Salestrakr Blog

Accounts and Contacts

Salestrakr is a wonderfully "flat" system.  That is, the database was designed to support a limited hierarchy of objects, enabling a prettier user interface and a really fast system.  Well, some things just could not be avoided.  We really needed to be able to allow for the creation of an account which then in turn contained contacts.  So, we kept our fast and flat database and at the same time created an account/contact methodology.  Why let these words only tell the story.  Just view the screencast!

Discover your Contacts' Social Networks

Salestrakr automatically discovers what social networks your contacts participate in. It uses the email addresses you enter for your contacts to see if any of those addresses are linked to an account on one of the following social networks: LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Hi5, Beb, Ringo, Multiplyo and Yahoo360. You don't have to do anything, this happens in the background.

An icon will appear in your contact's business card. Click on the icon to go to their social network page. This is a great way to better understand and connect to both your personal and business contacts.

     

Copying the existing contact

Many times you find yourself entering a whole bunch of contacts from the same company. They all share the same company name, address and phone number and website. With Salestrakr, you don't have to type the  same information over and over. When you are adding a new contact, click the link that says "copy the existing contact". This will pull all of the information from the active contact into the "Add a New Contact" box. Try it, it's easy!

 

Better 2 Factor Authentication

I wrote some time ago about Salestrakr's 2 Factor Authentication.  Well, it just got better.  Now a user has the choice to use 2 Factor Authentication or Not.  If they do use it, they can choose to receive the 1-time password via SMS or via email or both.  And if they do use it, they can now choose a simple word randomly chosen from a huge library of Enlgish words OR they can choose to have a ramdomly created password consisting of numbers, letters (upper case and lower case) and characters (also referred to as a strong password.)

Just another feature that provides better security and another reason to trust Software as a Service (SaaS).

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.