CRM, sales pipeline, project management and collaboration system – Glasnost21 for small and medium firms

While most people know about the leading CRM systems for the professions (e.g. LexisNexis InterAction for lawyers), it’s always interesting to hear about other systems for small to medium sized firms whose needs are a little less sophisticated.

Glasnost21 is produced by Antony Slumbers who specialises in the use of technology in the property/real estate sector – so he understands the challenges of systems in a professional partnership environment. He’s built systems for organisations such as the British Council for Offices (BCO) and Broadgate Estates.

Glasnost21 provides an intuitive, flexible and productive platform for getting things done, providing easy CRM plus project, document and image management. It’s available through your web browser and has a companion iPhone app.

It’s organised around:

• contacts – clients and suppliers and their social media accounts and it syncs with your iPhone contacts which in turn can integrate with other contact management systems
• projects – where you can communicate with others both internally and externally and allocate tasks to support delegation as well as an integral instant messaging system. You can record estimated and actual time
• related documents – digital images, screen shots, Word documents and PowerPoint slides. It means that you can everything you need to hand for meetings and presentations on your iPhone.

A new facility has recently been added to allow simple email campaigns to be set up and sent.

There’s also a new sales pipeline facility where you can add notes, contacts and reminders to prospects so there’s an automatic to-do list generator.  Like in SugarCRM, you can set up the probability of conversion and expected revenues so order books and financial forecasts can be seen at a glance. You can also add custom fields to suit your prospecting information requirements, as well as define your own ‘Next Steps’ and ‘Stages’, to reflect the way you operate.

Glasnost21 is ideally suited to businesses with 1-100 people where they work in small groups, particularly on a dispersed basis – so consultants (including building surveyors and valuers who do not need a link with a property database) of all kinds might find it valuable. There is a month’s free trial and the system costs £15 per person per month, with no minimum contract.

http://www.glasnost21.com

http://www.glasnost21.com/website/pipeline/index.cfm

http://www.antonyslumbers.com