Elastic (YC W11) launches Close.io, sales software designed by salespeople
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Streak: Great way to store Data in spreadsheet form but very difficult to analyze. It's often sluggish and unreliable. Search is no where near effective. It's more of a Data storage app versus an actual CRM. On days it crashes or does not load, my sales came to a halt!
Highrise: This is one big headache. The search feature is seriously lacking and it's difficult to add data, or even analyze it later. I like to see my pipeline at a glance. Highrise provides more individual leads at a glance.
Close.io is the perfect combination of a powerful search, intuitive UX and analytical feedback. At a glance, I know exactly what I have to accomplish in a given day or week, and the top leads to pursue. Prioritizing and tasking is dead simple, and the UX extremely responsive. Best feature of all: make calls through the App. I personally am terrible at taking notes after a meeting, especially when I'm swamped, so getting the opportunity to go back and listen to my calls is super helpful! Especially when I'm trying to pinpoint areas that need improvement in my pitch.
Afterwards I had to go back to using Salesforce for some other project. Like using a walkman after owning an iPod.
Wanted to just give a couple suggestions for changes you could test. First, I think it would be helpful to emphasize both the 14-day free trial and also the 1 free month with annual billing. The trial is barely mentioned and I think it is a huge selling point, especially when everybody who has used the product seems to immediately fall in love with it, so it is important to get as many people to try it [risk free] as you can.
Second, as was already shown in the comments, you may want to consider re-recording the video using a windows computer and display that for those who show up with windows. It may seem obvious to you that SaaS will run on any major OS, but it may not be so clear to customers. Further, even if a customer recognizes that they can use it on windows, it still helps to limit any potential "dividing" factors.
Going to try this out for sales.
Also, yay for using Plivo and good call quality instead of Twilio. This should presumably support native SIP endpoints (and G.722), so I'm a lot more likely to use it.
And you're right, we use native SIP -- that's the main reason we have native applications. Behind the scenes we use the PJSIP library.
- The concept as a whole is rock solid. - The ability to send/receive email and phone calls is killer - The way the software is designed fits perfectly with my bizdev flow - They cleverly handle account support via the app itself as a customer lead that is already in place. Our rep has been very responsive and helpful.
Some features are still lacking, but none are deal-breakers at this time. Overall, I expect we'll be using it for the whole organization in short order.
I'm happy to answer any questions.
I think like the recent Amazon post noted, Salesforce.com's competition is going to come from someone who undercuts them. There's no reason for SaaS software to be priced at $100/head/month (other than the need to fund a sales force).
The difference with us is we're not trying to be another CRM but rather focusing on sales communication that's automatically logged. We care more about the salesperson workflow than just being a database for deals.
Also the $99/month plan includes a phone number with unlimited minutes, which has a real cost associated with it. If you don't need built in calling, we've got a less expensive plan.
a. per minute pricing b. per hour pricing($2-$5/hr) c. crappy VOIP implementations
I haven't tried close.io yet but I am extremely glad someone filled this obvious hole in the market. If you've spent any time looking for simple auto-dialing solutions that aren't a dump of useless features, you'll know these guys seem very promising.
Edit: Never mind, the enterprise plan comes with call routing. Sold!
Since I haven't played with it yet, what number does it call people with? Would each user would get a new one, or would it be per plan?
As for being 6x more expensive than Salesforce? We've seen massive productivity gains over other CRMs and you need to ask yourself: how many more deals/month would a sales person need to close to make $100/mo? Probably not very many :)
1. Being cheaper doesn't mean more sales. I've often times chosen the more expensive option simply because it is more expensive and it has to be better right? If you're cheaper than salesforce, then I view you as an inferior product to salesforce. If you're the same price as salesforce, than you're a salesforce knock off, why not just get the real deal? If you're more expensive than salesforce, oh? Why is that? You're better in x,y,z ways? Perfect. That's exactly what I could use. Offering a lower price works when you view your self as a commodity. You probably don't want to view your SaSS product as a commodity.
2. "I"ll raise prices later" is a bad approach because SOMEONE will have looked at your sales page the day before and now want the old price. Also, if you say, "My real price is xxx, but I'm going to charge xx now", then you also have the added disadvantage of not knowing if you could actually charge xxx later. Furthermore, you might be attracting the wrong types of people via xx pricing, who then mass exodus at xxx, and you would reach the wrong conclusion. You're marketing and pricing brought in a bunch of cheapskates, and yet your revenue would triple by going to xxx, with decreased sales and support costs.
1. I follow your logic here, and it makes perfect sense to me, but per my experience in the real world things just don't work that way. If you are trying to crack into an existing market, you have to be better on both service and price.
2. Tell this to Michael Bloomberg. He raises prices every year and is one of the richest people in America. Also, there are other methods of raising prices at a later date other than just moving the sticker price. For example, introduce new/enhanced services at higher price points. For a real world example, our company did that with API access. We kept the original web access product priced low, but priced API access as a premium product.
I agree with you that you can mask your price increase and it isn't something that I'd considered when I originally posted.
However, I would argue that Bloomberg was priced high enough early on to not attract cheapskates. Again, pricing as a signal. If you're charging $15,000 and the person is making $1mm a month off of it the difference between $15,000 and $25,000 isn't very much. However, if you started out charging $150 a month and hope to get to $25,000 you're going to have a very hard time doing so even if your customers are making $1mm a month of the service because you've anchored your price so low. Again, there are probably creative ways to get from $150 to $25,000 like you mentioned, but I'm not sure I'm interested in spending my creative energy moving the needle that much when I could just start out charging a much higher rate.
How do the leads get in the system to start?
And a bulk CSV import tool (from the dropdown in the app) http://help.close.io/customer/portal/articles/965955-bulk-im...
You might want to consider releasing a plugin to feed leads from gravity forms into your solution. My $.02.
Congrats on the launch though!