We’ve really pleased to have just released our referral program after lots of feature requests by our users – we wanted you to be able to share in our success, so all do you need to do to start earning 20% of all paid for plans is login and visit the admin section.

You can sign up for the referral program and start earning straight away. Full details are on the Tactile CRM website, and you can track referrals in real time from your account:

The brief: Tactile CRM‘s website is need of an overhaul, and as part of the plan this year we’re measuring and reporting on the the changes we make to see what is and isn’t succussful. We want to increase our conversion ratio on sign ups so we’re currently doing some market research on sites that people have felt comfortable buying from and leaving the credit card details.

The current list includes:

• Campaign Monitor
• Xero
• CrowdSpring
• Amiando
• SlideRocket
• Carsonified Events
• TSheet
• Cloud Contacts
• Ever Note
• Remember the Milk
• MailChimp
• Moo
• LinkedIn
• EventBrite
• Concept Share

Are there anymore you have brought from, or can suggest?

2009 is going to see a fair few exciting changes and new things for us at omelett.es. One goal is a big push on the number of signups for Tactile CRM

With the new features we have released (and will be), the platform is really great and we know will be of great benefit to people. Part of this push will be some updates and tweaks to the website, which leads on to my main question:

Have you ever brought [business to business] services based on presentation/brand, not just price? If so, who from?

Let me give you an example, I am about to send off a stack of business cards to Cloud Contacts, however I was recommended several other companies, but chose them on their website presentation and look and feel of the business. Hopefully, I won’t regret it, but the decision was certainly based on looks.

This week we are building and launching a new product which we will donate 50% of the first year’s profits to charity. The product is called Spend Meter, and we’re live blogging progress at Operation Canine.

We’ve nominated ourselves for the Crunchies 2008! If you are feeling in a helpful mood, we’d love for you to help us out by nominating Tactile CRM in any, or all of the following categories:

• Best Bootstrapped Startup
• Best Enterprise
• Best International
• Best New Startup of 2008

In the current economic situation it is the companies that keep it simple (stupid) and streamline their processes who will be the winners.

When it comes to pricing this couldn’t be more true, and is often an area that is overlooked. At Tactile CRM we’re currently simplifying our pricing structure, to make it easier for current and prospective users to understand our pricing bands. We think this is important from a ‘user acquisition’ point of view (please excuse the buzzwords) as it will help us to sign up more paying users.

However, not everybody has the same reasoning. I recently tried to join the local gym when I moved to Oxford, and nowhere on their website do they display pricing (correct me if I am wrong, but I haven’t found it yet). As a result, Esporta made me give up some of my weekend to visit the gym where I was still not able to find out the costs – two people on reception didn’t know them, and after a 15 minute waiting to see ‘someone’ I still hadn’t got any further and left.

I was quite happy to make an appointment to see somebody but nobody seemed that clued up – maybe a simple CRM system like Tactile CRM would have been a help.

Obviously I don’t know their pricing, but I’d imagine they are currently down about £1,200-£1,500 a year as my partner and I are now looking elsewhere. Hopefully my situation will have been a one off, but I have written to the manager out of courtesy to let them know what happened and given them a chance to redeem themselves.

I’m very much a believer that ex-customers are as important as those you currently have, as you can learn from them how to make your product/service better. That’s a blog post for another time though!

British Rail (or whatever they are called these days – National Rail, it turns out) are a great example of how this should work, the recently updated their ticket pricing from lord knows how many down to 3:

Thanks to Kai and Craig for the photos.