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.

As we’ve recently updated Tactile CRM with some new user interface tweaks and functionality we thought it was about time we updated our videos of Tactile CRM. The first to be finished is the introduction to Tactile CRM which will be on the front page of the website shortly. Here it is for your viewing pleasure:

We hope you find it useful and an easy way to see what Tactile CRM can do – please let us know any feedback you have!

Our goal is to make Tactile CRM the best easy to use web based crm system for small businesses. As part of this drive we recently made email support available for free to all users (not just paying customers), now we’ve made it easy to submit a support request directly when using Tactile CRM:

Got a question or need help with Tactile CRM? Click the Support link (top right) and a window will open within the sytem (prefilled with your email address so we can get back to you). All you need to do is tell us what’s up and we’ll get back to you ASAP.

We hope this makes life easier for people, and encourages people to ask us questions to get the most from Tactile CRM.

We’re pleased to announce a new feature we rolled out last week to Tactile CRM to allow admin users to update your contact details:

It’s a small thing that can make a big difference – you can correct any email mistakes (incase you weren’t getting emails from us correctly) and update where you are in the World – it’s nice for us to know where you are from, but from a more practical stand point, if we look at localisation we’ll use this setting too.

Remember, we always take feedback seriously and it influences our roadmap for Tactile CRM, if you have any ideas, feedback or suggestions do let us know!