Pankaj Malviya, LongJump’s CEO, is featured on vator.tv with Bambi Francisco discussing the company, how LongJump is helping small business, and the approach taken with LongJump and Relationals.

Pankaj discussed how the enterprise media industry successfully adopted Relationals CRM for managing customer relationships and sales operations as well as providing strategic business analytics.

LongJump, on the other hand, is focused on empowering the smaller and medium-sized companies and departments with a web-based application platform that offers customization, analysis, and policy-driven operations.

   LongJump has been shortlisted as a nominee for the Webware 100 in the Productivity category featuring products like application suites, groupware, and web platforms. It is an honor for us to be selected from what we understand was over 4,600 nominees. The top 10 winners are announced across 10 categories on Monday, April 21, the day before the Web 2.0 Expo opens (which LongJump is a sponsor at).

Rafe Needleman of CNet’s Webware once called LongJump “Back Office in a Box,” and we like that term. Rafe also indicated:

LongJump’s pitch is that the apps interconnect. People and companies that you use in one app can easily be found in another. Also, users don’t have to construct or modify the apps (aside from adding their company logo if they wish) for them to meet most basic needs.

You can vote for LongJump in the Webware 100 Productivity Category here.

LongJump’s CEO Pankaj Malviya provided some perspective to the entrepreneur and venture capital community on how LongJump built its business to the readers of the Under the Radar blog. The posting entitled “To VC or Not VC – Going It Alone,” provides the history of the company as well as the approach it took getting to where it is today.

There are times when a VC will let you get away with things, because they’ve already hedge their bets with you by investing in other companies. They might overlook a bad decision and tend not to intervene until it’s too late. Going at it alone forces you to grow within your own means. It’s also the best way to ensure applied innovation – that is, innovation with real revenue potential rather than just a technological potential.

You can read the entire article here.

As part of their feature on startups and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, LongJump’s CEO Pankaj Malviya is interviewed by Fritz Nelson at InformationWeek discussing how every enterprise can reduce capital expenditures and drive productivity by using and customizing business software applications on the LongJump platform. Pankaj also discusses how various SMBs and enterprises are using LongJump to securely and quickly support and automating their business processes.

“It’s nice to see a company willing to bite at the heels of SalesForce.com.” - Fritz Nelson

For the complete video and article, click here.

Email marketing campaigns can be one of the most cost-effective campaigns you can employ to both drive new business, as well as keep you top-of-mind with your customers. That’s because while educating your customers takes more effort than simple branding, an educated customer is also more likely to spend more and spend it with the person who is educating them.

Email marketing campaigns deliver a lot of information while also providing measureable results in both how many people see your message (opens) and how many actively wanted more information (clicks). You also capture information about prospects that don’t want to be bothered (unsubscribes).

In the past, CRM users had to employ a separate email delivery service to send whitelisted bulk emails to your constituents. This limited your ability to track the results of your campaigns as they related to new sales opportunities. You either had to pay for an additional service, pay for integration between two services, or manually reconcile campaign results with existing CRM data.

By combining CRM sales force automation and email campaigning in one application as LongJump does, you can specify your lead, prospect, and account targets, embedded personal information into each email, and measure results across your sales cycle.

Here are some terms you should be familiar with when using email marketing:

• Whitelisting - Known spammers are often blacklisted by networking agencies and email filters. A whitelisted delivery service is one that has commited resources and efforts to maintaining a good standing with these filters and ensure greater delivery of emails.
• HTML - Emails that are formatted in HTML are similar to web pages with links, images and table layouts. You’ll want to remember to not use Flash, animated graphics, and frames most email readers do not support them.
• List Management - Rather than importing names from wherever you get leads into your other CRM data (which can lead to duplication, bad data, and a lot of cold leads), it is often better to manage multiple lists individually. This allows you to send a specific group a certain set of information.
• Personalization - Like a mail-merge letter, including information about that particular person in your email adds a level of personalization which also improves the chance that your message will be heard. This can be done by embedding variables into the email template that call out fields like ‘first name,’ or ‘company name.’
• Callbacks - Callbacks are tasks or emails that are automatically triggered when the receiver of your email takes some action (open, click, open and click). This provides a proactive way to follow-up on a customer.

One other thing to keep in mind is content. As stated earlier, education is a very powerful tool in the sales process. That’s why newsletters make excellent campaigns. They provide the reader with information that will help them improve their situation in an unobtrusive way. Meanwhile, it positions you as a reputable source of useful information. The better your content is, the better your chance that they will forward the newsletter to colleagues and peers or look forward to the next email from you.

When you are initially starting your business, sales teams can be relied on to keep their customers’ contact and account information in their own way with little interaction with the rest of the business. It’s not uncommon to maintain your customer list in Excel and use Outlook to drive business activities. Or a worst case scenario is to keep customer information in your head.

But salespeople are becoming more mobile, customer relationships are becoming more complex, and staffing is more volatile.

What do you do when a member of your team leaves or is out of the office? How do you maintain the connections to those customers? Do you know what the status of their deals are? What is your revenue outlook for the next month?

Businesses today have to convey much more information to manage their activities than just set up a meeting here or there. In short, selling and managing a customer relationship go hand-in-hand.

To maintain measurable success, you need to be able to:

• Centrally access and manage your customer information
• Share that same information with your team members securely and with necessary territorial controls
• Reduce the time and complexity it takes to report individual sales activities
• Automate common practices and processes
• Monitor and measure individual and team success
• Effectively target prospects for new business and existing customers for repeat business
• Provide multiple ways to communicate to those customers
• Build on customer data with information relating to opportunities, products/services/projects, customer feedback, referrals, accounting, etc.

Contact managers put too much sales information on an island, making collaboration and the management of customer information difficult. It also significantly increases the risk that you lose that data. A hard drive crash or stolen computer can debilitate you for weeks.

These are all factors to keep in mind as you evolve your operations into a sales force automation or CRM solution. An SFA or CRM will allow you to put your sales and customer activities together for a greater, more holistic approach to developing an ongoing relationship with that customer and hence, your business.

Salespeople hate CRMs. Ok, maybe hate is too strong, but ask any of them how they feel about CRMs and you will either watch their eyes glaze over or see fury in their response. To them it is a necessary evil. But why? Could it be:

• Perceived busywork - Sales reps have to enter information about their activities, log opportunity information, update customer contacts, and don’t always get any value from it.
• Big brother - CRMs can make sales reps feel as if their every task is being micromanaged.
• Can’t find information - Many sales tracking tools tend to focus on forcing sales teams to adhere to reporting, but few help the individual rep sell more.
• Doesn’t drive new business - Most CRM activities involve what you’re doing, not what you’re doing next. They often don’t provide a way to continue to market to your leads and existing customers.
• Inflexibility - Many CRMs force you to adhere to their conventions and when you want to change it to fit your business, they charge you for it.

So how do you change their minds?

Make Entering Data Easier

Besides prospect, account, and contact data, the most important information is going to be driven by sales activities. That includes customer calls, emails, task status, etc. If it takes a lot of effort for a rep to enter data, it won’t happen. Let’s say they call a customer, but the customer’s not interested right now. Are they going to take the time to record that information, or will they move on to the next prospect? If their performance is based on sales and not data entry, they will almost certainly skip logging that activity, even though you know that that’s still a good prospect at some point. If you give them one place to go and log everything from customer information updates, opportunities, and next steps, you’re going to get better information about activities.

Give Them Valuable Information to Do Their Jobs

The best way for a rep to sell is by understanding the profile of who his customers are and how to strategically go after them. This means having good information about each customer and creating daily tasks that focus on those customers. Whether it’s by ZIP code or last date of purchase, they need to be able to slice and dice their customer data to find the best approach.

Identify Ways They Can Measure Their Own Progress

We’re all a competitive in the business world — especially salespeople. That’s the point of quotas and commissions. When reps see how their doing against their quota, or even against other reps, that’s encouragement to do better.

Enable Them to Re-Market to Their Contacts

Campaigning has traditionally been used as a marketing tool, but in many ways, it’s most valuable as a sales tool. Personalized email campaigns let an individual rep cover a lot of territory but still maintain a certain level of 1-to-1 selling. With a few targeted messages, automated follow-ups when the reader clicks or opens an email, and the ability to customize emails to fit the call to action, sales teams can drive a lot more opportunities more efficiently.

Design and Automate Best Practices

All efficient people have a lazy streak. They want to accomplish as much as they can with as little work as possible. That gives them time to deal with the more complex issues or to try new things, which can advances them even further. For salespeople, the more automated you can make a CRM, the more intelligent it can become and, ultimately, the more productive they can be. Creating data policies is a great way to do that. For example, if a new prospect is introduced and there is data indicating their interest in “Trucks,” a completely differ selling process can start for that prospect.

Salespeople don’t really hate CRMs. They hate that they don’t work like they do. The more a CRM can work in concert with their activities, the more successful your CRM implementation will go. And once you win them over, they won’t be able to live without it.