Campaigns for Individuals

[sansbury]

Campaigns as they exist today are great for generating leads from cold lists. But once I get a "hit," it becomes an entirely manual process to interact with that lead, and that's a missed opportunity for some real productivity gains. Here's my situation:

Someone comes to my website and registers for a trial of my product. I setup an account for them and mail them the login info. After three days, I want to send them a mail askign if they've tried logging in, and offering some tips on how to get started working with our tool. After one week, I send a mail asking how they are doing, and suggesting they set up an account for another person in their company and introduce them to the product. After two weeks I want to send a price sheet. So on and so forth.

While I'm thinking here specifically of sending a schedule of emails, really it is just a series of tasks, stored in a template, which can be applied to any prospect/lead/opportunity. The tasks are defined by offsets: do task A after 1 day, task B three days after task A, and so forth. These sequences could be halted or accelerated by manual intervention.

There was a company called Revenio that built a very slick product for doing very sophisticated "dialogs" as they called them that could cross multiple channels. Very powerful and could really handle anything if you wanted to spend the money to integrate it with your mail, phone, CRM, accounting, etc. Their mistake was to do this in 2000, before companies had the CRM data warehouses needed to make such processes feasible. The product is now owned by Vignette. More recently, Salesnet has a lot of this kind of process-driven philosophy in their system which is in many senses a far more "intelligent" product than Salesforce. In the late 90s Salesnet raised $10m in VC, while Salesforce raised $100m. End of story.

The direct of good OSS is to start out imitating the market leaders, and eventually leapfrogging them. Just my two cents.

[JamieinNH]

This is the very thing I have asked about in this thread:
FeatureRequest: Automation of Tasks

I used to run ACT! and their was a company that had created a Automated Process that worked with ACT! to handle the simple tasks on a sales-person's day.

I wish something like this could be included as a module with SugarCRM.

Jamie

[deltyme]

Interestingly enough, guess who else's product has a Workflow feature. Yes, Microsoft. It is one of the MS CRM features that I really like. I have it set up to send 30, 60, 90 day emails from the initial inquiry. I'd say that this is a key feature. I have been impressed that SugarCRM is free for the basic features.

But, MS CRM is extremely slow and lacking some key features as well.