We’ve been doing a bit of internal house keeping over the last few weeks, and one of the changes has been to the blog.

Behind the scenes it was actually run from our main blog on omelett.es (our company blog). This caused us a few problems with replication and commenting. Without getting too technical we were trying to be too clever by running several blogs from one.

We’ve bitten the bullet and moved the Tactile CRM blog to a new location.

What does this mean for you? Hopefully not a lot of disruption, but a few new features! The RSS feeds will continue to work as they always have, and commenting should be a bit smoother. There’s a new search for the blog, and will be adding some new things over the coming months.

The old blog posts are still available, but like a phoenix, the Tactile CRM blog has been born again (photo credit: Jon Tucker).

We’ve really pleased to have just released our referral program after lots of feature requests by our users – we wanted you to be able to share in our success, so all do you need to do to start earning 20% of all paid for plans is login and visit the admin section.

You can sign up for the referral program and start earning straight away. Full details are on the Tactile CRM website, and you can track referrals in real time from your account:

I’m often asked the question: “is Salesforce your biggest competitor to Tactile CRM“? Up until now the answer has always been no. Kind of.

In our target market of 2-10 people organisations/departments you’d traditional be paying between $35-$65/user/month for Salesforce.com. That’s roughly 4-7 times the price of Tactile CRM and could save you up to $6720 per annum. A tidy sum.

And for that reason we don’t see Salesforce as a direct competitor. However on brand awareness we do.

Our users and prospective users are nice people, and we’ve been aware for a while that Salesforce were launching a smaller package (it competes on the same price point as Tactile CRM) as they [our users] have let us know that they have been offered the $9 pricing and there has been some information about it on the site for a while.

Now that is out in the open there are 2 things to note. First of all the $9 pricing is for a cut down version, and only for 1-2 users. Once users start looking above that then we’re back to the old scenario (hence why I’m not worried).

However, I’m betting users don’t think like that.

We’ll either have to start ‘objection handling’ the questions that go along the lines of “ah, but Salesforce have a $9/user/month edition” or help people migrate away once they grow and don’t want the ‘real’ pricing.

Salesforce have a big PR machine/budget/awareness and this new product is already spreading thick and fast. Time will tell what happens but I’m looking forward to increased awareness of CRM amongst SME/SMBs and hope that in the long run it will do us some good too.