Barking

In the current economic situation it is the companies that keep it simple (stupid) and streamline their processes who will be the winners.

When it comes to pricing this couldn’t be more true, and is often an area that is overlooked. At Tactile CRM we’re currently simplifying our pricing structure, to make it easier for current and prospective users to understand our pricing bands. We think this is important from a ‘user acquisition’ point of view (please excuse the buzzwords) as it will help us to sign up more paying users.

However, not everybody has the same reasoning. I recently tried to join the local gym when I moved to Oxford, and nowhere on their website do they display pricing (correct me if I am wrong, but I haven’t found it yet). As a result, Esporta made me give up some of my weekend to visit the gym where I was still not able to find out the costs – two people on reception didn’t know them, and after a 15 minute waiting to see ’someone’ I still hadn’t got any further and left.

I was quite happy to make an appointment to see somebody but nobody seemed that clued up – maybe a simple CRM system like Tactile CRM would have been a help.

Obviously I don’t know their pricing, but I’d imagine they are currently down about £1,200-£1,500 a year as my partner and I are now looking elsewhere. Hopefully my situation will have been a one off, but I have written to the manager out of courtesy to let them know what happened and given them a chance to redeem themselves.

I’m very much a believer that ex-customers are as important as those you currently have, as you can learn from them how to make your product/service better. That’s a blog post for another time though!

British Rail (or whatever they are called these days - National Rail, it turns out) are a great example of how this should work, the recently updated their ticket pricing from lord knows how many down to 3:

Thanks to Kai and Craig for the photos.

So that’s a bit of a mouthful, or as Stewart from Sun Startup Essentials eloquently put it - it’s Server Porn!

Thanks to Sun and their Startup Essentials program, we have a lot of shiny new servers to go in our data centre. Due to popular demand, here are some pictures for you jealous types to drool over.

First of all a big thanks to Stewart at Sun Startup Essentials for our stand at FOWA - it meant we increased our presence from myself, to a total of four of us each day. Not only that - we saw a significant increase in coverage of our Tactile CRM product online, via popular blogs such as Paul Carr, Iain Wallace, a decent amount of Twitter traffic, and a video interview by Dennis Howlett.

We met a lot of people interested in Tactile CRM, and the general consensus was that an API would be really useful; we caught up with the Soocial guys and would love to put something together with their product when we have our API in place, and many more.

As always Ben from Redcat Co was on-hand to take my blog photo for the day (see below)!

Highlights for me where Andy from Huddle, talking about life outside Silicon Valley, and Jason Calacanis with Tom Nixon talking about work/life balance.

Last week was spent preparing for, and going to FOWA to promote Tactile CRM. The weekend was therefore spent catching up on email, news, and life in general.

One thing that caught my eye (as I was reading my RSS feeds) was that a competitor has recently rolled out a long overdue feature in their ‘CRM’ product called deals. As a CRM veteran (I’ve been doing this for over 10 years), the concept of deals/opportunities is one of the key features to the CRM concept as it helps to manage and maintain your sales pipeline. Without this a CRM application is not so much a CRM solution, rather a complex address book.

Now the folks at 37 Signals have done a nice job in rolling out deals to their product - one thing they are often criticised about when talking with people is the lack of a roadmap (we have one at Tactile CRM) since people have been requesting this feature for a while.

However, on this occasion I feel they have missed two fundamental features. Firstly, their is no due date on the deal to help you build your pipeline, and secondly, there is no pipeline (graphs/reporting/etc). Without these features I feel they have missed the point. We’ve had these features since day one (see the screenshots below).

At Tactile CRM, we talk with our users, actively encourage them to leave comments and suggestions, and take on board what it is they want.

37 Signals know their market, and create some great applications for their customers, however at Tactile CRM we are after a difference market and hence why, although we like to keep our applications simple, we have a more featured product.

So to the 37 Signals team, congratulations on the new feature, and lets hope we can all help our customers get through the current economic mayhem with some apps to help them streamline their businesses.

We’ve been building the team here at Senokian over the last couple of months, and Matt Galloway is the latest member to join the team as a Systems Engineer.

“Hi, I’m Matt Galloway and I’ve joined Senokian recently as Systems Engineer. This is my first time working in this industry, well actually it’s my first time working after having a year out doing fun things like a ski season in Whistler and traveling around New Zealand and Australia.
I’m really enjoying working at Senokian and I hope that I can learn new things and help Senokian to go from strength to strength.”

So there you have it! We’ll be hearing more from Matt over the next few months as he undertakes some major infrastructure upgrades with Richard and Matthew.

I wrote a guest post on the Sun Startup Essentials Blog about the recent Digital Mission to New York that Tactile CRM took part in.