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We have been loving the Flowtown integration and have been looking for more ways to leverage the information we get back from Flowtown in BatchBook.
We’ve received some ideas from Twitter as well as a very thoughtful blog post from our customer Hugh Macken. They all agreed on one thing: Add Klout!
Klout, for those who don’t know, is a great tool to measure a persons influence on the social web. Influence is measured on many different fronts including followers, friends, total retweets, etc. You receive a Klout score from 1-100 with 100 meaning you basically rule the social web.
Flowtown gives us this score but until today we were not displaying it. Now, if you are using the Flowtown integration, we populate the score into your social media supertag:
Yeah my score is pretty low…thank you Mom for following me though!
We import the score as a number field so using BatchBook reports you can search for folks with a Klout score greater than, less than or equal to. You can create lists targeted based on Klout score which can be very powerful.
We’re also pulling in job title information from Flowtown if the contact does not have a existing title on their contact record. Let us know what else you would like to see out of this integration — we’re listening!
So there you have it, a small addition to BatchBook but something we think you will find very useful. And you’re welcome, @tsondermann.
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Tags: batchbook, flowtown, marketing, social crm, Social Media
If you use Google to handle your email, you may have heard of the awesome social plugin from the folks at Rapportive. This plugin allows you to view the social connections of anyone who emails you right in the context of the email. Check it out:
This information comes up on the right of my screen whenever Rahul sends me an email. You can also hover over any email address and have the relevant info show up. Really powerful stuff and as lovers of all things contact data-related, we at BatchBlue have been big fans since they launched.
So of course we were excited when the folks behind Rapportive got in touch and asked if we wanted to participate in their new developer platform called Raplets. We immediately said yes and got to work.
What Raplets let you do is add onto the information supplied by Rapportive. In our case we can provide contact information, to-do (tasks) and comments. After setting up the BatchBook Raplet, you will see the following in addition to the Rapportive information:
With the BatchBook Raplet installed, from within Gmail, you can get a view of a person’s BatchBook information including basic contact information, any attached To-Dos and view/add comments without ever leaving your email. This is really powerful stuff and as you use it we think you will agree that it totally will rock your email world.
Additionally, if the contact does not yet exist in BatchBook you will see:
Click the “BatchBook It!” button and it creates the contact in your BatchBook account and even save the Twitter handle as well. A quick and easy way to get new contacts into BatchBook – we’ve already found this to be a huge time-saver and tremendously useful as we go about our busy days.
To install:
1. Go to Rapportive and install the plugin. You’ll need to use Google for you mail via Gmail or Google apps and also you must be using Firefox or Chrome as your browser.
2. Go to the newly-launched Raplet directory and select BatchBook. The install process will ask you for your BatchBook account name which is the first part of your BatchBook url. For example if your url is mycompany.batchbook.com then you would enter “mycompany” as the account name.
Then just make sure you are logged into your BatchBook account and start enjoying the awesomeness that is Rapportive + BatchBook.
We love that these guys are taking email to another level and are super excited they’ve invited us along for the ride.
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, email, Raplets, Rapportive, social crm
You’ll probably notice next time you log into BatchBook that we’ve added a fresh coat of paint and moved some furniture around a bit. Actually, it’s much more than that — what you are seeing is a culmination of four months of work to bring you of what we feel is a significant upgrade both visually and functionally.
First, we wanted to thank Alex Taylor of Big Ring Design, who is responsible for the new design. The BatchBlue team had a great time working with and getting to know him better over the past few weeks and we’re very pleased with the outcome of his efforts. Thanks, Alex!
Over the upcoming weeks, we’ll publish a few more posts that go into more detail about some of the specific changes, but I wanted to touch on the main areas of the site that were changed/improved.
New Quick Add options
- Quick Add an Event and a Deal
Dashboard
- Deals widget now displays totals and there is a new comments widget
Batch Actions
- Now options displayed in a drop down. Much cleaner.
Contact Detail
- Click & drag sections in body of page
- Activity log in body of page (not new, just moved)
- New, integration partners section in body of page
- Contact info in sidebar (not new, just moved)
- Social network search ( a big add – more details coming on this in another blog post)
- “Customer touchpoint” stats (created, last updated) in header as well as last communicated dates.
- Notes & attachments grouped together in new sidebar section
Communication Detail
- Attachment section now on sidebar
Browse Deals
- Admins can now create custom statuses. Now you can create a deal status of lead, prospect, etc to better tune your sales workflow.
- Deal totals shown on sidebar for admins
List Detail
- Record created/updated stats moved to header
Browse Tags & SuperTags
- Manage tags & STs in new, tabbed table; no longer in 2 separate tables
Sync
- Sync and integration services now in new, tabbed table
We hope you like what you see and that you’ll let us know your thoughts and feedback. We wouldn’t be where we are without our all the support and feedback we have gotten from our customers over the past couple years. So thanks to you all, too. Our customers continue to be an invaluable resource in growing and designing our product.
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Tags: batchbook, social crm
I woke up this morning to an early Christmas gift from Jonathan Blum at TheStreet.com. He posted a great review of BatchBook this morning entitled “To Sell Better, Sell Smarter.” While Jonathan had some very nice things to say about the simplicity of BatchBook as a CRM tool, he also had some very insightful criticism as well.
Jonathan writes that “BatchBook is no CRM final solution. As with all CRM tools, BatchBook is no miracle.” I could not agree with him more. I wrote an article for Network Solution’s Grow Smart Business blog a few months ago titled “For Start-up Businesses, CRM Software is Not the Answer”, where I argued that CRM software is a tool that can help small businesses collect and share information across the team as they learn together what their winning sales strategy will be. I argued that “there are no magic growing beans for new businesses. The fun part is figuring it out as you go.”
CRM software that tries to sell a small business the right sales funnel or the winning pipeline is selling magic beans. Even within the same industry, same market and same product offering, two competitors are going to have very different sales strategies. If not, neither is likely to succeed. What your CRM software should do is make it easier for you, your team, your network and your customers to work together to find the right way to make your business successful.
As Jonathan notes in the article, “Cleaner, faster, leaner selling will be job No. 1 in 2010. Or you can expect not to make it to 2011. And BatchBook is as simple a way to fight that fight, as I have found.” With BatchBook, we’ve provided a tool to help small businesses be more successful in managing their contact network. In 2010, we look forward to both expanding our tool set and helping our customers better manage their workflow processes.
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Tags: crm, small business, small business CRM, social crm
Jeremiah Owyang recently wrote an article for CRM Magazine Social CRM Vendors Don’t Walk The Talk where he puts a number of CRM vendors through the spreadsheet grinder to see how their social media engagement measures up to the social media features their products espouse. BatchBook was not included in the analysis, though BatchFriend and customer Paul Mabray from Vintank.com was kind enough to mention us in the comments.
I agree with Jeremiah, but I think there is a clear distinction between the CRM companies that are now making a social media play versus the social media upstarts who are incorporating some traditional CRM features such as sales and customer service management into their products as they build them. Jeremiah highlighted a number of products that were developed around older (phone, e-mail, direct mail) marketing tools and are now working to add social media as an additional sales channel. Alternately, there are newer products like Jive, Gist and our own BatchBook that really began as social media communication tools and have added sales features as another layer.
Not surprisingly, those with Web 2.0 roots have more integration with social media throughout our products and throughout our company cultures, as well. As he mentions, social media is not a linear channel that can be “added on” in the same way previous channels have been. It is an intricate web of blogs, comments, tweets, direct messages, friend requests, recommendations, favorites and hashtags each with their own sub-culture and mini-dialect that together shape the direction of a conversation. Whether it’s sales, customer service, or project management, this new dialogue is not fully represented unless you can track all aspects of the conversation, and more importantly, understand their meaning in context with your relationships.
I applaud Jeremiah for calling companies out for more engagement. He makes great points about not only supporting customer and developer discussions, but also showcasing those communities as a vibrant component of the product. He’s also given us a few ideas for pushing our community into a more prominent part of the product. And isn’t that what social media is about? Using a public kick in the pants to move your efforts forward.
While it’s certainly interesting to watch how the older, more established companies work to fit social media into their product offerings, I think it’s even more interesting to build a product around the new tools as they are being developed.
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Tags: batchblue, batchbook, crm, social crm, Social Media
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