GeeKs Blogging @ dotCOM

Doorbell comes out of beta

by Nitin Jain

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All of us know that Siebel is by far the most popular CRM system on the planet. However, one of the biggest restraints on setting up Siebel is as a Siebel employee once put it up in his own words, “.. Siebel CRM is targetted only at companies with over $250m in annual revenues ..”. Though this has more or less changed with the launch of Oracle’s CRM OnDemand, the push is still there. Siebel is not something we can pitch to the small startup with 10 guys round the corner of our block.

CRM is HOT!! Aand, there is lots of competition around. Another new competitor in the space is the Doorbell CRM, which dropped its beta tag recently. Up till now, anybody could just reach out and sign up. Now, they have introduced pricing for the product, having come out of beta. Doorbell CRM is the first product from the Canadian startup, Smibs.

As a part of the experience, Smibs claims to have carried out a number of enhancements to the existing Product Lineup.

They claim to have introduced a brand new interface, which makes it easier to navigate around. I found the UI cute & nice with most of the important information displayed on the first page. Contact Info, Upcoming Tasks and History are prominently visible in the center of the page. Basically, the following sections are clearly demarcated:

Contacts
You can find out the details about a contact, list of all the contacts, History, Futures Tasks related to the contact, Background Info, the Contact’s phone and other contact details, and a few more features. Contact Detail Info and Connections are clearly visible.

Tasks & Notes
Displays Tasks Overdue, Tasks due soon, Comments related to the To-do task, among the other features

Opportunities
All of us want all the opportunities to covert into Orders, don’t we?
Well, this particular view here list all the opportunities, or as per the filter, Overdue opportunities, approaching opptys, and the like.

Groups & Tags
This is one interesting feature I found. The CRM has the capability to group our contacts into groups, vis a vis the email contact List. This makes it easier to implement certain functionality for a certain group of people all at once. The interesting part is that the group need not be related as belonging to the same Account or the likes.

Connections
This is another interesting feature. The CRM has the capability to link to the popular Social Networking websites like Twitter. At the same time, Smibs, has launched another interesting product, the Smibs Network. Check it out.

Permissions
This defines what all a contact is allowed to do. The most prominent feature being, who can access this contact.

All in all, a cute little CRM to automate the Sales Force.

Prominent flaws that I could see straight away, probably when you compare it with the other established players in the market. Nothing like no Account Info, no talks of Integrations, configuring Products and Price Lists, automatic advising of new products on a Sales Call, Forecasting, integration with other Business Intelligence Systems, and many more.

But then, this is just the beginning. I would guess there is much more to come. Keep watching!!

Till then, check out the Doorbell CRM homepage.