Pay for Performance CRM

One of the companies I work with (called IntranetSites) is looking for partners who might be interested in signing up, allowing us to create, and manage, on-line customer relationships for them. We work completely on a pay for performance basis (i.e. we only get paid for new business generation), so there are no up-front fees. Since we handle the entire web customer relationship (both recruiting the customers, and maintaining the relationship), there is no need for our partners to immerse themselves in a CRM system, or spend time with on-line marketing activities. Our partners can focus on whatever it is that they do best, whether it is running a restaurant, an auto repair shop, etc.

Companies that already have their own CRM solutions, and processes, may not need our help, but there are many firms that have basic web sites, but no actual active web marketing or customer relationship system.

Web design firms, that build web sites for businesses, can offer the IntranetSites web marketing service as an option to their customers. They would still build, and maintain, their customer’s web sites as they already do, but could also share in any revenue that results from new business IntranetSites generates. Customers of the web designers don’t have to pay anything extra to get this service (except when they get new business from it), and the web design firm gets an on-going stream of income from each customer who signed up for the service.

We do it all

For example, a restaurant that signs up with IntranetSites would agree to create 4 web specials a month (free entrées, 2 for 1 Thursday lunches, etc). IntranetSites will then promote the special of the week on the restaurant’s web site, and drive traffic to those specials from search engines. In order to take advantage of these specials, customers will have to click to redeem the web coupon code, and enter in some information about themselves in the process, where we also ask if they would like to be on the mailing list for a newsletter and notification of future specials.

These customers who come to the restaurant web site are now a part of the CRM system, and IntranetSites will start managing an on-going relationship with them. We will send out a monthly newsletter specific to our partner’s business (talking about specials, etc) to maintain frequent contact, and conduct surveys to better identify which promotions would be the most successful.

All of the web promotions, and customer relationship management services IntranetSites provides require no up-front fees. Instead, we work out a fee schedule based on how much business is generated from the web promotions, and customer management.

If any of our partners ever decide they would like to begin managing these on-line line customer relationships, and marketing activities, they are free to withdraw from our pay-for-performance offering and take direct control of our CRM tools themselves on a subscription basis.

If this sounds like a service that interests you, please drop me a note, and we can setup some time discuss your needs, and explain our business a little more. We are a startup business ourselves, and are quite flexible in creating business arrangements that work well for our partners.

Seeking software developer guinea pigs for on-line project management

If you are interested in finding a way to manage your software development projects, helping improve communications, efficiency, and timeliness, please write intranetsites@surkan.com to enquire about being a beta tester for a new end-to-end on-line project management tool. This software has already proven itself as a great help to one small distributed web software development team (with team members in places as diverse as the Philippines, Canada, and Russia).

• Track entire projects, including e-mails, customer requirements, and specifications from the beginning to end of project. Everyone on the project stays on the same page.
• Complete versioning and history on every document in the system (can easily revert back to whatever previous version you wish).
• Handle project and task management, automatically determined delivery dates and assigning tasks to the appropriate people. It is easy to tell when things are falling behind (and automatically re-adjusting schedules in real-time) before they get out of hand.
• Automatic costing, easily showing how much a project will cost (with labour, materials, etc) and the profit margins.
• Completely web-based architecture doesn’t require any local software, and can be easily used by an team-members wherever they are in the world.
• Serves as core of your own public web site, allowing you to automatically turn any document into public web pages.
• Granular permissions allowing administrator to define how much, or little, of system each individual participant can access.

There would be no charge for using this software for at least 6 months from first registration. Future prices for beta testers will be capped at nothing more than the cost of hosting the servers for a year after the first 6 month trial (e.g. if you setup a web site that has huge amounts of traffic and downloads your costs will rise accordingly). To give some perspective, this software has already been licensed to some small manufacturers for upwards of $40,000 a year. Being able to use this for free is a steal.

The prime motivation for making this offer is to because we want to move into the software development market. We expect our beta users to put some effort into creating project template definitions defining the standard tasks in their development process, which we can then use to create a generic turn-key solution for future customers. Just imagine that we are giving you some spreadsheet software, but want you to create a detailed spreadsheet template that can be used by others who want to do similar things.

In the interests of full disclosure, the UI is rough around the edges right now, and wouldn’t be appropriate for rank technology novices (for doing the actual setup and definition of the projects that are being managed, day-to-day usage could be handled by many people). This software works best for small organizations with less than 200 developers or testers. You can check out more details of the features of this product, and watch a demonstration video.