This post is a guest piece from Richard Rosen, CEO and founder of Fastcall, a Salesforce CTI vendor and one of my clients. I was talking with Rich about customer focus for focused businesses in a crowded market, and our talk drifted into how limits aren’t a bad thing.
Our chat was fun. It was deep. Quotes from the Tao Te Ching and/or a Star Wars prequel may have been thrown around, and I didn’t want to keep it private. To that end, I asked Rich to turn it into something applicable to other business readers. Fastcall is my client and it’s my job to show its strengths, so of course it’s the example in play here. But Rich presents a much-needed perspective whether you’re a user or developer of business applications. I turn things over to him now.
Representing your brand as an owner requires a tricky balancing act in an industry where integrity and thought leadership are highly valued. You want to attract new customers and shout the qualities of the product, of course. But that’s making a sales pitch, and nobody wants to read a sales pitch. Then again, integrity and thought leadership mean revenue in the future, when your company (especially a smaller one) needs revenue now.
I’ve been holding back from writing about what Fastcall is capable of—that’s what the website and the AppExchange listing are for—but this is an incredible company and there’s plenty for me to brag about. So here’s my plan: I will talk about what we at Fastcall do best, but with as little reference to our products as possible. It’s about why you should consider us, but not what you should get. It’s about why the specialized company is often the right one, and why boundaries—as represented by what Fastcall “only” does—are empowering.
Home Field Advantage
A discussion of which Fastcall products you should use would be a short one anyway, because we only have three apps. The word “only” is misleading, because having those three is a conscious decision to keep us focused on our core competencies. We know Salesforce CTI very well, it’s our home field. Why should we play on somebody else’s? We are very comfortable doing what we do, and I’m confident that our work will stand up against any other vendor.
Fastcall is only available on the Salesforce AppExchange. That’s our native environment, and everything Fastcall does was built exclusively for it. There’s no reason to go cross-platform; Salesforce is the #1 cloud CRM platform, and all the customers we could ever want are here. We are subject matter experts on Salesforce technology. Our certified developers know the platform, we know Apex and visualforce. Fastcall customers know that if they need solutions to a problem, we will always be able to provide the best.
These Shoes Fit
Finally, we will only sell you what you agree that you need. Our main product, Fastcall, has three pricing levels. The first one, Essentials, is about half of Fastcall’s functionality. The next step up, Pro, has twice as much and costs twice as much.
Our third level, Custom, is for customers who want to pick which specific functions they want without anything extraneous. We don’t charge a premium for that customizability, and why should we? One great thing about cloud computing is that each part of an application has an on/off switch. Besides, we only charge for usage.
The walls of a house are its boundaries, but they also hold up the roof. By knowing our business and channeling our efforts, we can focus 100% on serving our customers the most up-to-date CTI application in the Salesforce ecosystem. Those are the things that make Fastcall what it is, and what let us be the best at what we do.