Technology has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years and one of the biggest issues I’ve had since I started my businesses online, has been tracking sales and enquiries.

Back when I used to provide leads to other companies (something I no longer do – it’s more profitable to use them to feed myself), it was difficult to get follow-up information for my enquiries from the third parties I provided them to.

That’s a lot easier now, because all of my sites for business are made using WordPress.

One of my favourite (paid) plugins is Gravity Forms because it’s just the simplest and most comprehensive form builder for WordPress, with an excellent back-end that stores all the responses in the WordPress database, so none are ever lost.

Today, I opened an account with Highrise from 39Signals, in preparation of my forthcoming business name change and the formal expansion into commercial building surveying.

Highrise is a Customer Relationship Management system that will help keep track of contacts, enquiries and sales – and it lets me categorise what business is coming in – for example, roof surveys, asbestos surveys, condition surveys etc.

It also shows me, at a glance, what each deal is worth and how much each client (and contact within the client company) has spent with me.

This is of course, something I should track anyway, but I’ll admit to being sloppy in this area – my accounts software does a similar job, though it’s harder to extract that information.

I’m in the process of showing our staff how Highrise can benefit us by keeping all documentation about our various clients in one place. To begin with, I was only concerned with enquiries that come in by telephone, but then I searched the WordPress plugins…

Sure enough, there’s a WordPress plugin for Highrise – and it takes entries from any forms submitted on any of my web sites (after installing on them of course) and sends the information directly to Highrise.

This is going to make my business life a lot easier.

Take a look at Gravity Forms and the various ways to extend it – it really is an invaluable tool for very little money.

I finally succumbed to getting an iPad last month. The reason was simply that I wanted something light enough to carry around whilst on my travels, that could be used to browse the web, use Skype to phone home and to upload photographs from an SD card to my web server using FTP.

Now, I should point out that the iPad does neither of these things straight out of the box, so in order to do what I wanted, I had to buy a camera connection kit and get an app that would import images, resize them and then upload them to my server. Surprisingly, the app was free and it worked like a dream.

My business partner brought his netbook with him. It was little, or no heavier than the iPad and took up as little space in his bag. The netbook runs a cut-down version of Windows 7, but in all honesty, I couldn’t really tell what those differences were. Perhaps if it were needed for process-heavy tasks, those differences might be more apparent.

When we arrived at our destination in Kenya, in a UK Army base, the limitations of the iPad soon identified themselves. To be fair, it wasn’t so much the iPad, but the fact that it kept dropping the wireless signal, which in turn was more the fault of the way the wireless system we were logging onto.

The netbook had the same problem, but the flexibility of the netbook allowed us to buy a dongle and a month’s unlimited Internet for around £40, which proved to be our saving grace.

From the moment we connected that dongle, the iPad was redundant because the netbook did everything we needed to do and more. With a permanent reliable Internet connection available at all of the places we visited (even the very remote places), we were able to complete all of our on-site surveying work, get our photographs and survey sheets onto the netbook and upload them to our web server to allow the back-end work to be completed by our staff in the office in the UK.

The iPad wasn’t used after that, apart from an hour or so at the airports on the way home, where it performed it’s task as a web browser and Skye interface perfectly well.

I came to the conclusion, quite early on in this trip, that the iPad is little more than a toy, a sort of big brother to the iPhone, but less useful and more cumbersome.

My love affair with Apple is well and truly over. PC’s rock and in future, I’ll trust my away from home communications to laptops or netbooks – nothing beats them for versatility, no matter how many apps you can download from iTunes.

As for my iPad, it has sat on my bed side cabinet, under a pile of books for the past two weeks and will probably remain there for the foreseeable future – unless one of my sons wants it.

Since declaring my departure from the domain industry to concentrate on developing our surveying practice, a lot has happened.

Let me start by saying that it could all be coincidental, but the past month has seen a significant increase in the number of enquiries we have received and the number of sales we’ve closed.

Turning off computers and phones after office hours has had no detrimental affect and of course, the weekend calls have stopped and allowed me to relax and do little than enjoy myself, which is an added bonus that is sometimes ignored by those of us who are self employed. Winding down and relaxing is not as easy as some suggest!

One of the web sites I run has done particularly well. Without going into too much detail, it’s another specialist service site that is there to capture enquiries that should lead to surveying work.

It is so niche that no other building surveying firm targets this market to any degree.

Yet it’s one that brings in not only super quality enquiries, but also very high value back-end sales.

Given that my business partner and I like to concentrate on the lower hanging fruit, we have concentrated on the surveying elements only.

However, in the past few weeks, it has become obvious to us that we are potentially missing a trick.

We have seen a lot of evidence of demand for a specialist service that is already available, but not widely promoted. In fact, even searching online for it won’t take you to a single competent service provider. I know, because I’ve tried.

Coincidentally, I happen to own the exact search term domain names  for this service, so subconsciously at least, I did recognise the potential at some stage in the past.

Ordinarily, I would simply try to find a supplier of the service and do a deal with them – but my experience in this particular niche has shown me that this is a service we would probably need to offer ourselves, or fund somebody else’s entry into the market and take the lion’s share, as costs are pretty high.

Focusing on the business has allowed us to stop and take a look at the enquiries we are getting in. At the moment, we are getting between one and four daily enquiries for this potential new service, without any form of promotion, apart from some throw-away advice on the afore-mentioned web site.

That throw-away advice has turned us into perceived experts in the subject and therefore we’re getting the calls.

Whether we want to take this little diversion, I don’t know. At he moment, we’re busy preparing for our surveying trip to Kenya and cramming in as much work as possible before we leave at the end of next week. It’s funny how when you know you’re going to be away, much more urgent work suddenly flows in through the door.

At least now I don’t have the distractions I used to have and the ones that do come along are based on demand, not on domain potential!