Another gathering of Ukraine startups happened while I was on holiday in September. Like the last few times, these events are out in San Francisco–hey, what’s wrong with New York City’s vareniki?–featuring the usual cast of investors, incubators and successful companies. This time they also included activist and Ukranian singer Ruslana Lyzhycheko.
I took a closer look at one of the featured companies, bpm’online, which has a CRM in-the-cloud service. This London-based 12-year old software maker is a Ukranian success story –R&D is still in the old country–with over 6,000 customers and a strong US presence.
And in case you’re wondering, the world does need another CRM app. Especially if it’s designed for human beings, and completely doesn’t resemble a well-known CRM product from a major US software company.
Whenever I’ve had to work with the aforementioned CRM product for my marketing assignments, I would find myself getting completely lost in their layers of bloatware. bpm’online and the newer generation of CRM software–and we’ve reviewed a few in TvB–eschew complexity and make the most important entities–account, lead, and opportunity–easily reachable. Along with the basics, bpm’online adds dashboards, social media updates, and business process management or bpm.
Unfortunately, the demo version I tried didn’t allow me to create any new processes. But their website copy and graphics seem to suggest that sales and marketing support staff–what’s now called growth hackers–can put together some useful gadgets.
They have a reasonably priced SMB edition– 5 users for $1250/year–and for the enterprise, there’s a la carte pricing that start $350 per seat. bpmonline is worth looking into.