Sprymbl Inaugural Blog Post

My Top 3

I am a fairly experienced blogger, but this is my first crack at a product blog. I promise to mind my tone and sarcasm and other default blogger tendencies, and to handle my future competition with kid gloves.

I wrote a little about myself in my About page, but let me add a little bit more. Basically I am a internet person. I was there for the first dot-com boom, working for an interactive agency in New York building websites for big non-profits like the MoMA and Consumer Reports, Ecommerce ventures,  like QVC and Tiffany, and a bunch of risky startups whose names are gradually fading from memory.

Then what…. then another web design firm, that like so many, morphed into a CMS software company before my very eyes. Instead of building one-off websites with content management built in, we developed a product. And before you know it — CRM! Because website owners started collecting really big lists of people, and they needed tools to deal with them.

That’s when we got acquired by a large web-based CRM software company. Enterprise CRM. All of the sudden, I went from wen developer at a web design shop to enterprise software project manager at a major CRM software company, delivering half a million

Yes, the clients pay twice: once to buy the software license, and again to pay an expert to “implement it”. Implement being nothing more than a fancy word for “set up”, of course. A lot of the setup though wasn’t custom coding or design work, it was training. And we had “Enterprise” trainers too. Imagine having to pay for days of training, and still requiring more training from whomever your project manager is!

Well, I guess Sprymbl is my response to all that. It’s my statement about what CRM should be, and what it shouldn’t be. Othes have tackled this challenge too, and pretty successfully. Most notable among them is 37Signals, who’ve released “Highrise”, a sort of Web 2.0 Contact Management System. My problem with Highrise is that even though it’s web-based, it’s not web savvy, and it’s not email savvy either. It’s a shame to have all that rich contact data, enhanced with your own tagging (market segmentation) and not use it.

To me, that’s what a web CRM should do: it should let you combine automated and manual contact acquisition with automated contact communication: smart widgets that know what ads, what articles, and what content people want, and smart personalized emails to point them in the right direction.

So it’s not just an Address Book, like Highrise.

But it’s not a bunch of bells and whistles either, like Salesforce.com; at least Sprymble isn’t. No charts and graphs, reporting options, billing, ecommerce, content publishing, preferences, options, this that and the other.No CMS. Wordpress does that better. Or your Ebay page does. Or your Joomla, or your Drupal site.

Let your CMS do your publishing and Sprymbl do your marketing.

Here’s to working smarter, not harder!

- The folks at Sprymbl