Eating your own dog food

We’ve been looking for a great CRM tool for some time to replace our internally-developed Notes-based system, without much luck I might add, but I received an email today from a company called Entellium today promoting a new CRM offering called Rave.

Last time, I looked into Entellium, I got fobbed off because we were too small. We have just a couple of people who do sales so we don’t need some of the bells and whistles that larger sales departments might require. As such, while I felt a little bit unloved by being told so bluntly that they weren’t interested in my business, I reasoned that they were probably saving my time and theirs, and so didn’t give it too much further thought.

However, the Rave promo was touting $25 per month and seemed very firmly pitched at my end-of-town. Further more, it appeared very closely aligned with the sales methodology our inhouse system has been based on, using stars to rate clients and prospects.

So I enthusiastically responded, requesting a trial and more information. Today I recieved an email from Entellium, once again fobbing me off. This is what it said:

“Thank you for your interest in Entellium. It appears your business is located in an area not yet served by Entellium.  Although our company is rapidly expanding its global presence, we do not feel that we can adequately meet your needs at this time.

 

“A number of other vendors serve your local market, and we encourage you to explore opportunities with them.”

 Firstly, why did I get sent an email for an offering that apparently isn’t relevent to me? Not a very good advertisement for the sophistication of the email campaign offering.

And secondly, are these guys serious? Here we have a web-based, CRM company who should really be leading the way in both selling and servicing customers via the web and thereby opening up global opportunities and they refuse to sell to me because I’m in Australia! Not only do they not want to sell to me right now, it appears they have such little interest in my business that they’re encouraging me to go off and sign-up with their competition.

I honestly don’t get it. Is their system so difficult to use or set-up that they can’t do web-based customer service?

Entellium proudly trumpets that its CEO was a former sales-rep and that it better understands sales. Well, if my experience with Entellium to date is an example of best practice sales processes and methodologies then leave me out of it thank you very much.

Filed under: CRM, Entellium

Now Duncan Riley’s blog is offline

So the Duncan Riley saga gets more mysterious…

Now duncanriley.com is off line. Upon clicking through to read Duncan’s post about him leaving, the page failed to load. No prob, I’ll check it out in the Google cache, I figured. Bugger me, if I couldn’t find it there either.

Duncan Riley has dissapeared off the face of the blogosphere. Has B5 DoS’ed him? Is he now blogger non grata?

I wrote a post not too long ago commenting how intriguing the B5 thing was. The fact that this enterprise could evolve without the main stakeholders in the business having ever met each other.

As best as I know, this Toronto trip that Duncan was on was the first time he’d met with his Canadian co-partners. I’m not sure if this means it’s just better not to meet or the way that this thing sprung up was just bound to spring leaks somewhere along the line.

Duncan attended MediaConnect’s most recent Forum, I had a great, long chat with him one night over a bunch of beers. I’ll be very interested to see how much more is said. Bloggers crap on about transparency incessantly but when push comes to shove and people’s reputations, businesses, careers and so forth are at issue, you’ll generally find everyone takes the legally safe route of wishing each other the best and making no further comment. When you don’t it tends to lead to lawyers getting involved. Is it a coincidence that Duncan’s blog is offline?

Filed under: Blogs

I want Alt-TAB for Firefox

I use Alt-Tab ALOT. Not so much to cycle through apps but more so just to revert to the last window I had open. Well I used to user Alt-Tab alot anyway. My typical day generally saw me zipping between my browser and my word processor or spreadsheet, plus Lotus Notes or an Instant Messenger window.

However, now that I’m back using web-based productivity tools and everything is being lined up in Firefox, which quite regularly is the open application I have open, I’m missing my Alt-TAB functionality like crazy.

I know you can navigate up and down between tabs or even pick a particularly tab, but I’m used to just zipping and nipping between the window I have open and the last one I had opened.

Maybe, there’s an extension that does this and if so can somebody point me in the right direction! Or else can the Firefox crew please add this. Ctr-TAB to switch to last open tab would be fantastic!

Filed under: Uncategorized

The holiday is over, baby

So I’m back on the job after nearly five weeks off.  I had intended to try and post at least once a week to Squash but between trying to stay in touch with work and seeing and doing as much as possible while away.

A lot of news in the past month, but the one that I found particularly interesting was Google’s acquisition of Jotspot. I tried out Jotspot recently when we were considering platforms for a website for one of our Forums and I was hugely impressed with the concept but thought the execution was just a little bit lacking. The spreadsheet and calendar apps that form part of the wiki application concept just weren’t up there with what Google was offering.

So its going to be very interesting to see Google’s app’s tied into the Jotspot wiki platform. I’m pretty much using now gmail, google docs and spreadhseets, and google calendar as my primary productivity tools these days. I think being tied to a Wiki platform is a massive advance in extending web applications beyond the limitations of desktop applications and I’ll be watching this side of Google’s strategy very closely.

Filed under: Uncategorized