Keri:
Well, just to give you some background on our product so you can understand where I am coming from, we sell a hosted Sales Tool and CRM system for individual users. There is no sharing because it is targeted to a single user in a small company, although we have clients with 19+ accounts in sales companies that don't need sharing of contacts. One example is a Xerox office that uses our system for their sales team due to the ability to customize it for their team and how simple it is to use. If you want to take a look at the functionality, please feel free to go into the demo account on our site, or sign up for a free 30 day trial. We are one of the few apps with a completely integrated hosted email client that you can use to check all your emails and consolidate it into one place, and automatically attach it to your contacts history, etc.
Due to the fact that our system is geared for an individual, we are usually dealing with customers and industries where the person in charge of sales is not always a sales person. Some examples would be Consultants, Engineers, Architects, Photographers, Realtors, Investment Brokers, and we even have a person managing a horse farm with it. Adding to that, we have some unique functionality that goes far beyond the usual CRM tool, and we are having to educated people about the uniqueness and ability of our software, as well as what a hosted app is. We have free unlimited telephone and email support, and we constantly get calls that end with the user saying WOW, I had no idea that you could find a system that can do all that so easily — without having to install anything.
Here is the hosted app educational part:
I think Salesforce.com and others paved the way for hosted apps at the enterprise level, but we are having to educate the small business and individual sales people about hosted apps. We are finding that in the small business circles, there is little understanding of hosted apps, and we are forced to hold their hand a lot through the sales process (or our 30 day free trial). We host free weekly Oprius 101 Webinars (30 min demo and 30 min Q&A, as it's on our conference call lines) for potential and trial users, so we can teach them about the benefits of hosted apps as they are in the purchasing process. We constantly have questions about hosted apps, and what they are, and how they work. After a 30 min demonstration (on a webinar), they still ask questions like "so do I just download it and install it and then it links up with your system" or "how do I install it?" We also get a lot of questions about security, speed, where the data is stored, etc. Very simple hosted app questions.
It seems to me that the small business market place is still quite behind in their understanding of hosted apps, and we have to do a lot of education for a $14.99/month app. That said, once we have helped them they are usually ecstatic about our app, and think we are completely ahead of our competitors because we introduced them to this "new" way of using software.
