Batchbook Gives SMBs Social Business Control PanelBatchbook Gives SMBs Social Business Control Panel

14 Leading Social CRM Applications

Want to help Rebecca Rescate in her noble mission of toilet training the world's cats? She will be happy to add your contact information to Batchbook, a social CRM product for small business that she adopted when her company began to grow so fast that she worried about dropping sales leads.

CitiKitty sells a sort of training potty seat for cats, along with instructions for cat owners who would like to say goodbye to the litter box. BatchBlue Software's Batchbook is a contact manager and sales lead manager that emphasizes connections with social media, and with other Web 2.0 products for small businesses such as Freshbooks for accounting and MailChimp for email marketing. Rescate said it fit her need to get organized, without being too complicated.

"As a small business, I need something extremely simple," Rescate said in an interview. She had used Salesforce.com's service while working for a previous employer, but found that even the entry-level version was overkill for her needs and too difficult to use, she said. Really, all she wanted was a simple way of tracking contacts such as pet stores and distributors interested in carrying her product, and a system of reminders to follow up on opportunities.

BatchBlue CEO and co-founder Pam O'Hara said her company started with the idea that what small businesses needed the most was good contact management. "When you're starting a business, the most important thing is your network," O'Hara said.

Since it was founded in 2007, BatchBlue has added more social features to Batchbook so you can connect with contacts through social networks and monitor feeds from their profiles. Some of the social media integration features resemble those offered by Nimble, although Nimble has bigger enterprise ambitions. BatchBlue is instead focused on becoming part of a best of breed ecosystem of products for small businesses and was one of the founders of an organization for technical and marketing cooperation called The Small Business Web.

Even if the ease of use virtues of Batchbook catch the attention of enterprises that would like those same features, O'Hara said she can't cater to them because "it would change our product, and it won't be the product for small business anymore." Some of her largest customers have 40 or 50 employees, and a few of those have used the product's application programming interface to elaborate on its account management features, she said. But ultimately, she said, "It's a complement to me if you outgrow me. If you get to the point where you need to move to one of those enterprise systems, I'll take that as a complement that we helped you get there, but I am not going there with you."

Rescate won't be outgrowing Batchbook for a while yet. Her CitiKitty idea is essentially to get the cat used to the idea by initially mounting a litter box contraption with a hole in the center over the toilet seat. By phasing in litter box trays with larger and larger holes, the device gets the cat used to the idea of hopping up onto the toilet seat until they can do it with no special equipment at all.

Nimble Contact Integrates Connections Across Mail, Social Networks

Rescate discovered this "disappearing litter box" technique through online research as something inventive cat owners had implemented using things like roasting pans and sitz baths. That was back in 2004 when she and her husband moved into a cramped Manhattan apartment, where there was no room for the litter box. Once her cat Samantha learned with a foil roasting pan version of the training seat, Rescate decided to create and sell a manufactured version. She now runs the business from her home in Yardley, Pa., and brought in $350,000 in sales last year. Sales are growing rapidly in 2011, particularly following her appearance on the ABC reality show Shark Tank--which, in addition to publicity, netted her a $100,000 investment from one of the judges. Walgreens is now starting to carry the product in its stores, and online sales continue to grow through her own website and deals with Amazon.com and Walmart.com.

Still, at the moment she has just two employees, counting herself. Rescate also uses a stable of freelancers, although none of them are so deeply involved that they need their own Batchbook accounts. Mostly, collaboration through the system consists of her assistant fielding inquiries and assigning follow-up tasks. She is planning to hire a third employee soon, however, and said it's important for her growth plans that Batchbook is simple enough to learn with zero training.

Before discovering Batchbook, she was tracking sales lead in an Excel spreadsheet "and follow ups were completely getting lost," she said. "This really helps me stay more organized and keep track of those leads that end up closing and make me money. When you've only got two people, you can't afford to let anything slip through the cracks."

Batchbook's social media integration "is not the reason I started using the software, but it is something I like about it," Rescate said. "If I've just connected with a pet store, I can see how much they do online. I can add a Facebook account or a Twitter account and follow them. It gives you such a better picture of who are these people who are contacting you."

BatchBlue's O'Hara said one way Social CRM is different for small businesses is they can take the time to have a more personal relationship with their customers--as opposed to tracking mass populations of consumers through automated mechanisms. "Really the customer relationship should be a more personal interaction--it shouldn't be about buying lists and messaging and funneling," she said.

Social media connections can be part of that personal relationship, O'Hara said. "It does give especially small businesses a deeper glimpse of their customers and who they are, what sports teams they follow, that sort of thing." But small business people are also too busy to deal with social media, unless it's very easy and integrated with the contact management workflow, she said. "They don't have time to look at Twitter all day."

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