When you look at Google trends for searches on info@hand it is relatively invisible when compared with other similar software solutions. However, as you will see with a closer look this “CRBM Platform” it has more features, greater extensibility and a much lower cost of ownership.

Little testimonial... We have been using the info@hand CRBM (Customer Relationship Business Management) system for the past 3 years.  I guess you could say we are power users since we leverage the

• project management,
• account management,
• HR and timesheets,
• sales pipeline management,
• emarketing campaign management,
• workflows & business automations,
• the mobile portal,
• integration with MS outlook,
• ecommerce with Joomla CMS,
• synchronization with QuickBooks

and virtually all of the available features. Wow! Quite a mouthful… hummm?

Well it is a very powerful business solution and perhaps a better definition would be to call it a “CRBM Platform”.

We originally started our business as Joomla and flash geeks building creative and interactive portals for small businesses, non profits and serial entrepreneurs. Since we worked online all day we wanted a web based infrastructure that could help us automate our business management, consolidate our systems  and connect our global work teams as efficiently as possible. We looked at a lot of solutions and nothing else quite fit the bill. There was and is a lot of great software on the market but we found they either were extremely expensive or did not have the full range of features we needed. I set out to find a consolidated feature set that could manage the full life cycle of our ecommerce transactions and customer account management as well as sales, marketing and production management.

Click here to see an overview comparison of features for Info@hand, Entelium, Everst, Infusion (Now called infusionsoft), MicrosoftCRM, Sage, Salesforce, SugarCRM Enterprise. These are all great software packages for CRM and worth reviewing when you start down the road for comparison. I cannot show the pricing for these but the real kicker came when we started price shopping. While in many cases it was difficult to compare then from a price point since many had different models but the bottom line left info@hand as the lowest cost of entry and greatest ownership position of the software.

Not only did info@hand beat the competition for features but it was also much more affordable for us as a small growing business. Since we became so excited about the powerful features and deep functionality for a low investment we chose to become a VAR for info@hand tool suite.  We felt this was a great value and superior platform for the folks we had already been serving and we could compliment it our Joomla expertise.

New innovative software packages of this kind requires a lot of work to build the support teams and training programs and a consulting approach that allows us to really give superior value and responsive support to our customers. We are now preparing a value builder program to even take this a step further and deliver all of this in a “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) model to keep it from being a horse pill to swallow.

We have discovered and I cover this more in-depth with other blog posts, that the technology is really only one part of what is required to successfully deploy a CRM strategy for your business. Our new PaaS approach for presenting the “CRBM Platform” includes;

• Proven success strategy planning
• Integrated technology configuration
• Comprehensive user and admin training
• Cloud computing infrastructure
• Responsive and affordable technical support

Essentially this is what we deliver now but we have to put the marketing spin on this so it is easy to communicate. We need to get the word out with a “web 3.0 shine” to the “140 characters via twitter” and 12 second sound bite generation.

Thanks for reading… please pass the word.  J CN

I am on twitter at @cnpsupport