By: John Brown

John Brown — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 21:54:01 +0000

You are absolutely right, the recession has caused many companies to rethink their CRM strategy. We have been noticing a trend where the established CRM vendors are not living up to the hype and as such, buyers are seeking out niche solutions. One such solution is http://www.micontacts.com.
MiContacts is focused on sales prospecting. It aims to achieve a 30% growth in pipeline within 6 months – it claims to have achieved 38.6% in early Beta trials. It approaches prospecting from a KPI perspective – best practice KPI’s are inherent and the technology enforces them. It’s simple for sales people to record their notes, activities and collaborate with virtual prospecting teams (eg sales, pre-sales, engineers, etc). Managers have access to a clever Scorecard which provides comparative analytics across the sales teams – manage using facts and not fiction. Marketers can easily create telesales type campaigns and assign tasks to sales people.
Whilst MiContacts may be all the CRM many companies need, I believe it will ultimately complement CRM by being a focused sales prospecting work-horse. Once an opportunity becomes a customer, then it will move into a CRM system. This will solve two problems:
1. CRM processes are useless at managing sales prospecting
2. CRM is not designed to be populated with potentially useless information
It’s a new entry to the market and an interesting one to boot!

Comments on: Why CRM and Social Media is More Important in a Recession

By: John Brown