thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
Fresh wind in the SME CRM Market with Freshsales?

Fresh wind in the SME CRM Market with Freshsales?

It appears to be demo week for me. After Jon Ferrara gave me a deep dive into the leading social sales application Nimble and I got a dive into the new travel management solution Traform by my old friend Balamurugan Kalia, Sreelesh Pillai introduced me to Freshsales. Freshsales is the new social sales solution by Freshdesk, a company that got founded in the second half of 2010 only and until now focused their efforts on customer service and support. An interesting twist in Sreelesh’s story is that Freshdesk built Freshsales initially to accommodate their own needs and to deal with the demand caused by their growth. Growing at about 50% over the last year or so, the Freshdesk team realized that the applications (yes, plural, including tier 1 solutions) that they used did not really fit their needs. The Freshsales solution covers simple applications for leads, contacts, accounts, deals (opportunities). Leads and contacts can get imported into the system by means of a csv upload. This way it is also possible to migrate Salesforce data into the system. Google contacts or contacts from Office365 are not automatically synced or used. E-Mail and phone conversations that are initiated within Freshsales are tracked against the lead/contact to provide a historic context about what is going on with the person. In case mails are sent directly from an email account one needs to bcc the own Freshsales email address (e.g. sales@aheadcrm.freshsales.io) in order to have the interaction tracked by the system. This then transparently creates a new lead if the recipient e-mail address is not yet known to the system. Using territories and...

Some Klout Score Musings

Today I’d like to present some musings about the klout score. Now, mine is not particularly high – actually it is pretty low – as you can see below; but the curve is interesting, if set into a context. So far I only followed my klout score pretty idly, till I started to do some minor experiments on 16.02.2011. You see some immediate effect on the day after. This is mainly due to me posting a blog entry and communicating this via Twitter and LinkedIn. There also should be a communication via CIBER’s Twitter account. This usually leads to a few clicks and one or two followers on Twitter. However, the real point I’d like to draw your attention to is the 22.02.2011. This is the day the 6.3 earthquake struck in Christchurch downtown and caused severe devastation. As you may know, I normally blog about CRM and social CRM on the CIBER site, so that event is clearly outside my usual activity. Now the catch is: I do live in Christchurch and quite some of my network friends do know this. So I did some simple things by updating my status in the few networks that I actively use: [unordered_list style=”green-dot”] LinkedIn with direct update to Twitter Facebook XING [/unordered_list] As you can imagine this still caused some reactions of my friends – quite some of which are real life friends. Of course there are still one or two CRM related posts of mine in there, plus an opinion on a political matter in Germany, but the majority of all conversations deals with the Christchurch quake, and the...