Barking

We are pleased to announce the second of two new feature sets we have recently rolled out to Tactile CRM.

These features are based around activities and calendaring.

Activities in Tactile have been upgraded - previously they were simply a list of ‘To Do’ type items that you could attach against clients, leads, people and opportunities. There was a bit more to them than that, you got an email when people added new ones for you, a daily update when you had things to do, but now we have made them even better (don’t worry all the old stuff is still there too)!

Events - the first change we have made to activities is to add the concept of an event. This could be a meeting, a lunch or anything that would typically block out a period of time in your diary for.

You can of course still add ‘To Do’ items, but now you can add events too.

iCal/vCal - Tactile CRM is designed to be an easy to use CRM system for small businesses. We have deliberately kept away from building a calendar application as there are several excellent ones already available (Google Calendar and iCal), what we have now added is two easy ways to add events to your favourite calendar application.

The first is an iCal/vCal feed you can subscribe to and keep your calendar application synced with Tactile CRM:

All you need to do is visit your preferences (generate the link if you haven’t already) and you can subscribe to the link in your favourite calendar application and keep updated with all the information in Tactile CRM.

If you want to share an individual event with somebody, or just download it for reference, you can easily do that too. We’ve added a handy link when you view an activity:

The Tactile CRM Help has been updated with full details on how to use iCal/vCal information.

Finally we have also added a date picker. When you need to add a date anywhere within Tactile CRM, simple click on the date field and the handy date picker will pop up to allow you to easily choose a date:

Remember - if you have any thoughts, suggestions, or feedback you would like to give us we’d love to hear them. Just drop us an email to support@tactilecrm.com and tell us anything you want so we can right any wrongs. We read every bit of feedback we can get our hands on, and try to rectify the things we can.

We are pleased to announce the first of two new feature sets we recently pushed out to Tactile CRM.

These features are based around the way we deal with contacts, particularly people within Tactile CRM.

Permissions on people - the way permissions used to work on people wasn’t great. If you created a person that didn’t belong to a client/lead then only you could see it. For freelancers and B2C businesses this wasn’t great as it meant you couldn’t share these contacts easily with other people in your organisation.

After comments and feedback from users we updated people so that when you add new ones everyone can see them unless you mark them as private:

We’ve updated the permissions help on the website accordingly.

Email linking - when you logged in and looked at your dashboard you could see all the recent emails that had been sent. Great, apart from the fact that you had to search for the person to find them and see what else was going on. We’ve fixed this by making the person a clickable link through to their record so you can now easily find them:

Remember - if you have any thoughts, suggestions, or feedback you would like to give us we’d love to hear them. Just drop us an email to support@tactilecrm.com and tell us anything you want so we can right any wrongs. We read every bit of feedback we can get our hands on, and try to rectify the things we can.

Had a great afternoon at the TechCrunch UK meetup yesterday, spoke to a lot of cool people and got a few people interested in Tactile CRM.

Blagged some swag, a couple of t-shirts, a bag and a frisbee too, and managed to snap Mike Butcher with one of our dragons on his head!

I had an interesting conversation with a few guys about usability and managed to get some good tips about Corsica for my trip in July! A few cheeky beers were had throughout the afternoon and everyone was really friendly.

Well done to Mike for organising the event and I look forward to the next one.

I’ll be at the TechCrunch UK Meetup on Friday afternoon in London if anyone fancies catching up and finding out a little more about Tactile CRM. I’ll also have some Dragons to give away too!

We are currently looking for a new developer to join our team in Coventry. Full details are on the main website. We’re also offering a £200 thank you to anybody that suggests somebody we eventually appoint.

Shoeless Joe Jackson once famously said ”If you build it, he will come” (OK, technically he didn’t say it but his character, voiced by Ray Liotta,  in Field of Dreams did).

It may well have worked in Field of Dreams, but not so in the world of business.

I spent an enjoyable afternoon at the Kit Car Show today in Stoneleigh. I went along as I own a Caterham and needed to pick up a few bits for the car (I ended up spending the grand total of £1.10). As I walked around the show I was amazed at the number of small suppliers that also offer kit versions of the well established original 7 (it had its 50th birthday last year), and it just doesn’t make sense to me. The basic Caterham can be brought and assembled for under £13,000 for a new car - the others don’t really offer anything above and beyond this, and in most cases don’t offer half of what Caterham do - they are still developing new versions of the car, have recently been brought and launched the frankly awesome R500 last month, there is a massively active owners clubs and several racing series based around the car.

This got me thinking about what we do with our products and services - Tactile CRM in particular. Tactile CRM has several competitors (like most ideas it is not truly original - CRM has been around for a while), however we think our approach to our market space is unique and we have an offering that nobody else does. We don’t aim to copy and trail behind competitor products - we were first to launch Google Contacts API integration for example; our aim is to innovate and listen to customer comments and business problems and find a way we can help to alleviate some of their issues.

Second best is never good enough and won’t get you anywhere. A good product needs to have new ideas or a new approach to the space they are in. For unique/new concepts this is a given, but when launching into an already busy space, being different is the only way to get yourself noticed.

I am a stickler for perfection, anything less than perfect irritates me and I have to do something about it.

Today was no exception, I wrote a quick management script a while back to email me with the number of people who have signed up for Tactile CRM but not logged in 24 hours after signing up so that I can follow them up (I thought this was enough time to let them get the email Tactile CRM sends if the signed up in the evening and it hadn’t arrived before they signed off).

Today was the first time that it ran with only 1 user who hadn’t logged in - imagine my horror when the email said:

There are 1 people that could do with a nudge today to remind them to login to Tactile CRM.

Urgh - quickly logging into the server, updating the script, testing it and changing my neat 4 line bash script to 6 lines and my sense of well being has been restored. It now says:

There is 1 person that could do with a nudge today to remind them to login to Tactile CRM.

It is this level of detail that goes into the products we produce and hopefully makes them run just that bit better for users.

Loic and Geraldine Le Meur announced LeWeb 08 today. I plan to go along but waiting for the registration to open.

When launching a new product, such as Tactile CRM, I have found there are two main areas that you need to work on. The first is obviously writing the software itself and the second is marketing that product and getting people to use/pay for it.

Tactile CRM has been live for a couple of months now and we are really pleased with the number of people signing up (we are currently on target for our projections). The main push now is twofold - development and sales/marketing - and more around the sales/marketing side of the application than the development.

Don’t get me wrong, Tactile CRM is an awesome piece of software from a technical/engineering perspective - it is really well built, easy to expand and add to, and the feedback we get from users is excellent. Obviously as Senokian we are comfortable with the development of an application like this as we do it on a regular basis for customers.

The new and unknown area for us however is the sales/marketing side of things. Adwords, and exhibitions/trade shows are easy to cost/plan, the difficult part is getting the buzz around the product - people and sites talking and discussing your application.

So far we have had a reasonable amount of success with our marketing, the graph below shows two decent spikes. The first was getting mentioned in the Amazon AWS newsletter, the second appearing on the new Google Solutions Marketplace. Both of these obviously drove a decent amount of traffic and sign ups to the site, however we need more people to talk about Tactile CRM.

Currently I am working on getting coverage on ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch. Which brings me on to my current dilemma. Do we add new features we think are useful, or go for the bigger ones that are likely to get more press coverage (and still be useful in the long run).

I’m thinking things like the Google Contacts API integration we did - we were doing import work that people had asked for and at the same time Google launched the new API. As a result we were the first CRM system to implement it and a few people picked it up. ReadWriteWeb included us in an article on Socialprise and helped to drive more traffic to the site. This wasn’t a feature people request but one we added for PR purposes.

So the dilemma I now face is should the next set of features we add be for PR/marketing purposes or customers. I know the answer to this question when a product has reached critical mass is to add features for users but as we are not there yet, the PR/marketing drives the users and is the most important thing at the moment.

A friend of mine emailed me last night to ask a few questions for a presentation she is doing for the Young Entrepreneurs Forum at Warwick University. I thought the answers may be of interest to some people so have posted them below:

Why did you set up in business?

Mainly because I was fed up with the crap quality of work the company I worked for produced in the web space. That and the fact that they never delivered on what they promised to staff.

What do you think of young people going straight from education into running their own business?

I worked for a year before starting Senokian. I don’t see any reason not too, the only things to bear in mind are that it can be lonely to start with (for example working in a company with existing employees will help you meet and make new friends), and also some experience you gain can be useful when you setup yourself.

The other thing to remember is that in general businesses are happy to spend more for piece of mind, for example as a student you may well build your own computer to save a bit of money. A business is more than happy to spend a few hundred quid extra, get one pre built and supported so employees don’t waste time on it.

What would you do differently if you started over?

Do it with a partner. I started Senokian on my own - with nobody to start with I didn’t have anyone to bounce ideas off or to help out when things got hectic

What would be your top 3 pieces of advice?

1. Don’t under charge yourself
2. Make the correct first impression - we don’t have a dress code, but I am always smart when I visit people for the first time, you can then use this to gauge what you can get away with the next time
3. Have fun, if running your own business isn’t fun, stop and think of another idea. Running your own business is going to consume your life for a while so you might as well enjoy it.

What are your top 3 big ‘no nos’?

1. Not having fun running your business
2. Poor branding - first impressions count, if you need to spend a few hundred quid getting a good logo etc. do it, it will pay dividends in the end
3. Don’t give people too much of a chance. You are paying their wage, if after 3-4 months they are not performing, get rid of them

What have you found scary?

How fast time flies by when you are having fun/running your own business

What have you found fun?

Meeting new people and working with businesses

Any funny or interesting/useful stories or anecdotes about setting up your business?

We have an office dog and that is always part of office negotiations when moving.