Use Highrise to Manage Your Consulting Business

As a consultant, it's likely you're working on multiple projects at one time, juggling back and forth, at different stages in each. Not only are you handling projects, but you're managing the people associated with those projects too.

Highrise can help you organize the entire process, by keeping your projects and contacts all in one place. You'll never have to question when you have a deadline to hit, which client you need to speak with when, or where you are in that conversation.

Step 1: Set up a Case per project

Cases help you organize information about a particular project all in one place. You can keep notes, emails, files, any data you might need together.

As you move forward, you can associate contacts in your Highrise account with specific Cases, to keep much needed information, and people, together.

Step 2: Forward important emails to a Case's dropbox address

You probably have many important emails in your inbox from clients on everything from project specifications to due dates. Each Case you set up in Highrise comes with its own dropbox address, a special email address you can use to forward emails directly into Highrise and the specific Case.

Not only will the email be associated with the Case, Highrise will also connect the email to the contact record that corresponds with the  From field on the email.

That person not in your contacts yet? Highrise will create a brand new contact record for them.

Step 3: Create tasks on Cases

Projects are driven by deadlines and items that need to be completed. You can create tasks and associate them with any Case to keep track of everything that needs to be done for a specific project.

Use categories with tasks to identify specific areas of a project and easily determine what needs to be accomplished at a glance.

Step 4: Create contacts and connect them with Cases

Anyone you're working with, from vendors to clients, can be added to Highrise. There's three ways you can create a contact:

• Manually by selecting New Contact on the top of any Highrise page
• By forwarding emails to your dropbox address
• Via a bulk import from a spreadsheet.

Once you have those contacts in Highrise, connect them to a Case by clicking on  add/remove with Who's Involved and search for the contact you'd like to add to the Case.

Other tips

• Use Deals to manage pending contracts. You can note how much the project is worth, and whether it is pending, won, or lost. Just like Cases, emails, files, tasks, and contacts can associated with a Deal. See our tips on creating a pipeline: here.
• Connect Highrise tasks to your ICS compatible calendar (like Google Calendar or Outlook), and keep on top of what you need to accomplish even outside of Highrise.

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