In the meantime, we’ve been working on CRMbrella Pro. The Outlook integration looks pretty good, and I can see moving that into Standard. We’ll see–up to the product manager, Amy…
Available now on Amazon.com…
June 12, 2008 by Charlie CrystleCustomizing CRMbrella
June 9, 2008 by Charlie CrystleOne of our customers has clients in other countries, and wanted to be able to change the country listing.
Changing CRMbrella field values is quite easy. Simply click on Settings, then Customize CRMbrella, then Change CRMbrella Fields. You’ll see a list of fields, the values for which you can change, add to, and remove.
Spend some time in the customization section; a lot of the power of CRMbrella comes from the basis of customization that reflects your business. You then apply that power through SmartLists, which give you the ability to create highly targeted lists–segmentation. After you create those lists that reflect a useful segmentation of your customers and contacts, you can send targeted email and mail to them, creating separate messages for each list (where it makes sense).
Segmentation can go a long way toward helping you increase revenue, and will give you a lot more insight into your marketing activities than simple generic mailings. For instance, if you have 3 price points for your services–bargain, standard, and “executive”, for instance, you will want to send a different message to your potential bargain customers than the likely executive customers. SmartLists and Mailings allow you to do this, and customization gives you greater depth.
The Reports Section ties everything together and gives you insight into your business. You can run reports on any SmartList, giving you very specific, granular insight into how well things are working. For instance, out of people who were sent the last mailing, how many purchased? How much revenue did it generate?
In the Pro version, we’ll be adding a lot more custom fields, to give you even deeper customization. Let us know other ways we can improve, as well.
Importing from Outlook
June 4, 2008 by Charlie Crystle–it takes just a few clicks to import all of my contacts
–I can import folders and organize them into groups automatically.
–it doesn’t import emails! i know this, because I run the division, but it’s something I’d really like to see in the next version.
But then the point came up–do we really need to import emaiL? Can’t we just reference emails? And I think that’s a valid point–lightweight, etc.
But that only works for a single PC. We’d have to have the ability to search an index every PC on a network, or even Exchange, and while there are solutions for that kind of search and indexing, it’s not a trivial implementation.
What we’re finding is that while our target is very small business,larger businesses with more sophisticated needs really want to use this, but with a few more features. SalesWOrsk CRMbrella Pro will get us some of the way, but I can see beyond that…
anyone else try the Outlook import?
CRMbrella Users Group on Facebook
May 29, 2008 by Charlie CrystleNate’s the man on this one…
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=28710298432
And we have some early joiners…
The Power of the Desktop, Integrated with the Web
May 24, 2008 by Charlie CrystleThe Hybrid Web. When Dave and I started down this path we talked about leveraging the supercomputers on our desktops, which perform much better than the browser running on those computers. We new that the rich desktop would outperform web applications for a long time. But we also knew this Internet thing was gonna be big (people still laugh at that joke, which as usual, wasn’t mine). Chili!Soft was at the beginning of that, sitting between operating system giants, and ultimately consumed by one of them, Sun Microsystems (JAVA).
It’s still true. We built GiftWork and CRMbrella on a platform to leverage that power of the desktop but integrated with the web. The ridiculous statement “No software” pushed by the self-interested hosted applications providers does nothing to change that. Hosted applications (Software as a Service) were developed as a response to the shaky state of the desktop, it’s lack of reliability and slow performance a true drag on productivity.
But that was 1999. In 2008, the dominant operating system is stable (Windows XP), the PC is at least 100 times more powerful, RAM is cheap, storage is cheap, and just about everyone has a decent PC, if you would only uninstall the bloatware and freeware that clogs up our systems (and maintain it, yes, you still have to defrag once in a while).
But web applications are terrific. Not for minute by minute, hour by hour work like customer management, but for task-specific things, like some mapping (not all), email marketing, hosted remote backup, social apps, ecommerce, etc. None of these are apps you would spend all day working in, but they are all better suited for the web, not the desktop.
Except most of us work on both. So we developed the Hybrid Web, which merges the two. So far, we haven’t done a lot of obvious stuff on the web side of things. There’s some AJAX for grabbing info from our servers, the usage files are posted to the server for analysis and support, and you can map contacts out to Microsoft maps. And in the labs we’ve integrated wth Facebook ad Google Maps in some interesting ways.
But the core of what we’ll be delivering over the next year will come from two efforts: our SDK, which will allow developers to build their own add-ins to CRMbrella that integrate with the web (or desktop), and our online services infrastructure, which we are building out now.
What we’ve learned from customers is that we’re close but not quite where we need to be. First, one of the benefits of hosted applications (and shortcomings) is that they are browser-based and reachable from anywhere on the web. You don’t always have web access, so that’s a limitation.
But with CRMbrella, we don’t offer inherent web-based accessibilty. You can get there through Remote Desktop Connection and other methods, but that’s not seamless, and we are al about seamlessness and simplicity. So you’ll see us working hard on that issue, something we’ve solved in another project, but given the size of our customer base it needs a robust effort.
And then a lot is up to you. We can integrate with just about anything that has a decent web API. The question is, what makes sense to you? Integration with eBay? Amazon? InfoUsa? Yahoo? Let us know. Part of my job is to see the holes and build the solutions to them on your behalf. Call it pragmatic application of near-field discovery: a fancy way of saying there’s a simple solution by tying existing technologies together in a useful way.
Now that CRMbrella is ready for the market, the team is focused on the Pro version. I’m working on building the team, and sketching out near-field solutions. It’s an exciting time at Mission Research.
CRMbrella vs. Act: The Charles Wilson View…
May 22, 2008 by Charlie CrystleCharles Wilson is a friend from the West Coast. Nice to hear this shout out…
“If you’re a small business an you’re looking for a way to manage your prospects and customers, look no further.”
Clearly a man of good taste…
So far so good…customer feedback
May 22, 2008 by Charlie CrystleWe’ve had a few emails back from early users of CRMbrella, most of whom converted from SalesWorks. One of them did have an issue, but their IT consultant took care of it, so it looks like we’re going well so far.
One thing Schelle noticed in support was a bug in the Smartlist display of the Contact Description field. It’s fine in view contact, but we’ll fix it for the SmartList in the July update.
Keep the feedback coming!
CRMbrella 2.0 is Ready!
May 19, 2008 by Charlie CrystleVisit the site at http://www.crmbrella.com to download the new version. If you have SalesWorks, please uninstall it first. You can use your existing database with it, but back it up in case you run into any issue3s ( simple copy to another folder will do, or you can use SalesWorks to to the backup).
Thanks to Amy S, Shawn, Michelle, Kaitlyn, Jason, Mike, Steve, and especially Jeff for making this happen!
So the plan from here is to start slow–letting friends, customers, and consultant partners know, and learn from their use. We’ll start marketing after a few weeks, and if there are any issues we’ll try to fix them in that time. We’re planning an early July update if it’s needed.
In the meantime, we’re working on CRMbrella Pro, which will have more features but that same, easy to use interface. Uncluttered, feature-relevant software. Let us know your thoughts.
We’ll be posting daily, by the way, and not always about the software, so check back often, or subscribe. Thanks!
CRMbrella 2.0 to Ship May 19th, 11 AM
May 8, 2008 by Charlie CrystleWe’re almost positive, anyway. We’ve been making the name changes, polishing the hubcaps and dotting what needs to be dotted. It looks good, it’s stable, and has some of your suggestions in it.
The roadmap, though–where are we heading with this? Well, lots of good stuff is on the way. Ron has been working on the online services infrastructure. Tony is new and getting up to speed on the APIs, and is testing out some new mapping stuff. We’ll likely make his stuff available to you through the labs site (as soon as we set that up.
But SalesWorks Pro…er, CRMbrella Pro, that’s what’s next. Here’s what I know will absolutely be in there:
- role-based administration, so you can limit who sees and does what throughout the software
- a lead pipeline. there’s likely to be some debate about the best way to do this, so jump in and speak your mind. I’m personally designing this, and I have some specific biases after thinking about it for, oh, 10 years. I built the pipeline application for ChiliSoft’s internal sales team.
- Outlook, QuickBooks, and handheld integration
- importing from Plaxo, Act, and others
- virtually unlimited custom fields
- more reports
So we have a lot to work on. We’re targeting October 15th for the release, which means Beta 1 will be by the beginning of August. We hope you’re along for the ride, and contribute to making this the best software for small businesses!
