Salestrakr

Universal Access to Salestrakr

I had a customer ask me this week whether we supported an older version of Internet Explorer (the one that came with Windows 2000.)  I believe he is using IE 5.  But, Salestrakr is an AJAX based application (which stands for asynchronous JavaScript and XML.)  And unfortunately, our customer must move to the latest IE (version 7 or Beta 8) or to Firefox.  And given that support for Windows XP is supposed to end this month, perhaps a move to Vista (and thus a more powerful computer) is required.  I feel for this customer because it is now very apparent that they must get a new computer.  It's not the worst time to do so.  I saw a great new Toshiba at Office Depot yesterday for only $500.  But, for a small business, each dollar is scrutinized.  I know, Salestrakr is a small business.

But, things are better now with AJAX.  I've tested Salestrakr on IE and Firefox on XP and Vista and it works exactly the same.  Same is true on the Mac and on Linux.  A Salestrakr user can go into an Apple store and work from one of their machines or go to an Internet cafe in another part of the world and know they can gain access to their data.  Sure, you do that with any old web site.  But not if you rely on a sophisticated CRM/SFA client.  Salestrakr is essentially a client on the web but without the weight of a Java application or Flash. 

OK, I do have to admit something.  I tested Salestrakr today on my new Blackberry Pearl 8120.  The browser does not properly support AJAX.  Nor do the other mobile browsers.  Salestrakr is though offered in a lite HTML mode for mobile users.  I guess we'll have to celebrate advances in the PC world and push the device makers to catch up.

Social CRM

I read an article this past week at destinationcrm that references a Gartner prediction that "SocialCRM" will be at the center of change and growth in the CRM world.  According to the article "Social CRM does (help customers find important and qualitative information) this by providing sales people with the critical data needed to build relationships with customers, prospects, suppliers and vendors, all via one single interactive network."

Well, I'm glad Gartner and destinationcrm believes this.  We have for a while.  When you add a contact to Salestrakr (already very contact centric), Salestrakr then looks at the entered email addresses and then  searches the popular social networking sites for matching profiles.  Once Salestrakr makes a match, it puts a logo on the Salestrakr business card and provides a link from that logo to the appropriate profile on the social network.  Just another way to extend a relationship and bring unexpected value to our subscribers.

Freedom for Salestrakr

Salestrakr looks great and performs even better.  And thus we expect lots of new customers in the coming months.  People keep asking us how we will scale?  These questions were burning a few years ago.  But, with the maturation of open source, and with lower prices of hardware combined with much higher reliability, we no longer have to work so hard to squeeze blood from the stone.  We can really "throw hardware" at the problem. 

In our case, we utilize LAMP.  LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL PHP.  That's really it.  OK, we did write our own AJAX framework (and thus utilize Javascript and XML methods and external libraries to do what we need to do.) But LAMP forms our base.  Use of this base will keep Salestrakr easy to extend and scale (and use.)  Support is easier.  Thus, our costs are MUCH lower than they would be using most other technologies and methods on the market.

BTW, is that guy in the T-shirt Brad Pitt?

Strong Authentication

Yesterday there was an interesting email I received from Techrepublic concerning the top obstacles to user adoption of strong authentication.  In the email was an overview of a related webcast stating that in a recent survey, 70 percent of IT pros acknowledged that user names and passwords do not provide an adequate level of security.  And it seems the primary reason that a 2nd factor of authentication isn't used by the majority of logins is user resistance.  Users hate security tokens and certificates. 

Salestrakr has made it super easy.  A user can turn on 2 factor authentication and choose email, SMS or both as the method to receive their out of band password.  I've been using it for weeks now and the SMS receipt is immediate (and really simple.)  I wish we had the PR machine to be on this webcast.  Perhaps this isn't a user problem but a software vendor problem.

What are "Tags"?

Most business people today are reliant on search for our everyday activities.  We use Google to find things.  Google looks all across the Internet for terms and keywords in web pages and then associates those web pages with those terms. 

Salestrakr supports the tagging of contacts.  That is, it allows a keyword or term to be associated with or assigned to a contact record.  In Salestrakr, you decide the terms that are best for your contacts. Let's say you have many contacts in Seattle, tag them with the word "seattle".  And those contacts who are in the software business, tag them with software as well.  Those at Microsoft get an additional "microsoft" tag. 

THen when you're ready to find a contact, just go to the Tag Cloud, find your keyword, click on it and there you have all the contacts that share that key word.  This simple feature saves lots of time when your number of contacts has grow substantially.

Small to Medium Business are Driving On-Demand CRM

According to Art Hall at Alvarez & Marsal Business Consulting, 87% of Small to Medium Businesses (SMBs) are driving towards CRM deployments that are on-demand versus premise based.  And SMBs are driving the CRM space as a whole.  Even more interesting was a survey of SMBs by AMI-Partners showing that nearly 83 percent said that getting staff to use the software was their biggest CRM challenge, and the critical driver behind this was the complexity of the user interface.

My wife's company is looking to leave their industry leading Sales Force Automation (SFA) product and go with a different one.  Aha, I'll show them the future.  Online, on-demand, Web 2.0, AJAX, browser based encryption.  And more.  Problem is, they don't know the stats out there and want to stay in the same vein as before.  Unfortunately, that other one is just as hard, tied to Windows (server and client) and doesn't appear to add any new features or simplicity.  Why then change?  There's no overbearing IT department there.  I guess it just like one of our political candidates who is showing very popular with their offer of "Change" coupled with no details.  "It may be bad, but it's new and that's change!" 

Funny, my wife's company hails from the same city as that political candidate.  Up there, they make changes all the time to the Cubs organization and the Cubs just get worse. 

ARGHHH, some things never change.