Why, given the dominance of SalesForce, would anyone think it was a good idea to bring a new CRM tool to market?
Because we think:
Start-up and small companies need 50% of Eloqua and 50% of Salesforce, but without the costs and integration hassles. And everybody needs more leads.
Existing tools are complex and expensive for SME’s. Yes, they can do almost anything, but only with the application of an inordinate amount of consulting fees that make a mockery of headline $50/user/month figures. Even if implemented with internal IT resource, that still costs money.
Further, existing applications are based on an artificial premise of central command and control that was never true. SalesForce is really just a cloud-based version of Siebel. Both are sold to executive management on the basis of providing a mythical reach of visibility and control down to the individual sales reps. But hated by sales people for their never ending appetite for typed input, they remain used in the most part as simple contact management systems. Excel with a hat on.
From our own diverse experience in Sales and Marketing, we know all too well the shortcomings in existing tools. As technologists, we also see trends opening up new opportunities:
Social as a new avenue for customer engagement
Mobile as a new avenue for application engagement
Visualisation as new avenue for data engagement
It’s noteworthy these trends kicked off after existing tools like SalesForce and Marketo came to the fore, and those tools remain trapped in their existing architectures. We believe we can do better than that. Today, every B2B purchaser is on LinkedIn. Every sales person has a smart phone, and newly matured HTML5 capabilities have made sophisticated visualization techniques accessible for the first time. The days of giving rainmakers open expense accounts to bamboozle deals home has been replaced with sales best practice that puts the customer in the driving seat.
We believe that Sales is all about closing deals. SalesSeek will help you do that quicker. Marketing is all about getting leads. SalesSeek will help you get more. Management can’t even start unless you know what’s going on. SalesSeek lifts the fog. Everything else is either just a proxy for the above, or irrelevant.
Marketing and Sales Force Automation needs to get smaller before it gets better – KISS. That’s SalesSeek.
