Sales Force Automation and CRM - new approach needed

I have had a pretty good look at the main serious Web-based hosted SFA and CRM solutions. Salesforce.com, Netsuite, SugarCRM, EBSuite CRM. They are all very similar and probably very appropriate in many situations.

However my opinion is that none of them are intuitive and in a sales situation none of them are fast enough. There are too many clicks for the bread and butter task which is

• get the customer history on-screen
• identify the contact - or record a new one
• record the call,
• send a mail
• schedule the next call.

The user is buried in a sea of leads, opportunities, tasks, timetables, cases, quotes and projects. Each with its own list and its own update form. Of course most of this doesn't get used, but it does clutter up the screen something rotten.

In the end I wrote a system for my own use and have rolled it out to a couple of clients where we could integrate it with the web site functions so that transactional data is included on the customer screen.

The objective was to be as simple and intuitive as possible. You won't recognise it as the same animal as the market leaders I listed above, but for me at least and my telesales person it seems to work very well at the core task.

There is a demo at http://sales.textor.com

Obviously it needs development and probably money to take it any further. Here is my question. Is there an opportunity here? Should I think about taking it further?

Bob

An own-goal for IBM

I may have mentioned before that once a concept becomes 'hot' everyone wants to get on the bandwagon and spin their products. So IBM has announced a new rack-mounted server "designed for heavy traffic web 2.0 social networking sites".

In marketing terms an own goal because the product almost certainly is good for any heavy-duty computer cluster application where fault tolerance for individual systems is not a huge issue (that is the trade-off). By marketing it in this way they are limiting their market to a very small number of specialised web sites. Admittedly these guys buy servers by the thousand, but the market must be much bigger.

Eye tracking - not counterintuitive at all

I love eye tracking studies. This study tracked men and women separately on the Marks and Spencer home page.

http://www.etre.com/blog/2006/05/five_days_bonus_ms_revisited/

Quote "As you can see, these findings are somewhat counterintuitive. The women were extremely focused on the navigation menus and rarely looked at the main body of the page. However, while the men were also predominantly navigation-focused, they were a lot more willing to venture into the main body of the page - even though the majority of the feature located therein targeted women!"

People! Think!. The centre of the page is a picture of Twiggy with a big smile on her face and below her a couple of other very beautiful women. The men take a sneaky look at some attractive females? Big surprise!

The small print

A designer who we had done work for just sent me a contract their client had sent them to sign. It was headed 'Assignment of Intellectual Property(IP) Rights'. It would assign all IP rights in the software to the client.

I had to check the date on the email but it was April 3rd not the 1st. We use the identical software on all our client's sites, so the whole idea of giving the IP rights to one of them is a total non-starter. We would be out of business.

We include on all our quotations a para that summarises our terms and conditions which includes a link to our standard licence on our web site. The licence is pretty standard, in fact rather less restrictive than an open source licence. The client has the right to use, copy and modify the software as they see fit. The only real restriction is that they can't go into business selling my software.

So why would they want the IP transferred?

I suspect some lawyer saw a chance to earn some fees. Or some manager somewhere, who didn't bother to ask some basic questions, had the idea that a really serious content management system had been written for them from scratch (in a month and a half - some chance!) and as they had paid for it they should own it. Now the Designer is going to have some difficult conversations with the client.

This could all have been avoided if designers who resell our CMS had terms and conditions which mirrored our own. All I have to is figure out how to persuade them to do it.

SP1 has arrived

I have just downloaded Vista SP1. The wretched program warns you that it will take an hour. I watched it for a while and got bored, so I took the hint and went out for a cup of coffee. When I got back there was a 'click here to proceed' thing! It then took about an hour while I twiddled my thumbs.

Why????

In any event I would say it was worth the wait. The machine is noticably slicker. Listing directories and copying files in particular much faster. Or should I say much less slug-like.

Designers are not users are not designers.

This month we have an outstanding useability column from Jakob Neilsen. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designer-user-differences.html

There are two important insights

• Designers are not users
• Users are not designers

Like a japanese haiku these two statements can be used for lengthy meditation and should be burned on the heart of every designer. Too many sites are built for the designer, not the user; an exotic, barely understood being. A person who doesn't know how to run a search on Google, let alone manipulate a strange scroll bar or fly-out menu.

Read

Learn.

One born every minute

If you want a good laugh at other people's expense go take a look at http://www.telebid.com/. It looks like a very cool auction site with some real bargains. There is a 32" flat screen with 49 minutes to go for £197. What is the catch?

The catch is that it costs money to bid. They state very clearly that bidding starts at 10p and it costs 50p for each bid. And each bid ups the price by 7p. Do some math. £197 means that there must have been 2814 bids (197.00 / 0.07). At 50p per bid that means they have made around £1,400 in bidding fees plus the £197 someone will pay for the set.

In a bizarre twist, they are auctioning packs of 300 bids (worth £150). Bidding has already reached £122 so they have made an amazing £871 plus £122 = about a grand selling something that doesn't even costs them anything.

Are there really that many suckers around that they will pay 50p to make a 7p bid on an auction site?

WC Fields had it right. "Never give a sucker an even break."

Google

This from the Google website

"Unfortunately, we're unable to interpret the meaning of changes in our legal documents for you. If you have questions or you need legal advice on interpreting the terms, please don't hesitate to contact an attorney."

Uh!