September 16

Make easy money with the Tactile CRM referral program

 

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:

referrals

 
 
July 21

Tagging with the API

 

One of the most powerful features within Tactile CRM is tagging and it enables you to categorise people, organisations, opportunities and activities.

Once you have your tagged items within Tactile CRM you can use them to do all sorts of things including filter contacts into lists, manage your opportunities more effectively and push groups of people over to 3rd party application such as Campaign Monitor.

This week we released the ability to tag all of the above items using the API, which means you can now automatically insert and categorise information from your website or desktop application. When you request a record using the API we also return the set of tags associated with that item.

Information about how to use these functions is available via our online documentation, and we hope this will make life much easier when integrating with Tactile CRM.

 
 
July 8

Tactile CRM + Campaign Monitor = seamless email marketing

 

Using the data you have in Tactile CRM with other services is something we think is really important. Now with the release of our Campaign Monitor integration you can easily send you contacts to this great email service to send and track email campaigns.

We’ve put together a video of just how easy it is to send contacts and emails to Campaign Monitor so you can send beautiful email campaigns, track the results and manage your subscribers. Now you can seamless work in Tactile CRM and communicate with customers:

We’d love to hear your comments and feedback and what we can do to make the Tactile CRM and Campaign Monitor integration even more useful. Drop us an email or visit our feedback forum to leave new feature requests.

 
 
February 6

A Tactile CRM Update

 

We’ve been metaphorically, and literally snowed under at various points since December and wanted to let you know what has been going on:

  1. We’ve been working on a brand new user interface
  2. We’ve be redesigning the website
  3. We’ve integrated FreshBooks invoicing
  4. We’ve integrated Campaign Monitor
  5. We’ve added loads of new graphs
  6. We’ve added opportunity exports
  7. And lots more!

We’re going to release all of these changes over the next few weeks and will let you know when via our newsletters.

 
 
December 1

This week I am spending time on #operationcanine

 

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.

 
 
November 24

Tactile CRM: ‘Clients’ and ‘Leads’ become ‘Organisations’

 

As part of today’s new release of our award winning simple CRM for small businesses – Tactile CRM, we made one major change that should make our lives a lot easier, and keep things easy to use for people using Tactile CRM.

We’ve merged the ‘Clients’ and ‘Leads’ tabs to become ‘Organisations’.

New Organisations

Previously Tactile CRM had the concept of clients and leads. When we built the system we made a concious decision to seperate out clients (companies/organisations you actually work with/sell to) and leads (companies/organisations you are talking with, but don’t yet work with, or would like to work with).

This decision was based upon our work with companies building bespoke web software systems to enable their CRM systems. Traditionally the work was with larger corporates and this distinction was needed to help keep their systems neat and tidy. We thought this would be a great concept to bring to Tactile CRM, however we were wrong.

Analysing the database and our user stats we can now see that most people don’t use the ‘Leads’ functionality, and with the addition of the new tag features, it isn’t really needed. We also tended to get a reasonable number of support requests asking what the difference between Clients and Leads, or Leads and Opportunities were.

Tactile CRM version 2 now has the ‘Organisations’ tab which has all the ‘Clients’ and ‘Leads’ together – for users that did use the Leads tab, we have automatically tagged all the ‘Leads’ with the tag ‘Lead’. If you don’t want this tag, you can use the new tag features to easily remove it.

We hope that you find this new feature useful, and would love to hear any comments or feedback that you may have.

 
 
November 24

Tactile CRM: New tag features

 

Today is a big day for Tactile CRM, our small business contact and sales management system – we have just released Version 2.

After listening to our users feedback we have implemented a lot of new features around Tags. The new features are available via the ‘Tags’ tab and allow you to easily view all items with a specific tag (see the screenshot below) as well as being able to rename/merge tags, delete a tag, delete all items with a specific tag (if you are an admin), and search across all items (organisations, people, opportunities, and activities) with a specific tag as well as being able to drill down on specific tag combinations:

Lots of Tagged Items

We’ve also added a new tag cloud so that you can easily see the most popular tags and drill down on them – a bigger text-size means the tag is used on more items (organisations/people/opportunities/activities).

Spot any pre-release new features in Tactile CRM?

We hope that you find this new feature useful, and would love to hear any comments or feedback that you may have.

 
 
November 24

Tactile CRM: Version 2 – out now!

 

The team behind Tactile CRM – the easy to use contact and sales management system for small businesses, are pleased to announce version 2 of our award winning CRM software.

Tactile CRM Tags

We’ve spent a while tinkering under the hood and adding some great new features that our users have requested, and we hope you’ll agree it’s been worth the wait. There are some big changes and updates this time – so, a drum roll please for our new version:

  • We’ve merged ‘Clients’ and ‘Leads’ to give ‘Organisations’
  • Added new Tag options
  • Added a new tag cloud to easily find everything you have tagged in Tactile CRM and to give a more powerful search
  • Added the ability to rename, merge and delete tags
  • Added the ability to delete everything with a certain tag
  • Updated the quick search to show ‘Recently Viewed’ items at the top
  • Increased the number of opportunities on the ‘Micro’ and ‘SME’ plans, and the number of contacts on the ‘Micro’ plan too
  • Hidden disabled users from the list of users you can assign items to
  • Added the ability to delete configurable data
 
 
November 7

Interface Design

 

We’ve recently been working on some exciting new features for Tactile CRM, which we doing final testing on and hope to release this month. Watch this space.

Whilst Team Tactile have been working on the underlying code, we’ve also been contemplating some interface changes. Now we don’t mess around with mockups in Photoshop, with some of the excellent plugins available for Firefox, including the Web Developer Tool Bar, Firebug, and Stylish, we can quickly and easily work on the interface and see how it actual works in the browser, so we can have some user testing thrown in for free.

One thing we’ve been thinking about is moving to a fixed width design. Mocking this up with the plugins in the browser took about half an hour and the result is below. This may never make it into production, but we’d love your feedback as to which you prefer.

Potential New Tactile Layout

As displays get bigger, presenting text in a fluid layout becomes more of a challenge as it has a tendency to spread out onto a single line. Working with a fixed width also gives us more potential when working on reporting/graphs.

The screenshot below is the current layout for comparision.

Current Tactile Layout

What are your thoughts, and which do you prefer?

 
 
October 13

FOWA, it’s a wrap

 

First of all a big thanks to Stewart at Sun Startup Essentials for our stand at FOWA – it meant we increased our presence from myself, to a total of four of us each day. Not only that – we saw a significant increase in coverage of our Tactile CRM product online, via popular blogs such as Paul Carr, Iain Wallace, a decent amount of Twitter traffic, and a video interview by Dennis Howlett.

We met a lot of people interested in Tactile CRM, and the general consensus was that an API would be really useful; we caught up with the Soocial guys and would love to put something together with their product when we have our API in place, and many more.

As always Ben from Redcat Co was on-hand to take my blog photo for the day (see below)!

Jake at FOWA

Highlights for me where Andy from Huddle, talking about life outside Silicon Valley, and Jason Calacanis with Tom Nixon talking about work/life balance.