 BrainSell has recently started using Pardot, a marketing automation and lead management tool. One of the coolest things is the simplest feature; lead tracking by reverse DNS look up. A cookie tracks a visitor’s every move on your site. If they fill out a form, you can track them by name. It’s a little creepy, but it’s a great tool. Before you call the prospect, you know exactly which pages they’ve visited and and for how long. You’re one step ahead.
But some companies are taking this to the next level. A New York company, Lotame Solutions, can profile Internet users by inspecting their participation on various social media outlets. Once people are profiled, they are sold for as little as a tenth of a cent. This kind of business is booming, it’s one of the fastest growing in fact.
Julia Angwin of the Wall St. Journal explains it well.
“Ms. Hayes-Beaty is being monitored by Lotame Solutions Inc., a New York company that uses sophisticated software called a “beacon” to capture what people are typing on a website—their comments on movies, say, or their interest in parenting and pregnancy. Lotame packages that data into profiles about individuals, without determining a person’s name, and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers. Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s tastes can be sold wholesale (a batch of movie lovers is $1 per thousand) or customized (26-year-old Southern fans of “50 First Dates”).”
Creepy, right?
Would buy leads that way? How much value do they hold?
For Angwin’s full article, click HERE.
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 BrainSell and Sugar hosted a webinar last week: “Creating a Winning CRM Initiative With Sugar 6.” BrainSell customer Insource Performance Solutions did a great Q&A on why they switched from Salesforce.com to SugarCRM.
View the webinar HERE
Here’s a summery…
Part 1: Intro and Sugar 6 reveal with Sugar’s Director of Marketing, Martin Schneider
Part 2: BrainSell’s Sugar Practice Manager, Kevin Cook, delves into the differences between Salesforce.com, another CRM application that many businesses try.
Part 3: A live interview with BrainSell customer Insource Performance Solutions, who switched from Salesforce.com to Sugar.
Part 4: Q&A
View the webinar HERE
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Jimmie BrainSell is at it again. You can’t stop him from creating business success with CRM, ERP and dangerous liquids.
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 One of the big concerns many CRM users have is storage. Both Sugar and Salesforce.com limit the amount of data a company can store when they host on-demand to 1GB of data.
All three companies allow you to purchase additional storage.
Sales Force Data storage is $300 extra per 50MB per MONTH *
Sugar Data Storage is $200 extra per 1GB per YEAR no matter what kind of data
SalesLogix Cloud = 50 cents per month, per GB
Of course with Sugar and SalesLogix you always have the option to host it yourself, in which case there are no storage limits. SFDC has no option to host the application yourself.
*Note that Salesforce.com charges two seperate data storage fees. $250 per GB per month for FILE storage (documents, pictures) and $300 per month per 50 MB per month for general data storage (notes and other organic info).
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 A few months ago, a key piece of legislation was uncovered in the 1000 + page health care bill. It states that businesses have to give 1099 tax forms to vendors for services and goods worth $600 or more. People are UP IN ARMS about this hidden measure. It will pay for a nice little chunk of health reform, $19 billion over 10 years. No wonder it was sandwiched in the middle, where it took months for people to find.
Business people have raised enough hell for legislatures to take a second (or first) look at the measure. They’re taking two positions on it. Get rid of it all together, or modify it. The modification raises the $600 reporting mark to $5000. Businesses with less than 25 employees would be exempt. And all credit card transactions would be exempt too.
The Senate will hold a vote on the amendment on September 14th.
For more detailed information on the amendment, take a look at the New York Times article by Robb Mandelbaum.
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 Fred Reichheld is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on business loyalty and is a frequent speaker to major forums and groups of senior executives. Audiences around the world consistently rate him as an outstanding communicator. Mr. Reichheld has written the book “The Ultimate Question” which has been ranked #1 on the Wall Street Journal’s Business Best Seller list and #1 on USA Today’s Money best Sellers list.
So what is the ultimate question?
How likely is it that your customers would recommend your company to a friend or colleague?
This single question allows companies to track promoters and detractors, producing a clear measure of an organization’s performance through its customers’ eyes. It is also known as your Net Promoter Score.
Good relationships are hard to build. It’s extremely difficult to understand what people really want, keep promises and maintain a dialogue to ensure customers’ changing needs are met. Even initiatives to “better understand” customers can backfire, drowning firms in a sea of data.
Net Promoter Score is based on the fundamental perspective that every company’s customers can be divided into three categories.
“Promoters” are loyal enthusiasts who keep buying from a company and urge their friends to do the same. “Passives” are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who can be easily wooed by the competition. And “detractors” are unhappy customers trapped in a bad relationship. Customers can be categorized based on their answer to the ultimate question.
In concept, it’s just that simple. But obviously, a lot of hard work is needed to both ask the question in a manner that provides reliable, timely, and actionable data—and, of course, to learn how to improve your Net Promoter Score. Asking the ultimate question allows companies to track promoters and detractors and produces a clear measure of an organization’s performance in its customers’ eyes. Analysis shows that, on average, increasing this Net Promoter Score by a dozen points versus competitors can double a company’s growth rate.
Do you how what your Net Promoter Score would look like?
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Salesforce.com Pricing
Salesforce.com is delivered solely as a SaaS offering. On the surface, there is only a simple, monthly subscription fee levied on a per-user basis. Salesforce Contact Manager and Group Edition are not considered as they cannot be used by more than five users. Salesforce’s subscription model means that these fees are charged annually. The breakdown of subscription list prices for the various Salesforce.com CRM editions is as follows:
| Edition |
Monthly per user costs |
Annual costs per user |
| Professional |
$65 |
$780 |
| Enterprise |
$125 |
$1500 |
| Unlimited |
$250 |
$3000 |
Hidden Costs
Salesforce.com offering also have some hidden charges. For example, adding mobile access to the CRM system for users of Group, Professional and Enterprise editions costs an additional $50 per user, per month. Also, integration capabilities to popular products from technology providers such as SAP or Oracle can cost $12,000 a year. Remember, these additional prices are not one-time server fees— they are annual fees that must be paid each year in order to access your data and CRM system in the manner you see fit.
SugarCRM Pricing
SugarCRM is offered under a subscription model, similar to Salesforce.com, but with some important differences. The subscription fee is inclusive of maintenance, but also includes mobile access, customization and integration capabilities. In short, SugarCRM aims to limit the “hidden fees” that some CRM providers do not include in their base license costs. In addition, Sugar can be deployed either as an On-Demand or SaaS deployment, or on the user’s own servers. Sugar is priced the same, regardless of deployment option.
Sugar comes in two editions: Professional and Enterprise.
| Edition |
Monthly per user costs |
Annual costs per user |
| Professional |
$30 |
$360 |
| Enterprise |
$50 |
$600 |
Again, SugarCRM’s subscription fees are inclusive of basic support, maintenance, as well as mobile user access and complete access to integration toolkits.
For a deeper comparison of SFDC and Sugar, check out this free White Paper.
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Recently, a fantastic client, Online Information Services, came to us with the intent of ditching their old CRM system. Instead of throwing them into a new, expensive solution, we fixed what they already had. It made sense for them. Their response to our performance is what we strive to achieve on every job, no matter the income potential.
What Online Information Services has to say about BrainSell…
“I cannot say enough good things about our experience with the Brainsell group. Our organization was utilizing an existing CRM solution that we thought would not be able to meet our needs. Through Brainsell’s consultative approach and their experience with different CRM solutions they approached the job with “first let’s see what you currently have and see if we can make it work,” instead of automatically trying to sell us a new system. Through their expertise we were able to make minor modifications to our existing system and continue to use it instead of implementing a new expensive CRM. Thank you to the Brainsell group.”
Christoph Turner
Director of Sales and Marketing
ONLINE Information Services, Inc.
 We Strive For Reactions Like These Leave a comment
 Dear 1-800 Contacts,
I love you, and here’s why…
Your web site is awesome. I don’t know about other people, but I wait until I can barely function with my last pair of gunky contacts until I reorder. It’s easy to order and the shipping is free if you spend $50, which is easy to do.
You remind me when I need to reorder with nice, very infrequent emails.
All of your salespeople are overly friendly, mid-western women who thank you up and down.
You can talk to one of those awesome customer support people VERY easily.
Your prices are great.
It may seem silly to like an eye-wear company so much, but it’s refreshing to get excellent service. I relish it! And hope to replicate it every day.
Any other outstanding companies out there?
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 Being a very cutting-edge software business, it was natural for us to get immersed in social media. However, we quickly found ourselves missing some vital links in our social media routine/adventures. The blog gets LOTS of hits, but from who and how do they find it? Are they potential leads? Gallivanting on our web site without leaving a trace behind? The idea has un-nerved some of us.
So we’ve tried several different programs to convert those visitors to live leads.
Hubspot was first. I liked it, but didn’t completely understand the value. We already track our analytics through Google, retweets and mentions are easy to find. I couldn’t grasp why we should spend $9000 a year on a tool that aggregates what I already do for free. Sure, it will save us time, but not $9k of time.
The real value of Hubspot is in it’s landing page builder. So what if people are looking at your blog, you need them to fill out a form. My Hubspot consultant didn’t concentrate on this feature, and that’s where she lost the sale. I know how amazing landing pages can be. Offer a free white paper and watch the names filter in. Then nurture that lead and hope it converts.
LeadLander was next. It’s a neat tool, but incomplete. LeadLander tracks visitors IP address when they’re on your site and creates a list of those addresses. They’re names of companies, not people. Neat, but then what? It’s a HUGE tease to see a company come back again and again and not convert them. That’s where landing pages come in. You need conversion tools that are tempting and easy to use.
Lead Lander is over $1000 per year. Not bad, but I’d rather get forms filled out than see who’s playing on my site. Plus, Hubspot tracks companies that visit your site anyway.
Is $9000 worth it? What kind of returns can you expect if executed correctly?
Calling all Hubspot users!!! Is it worth it?
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