Spark Consulting getsCloud with Solve360 CRM

A large part of my working life revolves around my role as a Cloud Application Consultant helping people “getCloud” This is a 3 step process of Discovery, Adoption and Direction, but one area which I have not been able to find that “Good Fit” for the varying needs of so many of my clients is in the area of CRM.

There are a whole bunch of online CRM applications and I believe I have tried a greater majority over the last 12 months. In all fairness the majority of them are fantastic, feature rich applications and a lot of them I just couldn’t quite put my finger on why they just didn’t fit my business. I have quite a few clients who have happily adopted SalesForce CRM or smaller products like Tactile, Highrise, Pipeline Deals as a good fit to their business with no second thoughts but have not been able to comfortably recommend a suitable app for a good many clients due to the lack of Application Agility.

It wasn’t until several weeks ago when I had the good fortune to stumble upon Solve360 from http://norada.com that I realised just what it was that held me back from committing to any of the previously tested CRM applications. I couldn’t fit my idea of how I want to work into the structured environment and it didn’t have a functional workspace environment to live in.

Solve360 imho defines cloud app agility in a user defined application, “plain english” you make Solve360 fit your workflow and sales process, you bend it twist it and shape to your will and then sit back and watch it do tricks. Then, if you are lucky enough to get some deeper insights into the customisation, usage of API and little tricks there is one big “Aha” moment.

One of the most critical areas often overlooked in the adoption of any data based application is the failure to simulate how it looks, feels and operates after months of data input. Does it still look clean and user friendly as it did when it was void of data? Is the data retrieval process work as well when there are hundreds of entries vs just a few dozen and does it scale as you grow?

So here’s a 60 second “Lets put it through its paces”

Setup was easy (pretty much no setup required for basic operation), linked contacts from my Google Apps account, search is good, filters are powerful, the customised fields I created are useable as filters. i.e Search for all contacts not viewed in the last 30 days who haven’t got any open projects and fit the custom tag of “New Clients”

All next actions, and calendar items are available in my Google calendar,  what about my iPhone? I had to choose between native retrieval using the iPhone calendar or through Google calendar (I chose native as its faster than Googles sluggish calendar subscription retrieval :)

Project Blogs, now heres an area that got cluttered and messy quickly, even with the ability to drag and reorder. But hang on, you can add section header to any part of the blog and group a bunch of activites into a tidy collpased area. i.e Finish a months worth of tasks, add a section header called April, collapse it and carry on. 3 months of data or 3 years of data, it remains as clean as it did in the beginning.

Solve360 blends the concepts of CRM and Project Blogs into a private, versatile hub where sales, support, operations and clients team up and stay coordinated. Securely publish individual Project Blogs to anyone with an email address so they can stay up-to-date and collaborate with your team on specific projects.

Prices start at $24USD p/mth which I think that for the well rounded and mature look and feel of this application it is excellently priced.

Support has been outstanding with an active forum and responsive email replies to questions that I couldn’t find an answer for. Documentation is a bit sparse but to be honest I think that it would be hard to document something whose structure is essentially defined by the person driving it.

follow Russell on Twitter @russellmasters