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:

You’ll be asked to verify your email address the first time, but after that it’s plain sailing.

Full details are in the help where it tells you how to add templates, site wide email addresses and more.

As always, let us know your comments, thoughts and feedback. The new email system was lead by customer suggestions so we’d love to hear any other ideas you may have.

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.

It’s often the case that you’ll be dealing with several people at the same organisation and they all share the same phone number and address. Instead of entering it multiple times you can now see them when viewing the person:

We’ve also extended this to opportunities and activities so important contact details are always on your screen.

Tactile CRM now has a realtime reporting engine to enable you to report on information in the system without having to export and manage data yourself. The new release includes a 30/60/90 day pipeline graph (see below), and we want you to let us know what else you want to see.

We’ve also updated the reports tab to give you a list of reports and graphs from every page, and we’ve added some new graphs, and updated others:

Getting those details into Tactile CRM can be hugely valuable but the time to type them in can be costly too.

Not anymore though! All you need to do is pop them into the post, Shoeboxed will digitise them, and then you can import them directly into Tactile CRM.

We’ve even got a special offer for you: sign up for Shoeboxed and they’ll give you $10 off their annual plans!

The updated activities widget now shows you all the details for all upcoming activities today and tomorrow, and a summary for overdue and future activities. We now include the person or organisation the activity is attached to, and a link through to see their details.

You can also see the details for all other activities by hovering over the activity title, so you now get more useful information at your finger tips and less clutter on the screen!

We hope you find this feature useful, as always let us know your thoughts, comments and feedback and we’ll see what we can do.

The new wizard trys to auto-match column headings in your CSV file with those in Tactile CRM, and will now show you which columns you are importing and which ones have been missed. Check out the screenshot of the new system below:

We’d love to hear your feedback and any ideas we can incorporate to make it better (including other column headings your like our auto-match to pick up).

Once you have your tagged items within Tactile CRM you can use them to do all sorts of things including filter contacts into lists, manage your opportunities more effectively and push groups of people over to 3rd party application such as Campaign Monitor.

This week we released the ability to tag all of the above items using the API, which means you can now automatically insert and categorise information from your website or desktop application. When you request a record using the API we also return the set of tags associated with that item.

Information about how to use these functions is available via our online documentation, and we hope this will make life much easier when integrating with Tactile CRM.

We’ve put together a video of just how easy it is to send contacts and emails to Campaign Monitor so you can send beautiful email campaigns, track the results and manage your subscribers. Now you can seamless work in Tactile CRM and communicate with customers:

We’d love to hear your comments and feedback and what we can do to make the Tactile CRM and Campaign Monitor integration even more useful. Drop us an email or visit our feedback forum to leave new feature requests.