Bantam Live: A Look at Small Business CRM

I just finished writing and posting my five favorite small business apps and then some underutilized neurons kicked in with the following thought:“wasn’t there a contact and project management tool that I had seen a few months back that looked promising?”

I searched through The Technoverse Blog’s Up Starts database to jog my memory and came across Bantam Live. It was slowly coming back to me.

I decided to gave this cloud-based social CRM app a closer look. My snap judgment after trialing it for under an hour:Bantam Live is a capable contact relationship management tool with the usual sales gears.

The social part comes about through Bantam’s ability to display a Twitter stream within the app and then allowing its users to import Twitter ids into the contact database. It’s a nice touch, and it will no doubt get used by sales folks scouring Twitter and Facebook for leads.

I have been a long-time follower and user of personal information managers or PIMs, as they were once called, believing that the right software would magically improve my limited administrative prowess. At one point, I had high hopes for the now deceased Chandler Project.

CRM or contact relationship management is the business-class version of PIMs with familiar calendar, task, and contact functions, but busini-fied with project management extras.

So can a small business with sales ambitions get along without a CRM?

Yes it can. In my experience working for smallish companies, CRM usually gets “implemented” as Excel spread sheets being emailed between the sales staff. While this approach is inexpensive and workable in the short-term, it comes with the inevitable consistency and availability downsides that characterize decentralized information—i.e., “I have the latest estimates, but it’s on my hard drive.”

This is really the main advantage inherent in web-based CRM software: files, messages, calendars, and contacts are automatically seen by everyone. Of course, Bantam Live  assumes that your sales and marketing gang share and play well together. But once everyone gets with the program, workplace harmony should ensue since data resides in a central, globally accessible spot.

If you do need to segment your users into workgroups, Bantam Live lets you: it’s a way to keep the information routed to the right eyes without overloading non-relevant workers. Bantam also supports separate projects as a way to organize collaboration activity into discrete areas.

One quibble, which relates to my experience with PIMs. It would be nice to see a “virtual folder” concept in Bantam Live. It’s a simple idea—only recently introduced in Outlook but long established in other info managers such as Zoot—in which messages, files, etc. are tagged with one more project or folder names, allowing a single object to be viewable (or virtualized) into multiple venues.

Anyway, as a cloud-based app, you pay for a subscription to Bantam Live. Basic service starts at $29 per month for 6 users.

I realize SalesForce with their own aggressive pricing looms over Bantam and others. But I have a natural suspicion of large software companies with business models and expectations suited for handling their Fortune 1000 clients getting into the SMB area.

I would try Bantam Live or another SMB-only CRM product first.

Related articles

• When Does CRM Become A Collaboration Service? (readwriteweb.com)
• Mitch Kapor Bails on the Chandler project (news.cnet.com)
• Bantam Live
• Zoot Software