Penalty on Salesforce: Complexity!

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Penalty on Salesforce: Labor intensity!

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Penalty on Salesforce: Inefficiency!

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Let the Games Begin: Salesforce vs. Upswing

Some CRM implementations fail in part because of laborious complexity and user fatigue, and we think the click contests in the ensuing posts between Salesforce and Upswing's forthcoming new version release speaks for itself. We're doing strict apples-to-apples comparative analysis with frequently performed actions and counting the clicks it takes each system to execute them. It's one measure to gauge the efficiency of an on-demand CRM product.

The reduced labor and increased efficiency of Upswing CRM associated with these frequently performed actions is representative of the entire Upswing application. When amplified over the course of a year in using the Upswing product, a significant amount of labor reduction and time savings is accrued relative to laborious CRM systems, not to mention increased productivity and user satisfaction.

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Web 2.0 and CRM

Web 2.0 as a term has come to mean a lot of things, some specific and some ambiguous, not unlike “CRM.” But for better or worse, people now use “Web 2.0” as a catch-all term to describe range of interactive models and tools on the internet that create both threats and opportunities in many sectors - including financial advisory services. While the term Web 2.0 has been bandied about for some time, it seems the financial services industry media is abuzz about it lately, and with good reason. It’s a force for everyone. WealthFly just ran an excellent post about Web 2.0 that you might want to check out which aligns precisely with our views of Web 2.0 in the financial advisory space.

A common feature of Web 2.0 in the realm of financial services is that the dynamic between businesses (such as investment wirehouses, broker-dealers, and advisory firms) and consumers (investors) is changing from a vertical model (investors receiving information and guidance from financial firms and professionals) to an increasingly horizontal model (investors learning information from each other). The relationship of the financial advisors to his/her clients is changing in a Web 2.0 world, and this spells both a threat and an opportunity to a financial advisor. (Don’t believe us? From one angle of the business, check out the success of new Web 2.0 upstarts like Covestor and Cake Financial, where the world of investing advice is getting democratized.)

If you’re a financial advisor who's new to all of this and want to get a good primer on Web 2.0 technologies, tools and practices for your business, we suggest contacting Marie Swift, president of Impact Communication, a marketing communications firm that assists independent financial advisors. We caught up with Marie and did a quickie interview with her in the video above after she presented at another standing room only session entitled “Using the Web 2.0 to Build Rapport With Your Clients and Market Your Business” at the recently held Technology Tools for Today Conference in Orlando.

In subsequent blog posts we’ll reveal how the many Web 2.0 features of Upswing’s CRM service can help advisors and firms interact with their clients in entirely new ways in a changing world. Opportunities abound.

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High Turnout for CRM

This morning’s session entitled “The Expanding Role of CRM Software in Advisors' Offices” at the Technology Tools for Today Conference in Orlando was quite a hit. However, it started with a momentary event glitch: too many people showed up to attend. ...On a Saturday morning no less. Session moderator Bob Veres deftly got the event management company here at the Gaylord Palms Convention Center to expand the sliding-wall conference room to three times its original capacity and the session got underway, still packed at full capacity.

Upswing’s Alex Turnbull was a speaker in this session along with representatives of competing CRM systems from Fidelity, Junxure and Redtail. Bob did a great job of moderating the session. While he prodded the session panelists and amusingly hinted at an impending "feeding frenzy" among the four CRM vendors who spoke out to a sea of prospective customers, all remained decorous and provided helpful information about implementing their respective CRM technology in financial advisor environments. We suppose the polite restraint among the CRM vendors reflects a burgeoning market and lots of fish in the sea. Today's high turnout to learn about CRM certainly supports this view.

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The End of CRM Complexity

Upswing CRM issued a press release today about our plans for a promotional campaign called "The End of CRM Complexity." Such a slogan and attendant campaign stands on its own, though industry watchers who know their software-as-a-service market history will recognize what we'd call "remix marketing" with a sprinkle of parody in our advertising efforts, including some of the words used in the press release that respin a release Salesforce once issued. Like a DJ spinning old music and mixing it with new, we're respinning some of Salesforce.com's PR sloganeering - namely, their ad campaign of "The End of Software" - and putting our own twist on it. The source of this inspiration comes from the on-demand CRM software services that we've designed versus what Salesforce has engineered.

(We never quite got how "No Software" was considered by Salesforce to be a good slogan to sell hosted software, and we never understood why an early-entrant company in the on-demand software sector with inevitable expansion beyond CRM would limit its corporate brand name by labeling itself "Salesforce" and using the stock ticker "CRM" but we digress.)

This coming summer, the End of CRM Complexity campaign will put a spotlight on the usability of first generation CRM from vendors like Salesforce and compare them to the new version of Upswing CRM. Stay tuned, because CRM is about to get a lot easier.

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Hello.

A touch of writer's block often accompanies the first entry of a new blog, such as this one, so we'll start it off with a simple, inviting word: Hello.

It's an auspicious salutation from our point of view. The word "hello" has once again come in favor on Madison Avenue as a term marketers are using with increasing frequency in ad campaigns to attract attention. What caught our eye in relation to Upswing's forthcoming version of our on-demand CRM technology was this from a recent New York Times article saying that the greeting "'hello' lets people feel comfortable, to humanize something that they might look at and say, ‘I don’t know if I can use it.'" ...Judging from the visual and functional designs of many competing CRM software solutions we've seen, and compared to what Upswing is about to launch, that pretty well sums up why we're saying hello to you. Our forthcoming version 2 of Upswing CRM will makes users feel comfortable and confident they can use it immediately.

So, hello, and welcome to the new Upswing. This new website with our new corporate identity will increasingly have more informational sections and interactive content. Stay tuned to an awakening of sorts in the on-demand CRM market with the new version release of Upswing CRM.

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