The CRMbrella Blog

First, THANK YOU to everyone who has contributed to this process! It’s been hell for us, but the last 5 days have been a complete joy becuase of you and your great ideas here. 

VOTE HERE (click) 

I especially want to throw shout outs to Craig Lauer, who is a big influencer here at the company (freelance but for a long, long time) and has really shaped a lot of the product and language around it. Also, Charles Wilson had some great names.

I personally liked  Worksy–cute, fun, and will make a great product name for someone. Thanks, Tiffani. Ed Westin had some cool entries, as did Jasper and James David. Jason was relentless; my favorite of his was Fester, just for the Addams Family reference.

JBDean had flair for the functional, and Prajjwal won some fans with “IceCRM”, pronounced “ice cream”. Michael reminded us of works, works, works with about 20 entries; I liked Lucid from Walter, but one of our criteria was that we wanted the URL. Patrick’s Hermes was popular with one of our developers, Tony, who likes Greek mythology but conceded that we need to be a bit more mainstream.

Craigs’ SimpleWorkDay was one of my favorite’s as well, but Pink Girly won my support for EllaBellaU simply for the fun of it. (U for Umbrella or University, unsure).

We also hired a branding expert–PureTungsten.com. I read a number of Phil’s articles last week. Phil had a number that we liked–he’s really quite thoughtful and good.

You can vote on the finalists here: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB2283CYQSE3B

Thank you!

There have been some really great suggestions over the past 4 days! So a bit about our decision process. First, we have some internal names developed. Most of them suck pretty bad, so it’s unlikely they’ll get chosen.

Next, we’ve retained a branding firm, which has come up with 12 names, 5 of which we really like. On Friday we asked them to take another pass because we like the direction and some of the names, but we’d like to see what else they can come up with.

At 11 am tomorrow we’ll hear back from the firm. At noon, I’m buying the team lunch and kicking around the names you’ve provided along with the internal ones and the branding firm ones.

Sometime in the afternoon tomorrow, we’ll choose the name, and if it’s yours, bells will ring throughout the land and we’ll cut you a check.

I want to thank everyone for their thoughtfulness and creativity–some really great choices. Naming is one of the hardest things I’ve had to go through. And my guess is we’ll still end up naming it something that’s not perfect, just pretty good. I’m ok with that–the love of the product creates affection and respect for the name, not the other way around.

I do hope you’ll download and try the software!

Thanks. You can keep suggesting until 11 am Tuesday EST.

Things to know to help you name:

1) Download the software. Try out the sample database–get a feel for it.

2) The price is $129 for Standard and $299 for Pro (Pro is due Oct 1).;

3) It’s multi-user.

4) It runs on the desktop, but is integrated with web services like email marketing, mapping, Facebook, etc.

5) Post your name selection in the post comments of the PREVIOUS post–appreciated.

SOME BACKGROUND:
We make GiftWorks Fundraising software and have 7000 nonprofit customers. The new software, though, is for small business and is currently called CRMbrella (long story). We’re renaming it by Monday, and launching it in 2 weeks, though we’ve already got about 100 customers who really love it.

The Pro version will have a nice sales Pipeline, real-time integration with Outlook, Quickbooks integration, pretty cool calendar and task management, and a transmogrifier weapon throw in for good measure.

CRMbrella home page...

Coming down the road is remote backup and integrated email marketing. While the software runs on the desktop, it’s integrated with web services. Try the 30-day trial here: http://www.crmbrella.com/freetrial.html. Thanks!