Barking

We’ve just pushed out an update to Tactile that brings with it some new functionality and improvements as a result of customer feedback, so keep it coming!

Both emails and notes on the Dashboard and when viewing things are collapsed initially but can be expanded by clicking the “Show More” link.

For Clients, Leads and People the default ‘index’ view is to show those you have recently viewed. This should be more useful than the previous alphabetical view but, if you do still want to just browse through all your contacts, the “A-Z” option is there just below the page title.

You will also notice that for Clients and Leads the “town/city” and “county/state” parts of the address on the index pages are now links. Clicking them will filter the list to show just those entries that are in the same location so you can, for example, find all of your clients in “Coventry” or in “Devon” really easily - if you’re planning on visiting someone, you can take a look at who is nearby and perhaps drop in and say hi!

It’s now even easier to keep on top of your Activities, as they can be marked as Complete right from the Dashboard so no excuses not to keep on top of things!

As always, feedback on features (both new and old) is much appreciated, we have added a few extra areas to the forums where you can make them.

So I am starting to get addicted to AdWords. tweaking keywords and adverts to boost signups for Tactile CRM, our cost effect contact and sales system. I won’t mention specific competitors but I have been surprised that our advert being shown against one of our competitors is proving to drive the most traffic and signups to our sites. I’m also surprised where a lot of our signups are coming from - I’ll post some stats on these in the next couple of days.

Senokian, the Coventry based applications hosting and open source specialist, today announced the launch of its new web-based contact and sales management system, Tactile CRM. Aimed at small businesses the product helps companies manage their sales leads, contacts and emails in one easy to use, fully hosted system.

Many small businesses have been slow to embrace traditional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) due to complexity and cost. Tactile aims to make CRM easy for organisations to adopt, enabling them to manage and track sales, leads, prospects and even emails in one place. Tactile’s dashboard gives a visual overview of the current sales pipeline enabling sales teams to maximise their efforts on the deals they are most likely to win.

With this key information in one place business can avoid unnecessary and unprofessional confusion when engaging with customers. Information previously available only to individual team members is now shared across the whole department or company, providing unparalleled transparency and insight.

Senokian’s development of Tactile CRM was driven by real world business requirements and demands. Having worked with local businesses in a range of industries, Senokian built Tactile CRM to meet the issues faced by sales and admin staff in their day to day life. Drawing on the expertise that Senokian gained from building and implementing bespoke systems for larger clients, it was able to build an easy to use, affordable system that can be used to replace homegrown spreadsheets and paper-based processes that small businesses must evolve from.
With a free trial for organisations to test the system and several payment plans (start from as little as 6 per month), Senokian have already signed up clients across the UK, US and Australia.

Peter Bates, Managing Director from LCA said, “We didn’t have anything in place before we started using Tactile to manage our customer data and information about people we would like to work with. Now we have Tactile I don’t know how we ever survived!”

Ben [front page NSFW at the mo] and I were chatting about blog posts a week or so back before we got down to the serious business of playing cards and drinking, one of the ones I said I fancied doing was the ‘Top 5 Song Covers’ I’m currently listening to on the good old iPod. Greg at work posted about the Top 10 Albums That Every Music Snob Name Checks (I have heard of two of the artists and none of the others!) today and it got me thinking that I should take this out of my drafts and finish it up. So for the record here are my top 5 covers I currently rate/am listening to:

1. All Along the Watch Tower - Jimi Hendrix. OK I know this is probably at the top of most people’s list, but Jimi’s cover of Bob Dylan’s song is fantastic and not only at the top of my covers but probably on my ‘Desert Island Discs‘
2. My Favorite Things - John Coltrane. This guy is a genius, no two ways about it, I absolutely love the stuff he does and coming up with a frankly amazing cover of The Sound of Music’s - My Favorite Things is incredible.
3. When the sun goes down - Lack of Afro. The Artctic Monkeys original is OK but this funk version is fantastic. I just need to make sure that I don’t play it to death.
4. The Village Green Preservation Society - Kate Rushby. I love the The Kinks’ original of this and like my number 1, would probably put that on my ‘Desert Island Discs’ so was plesantly surprise when I heard Kate’s version and really liked it. Even found out I was miss-singing some of the lyrics when I was blaring it out in the car - ‘God bless the George Cross and all those who are awarded her’, I don’t know how but I thought it had something to do with Sumo Warriors in the original!
5. Over the Rainbow - Maceo Parker. Again another classic jazz cover. I just love this whenever I hear it. These jazz guys (and girls) always amaze me when they come up with stuff like this.

For the record, a few more that didn’t quite make it (and not enough to make it a top 10 list!) were: Mr Bojangles by Nina Simone, One by Jonny Cash, and a few by Ella Fitzgerald - another woman I greatly admire.

What with getting back into playing rugby and going to the gym after being ill last year, I have started to try and eat a bit more healthily - doing things like eating breakfast etc!

I popped into the local super market this morning to get some fruit loaf for breakfast and was half tempted by the hot cross buns (I know they aren’t the healthiest thing in the World), decided they wouldn’t fit in the toaster at work so carried onto get my fruit loaf. You can imagine my surprise when I was confronted by this:

Not only was it exactly what I wanted but also on special offer. I can’t imagine the meeting where they decided that this would be a good idea, a pure marketing gimic, but it got my attention and my money. They only thing is its not quite a hot cross bun loaf - in my excitement I didn’t pay full attention to the top, so mine is more a hot ‘T’ bun loaf:

Anyway it tasted great and I now have a full stomach to face the day with!

Dave popped his head round the office door today and asked if I had seen today’s Dilbert, just managed to have a look and that seems about what happened in the office - it did take a while for me to read up on it though, and it wasn’t on a trade journal!

As if on queue, a new version of Crunchbase has been released. I have just tried to submit Senokian and our low cost, affordable CRM system - Tactile.

Techcrunch is one of those great places to get noticed by and can often help make web applications. It is notoriously difficult to catch their attention as they are so busy - introductions are often useful and I am hoping that the guys at Polecatting may be able to help - they are involved in the 2008 Web Mission I mentioned this week and that I am hoping we may be able to get involved with.

I’m also trying to register on the forums, but they seem to be down at the moment.

Wow, what a big milestone - Tactile CRM is now live and all of our payment engine etc. is in place for people to sign up to Tactile CRM. I’ll write a bit more about it soon, as you can imagine we have a lot to do at the moment with the launch but check back for more news.

As a new Make Your Mark Connector I have been taking a look through some of the various bits and pieces that they do/are involved in and came across a fairly timely event that could be very useful in the Launch of Tactile CRM - Web Mission 2008.

As press and e-coverage is key to the success of Tactile CRM these sort of events can be key to getting in-front of the right people to help you not only promote your application but also gain valuable feedback on the application itself and gain further ideas on how to take your product to market.

I have dutifully sent a submission to be considered and we will see how we get on in the process.

Lots of people write about launching a new web application from different perspectives/view points and at Senokian we are no different; with the pending launch of Tactile CRM (you can sign up with the code APPROVED) we are going to write about the various promotion, pitfalls and successes that we achieve over the launch of our new product.

We hope that this will add to some of the excellent writing that is already available (such as Bare Naked App) and add another useful perspective to those that are thinking of building/launching an application.