New CRM’s will target Verticals

June 23rd, 2010 at 9:53 pm No Comments

I’ve always been involved with a lot of CRM projects but I’m starting to see a lot of change in the SMB area where our clients are beginning to adopt CRM products but interestingly enough it’s not the usual names that we talk about.  The “one CRM fits all” model is starting to die off I believe.  I think that CRM vendors that target specific verticals will become the winners in the future.

As CRM consultants we typically have one rule:

Never fit your business into a software’s process, make the software fit YOUR process

Easy enough?  It is very much so.  Packages such as Salesforce.com, Pivotal, Siebel to name a few allow you to do this quite easily.  Lower cost products such as Highrise and Tactile force you to adopt their processes, which for a lot of people isn’t a bad thing.  But let’s talk about a couple of real life scenario’s.

Your Neighbourhood Flooring Store

To protect the innocent I won’t specify names but I will talk about some success you can have with a vertical specific system.  We had some challenges with the software vendor implementing their product but overall they are on the right track once they kill some of the problems with their software.  The main problems with their software is that they are obsessed with AJAX technology that it slows down a browser dramatically.  Anyways that’s another topic for another day.

Their system is wonderful other than the slowness.  The product itself is everything a flooring company would ever need, in fact it probably should since they designed it for flooring companies.  It gives you scheduling to book appointments to install floors, allows for quotations and invoicing while also providing a comprehensive product catalogue.

This is cool.  Not only can you track prospects and clients in the system but now you can instantly convert them through your processes.

The Local Car Dealership

Once again, to protect the innocent.  A leasing company I had worked with in the past purchased a comprehensive auto dealer program which gave them everything they needed as a car leasing company.  They could track inventory, depreciation of inventory, leased vehicle payments and buyouts as well as a whole quoting system to provide information to their prospective clients on their expected payments.

Again, this system was built specifically for the industry but gave everybody from the reception to the used car sales man up to the CEO a powerful tool that gave them a holistic view on their business and customers.

The trends will continue but the way I see it is if you are in the market for a CRM take a look around for a product that has been built for you, as in your industry.  If they don’t exist today they are probably well underway in development.

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Harnessing the Power of Customer Data

June 21st, 2010 at 10:49 pm No Comments

I talked to a lot of people on a regular basis about their customers and their businesses in general.  One of the things that I notice most is that people are not realizing the opportunity that they have available to them in terms of the information that they have on their customers.  A lot of people’s reactions to “using customer data” for their business scares them a bit because their thinking that it is intrusive.

I’m here to tell you that it isn’t!  Using this information, with your customers consent, allows you to better serve your customers.  How about a birthday card?  Maybe an anniversary card?  It can be anything that you want.  You have this data and if you don’t have all of it then you can simply ask.

Data is so important today and I once heard from another business owner who is in the mode of acquiring other businesses how he is looking for businesses that have strong databases.  He puts the value of a database very high because of the impact that it has on how a business operates.

We had a really creative review of Mobile CRM’s last week but now we’re going to get back to basics.  Let’s capture information on our customers through the following mechanisms:

  1. Phone Calls
  2. Emails Requesting Updated Info
  3. Surveys
  4. Existing Sales Information (what patterns can you find?)

You can look all around to find some important information kicking around.  What data do you have available at your finger tips?

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-06-20

June 20th, 2010 at 2:33 am No Comments
  • Great day after meeting with several of our clients #
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Mobile CRM Reviews: Week Roundup

June 18th, 2010 at 9:30 am No Comments

Well that was a lot of fun doing a parade through 4 of the more well known mobile CRM products out there.  It gave me a chance to mess around a bit more with these products than I have in the past.  Up until this past week I never really took the time to go through these Apps but now that I have I will admit I am a bit disappointed.  I really did expect more from all of them only because of the performance of tools I use on the web.

Highrise, Tactile and vTiger all seem to be trying to replace existing functionality.  As Paul commented on the Tactile CRM, his source has told him to expect a lot more and I think that’s exactly what we need coming our way.  Salesforce certainly has all of the features but again the problem is cost and always will be.  Although Salesforce attempts to show themselves as small business friendly at the end of the day they are geared towards the larger market.

vTiger, as is the same with the open source web version, is a bit of a pain to setup for the average user.  But that’s what you get with open source unless you pull in a programmer type to help you out.

Highrise is also on the same path as Tactile in delivering more powerful features and I would presume you can look forward to those soon.

But at the end of the day, even though it’s expensive, Salesforce is the standard as of right now.  It boasts all of the features you’d hope for on a mobile CRM and it really empowers your sales team to make business decisions properly and deliver information to customers.

I know that I can go a whole day on my iPhone without having to touch a laptop when it comes to surfing Internet and checking email.  The same goes for managing my sales pipeline, I want it in the palm of my hand.

We’ll have to revisit these Apps again in a few months to see where things have gone.

This was a lot of fun this week and we’ll have to come up with something else creative to do next week.

Have a great weekend!

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Mobile CRM Review: Salesforce Mobile

June 17th, 2010 at 6:14 pm No Comments

Well for this weeks quadruple reviews of Mobile CRM apps we are now left with Salesforce.com.  This has a ton of pluses unfortunately it also has a lot of negatives that I am going to get into.  Salesforce is known as the king of cloud CRM and rightfully so as they were the first to really pioneer this service about a decade ago and now we are seeing a wide adoption of the product.

Features:

  • Leads
  • Contacts
  • Accounts
  • Activities
  • Dashboards
  • Much More

Review

Salesforce is by far the most complete Mobile CRM of the 4 editions that we reviewed this past week.  The concepts of Salesforce Mobile is simply built around the Accounts and beneath that account is a series of contacts, leads, relationships, activities…etc.  It is structured quite well and the way you’d expect from a web-based CRM product.

The Dashboards I absolutely love.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sold CRM products based on the Dashboards features.  Salesforce has an incredible Dashboard utility that borrows directly from it’s web-based counterpart.  It’s absolutely easy to use and provides the vital information you’d need on the sales.

As I’ve harped on all week about other products, Salesforce delivers the goods to track everything including opportunities.  This is crucial I think for any CRM product.

Now the bad news.  It’s expensive.  Although they offer single user editions I’ve always found Salesforce to be expensive especially when the minimum requirement for users is typically 5 for any of the editions (except for the single user).  So you’re looking at several hundreds of dollars to get in on this action but hey, if you can find the ROI is appropriate for you by using this product then why not.

Salesforce is by far the best of the 4 that I’ve looked at this week and I can tell you that many of the other products will continue to evolve and grow which should begin to compete with the features of Salesforce.

Tomorrow is the round up as we do a quick summary of the week.

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Mobile CRM Review: Tactile CRM iPhone

June 16th, 2010 at 9:56 am 2 Comments

For our third review we’re going to look over Tactile CRM’s offering for the iPhone.  Appropriately and to help make sure nobody gets misled they have named the product: Tactile CRM Activities.  I have to admit, in comparison to both vTiger and Highrise, this App gets it.

Why?  Well they didn’t duplicate the contact list and they didn’t duplicate the calendar.  They brought in the crucial part which is activities.  Although I don’t have my sales portion built into this App, I still like how they didn’t try to be something more than they should.

Features:

  • Activities

Review

So here we go with probably the simplest of the 4 iPhone App’s that I’ve decided to review.  Tactile CRM is a great solution that provides an iPhone App that is built around the Activities tab of Tactile CRM.  When setting up your iPhone all you need to do is access the admin section of your Tactile CRM instance and enable API Tokens or External Data.  Once you’ve done this all you need to do is take that API Token key and punch it into your iPhone.  I found the easiest way to do this was to copy and paste it into an email to myself which showed up on my iPhone.  From there I copied and pasted it back into the iPhone App.

Now, if you’re expecting this app to give you any sales information you’re going to be out of luck.  This is strictly a to do list and event listing app.  In fact this is why Tactile made the smart move to call the App “Activities”.  It does what it’s supposed to do and it isn’t over the top.

There is a lot of room for improvement with this App and I think that you will see Tactile continually evolve the App to the point where people can do sales tools.

Overall, great for activities but as a CRM component it simply isn’t a CRM product without using the web interface through a browser.

Finally, tomorrow we will go over the expensive and king of the land when it comes to enterprise cloud CRM in Salesforce.com.

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Mobile CRM Review: vTiger for iPhone

June 15th, 2010 at 9:05 am No Comments

So we had to start this whole review thing off with my favourite area of topic: open source.  Get this…an open source product such as vTiger (www.vtiger.com) actually has their own application before the other well known open source (or commercial source) player Sugar CRM.  Again, when I mean application I mean Application app (see my previous post from last week).  I will qualify my statement that Sugar does have a web app that works great too but we’re not on that for this topic.

Let’s get into vTiger.

Features:

  • Calls
  • Meetings
  • Tasks
  • Contacts
  • RSS Feeds

This particular version of the vTiger iPhone App was built by Martin Henke (www.martin-henke.com) who is the programmer behind this App.  Much like many components of any open source project, Martin took it upon himself to build a vTiger App and charged a modest $0.99 cents for his app.

Review

I have to admit it was a bit confusing after installing the App the first time.  After downloading it directly onto my iPhone I went into the vTiger icon to see that I wasn’t prompted to start loading my data from vTiger in right away.  So after fumbling around I found that you need to go into your Settings > vTiger configuration area prior to using it fully.

Warning: In order to get vTiger iPhone to work with your installation you need to install some files into your PHP vTiger Installation.  Instructions are here.

The App itself, as with Highrise, is very limited in what you can do with it.  Your basically stuck with Contacts and Calendar management.  It’s definitely a nice addition but even at $0.99 cents I have a hard time justifying the purchase since all it’s really done is replace my existing Contact and Calendar on my iPhone.

I’m still looking for that elusive Deals/Opportunities component.  I really think that a tool that provides sales details will become the ultimate iPhone/iPad application without a doubt.

The contacts component is easy to use since it is exactly like the iPhone Contact tool.  The calendar functionality also features both events and to-do’s.  These are both as easy as can be and feature all of the options you’d expect from inside vTiger.

My final thoughts on vTiger for iPhone is that it is simply a very basic contact management tool.  It is easily duplicating effort with your contacts/calendar items but the beauty of it is that it utilizes the web services provided by vTiger CRM so if you want to keep your contact data in sync with your hosted version of vTiger then you’re good to go.

Tomorrow we will be looking at Tactile CRM.

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The iPhone Business Card Scanner, My new love

June 14th, 2010 at 9:02 pm No Comments

Like many of my fellow iPhone counter parts we find ourselves spending a lot of time trying out new Apps from the App store.  I constantly find myself on the couch late at night fiddling around with my iPhone and a couple of days I came across the coolest iPhone App for a small business guy.

It’s called: Business Card Reader.

That’s it, it’s a simple and straight to the point name.  In fact, it is perfect.  Well, almost.  If you’ve shelled out $300 + on a card scanner device you’ll know that these things are great but sometimes are never exact when extracting information out of them.  I will admit that this App certainly has its hiccups as much as any card scanning device but it works as good if not better.

How does it work?  Easy.  I take a picture of a business card and it then scans the card for the pertinent information.  Once the data is stored on my phone it asks me whether or not I want to merge it with an existing contact or create a new one.

Now because I’m also a Google apps user my contacts are automatically sync’d up with my GMail contacts which allow me to do a quick extraction and import into my CRM.  Life is good.

Make sure to check out the Business Card Reader.

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Starbucks: The Monday Routine

June 14th, 2010 at 2:47 pm No Comments

Monday’s at Starbucks has become my regular routine. Each Monday we sit down at Starbucks toget the week rolling.

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Mobile CRM Review: Highrise for iPhone V1.01

June 14th, 2010 at 9:05 am No Comments

I have to admit that when it comes to small business, Highrise is a pretty special product.  From the guys at 37Signals and their most famous brand which is Basecamp comes a simplified CRM product for small business owners.  I will admit that when we’re building our own Eligeo CRM we are targeting Highrise in a big way.

The review today is about Highrise – Floor 13 iPhone App.  The guys at 37Signals approached the team at Floor 13 to develop a sophisticated App for iPhone, iPad and iTouch that would help improve the customer experience.  I will go as far to say that Highrise is the top product out there when it comes to iPhone today.

Features:

  • Contacts
  • Notes
  • Emails
  • Voice Notes
  • Tasks

The version I am using is for the free edition of Highrise however I have seen a demonstration by a colleague of mine using the more advanced features such as voice notes and any other type of upload.  The free features are quite powerful but you get the best bang for your buck when you actually upgrade into one of the paid versions of Highrise as it gives you a lot more cool features to mess around with.

Review

Installing Highrise is a piece of cake.  Simply download the App into your iPhone and then all you need to do is provide your URL (yourname.highrisehq.com) along with your username and password that you typically use to login online.  The free edition has contact, companies, and tasks available to you out of the box.  With the advanced features you can actually take voice notes.

Now, the iPhone app is missing a lot.  It’s almost like a basic “viewing” tool rather than a fully functional tool which allows adding, editing and deleting.  In fact, unless you have no real activity in adding new contacts and companies to your database then this might not be the App for you.  There’s no ability to add contacts and companies on the fly and one of the more crucial features for a CRM is the deal management systems.  There’s none what so ever available.

In fairness to 37Signals they have said they wanted to get something out there for people to use rather than nothing however I think they have fell short in a big way with their iPhone App.  While I like the voice note features and note taking I think it is missing things in a big way when it comes to overall tracking of information.

I always tell people it’s easy to separate yourself from your computer and use strictly your iPhone because all of those features have been moved from the Internet to your phone app.  Who really goes online to check movie schedules when you can pull up Flixster for a quick movie showtime list.  Unfortunately with Highrise you will find yourself still using the online version through your web browser since it’s still absolutely necessary.

I like where these guys are taking this App and I am looking forward to future releases but I’m going to be blunt that I think they should have held off on the iPhone App until enough features were polished.

What did you think about Highrise?  Does it provide you with the necessary features for your business?

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s review on vTiger Mobile CRM.

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