and feel we have only penetrated the surface.

Our production manager goes back and forth on making a shoot be a Project, or simply and all day appointment, or both. We would also like to be able to generate call sheets, which pulls in information about a shoot and makes it available to our crews. But can't seem to get a handle around reports, and lists. Also, have no idea the way pipelines work, as they just seem to be a symbolic path - showing an icon of where you are. Activity sets seem interesting, and are starting to explore them.

We also have a tremendous amount of equipment to manage, and it would be great if this HD camera, and that Light kit, could somehow be attached to a specific shoot along with the people and contacts who make up the client and crew.

And then to be able to print this all out into some kind of a call sheet report would be great!

Was wondering if anyone in my business has taken Daylite to this level, or if anyone within Daylite could offer some advice.

By the way, a robust printed or printable manual that goes WAY deeper than the user guide would be a tremendous help. The online stuff is fine, but I consider it supplementary. I would love to master this program, and can't seem to do it without a good manual. Anybody written a book on this?

Sorry for the long note. Any answers would be great. Thanks!

Tom Miller
Big Pictures Media, Inc.
www.BigPicturesMedia.com



Anyway, was wonderin

Greetings Tom,

We have been on Daylite for almost 4 years now (OMG... has it been that long!) and have managed to put into practice most but not all of the features in Daylite to dramatically improve our business processes. The weird thing is the better you learn how to systematize and capture your business needs, the more you learn about the limitations of ANY toolset you work with.

For us Daylite does many things incredibly well:

* Manage hundreds of groups and many thousands of contacts
* Manage thousands of opportunities, with different pipelines, sources of leads and pricing structures
* Collect all email conversations with a client from all of our office (we call it corporate memory)
* Share personal and public calendars, so we can record vacation time, share PR, Sales and Production meetings
* Manage basic projects, sort of...
* Sync with all our iPhones
* Handle mailing list sends to our different groups - this has been very powerful on its own

Areas we are making progress but still struggling with
* Building custom reports that help make sense of lots of information - we need lots of math (report aging, mean and mean averages of sales, specialized charts) that really just look better and have more functionality when managed in Numbers or Excel.
* Activity sets - can't use them for opportunities, which kills us
* Forms - we STILL have a problem reporting and filtering on forms, which makes them very difficult to rely on
* Resources - we are just looking into using this feature, but haven't found the right need yet
* Syncing online and offline - this used to be great, but now with Sync Services we are seeing some of our records duplicate 6 to 10 times. Online sync often times crashes when I try to sync offline. Kind of a nightmare actually - managing 8 iPhones, 8 Address Books, private and public Daylite Calendars just does not make sense yet.

Areas we we don't use
* Complex projects - try printing out a multiweek calendar with several people on a project with tasks and activities and you have yourself a mess. No gant charting, fine, but our PM will simply not adopt a tool that he cannot output useful reports for the team
* Estimates - not useful for us. We have to use extra fields to capture for the different variables we have in pricing
* Thresholds - Wish we could quantify our needs this well. Just don't know how to get my arms around it though

So... If you can track all your assets with the resources and assign them to teams AND develop useable call sheets, Daylite is the right application for you. My recommendation is to map out the standard call sheet, literally scribble in all the names of the fields you would capture info into, and then find a Daylite Partner to build you that report. Then you can send me a copy for free for suggesting this

Otherwise, if your needs are greater than this, you may have to look into a mega-expensive specialized system like Xytech, which is what many Hollywood Rental services use to manage people and gear. Daylite is definitely a general purpose tool that is being bent and pushed to handle more specialized tasks, but it is just not as sophisticated in ultra-specialized fields.

Regards,

Bill Sewell
President
www.wiredrive.com

Thank you Bill, for all of that very helpful information. Yes, I feel like each of these features is almost what we need, but a few of us just need to take the time to learn about it more. Then we can implement it on a broader scale as we grow. I'll keep you posted!