I’m pretty sure you’re the last man standing. Sadly the others have walked away, disappointed and disillusioned, yet you keep coming back for more punishment. You should start a business!  Here’s the logo, btw:

First, THANK YOU to everyone who has contributed to this process! It’s been hell for us, but the last 5 days have been a complete joy becuase of you and your great ideas here. 

VOTE HERE (click) 

I especially want to throw shout outs to Craig Lauer, who is a big influencer here at the company (freelance but for a long, long time) and has really shaped a lot of the product and language around it. Also, Charles Wilson had some great names.

I personally liked  Worksy–cute, fun, and will make a great product name for someone. Thanks, Tiffani. Ed Westin had some cool entries, as did Jasper and James David. Jason was relentless; my favorite of his was Fester, just for the Addams Family reference.

JBDean had flair for the functional, and Prajjwal won some fans with “IceCRM”, pronounced “ice cream”. Michael reminded us of works, works, works with about 20 entries; I liked Lucid from Walter, but one of our criteria was that we wanted the URL. Patrick’s Hermes was popular with one of our developers, Tony, who likes Greek mythology but conceded that we need to be a bit more mainstream.

Craigs’ SimpleWorkDay was one of my favorite’s as well, but Pink Girly won my support for EllaBellaU simply for the fun of it. (U for Umbrella or University, unsure).

We also hired a branding expert–PureTungsten.com. I read a number of Phil’s articles last week. Phil had a number that we liked–he’s really quite thoughtful and good.

You can vote on the finalists here: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB2283CYQSE3B

Thank you!

There have been some really great suggestions over the past 4 days! So a bit about our decision process. First, we have some internal names developed. Most of them suck pretty bad, so it’s unlikely they’ll get chosen.

Next, we’ve retained a branding firm, which has come up with 12 names, 5 of which we really like. On Friday we asked them to take another pass because we like the direction and some of the names, but we’d like to see what else they can come up with.

At 11 am tomorrow we’ll hear back from the firm. At noon, I’m buying the team lunch and kicking around the names you’ve provided along with the internal ones and the branding firm ones.

Sometime in the afternoon tomorrow, we’ll choose the name, and if it’s yours, bells will ring throughout the land and we’ll cut you a check.

I want to thank everyone for their thoughtfulness and creativity–some really great choices. Naming is one of the hardest things I’ve had to go through. And my guess is we’ll still end up naming it something that’s not perfect, just pretty good. I’m ok with that–the love of the product creates affection and respect for the name, not the other way around.

I do hope you’ll download and try the software!

Thanks. You can keep suggesting until 11 am Tuesday EST.

Things to know to help you name:

1) Download the software. Try out the sample database–get a feel for it.

2) The price is $129 for Standard and $299 for Pro (Pro is due Oct 1).;

3) It’s multi-user.

4) It runs on the desktop, but is integrated with web services like email marketing, mapping, Facebook, etc.

5) Post your name selection in the post comments of the PREVIOUS post–appreciated.

SOME BACKGROUND:
We make GiftWorks Fundraising software and have 7000 nonprofit customers. The new software, though, is for small business and is currently called CRMbrella (long story). We’re renaming it by Monday, and launching it in 2 weeks, though we’ve already got about 100 customers who really love it.

The Pro version will have a nice sales Pipeline, real-time integration with Outlook, Quickbooks integration, pretty cool calendar and task management, and a transmogrifier weapon throw in for good measure.

CRMbrella home page...

Coming down the road is remote backup and integrated email marketing. While the software runs on the desktop, it’s integrated with web services. Try the 30-day trial here: http://www.crmbrella.com/freetrial.html. Thanks!

Enter your suggestions as comments. You can try the software or learn more about it by clicking on the CRMbrella Website link on the right.

CRMbrella is really quite easy to use–very nice, elegant, simple interface, crisp screens, context-sensitive help. Pretty sweet. You can see it in action here: http://crmbrella.com/demo2.html

Thanks for your efforts! If we pick your name, you’re the winner. Pretty easy. And our friend forever. We’ll have ya over for pie someday. Oh, and don’t forget the $1000 you’ll earn for your efforts, plus 100 licenses to use or give to your friends and family!

In the meantime, we’ve been working on CRMbrella Pro. The Outlook integration looks pretty good, and I can see moving that into Standard. We’ll see–up to the product manager, Amy…

One of our customers has clients in other countries, and wanted to be able to change the country listing.

Changing CRMbrella field values is quite easy. Simply click on Settings, then Customize CRMbrella, then Change CRMbrella Fields. You’ll see a list of fields, the values for which you can change, add to, and remove.

Spend some time in the customization section; a lot of the power of CRMbrella comes from the basis of customization that reflects your business. You then apply that power through SmartLists, which give you the ability to create highly targeted lists–segmentation. After you create those lists that reflect a useful segmentation of your customers and contacts, you can send targeted email and mail to them, creating separate messages for each list (where it makes sense).

Segmentation can go a long way toward helping you increase revenue, and will give you a lot more insight into your marketing activities than simple generic mailings. For instance, if you have 3 price points for your services–bargain, standard, and “executive”, for instance, you will want to send a different message to your potential bargain customers than the likely executive customers. SmartLists and Mailings allow you to do this, and customization gives you greater depth.

The Reports Section ties everything together and gives you insight into your business. You can run reports on any SmartList, giving you very specific, granular insight into how well things are working. For instance, out of people who were sent the last mailing, how many purchased? How much revenue did it generate?

In the Pro version, we’ll be adding a lot more custom fields, to give you even deeper customization. Let us know other ways we can improve, as well.

–it takes just a few clicks to import all of my contacts
–I can import folders and organize them into groups automatically.
–it doesn’t import emails! i know this, because I run the division, but it’s something I’d really like to see in the next version.

But then the point came up–do we really need to import emaiL? Can’t we just reference emails? And I think that’s a valid point–lightweight, etc.

But that only works for a single PC. We’d have to have the ability to search an index every PC on a network, or even Exchange, and while there are solutions for that kind of search and indexing, it’s not a trivial implementation.

What we’re finding is that while our target is very small business,larger businesses with more sophisticated needs really want to use this, but with a few more features. SalesWOrsk CRMbrella Pro will get us some of the way, but I can see beyond that…

anyone else try the Outlook import?

Nate’s the man on this one…

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=28710298432

And we have some early joiners…

Visit the site at http://www.crmbrella.com to download the new version. If you have SalesWorks, please uninstall it first. You can use your existing database with it, but back it up in case you run into any issue3s ( simple copy to another folder will do, or you can use SalesWorks to to the backup).

Thanks to Amy S, Shawn, Michelle, Kaitlyn, Jason, Mike, Steve, and especially Jeff for making this happen!

So the plan from here is to start slow–letting friends, customers, and consultant partners know, and learn from their use. We’ll start marketing after a few weeks, and if there are any issues we’ll try to fix them in that time. We’re planning an early July update if it’s needed.

In the meantime, we’re working on CRMbrella Pro, which will have more features but that same, easy to use interface. Uncluttered, feature-relevant software. Let us know your thoughts.

We’ll be posting daily, by the way, and not always about the software, so check  back often, or subscribe. Thanks!

We’re almost positive, anyway. We’ve been making the name changes, polishing the hubcaps and dotting what needs to be dotted. It looks good, it’s stable, and has some of your suggestions in it.

The roadmap, though–where are we heading with this? Well, lots of good stuff is on the way. Ron has been working on the online services infrastructure. Tony is new and getting up to speed on the APIs, and is testing out some new mapping stuff. We’ll likely make his stuff available to you through the labs site (as soon as we set that up.

But SalesWorks Pro…er, CRMbrella Pro, that’s what’s next. Here’s what I know will absolutely be in there:

1. role-based administration, so you can limit who sees and does what throughout the software
2. a lead pipeline. there’s likely to be some debate about the best way to do this, so jump in and speak your mind. I’m personally designing this, and I have some specific biases after thinking about it for, oh, 10 years. I built the pipeline application for ChiliSoft’s internal sales team.
3. Outlook, QuickBooks, and handheld integration
4. importing from Plaxo, Act, and others
5. virtually unlimited custom fields
6. more reports

So we have a lot to work on. We’re targeting October 15th for the release, which means Beta 1 will be by the beginning of August. We hope you’re along for the ride, and contribute to making this the best software for small businesses!