By David Sims

David at firstcoffee d*t biz

 

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is just as good as it gets — a nice, 50-song Rolling Stones iTunes mix, heavy on the 1968–1972 supernova albums. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide people in the world into two kinds of people, and those who thrash air guitar to “Sway” while doing so:

 

LongJump, a vendor of on-demand business apps, introduced a new full-featured application, E-mail Campaign Manager, to its expanding suite. The product includes a visual dashboard and a step-by-step process that salespeople and marketers can use to build and track e-mail campaigns.

 

Unveiled in September, LongJump provides a catalog of customizable, interconnected applications aimed at small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

 

LongJump users pay a monthly fee for access to LongJump E-mail Campaign Manager, and a catalog of other business applications including CRM, sales force automation and deal tracking. Users of the LongJump Campaign Manager get 250 free e-mail messages each month, with pay-as-you-go pricing based on the number of e-mails sent. Companies can add new users and buy only what they really need.

 

The E-mail Campaign Manager is billed as being able to help “improve campaign results through better integration between Marketing and Sales department processes,” according to LongJump officials: “For example, it lets Sales or Marketing automatically schedule a call back task for a sales person when a prospect has opened and clicked an e-mail containing the latest newsletter.”

 

LongJump officials say the product can review all previous campaigns directed at a particular customer, and combine e-mail templates with simple mail-merge features, build and manage lead lists for sales teams.

 

As part of its announcement, LongJump has also opened up its platform to third-party integration, announcing its first partnership with VerticalResponse, a vendor of self-service e-mail and direct mail services.

 

This partnership with VerticalResponse “solves one of the biggest CRM issues: affordable, integrated e-mail marketing” products, says Pankaj Malviya, founder and CEO of LongJump. “This partnership also signals LongJump opening up its platform to third-party integration.”

 

LongJump is a service of Relationals, a privately-held provider of on-demand CRM and SFA business applications to more than 100 enterprise companies.

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IEnterprises, which styles itself the “wireless customer relationship management (CRM) experts,” has announced the availability of its pre-built wireless CRM application, Mobile Edge, for Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers.

 

Mobile Edge lets businesses access CRM information from Microsoft Dynamics CRM on the BlackBerry smartphone. Contacts, account cases, opportunities, and call reports, you name it, anytime, anywhere.

 

“Remarkably easy to use,” according to iEnterprises officials, Mobile Edge is a “configurable Web Services-based application that retains the data integrity and security of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM system and BlackBerry smartphone.”

 

The product offers hosted and/or on premise deployment and can be configured to support any language, so fields and actions are shown in the user’s preferred language. It supports custom Microsoft Dynamics CRM Objects, and as a pre-built application, there is no development platform required and no need for hefty customizations or consulting costs.

 

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Search engine marketing technology developer ClearSaleing has announced the release of Version 3.3 of its software, which can provide phone tracking, enhanced CRM integration, detailed granular lead tracking and customer buying behavior analysis, according to the company officials.

 

The product lets search engine marketers capture and measure offline phone orders resulting from their online advertisements. Research cited by the firm suggests that for every one online contact form or registration an advertiser receives, an advertiser will receive three to five additional sales phone calls.

 

The ClearSaleing 3.3 release also provides enhanced integration capabilities with major CRM platforms, including Oracle CRM OnDemand, SalesForce.com, ACT and Goldmine. Search engine marketers need only to install the ClearSaleing tracking code on their Web site to track and properly value each online ad’s contribution to sales that are consummated offline.

 

ClearSaleing’s phone tracking product “removes conversion tracking loss by relating phone orders back to the original online advertising source,” ClearSaleing officials say, so “online advertisers may accurately value each ad’s true profit contribution and return.”

 

“We have known for some time that there is substantial leakage in our current online advertising analytics as a result of not being able to capture call-in orders and track them back to the online ads that generated them,” said Marian Dieter, Executive Vice President of Princeton Watches.

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Parature, a vendor of on-demand customer support and help desk software, has announced a partnership agreement with TMA Resources, a vendor of association management software.

 

Organizations soon will have the opportunity to integrate Parature’s on-demand customer support software with TMA Resources’ flagship software, Personify. Integrating the two software systems will allow organizations to “extend Personify’s current customer service capabilities by providing their members with the ability to submit questions online, search an online knowledge base for answers, read documents to learn more about a topic of interest and participate in discussion boards,” according to the Parature officials.

 

The integration will enable TMA Resources’ clients to synchronize customer information and inquiries between Parature’s customer support software and Personify, the primary source for storing all customer data.

 

The Parature suite of modules is integrated into one product allowing organizations to manage support needs. This online software provides tools necessary to resolve issues.

 

Edi Dor, TMA Resources CEO & President, said integrating Personify with Parature’s customer service software “will enable associations to improve member and customer relations via the Web, which in turn may improve members’ perceived value of their membership.”

 

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Avidian Technologies has announced that Prophet 4.0 has been upgraded to support Microsoft Outlook 2007. This upgrade will enable users of the newest version of Outlook to “benefit from Prophet’s sales and contact management functions,” according to Avidian officials.

 

“We’ve continued to update Prophet for ease of use, integration, and to use Outlook’s best features,” said Tim Nguyen, CIO and co-founder of Avidian Technologies. “Now Outlook 2007 users can also take advantage of Prophet’s sales automation features while continuing to rely on the latest version of Outlook for their e-mail, calendar items and contact information.”

 

Prophet’s technology supports contact management features such as automatically linking all Outlook contacts with the same company name into one company account — without needing a separate stand-alone application.

 

Unlike traditional CRM or sales management software, Prophet is built into Outlook, eliminating the need to manage multiple contact databases or toggle between separate applications. Built on the .NET 2.0 platform, Prophet works entirely inside Outlook and integrates with other business capabilities.