College recruiting is becoming increasingly competitive. Companies have begun to realize that top graduates not only bring a lot of talent and energy to the table, but they also tend to cost less than more experienced prospects. But in order to successfully woo those fortunate enough to have their pick, businesses need to begin the recruiting process earlier. If they’re going to stand a chance… → Read More
Tylr Mobile today announced WorkinBox, a new mobile email inbox for salespeople connected to Salesforce.com. WorkinBox matches incoming email with CRM data to help sales people prioritize and focus on messages from customers and prospects, access relevant information and files from CRM, and update CRM systems. The technology has two parts: A native iOS application and contextual engine with… → Read More
Washington, D.C.-based Contactually, which makes a lightweight CRM tool for email, is today announcing it has just closed on a $1 million in seed funding led by SaaS backers Point Nine as well as Boston Seed, with participation from previous investor 500 Startups and other angels. The company is also announcing the public debut of its new API, which allows third-party developers to integrate… → Read More
Method, a Toronto-based CRM solution, today announced the closing of a $3 million dollar investment round led by Klass Capital. The company, which is the number-one rated such app for Intuit’s QuickBooks platform, will be using the cash injection to help it jumpstart a platform redesign, and the development of integrations with other leading bookkeeping software like Wave, Xero, FreshBooks and… → Read More
Over a decade after porting its QuickBooks desktop software to the web, Intuit is finally addressing the needs of its small business owner user base with the launch of a version of the QuickBooks application for iPad. The app has been designed from the ground-up to take advantage of the tablet’s screen size and feature set. But more notably, it’s helping to refocus the QuickBooks platform from… → Read More
Editor’s note: Clint Oram is the CTO and co-founder of SugarCRM.
I have worked with companies that considered its customers to be obstacles to avoid or ignore: “If only we didn’t have to deal with those pesky, complaining, customers,” they’d say, “we’d have time to do really great work.” Any company whose employees still cling to the “customer is always wrong” mindset can kiss… → Read More
Enterprise mobile startup DoubleDutch has raised $4 million in Series B funding, in a new round led by Floodgate, with participation from Bullpen Capital and Lightbank. The funding will see Floodgate’s Mike Maples Jr. joining the company’s Board of Directors, as the company further focuses its efforts on deconstructing CRM software and porting it into mini-applications running on mobile. → Read More
Last year, Abinash Tripathy and Baishampayan Ghose founded Helpshift to address what they perceived to be a significantly underserved market in customer service: Mobile. After months of testing their mobile solution, the startup is getting ready to pull the curtains back on its business and, to do that, it is today announcing that it has closed a $3.2 million round of seed financing, led by True… → Read More
Streak has raised $1.9 million for its CRM service to share your email and track deals through your GMail inbox.
Battery Ventures, Chris Sacca, g Lowercase Capital, Redpoint, Floodgate, Crunchfund, and a host of VC partners and angel investors such as David Tisch and Michael Birch. Streak will use the funding to expand its team and focus on building out its mobile efforts. → Read More
Neemware is a newly launched marketing platform for mobile developers which allows the integration of messaging, feedback forms, questions, alerts, promotions, and more, into mobile applications. You can think of it as something like an Urban Airship for marketing. The platform, now available as a beta SDK, gives app developers a more personal connection to their apps’ users, but it also lets them… → Read More
As Jon Ferrara what he thinks of today’s CRM software, and he’ll tell you, patently, that it sucks. Ferrara is the co-founder and former CEO of GoldMine, one of the pioneers of customer relationship management and salesforce automation software back in the ’90s. He sold GoldMine in the ’00s for $100+ million, but returned to the game in 2009 based on the belief that CRM was still broken.
The… → Read More
Capillary Technologies, a social CRM company that helps retailers engage over mobile, email, social and in-store channels, is announcing the close of $15.5 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners with Qualcomm Ventures also participating in the round. The company, which offers a cloud-based SaaS platform for customer engagement, clienteling, loyalty and… → Read More
Editor’s note: Justin Moore is CEO of Axcient, a cloud solution for data, application, and system uptime. You can follow him on Twitter at @justinrmoore.
Many great technology breakthroughs are subject to analyst predictions about how quickly that technology will take over the world. In 2007, Gartner famously forecasted that all PCs would be virtualized by 2010. While this didn’t happen then… → Read More
Salesforce.com is a major force in the CRM space (it even managed to nab CRM as its stock ticker when it went public on the NYSE) for the trailblazing they have done in taking enterprise services into the cloud. It’s also made a big effort to acquire new services to incorporate them into its platform (the biggest of late being Buddy Media for $689 million). But today, at TC Disrupt, Marc Benioff… → Read More
Prince Siddhārtha is said to have left behind his life of privilege, and his wife and child, to dedicate his life to the search for enlightenment and eventually become the spiritual leader known as Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism.
Y Combinator backed company Bushido’s pivot is less drastic than Siddhārtha’s, but the founders are leaving behind a baby of their own. They’re ceasing… → Read More
Thanks to increasingly powerful mobile and web technologies, people can work from practically anywhere. One eCommerce startup, the Utah-based Needle, sees a big opportunity for this mobile, remote, and telecommuting workforce to change the way businesses connect with their customers and influence the way consumers make purchasing decisions. Rather than relying on customer service reps stuffed into… → Read More
Less than a year after its $1 million seed round, Yesware has closed a $4 million Series A for its productivity platform for salespeople. The new round was led by IDG Ventures and saw participation from seed investors Google Ventures, Foundry Group, and Golden Venture Partners.
The company, which makes a suite of services that work in Gmail and on mobile, offers an alternative way to input to… → Read More
CRM is a massive business. At least an $8 billion industry according to Gartner. Salesforce, the company you think of when you hear CRM (after all, it is their ticker symbol) has a market cap north of $21 billion dollars. And while sales departments are typically most commonly thought of in conjunction with these systems, they’re far from the only adopters of CRM.
In the human resources… → Read More
Stride, a new CRM system designed to meet the needs of freelancers and small business owners, is launching into private beta today. The product, which was born out of an actual need for a more simplified CRM system, is focused on efficiency, not a complex feature set. It’s not for adding contracts, managing cases, or allocating tasks to a team of salespeople. Instead, Stride is about deal-tracking… → Read More
Tagtile is a new company (and recent TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley participant), which is using the Square model involving free hardware to address the issues surrounding customer loyalty, management and rewards for brick-and-mortar merchants.
Like mobile payments service Square, which uses a free hardware dongle that attaches to a mobile phone, Tagtile also provides its merchants with a… → Read More
Customer Relationship Management is an old business. There are tons of CRM solutions, both generic and industry specific. Mobile development shop MConcierge has recently announced a new solution for CRM in the hospitality industry that they’re calling GRM: Guest Relationship Management. According to MConcierge, the point of GRM is to provide a top quality experience for guests that goes beyond… → Read More
SugarCRM has gone from 3 developers, 154 members, and 396 downloads of its open source customer relationship management software in June 2004 to 40 engineers, 450,000 users, 5.2 million downloads, and the key metric: 55,000 active systems. As co-founder and CEO John Roberts delivered the opening keynote at the SugurCon 2009 developer conference in San Francisco, he showed the growth in a series of… → Read More
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