How Nimble is using its funding to take over “social CRM” (exclusive)
Customer relationship management “sucks,” according to Nimble chief executive Jon Ferrara. Investors are throwing money at the company, and Nimble is responding with new features that it hopes will turn “sucks” to “sales.”
“Since we started two years ago we’ve been getting phone calls from a number of large venture capital firms and tech companies interested in investing in or acquiring Nimble,” Ferrara told VentureBeat. “I’ve said no to all of them.”
Ferrara calls Nimble … Continue Reading
How well did you manage e-mail hell in 2011? Tout has the answer
Think you’re an email ninja? Check yourself before you wreck your (online) self with Tout’s special year-end product, Year in Review, built to help show email users their habits and trends in 2011.
After allowing Tout access to your email, it scans your account (for up to 72 hours, depending on traffic at the time) and subsequently sends a private report to you, complete with charts and infographics. The report features useful statistics like the … Continue Reading
How to keep the customers you already have
CRM, or customer relationship management, is at the top of everyone’s mind these days.
Just as important as attracting new business is developing and nurturing the relationships you already have. Doing so these days requires a sharp eye on the Internet (especially social channels) and equal parts patience and responsiveness.
Here are my top ten tips for keeping your customers satisfied, engaged and returning to do business with you again and again.
1. Let your … Continue Reading
SAP-SuccessFactors: 9 reasons why this is a smart acquisition
Software giant SAP acquired internet software company SuccessFactors on Saturday for $3.4 billion, in what most accounts praised as a commendable move to embrace the so-called “cloud.”
The “cloud” is a buzz-word that refers to the new way applications are being delivered: over the Internet.
Some analysts said the price SAP is paying for SuccessFactors was “nuts.” It’s a whopping 49 percent premium over SuccessFactors’ market value. SuccessFactors sells software that helps manage employee performance. … Continue Reading
Cloud technologies are a huge, untapped market, says Trinity Ventures’ Dan Scholnick (video)
Dan Scholnick is a general partner at Trinity Ventures. In this conversation with VentureBeat editor-in-chief and founder Matt Marshall, he discusses the future and potential of cloud technologies.
Scholnick will also be speaking at CloudBeat 2011, VentureBeat’s upcoming enterprise cloud conference, so you can catch him there for more perspective. He’ll be moderating a case study session with Thomas Kelly, Enterprise Architect for Cloud Services at Best Buy.
For Scholnick, “cloud” is a vague term, … Continue Reading
BuzzTable aims to revolutionize how restaurants connect to customers
Restaurants spend a lot of time and energy attracting new customers, but a startup called BuzzTable says it’s far cheaper to bring back existing customers more often.
The New York City-based startup has built a mobile customer relationship management (CRM) platform that lets restaurants offer deals, loyalty programs, news and even table waiting management, directly to customers’ phones. The company was a part of NYC’s Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator’s first class, all of whom presented on … Continue Reading
What the !@#$ is marketing automation?
VentureBeat inadvertently stirred up a storm of controversy when we published a guest post about marketing automation.
The guest post, by Justin Gray of LeadMD, looked innocuous enough at first. To our editors, it at first seemed like a straightforward list of the pros and cons of several different marketing automation solutions: Eloqua, Genius, Marketo, Pardot and Silverpop.
Unfortunately, when we published the post we neglected to mention one important fact: Gray’s company, LeadMD, is … Continue Reading
Social CRM company reaches out to small businesses with Assistly 2.0
Customer relationship management (CRM) software provider Assistly is shaking up its business model to become affordable for smaller and mid-sized businesses.
Assistly’s application gives businesses ways to interact with customers via various social media sites like Twitter and Facebook as well as email, all through a single window. Like the customer service product it is, Assistly listened to its own reviews and found smaller and mid-sized businesses could not afford the product.
Enter new business … Continue Reading
Box.net CEO: Apple’s cloud strategy is like Microsoft’s, and it won’t work
There’s not much future in online office-suite apps, like the ones Microsoft and Apple offer, if you believe Box.net chief executive Aaron Levie.
Rather than getting all their office apps from one vendor, he said, the best strategy in the enterprise space — and now the consumer space — is to find a service that wraps together the best apps from multiple companies that all do one thing very well.
Box.net (which specializes in enterprise … Continue Reading
Intuit aims to be the Facebook of small business
Accounting software company Intuit on Tuesday announced a set of widgets and a service for integrating its QuickBooks software into web and mobile apps.
The new service, Intuit Anywhere, lets developers connect their apps to Intuit’s Partner Platform, giving them the ability to integrate with QuickBooks data and let customers sign on using their Intuit ID. That’s similar to the way you can sign on to websites using Facebook Connect or a Twitter ID, except … Continue Reading
Site optimizer HubSpot raises $32M from Google, Salesforce and Sequoia Capital
HubSpot, an online marketing and content management suite, announced today that it has raised $32 million from Salesforce, Sequoia Capital and Google’s investing arm, Google Ventures, in its fourth round of funding.
The service “grades” websites and determines how often they will pop up in high spots on search engines — a process called search-engine optimization (SEO). The service also gives smaller- and mid-sized companies tools to quickly create and manage blogs and landing pages … Continue Reading
DEMO: Nimble Contact joins social customer relationship management race
Nimble Contact is one of 53 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2011 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.
For small businesses who may be feeling overwhelmed by large amounts of traditional and social contacts and communications, Nimble Contact may have a solution. The company is launching today at DEMO Spring 2011.
Nimble Contact dubs itself a … Continue Reading
Splunk (who?) takes on Google, Microsoft and Facebook for talent in Seattle
IT search engine provider Splunk is opening an office in Seattle, Wash., to try to acquire some of the talent in the area — and will be competing with a number of Web 2.0 titans and tech giants to do so.
Splunk provides IT professionals with ways to log any piece of information and quickly index it, find it and run a number of analytics functions on it. That can be GPS data, data from … Continue Reading
Salesforce picks up IBM enterprise sales veteran Jeff Lautenbach
Salesforce has hired IBM enterprise sales pro Jeff Lautenbach to head its enterprise sales division as it gets ready to take on some of the largest companies in the world as customers — and as rivals.
The company, which first made its name a decade ago as a provider of Web-based customer-relationship management software to smaller companies for whom traditional enterprise software was unaffordable, has finally realized it is playing with the bigger dogs in … Continue Reading
Salesforce makes 3rd acquisition in 2 months — productivity app developer Manymoon
Salesforce announced today that it has picked up Manymoon, a company that adds additional productivity and collaboration tools to web apps like Gmail and Google Apps, as part of a two-month-long spending spree that has now included three acquisitions.
Manymoon adds some additional functionality to Google Apps, such as the ability to create projects and alerts in Gmail based on information received in an email. It also has similar apps for the Google Chrome Web … Continue Reading
Assistly raises $3M to manage customer complaints on Twitter and such
Assistly, a customer relationship management (CRM) software provider that specializes in social media, announced today that it has raised $3 million in its second round of funding.
Assistly’s brand of CRM software mashes together pretty much every avenue of communication into a single Web interface. It includes traditional communication methods like email and phone calls. It then uses application programming interfaces (APIs) from social media services like Twitter and Facebook to directly feed that information … Continue Reading
Report: Open-source CRM provider SugarCRM worth around $350M (exclusive)
SugarCRM, a developer and provider of open-source customer relationship management (CRM) software, is worth somewhere in the range of $350 – $360 million, according to a new report by research firm NeXt Up!
The open source CRM provider is expected to bring in around $107.7 million in revenue in 2013 and $95.8 million in 2012, according to the report. That’s peanuts when compared to Oracle’s latest earnings report (which indicated that the company brought in … Continue Reading
MeLLmo raises $10M for enterprise analytics on the go
MeLLmo, developer of the mobile enterprise analytics suite Roambi, announced it has raised $10 million in its third round of funding from around 15 angel investors — though the company wouldn’t disclose which.
The application pulls in data from Salesforce, SAP and other enterprise-level analytics suites and translates it into a template user interface for mobile viewing. The application is available on the iPhone and the iPad. Surprisingly, it’s not available on Research in Motion’s … Continue Reading
Oracle sets eyes on HP after posting strong second quarter
Hewlett-Packard? They’re just a minor roadblock, according to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
After easily beating the expectations of many analysts with its most recent earnings report, Oracle is setting its sights on capturing market share and claiming HP’s spot of number two database hardware and software provider behind IBM.
Net income for Oracle jumped 28 percent to $1.87 billion in its second quarter of 2011, up from $1.46 billion in the same quarter a year … Continue Reading
SnapLogic (officially) raises $10M; investment titan Ben Horowitz joins board
SnapLogic, a provider of software that connects cloud applications, got a pretty strong vote of confidence today — investing titan Ben Horowitz of Andreessen-Horowitz has joined the company’s board as part of a $10 million fundraising round.
The round was dominated by Andreessen-Horowitz, with Floodgate also participating to an auxiliary extent, according to SnapLogic CEO Gaurav Dhillon. VentureBeat reported a while earlier that SnapLogic had raised $10 million in a funding round that included Andreessen-Horowitz … Continue Reading
