I had an interesting conversation on the flight to Seattle today with a guy who runs West Coast sales for a large legal research company. He lives in the Valley, has been in sales for 20+ years, and has been in successful startups in the past - very aware of current technology although his current business is law. Really neat focus though - his firm focuses on ethics guidance for large companies (and yes, he was on his way to meet with Microsoft, one of his major customers).
He started using Salesforce about 5 years ago - to use his words, back when the application was really rough - but it was "so much better than Siebel" and "got better so fast" that he adopted it wholeheartedly. I asked him what he did with Salesforce when he was on the plane or other disconnected situations. "I just use their offline client - it works fine, no problems syncing or anything." In response to my question about Outlook integration he said he just had Salesforce export the contacts to Outlook.
I told him about Smartcompany - how they use Outlook as a design center for their CRM smart client application connected to their SaaS offering, and are working on a future version that will deliver their functionality directly in Outlook - and his eyebrows shot up. "Wow! That would be amazing. I just tried out an application that looks like Outlook, and I got a warm, comfortable feeling because I felt like I knew how it worked. This would be even better." Conversation continued from there.
The point here is that here is a lifelong salesman, user of CRM applications over the years who was an early convert to SaaS and Salesforce.com who would rather have that same service come through Outlook.
SaaS is maturing and the smart clients are coming. Because user experience matters.
Wow, Sam, considering MS has their own CRM it's kinda big of you to praise SmartCompany :-)
I must admit I haven't heard the name before, but will check them out.
Posted by: Zoli Erdos | November 12, 2005 at 10:42 PM