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Recognizing our "Most Connected Customer" Brandon Dunlap at the SXSBW Happy Hour
In preparing for the launch of the new Small Business Web Directory and for the SXSBW (South by Small Business Web!) party that we co-sponsored at SXSW last week, we came across someone who we think just might be our “most connected” customer, Brandon Dunlap from Brightfly, Inc. Brandon uses several of the Small Business Web members applications to run his business.
We were delighted to bring Brandon to the party as our Special Guest of Honor and showered him with all sorts of hip and useful schwag from the thirteen sponsoring companies of the party.
Here’s Brandon’s story:
Very well-connected
Brandon Dunlap, managing director of research at Brightfly, Inc., logged nearly 100,000 air miles last year crisscrossing the country for business meetings, conferences and other professional events. He is constantly networking, which in turn helps the research and consultancy firm grow its contact base by thousands each year.
To foster and grow all of these relationships, Brightfly relies on a number of solutions offered by The Small Business Web, an open collective of businesses aimed at connecting Web applications to help small businesses bloom and grow. The integrated solutions, which work together through their open APIs, help Brightfly maintain mountains of contact data and more efficiently and personally stay engaged with each person.
“Being a relationship-driven company, we don’t have a sales team managing all of our data. without the help of BatchBlue, this would be an arduous task. The companies of The Small Business Web give us a single point to manage all the ways we get in touch with our friends and colleagues in the field,” said Dunlap. “Since The Small Business Web solutions can ‘talk’ with each other, I can get back to people faster, even while I am on the road. The time savings are phenomenal.”
For example, Dunlap might collect a batch of business cards while at a information security conference in San Francisco and send them off to Shoeboxed before he gets on a plane to return home to Texas. Once back in the office, he can take all of the contact data that can be scanned and digitized by Shoeboxed and seamlessly enter it into his BatchBook social CRM account by BatchBlue. BatchBook enables him to tag each person by what event he met them at, what types of materials they requested or any other follow-up or other identifiers. He can then build and manage e-mail lists using MailChimp, another Small Business Web partner, to stay in touch with contacts with key research developments as they occur. Recently, Brightfly has kicked off a Competitive Compliance survey project leveraging the relationship between MailChimp and Small Business Web member SurveyGizmo to glean research insights from leaders in the information security and audit field.
Data in Brightfly’s is also imported into a Freshbooks account for recurring invoices, while Small Business Web partner Clarity helps Dunlap and others try to forecast and look for trends in their revenue streams.
“Everything in our business is done on personal connections. For everyone on my team to share all that information in one location and to be able to pivot across that data is huge,” said Dunlap. “The Small Business Web network of solutions helps us maintain currency and relevancy with all the individuals we need to contact at a price and service level better than a single-source solution.”
It was great to meet Brandon in person and be able to learn first-hand how the Small Business Web is helping small businesses like his succeed.
What about you? Are you using multiple web apps to help your small business bloom and grow? Let us know, we want to hear from you!
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Tags: batchbook, freshbooks, mailchimp, small business, small business web, SXSWi
Today, live from the action at SXSWi in Austin, we launched the new version of The Small Business Web. This site has grown from a single page put together on the fly at last year’s SXSW, to a full-blown Directory that includes categories, screen shots, pricing info, links to integration information and more.
Helping small businesses navigate and use technology has always been part of BatchBlue’s mission. It’s why we write our “Blue Papers“, it’s why we started the Twitter chat for small business owners #SBBUZZ and it’s the reason we’re now so excited about the new Directory. We think it will be very useful for folks looking for ways to grow and manage their businesses using some of the best tools out there.
Here’s a short video our friends at MailChimp put together to help explain what the Small Business Web is all about:
We hope you will make many good connections through the new Small Business Web Directory. We look forward to helping you hook them all up.
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Tags: batchblue, mailchimp, small business, small business web, SXSW, SXSWi
You may have noticed our big announcement yesterday that BatchBook is now listed in the Google Apps Marketplace. We’ve since gotten a number of people (including reporters, other SaaS companies and even a few customers) asking us simply, “Why did you join?” So I thought I would share my response with you all.
As I explained to Mike Pearson who wrote an article about the new Marketplace for the E-Commerce Times, it just felt like the right thing to do. Let me explain why.
Google understands the value of giving customers control of their own information. All of the Google Apps business products have a publicly available API. You may think this is only important to tech addicts and uber geeks. But THIS IS HUGE for every entrepreneur who cares about growing their business. You see, this is Google’s way of saying (and something BatchBook says as well), “the business information that you trust to our care is yours – do what you need to do with it to succeed.” Yes, Google Apps let you send e-mails, schedule events and create spreadsheets. But they’ve just increased 20 fold what else you can easily do with YOUR information including tracking deals, sending newsletters, generating invoices, scheduling appointments, managing your projects, sending surveys and so much more.
And they were able to do that because a few years ago they made the decision to make their API, the gateway to the data stored within the Google applications, available to anyone their customers chose to grant access to it. They did it in a smart way, in a secure way and honestly, in a pretty gusty way. They knew customers might take their data and run. They knew competitors would have a peek at their inner workings. But they focused on empowering their users to take control of their own data, whether through a geeky friend, a trusted reseller, or another SaaS product. And their users are now benefiting immensely.
This idea is a founding principle of the Small Business Web, a movement we co-founded a year ago to bring together like-minded, customer-obsessed software companies to integrate our respective products and make life easier for small businesses. With more than 70 companies now participating, many of which are part of the new Google Apps Marketplace, we feel that the growing trend towards open integrations can only benefit small businesses.
So yes, the decision to join the new Google Apps Marketplace was a no brainer. They’ve made it easier for their users to access the growing number of applications they can use to run their business. We, of course, wanted BatchBook to be the first in line.
We are in this to help small businesses. And we know this is the right way to do it.
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Tags: api, batchblue, batchbook, google apps marketplace, small business web
We’ve been working with many of our Small Business Web friends in planning a Big Party for Small Business. If you’re going to be in Texas next week, we hope you’ll stop by from some food, drinks and conversation with the smashing hosts of the party (and the people who love them!)
Here are some of the small business SaaS companies who will be in attendance and eager to meet up:
FreshBooks
Formspring
Handset Detection
MailChimp
oDesk
Outright
Rackspace
Shipwire
shoeboxed
surveygizmo
TeamSupport.com
Wufoo
…and of course, good old BatchBlue (hint: look for the blue cupcakes!)
You can RSVP (required by Austin law) and find out more about the party on the official party page. You can also follow the party-specific Twitter account, where we’ll be posting updates, plans, pictures and more.
See you in Texas!
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Tags: batchblue, small business, small business web, SXSW, SXSW10
We wanted to start the new year off with a round-up of some recent articles and reviews that have hit the Interwebs. A brief media retrospective, if you will (a complete list of media coverage can be found on our press page.)
Live via Skype
Back in September, our friend and Internet marketer Bernie Borges did my first ever interview via Skype about all things BatchBlue and our content strategy in particular. His Optimize This blog post has a link to the audio version as well as a nice summary of our chat.
The work/life thing
One of our very favorite ladies Aliza Sherman, who’s the Entrepreneur Mom at WorkItMom (among her many other projects!) posted an interview of our president Pam O’Hara and me by problogger Gina Blitstein. Pam and I were both surprised at how different our answers were when it came to how we balance our work and family lives (Pam has three kids under seven and I have two.) Have a read – maybe you have come up with an entirely different way to make it all work that you’d like to share.
Locavores
Here in our hometown of Providence, we were featured in Rhode Island Business Quarterly. I like this article because it includes a picture of (most of) our team in our office, which is kind of rare. I also love the title “The Organizers” because it makes us seem alike street gang in a gritty episode of the Sopranos — arguably more exciting than building software!
Monkey do
Our favorite monkeys over at email marketing company MailChimp reached an important milestone with their API and mentioned BatchBlue and our Small Business Web cohorts over on their blog. Our integration with MailChimp was our first ever, therefore we will always have a great fondness (as well as free bananas!) for them. Congrads to the MailChimp team on their continued success.
Word on TheStreet.com
Finally, as an early Christmas gift, Jonathan Blum wrote a nice review of BatchBook on TheStreet.com and also posted a slick little video of BatchBook in action. It was a great way to end an exciting year.
As always, we’re now hard at work at the BatchBlue headquarters, building things to surprise and hopefully delight our customers in upcoming months. Thanks to all for your support — we look forward to what the new year will bring for BatchBlue and our customers.
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Tags: batchblue, batchbook, mailchimp, small business web
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