Dear Team Yammer:

Thanks for your email. Here's our reply: The reason we're not using your Yammer service is because we're internally beta-testing and finalizing our own service, called Upswing 360, which we think is better suited for us. It launches to the public soon.

Your service, Yammer, provides only group communication and status updates, whereas Upswing 360 is a purposeful business productivity application with all of your communication and status update features plus integrated CRM, calendaring, project management and other virtual office features that will be integrated to other apps, content, and other integrated communication systems. In other words, your entire product is just a feature within Upswing 360.

We know you recently won the TechCrunch50 award (which produces wonderful echo effects) and we blogged about that with glee. But your "ideas for posting" noted in your email point to the core weakness of Yammer relative to Upswing 360: it doesn't align context, community and content for a specific business purpose. In Upswing, you don't need "ideas" to prompt you to use this on-demand system; it's self-evident and useful for a business team to do.

To be sure, Team Yammer, your service has its place and it's well designed, but we're going to communicate, share, and operate our business on Upswing 360.

Regards,

The Team at Upswing

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Sneak Peek: the Message in Upswing 360

The "social workspace" software-as-a-service application of Upswing 360, launching soon, will act as a business person's operating system. In other words, business team members will "live in it" and collaborate with one another in Upswing's business applications like CRM, project management, etc. Upswing will have several integrated communication technologies like audio/video/web conferencing. It'll also have messaging. Writing a message among business teams using Upswing, as shown in the sneak peek image above, saves on time/labor by not having to toggle over to an email client and craft and send an email to the group, which often gets lost in overflowing email inboxes. Moreover, messages in Upswing appear in a "team feed" are readily able to be commented upon, and are archived and searchable for business intelligence within the team.

 

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Think Facebook for business teams: Upswing 360 is Enterprise Social Networking atop CRM in the SaaS-powered social workspace

Launching soon, the new edition of Upswing, code-named "Upswing 360" is an on-demand "social CRM" system fused with an Enterprise 2.0 communication platform for business teams in all industries to keeptrack of people, companies, tasks, files, calendars, projects and deals. Using social networking principals and Web 2.0 communication techniques, Upswing will also allow business users to update their profile pages, publish status updates, monitor team activity, get alert notifications, tag content, comment on activity, share CRM data, connect with their mobile devices (examples pictured), and collaborate through a range of web-services. As we've hinted, it's like Facebook and Twitter fused with our hyper-efficient on-demand CRM system. (Compare Upswing.) While the forthcoming version of Upswing is designed for use in all industries, all of the new features will be included in our current edition for financial advisors.

Sign up for the launch notice of Upswing 360, the new version of Upswing CRM with social networking and enhanced group communication features.

 

 

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More sneak peeks of mobile access...

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Webinars on the Upswing

We just hosted our first webinar and demo and had as our guest speaker Roy Jones of Aegis Wealth Management, affiliated with LPL Financial. Roy is a tech savvy, successful financial advisor and a power-user of Upswing CRM. It was very well-attended and the feedback has been fantastic. We promoted it via EventSpan.com (pictured above), the search and syndication service for web events; see the event listing here.

Web events are a great way to educate prospective customers about a product, and, in our case, having one of our customers provide some color as to how he and his firm use the "Team Plan" in Upswing CRM is a great way to share its features and benefits. We'll soon be publishing a regular schedule of webinars to customers and partners to join. Sign up here for the webinar series schedule.

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What are you working on?

UPDATE: September 12 - The just-launched, Charles River Ventures-backed Yammer.com, referenced below, won the top prize award at TechCrunch50. We're mildly astounded about that - and wildly validated in the functionality we've built in the upcoming version of Upswing. The Yammer product represents just a basic group messaging feature that we have built similarly in the purposeful CRM/virtual workspace application for business teams that is Upswing 360. We agree with Dennis Howlett of ZDNet and his view about Yammer when he writes that the "Enterprise won’t come kicking and screaming into the enterprise 2.0 world unless content, context and purpose are aligned." ...That's Upswing 360: focused and relevant content for a specific business purpose among a working group who share the same mission.

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Facebook combined navel gazing with oversharing in the ability for friends in a social network to publish the answer to the question, "What are you doing right now?" Do we really need to know what a random sampling of remotely located friends are doing at any given moment? To be sure, it's been a popular nugget of voyeuristic information for Facebook users, yet this status feature gets a lot more interesting - and useful - in the realm of business.

The new question (or some variant thereof) that business team members will be answering and reading of others in Upswing CRM is, "What are you working on?" Code-named "Upswing 360," this radically new version of Upswing CRM will introduce our advanced on-demand CRM service integrated with social networking techniques for sales and biz dev teams to stay connected and collaborate more productively. Essentially, it's CRM combined with purposeful social networking within organizations - for "colleagues." It'll have features like profile pages, personal status, tagging of content, commenting, notifying, sharing data, permission settings, mobile integration, etc.  We'll be unveiling this new Enterprise 2.0 web-based app next month, but we figure we'd reveal this small feature of "What are you working on?" ...Why? Well, it's been recently validated with LinkedIn using this technique. And yesterday at TechCrunch50, an entire Twitter-like startup was born around these basic updating and group communication functions - without any other purposeful, integrated business application, and certainly not CRM!  Amusingly, and evidently without any irony, none other than Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of on-demand CRM pioneer Salesforce.com (compare to Upswing) said of this new startup called Yammer, "I really like this company the best." (Yammer was founded by former executives of PayPal, eGroups, eBay, and Tribe. It is backed by venture capital firms Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures.)

What are we working on right now? The merging of group communication and social networking tools with on-demand CRM. This new version of Upswing launches soon. Stay tuned for more specifics.

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After Labor Day, Reduce Your Labor

Back to work. ...Welcome back to the increasing scarcity of time to get stuff done in our modern age. Now that we've officially launched Version 2.0 of Upswing CRM, we'll be highlighting its key attributes, one of which is time-savings. We've received many complimentary emails from our customers who signed up during our quiet launch in recent weeks and one of the things they're happy about is the time-savings they get when using Upswing compared to their previous CRM solution. As we're noting, Upswing requires less keystrokes - less labor - than competing systems to perform frequent, everyday CRM actions. If you're a daily power-user of CRM, on Upswing you can literally save 2 to 4 weeks of time (or more) in a given year based on the time-savings associated with reduced labor in using Upswing vs competing vendors.

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Penalty on Salesforce: Complexity!

View more click comparisons

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Penalty on Salesforce: Labor intensity!

View more click comparisons

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Penalty on Salesforce: Inefficiency!

View more click comparisons

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Let the Games Begin: Salesforce vs. Upswing

Some CRM implementations fail in part because of laborious complexity and user fatigue, and we think the click contests in the ensuing posts between Salesforce and Upswing's forthcoming new version release speaks for itself. We're doing strict apples-to-apples comparative analysis with frequently performed actions and counting the clicks it takes each system to execute them. It's one measure to gauge the efficiency of an on-demand CRM product.

The reduced labor and increased efficiency of Upswing CRM associated with these frequently performed actions is representative of the entire Upswing application. When amplified over the course of a year in using the Upswing product, a significant amount of labor reduction and time savings is accrued relative to laborious CRM systems, not to mention increased productivity and user satisfaction.

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Web 2.0 and CRM

Web 2.0 as a term has come to mean a lot of things, some specific and some ambiguous, not unlike “CRM.” But for better or worse, people now use “Web 2.0” as a catch-all term to describe range of interactive models and tools on the internet that create both threats and opportunities in many sectors - including financial advisory services. While the term Web 2.0 has been bandied about for some time, it seems the financial services industry media is abuzz about it lately, and with good reason. It’s a force for everyone. WealthFly just ran an excellent post about Web 2.0 that you might want to check out which aligns precisely with our views of Web 2.0 in the financial advisory space.

A common feature of Web 2.0 in the realm of financial services is that the dynamic between businesses (such as investment wirehouses, broker-dealers, and advisory firms) and consumers (investors) is changing from a vertical model (investors receiving information and guidance from financial firms and professionals) to an increasingly horizontal model (investors learning information from each other). The relationship of the financial advisors to his/her clients is changing in a Web 2.0 world, and this spells both a threat and an opportunity to a financial advisor. (Don’t believe us? From one angle of the business, check out the success of new Web 2.0 upstarts like Covestor and Cake Financial, where the world of investing advice is getting democratized.)

If you’re a financial advisor who's new to all of this and want to get a good primer on Web 2.0 technologies, tools and practices for your business, we suggest contacting Marie Swift, president of Impact Communication, a marketing communications firm that assists independent financial advisors. We caught up with Marie and did a quickie interview with her in the video above after she presented at another standing room only session entitled “Using the Web 2.0 to Build Rapport With Your Clients and Market Your Business” at the recently held Technology Tools for Today Conference in Orlando.

In subsequent blog posts we’ll reveal how the many Web 2.0 features of Upswing’s CRM service can help advisors and firms interact with their clients in entirely new ways in a changing world. Opportunities abound.

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High Turnout for CRM

This morning’s session entitled “The Expanding Role of CRM Software in Advisors' Offices” at the Technology Tools for Today Conference in Orlando was quite a hit. However, it started with a momentary event glitch: too many people showed up to attend. ...On a Saturday morning no less. Session moderator Bob Veres deftly got the event management company here at the Gaylord Palms Convention Center to expand the sliding-wall conference room to three times its original capacity and the session got underway, still packed at full capacity.

Upswing’s Alex Turnbull was a speaker in this session along with representatives of competing CRM systems from Fidelity, Junxure and Redtail. Bob did a great job of moderating the session. While he prodded the session panelists and amusingly hinted at an impending "feeding frenzy" among the four CRM vendors who spoke out to a sea of prospective customers, all remained decorous and provided helpful information about implementing their respective CRM technology in financial advisor environments. We suppose the polite restraint among the CRM vendors reflects a burgeoning market and lots of fish in the sea. Today's high turnout to learn about CRM certainly supports this view.

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The End of CRM Complexity

Upswing CRM issued a press release today about our plans for a promotional campaign called "The End of CRM Complexity." Such a slogan and attendant campaign stands on its own, though industry watchers who know their software-as-a-service market history will recognize what we'd call "remix marketing" with a sprinkle of parody in our advertising efforts, including some of the words used in the press release that respin a release Salesforce once issued. Like a DJ spinning old music and mixing it with new, we're respinning some of Salesforce.com's PR sloganeering - namely, their ad campaign of "The End of Software" - and putting our own twist on it. The source of this inspiration comes from the on-demand CRM software services that we've designed versus what Salesforce has engineered.

(We never quite got how "No Software" was considered by Salesforce to be a good slogan to sell hosted software, and we never understood why an early-entrant company in the on-demand software sector with inevitable expansion beyond CRM would limit its corporate brand name by labeling itself "Salesforce" and using the stock ticker "CRM" but we digress.)

This coming summer, the End of CRM Complexity campaign will put a spotlight on the usability of first generation CRM from vendors like Salesforce and compare them to the new version of Upswing CRM. Stay tuned, because CRM is about to get a lot easier.

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Hello.

A touch of writer's block often accompanies the first entry of a new blog, such as this one, so we'll start it off with a simple, inviting word: Hello.

It's an auspicious salutation from our point of view. The word "hello" has once again come in favor on Madison Avenue as a term marketers are using with increasing frequency in ad campaigns to attract attention. What caught our eye in relation to Upswing's forthcoming version of our on-demand CRM technology was this from a recent New York Times article saying that the greeting "'hello' lets people feel comfortable, to humanize something that they might look at and say, ‘I don’t know if I can use it.'" ...Judging from the visual and functional designs of many competing CRM software solutions we've seen, and compared to what Upswing is about to launch this summer, that pretty well sums up why we're saying hello to you. Our forthcoming version 2, due out in the summer, of Upswing CRM will makes users feel comfortable and confident they can use it immediately.

So, hello, and welcome to the new Upswing. This new website with our new corporate identity will increasingly have more informational sections and interactive content. Stay tuned to an awakening of sorts in the on-demand CRM market with the new version release of Upswing CRM.

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