The 6 Most Efficient CRM Tools

Fireside Chat with Richard Branson

At what can only in talk format be called a "Fireside Chat", thousand of Dreamforce attendees filled the seats today at Moscone South.

The talk started off with Mr. Branson telling the story of how he started his first venture, a magazine called Student.


Richard convinced his parents to let him leave school in order to pursue the newspaper fulltime. While running the Student from a basement in London, Richard noticed that stores were not discounting records. Richard began to run ads in the Student offering records at discount prices. The orders flooded in and record sales soon became more profitable than subscription sales. Richard quickly set up an office above an old shoe store and Virgin Records was born.

Since then, Virgin has grown to be one of the most recognized brands in Britain. More than 200 companies carry the Virgin name (and Richard Branson claims no prior expertise in any of them). Branson started Virgin Atlantic Airways in 1984 with just a single plane and built the airline into an international business with annual sales of approximately 1.5 billion pounds. In 1992, Richard sold Virgin Records to Thorn EMI for $1 billion and invested the profits into Virgin Atlantic. Branson has launched a variety of businesses ranging from cellular phones to soft drinks to bridal wear. It is estimated that the Virgin brand is now worth around $5 billion.

In addition to his business ventures, Richard relishes adventure and has attempted to break a number of land and air speed and distance records. In 1986, he raced his boat, "Virgin Atlantic Challenger II" across the Atlantic Ocean, in the fastest time ever recorded. The following year, Branson's hot air balloon, "Virgin Atlantic Flyer," was the first hot air balloon to ever cross the Atlantic. In 1991, he crossed the Pacific Ocean, breaking all existing speed and distance records. He has since attempted to fly his balloon around the world, escaping two near fatal disasters.

Today's Virgin is well-esteemed as one of the major drivers of innovation in commercial aviation. Famed for it's neon-glowing cabins and irreverent company language, it has been gaining more and more customers and today holds significant portions of the market for passenger aviation in several countries, with a market share of 30% in Australia alone.

What an impressive man.

Ending today's blog with a quote from Mr. Branson:

“Whether you are launching a start-up or leading an established company, you should start establishing your social media presence if you haven’t already.”

Andres Mendoza, Salesforce Innovation Blog

Dreamforce Program

Wednesday, Sept 19

9:00am - 11:00am

Business is Social Keynote
with Marc Benioff & Special Guests

11:00am

Expo Opens

12:00pm - 1:00pm

Breakout Sessions

1:30pm - 2:30pm

Breakout Sessions

3:00pm - 4:00pm

Breakout Sessions

4:30pm - 5:30pm

Breakout Sessions

6:30pm - 10:00pm
Dreamforce Gala

3:00pm - 4:00pm
Sir Richard Branson

Expo Hours
11:00am - 5:00pm

Peg Corwin on CRM for Small Businesses

Peg Corwin with SCORE Chicago has an interesting article today comparing several CRM services that compete for the attention of small and medium businesses. Her comparison highlights the prices of the different services, a special area of focus for small and medium businesses in these still dire economic times.

Small business clients so often ask about CRM software that I have pulled together a quick CRM software comparison for this market.

CRM Software Alternatives and Prices

These “software as service” products charge monthly by various factors such as users or contacts or online storage.  Some integrate through API with full-featured email programs.  Some interface with major accounting programs like Quickbooks.   Most offer a 30 day free trial.  Links below are to feature and pricing pages, not the company home page.

Contactme  $7.42 per month unlimited users

HighriseHQ    Basic level $24 per month up to 6 users

MethodCRM    $20 per user per month.  Quickbooks sync

Salesforce     $5 per user per month

Sage ACT     $39 per month (unclear number of users)   Also available in-house

vTiger    $12 per month per user

Zoho   Free for 3 users

In House Software

Maximizer    $229 one user one time

Sage ACT       $269.99  for up to 10 users

CRM with Gmail

Streak     “Streak is currently free while in Beta and there will always be a free plan. In the future, Streak will offer paid premium features.”

CRM Decision Factors

In his CRM software comparison How to Choose CRM Software: A Buyers Guide for Small Business, Christophe Primault recommends that you choose a product designed for your size business and your budget.  He further suggests that if you do not now have CRM software you choose a program designed for small businesses and startups.   If you want software to increase customer engagement and drill-down, choose some with features like email software integration or analytical tools.  See also tips on what to avoid with CRM.

I agree with her on most points, although I think many of these solutions deserve a more comprehensive review. More on that soon!

Reasons to attend Dreamforce

Andy Pattinson over at ProQuest Consulting is outlining great reasons why you should go to Dreamforce this month in San Francisco:

With Cloudforce just over a month ago and still fresh in the memory we think it’s important not to waste anytime and get ready for salesforce’s mega event of the year in San Francisco. With only 60 days to go to Dreamforce 10 here are my top 10 reasons to book your ticket for Dreamforce and experience an event like you’ve never seen before:

10 - The partner expo is an incredible place to learn all about the salesforce eco-system, theAppechange comes to life with all of salesforce’s partners showcasing their products and services with an incredible buzz. Learn about all the amazing products you can use to extend your use of salesforce like Conga, Marketo and OrchestraCMS.

9 - A really good Australian contingent travels every year, the Aussies have an amazing reputation at Dreamforce, San Francisco really is a home away from home for the week. We have many events where we all get together so you never feel too far away from Oz, you get to make great friends and have a lot of fun along the way.

8 - Take the opportunity to get certified, learn more about salesforce, take the exams and improve your knowledge, Train the Crowd a local Australian leader in salesforce training are running sessions so there is no reason not to.

7 - Learn from your peers, from world leading organisations and salesforce partners delivering industry changing projects. To see some of the amazing examples rolled out during the course of Dreamforce will fill you with incredible ideas for how you can improve your business, beat your competitors and become a social enterprise.

6 - Developer camp ground, we highly recommend you visit the developer campground to learn about the amazing things you can do with the salesforce platform, with Heroku and all of the great tools the community work with.

5 - Incredible breakout sessions, the agenda for this years sessions is going to be bigger and better than ever, there will be many amazing topics on everything from application development to user training and everything in between, in fact the biggest problem is juggling your agenda to fit everything in.

4 - Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Why wouldn’t you want to see one of the biggest bands of the last 20 years headline the main evening!

3 - If the Chilli Peppers aren’t your thing there are many amazing parties to go and socialise with your collegues, partners and salesforce staff, it’s a great opportunity to let your hair down in the evenings and discuss the amazing things you’ve learnt each day.  

2 - Great speakers, from Gen. Colin Powell to Tony Robbins, Jeff Immelt to Richard Branson you’re sure to learn amazing things from some of the leading lights in their field, whats not to love about that?

1 - The Dreamforce Keynote sessions are like nothing else (Get a sense of last year's keynote here) , from the minute you sit down in the main auditorium for the warm up session you know you’re in for a treat, @PeterCoffee does an amazing job interviewing attendees and warming up the audience for a keynote that never disappoints. Then it’s time for the main event with Marc@Benioff...who know’s what this years event will unleash!  I’ll be there...will you?

"6 Reasons Why Sales Reps Love Salesforce"

These are the top 6 reasons why Salesforce believe sales professionals should use their software. They make good points and it will be interesting to watch how the industry picks up some of the recent product changes.

1. Better visibility into customer information
– Reps can see alltheir accounts, contacts, opportunities, tasks, and events in asingle place. It means convenience, always being organized, and a 360-degree view of the customer. It means no more paper folders, Excel spreadsheets, or stickynotes—it’s all in Salesforce CRM.2.

2. Easy account planning
– Reps can do their own account planning. Because reps can see theircustomers’ history, they can develop an account strategy and an action plan, complete with to-dotasks. Reps can also create reminders of follow-up activities on specific dates. Finally, they cansee the amount of time committed to each account and the outcome of their efforts.3.

3. Better time management
– Reps can better prioritize their days and manage their activities. Theycan see their calendars and upcoming tasks on their home pages. And by checking theOpportunities view in Salesforce CRM, they can focus on and prioritize current opportunities.4.

4. Reports
– Reps can run their own reports, including the following:

• Accounts they haven’t visited in a while
• Opportunities in the pipeline, including won opportunities and lost opportunities
• Products they’ve sold
• Activities and tasks they’ve completed.

5. Dashboards
– Reps can create their own dashboards to see how they’re doing
—
at a glance. Withdashboards, they can see the information that’s critical to them, in various graph formats. They canalso designate red, yellow, and green thresholds to show progress toward their goals.6.

6. Trending analyses
– Reps can see selling trends and use this information to generate more sales.With trending analysis, it’s possible to calculate the win/loss ratio on opportunities, see monthlytrends with opportunities in the pipeline, see the types of activities the rep does most, and see thenumber of closed deals versus quot



While these are the typical selling points for the last generation of CRM software, the push of such documents shows the heating up of the market. In the marketing of its soon to be held Dreamforce conference, Salesforce is particularly witty, prewriting templates for employees to submit to their managers asking to be allowed to attend the conference.

Salesforce calls the approach "Justify your trip".