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ClinchPad is rethinking the sales tool for small enterprises.

Delhi has stereotypically been the startup city of deals and hustlers. Infamous for people who tend to prize their ‘contacts’ and somehow this fits right into the grand scheme of things that the online sales CRM ClinchPad is based in the capital city.

About

Started by Cheenu Madan, ClinchPad is a SaaS based product aimed at small teams and organizations to help effectively channel and manage their sales lead. Part of the GSF Accelerator ‘13, the name ClinchPad ( Clinch + LaunchPad ) simply stands for ‘grabbing a deal’

Product

On using the product, the landing screen greets one with a card like interface stacked one below the other. For the keen eyed observer it is definitely reminiscent of Trello ( the organizational tool ), but that is not a bad thing. The interface does aid usability especially for a desktop environment. With a pipeline layout which lays emphasis on leads. The user begins by moving their contacts between the various  stages of the sales ( beginning from a prospect going all the way to negotiation & closing ). The sales incharge can add meta data to the lead in the form of to-do, collaborators, value of the sale and in the end mark it as won/lost. Enough points for future benefits of individuals and their teams.

ClinchPad integrates with Google and in an attempt to get rid of the cumbersome methods currently used, one can upload their csv/excel sheets with the product. According to the team the ‘reports’ and the ‘summary emails’ are one of the most popular sections which help the managers to scan through their team’s effort faster.

The product is simple to use with a basic learning curve. Certain sections like the integration with Google need more visibility and we personally discovered it only during the walkthrough with the team. In a mobile-first world, the offering on that front also seem a little weak. But the ‘summaries section’ mentioned above and the ‘apps timeline’ mentioned below make up for it now.

Users

ClinchPad is currently being adopted by a diverse set of people such as the freelancers, marketing agencies and real estate firms amongst other, with a unifying theme that they are involved with sales in one form or the other. Though the Western audience remains the prime target group, the product has seen adoption from smaller Indian cities.

pipeline-new

Pricing

At the heart of any SaaS product lies the pricing. ClinchPad boasts of a genuinely enticing onboarding plan. The service is free-to-use for the entire team as long as the number of leads and the usage are within the limits of 100 and 250mb respectively. On the paid side the plans go from as low as $9/month ( 1 user and 2gb storage ) upto $99/month ( 33 users and 20gb storage ) all the while offering unlimited leads.

Competition & Timeline

ClinchPad is in no way the only company trying to crack the CRM sector. Even in the products catering to small and medium enterprises the competition from names like Pipedrive & Highrise along with the desi Zoho and its suite of products is there.

A less known fact about ClinchPad is that they already have an iPhone app in place, much less publicized though. The core focus for the coming months for the ClinchPad crew is to push out their apps by covering more platforms and changes to their web app.

The value of a sales tool lies in the integration it brings to the fold. The team is already in work to integrate the ClinchPad with some of the most popular business offering out there. One shouldn’t be too surprised to find it being a part of our favorite online form builder to email marketing service in the near future.

We’d love to know your experience with the product. For those of you who have not yet invested in a sales tool, the free plan for ClinchPad is great way to feel things out and experiment with it. If for nothing else, their blog is worth a special mention!

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KeyMails is making the email smart for Outlook users!

Still believe email is small and dying a slow death in the world of IMs, tweets and Facebook messages? Just have a look at the massively viral ‘Every Second on the Internet’ and scroll till the end to get a visual realization of how big a part of our life email still is. Email is still the first choice for internal communication and chatter within a number of organizations owing to its ubiquitous nature and presence, not that it was intended to be used that way.

A number of startups are now building tools to help users get more out the email ranging from helping you get the social media information to turning your inbox into a to-do list in itself. But it is no wonder that the biggest peeve with the email has been its overload. With independent researches confirming the belief held for long that the overdose of email has severe effects on productivity costing precious man hours and increased costs.

With the latest Gmail update the users found the presence of the tabbed inbox easily helping filter the signal vs noise between social media, promotions and genuine email content. But Bangalore based KeyMails is looking to provide a similar level of productivity for the Microsoft Outlook users. Keymails is a plugin for Outlook helping users to prioritize the email and the best part it becomes efficient over time based on the usage patterns.

What is KeyMails and how does it work?

The KeyMails team is reinforcing the belief that for a large number of corporate users the desktop/laptop is the device where the emails get done with. Thus the plugin keeps all of the information on the device itself and doesn’t send anything on the cloud. Options like the ability to archive a mail till a due date along with being fully functional offline makes it an impressive tool for Outlook 2010 users.  

KeyMails works within Outlook system by creating a separate folder which implies that the user is still using the familiar Outlook interface thereby reducing the learning curve. By default the system prioritizes the mails based on the previous usage patterns but moving on the user can upvote/downvote certain users or domains to affect their priority ranking in emails for the KeyMails folder.

But why email and why Outlook?

Pankaj Kulkarni is the founder of Colimetrics the parent company behind KeyMails and he has been in the corporate world long enough to understand the email usage tools and patterns. According to him there are enough corporate Outlook users out there to keep them busy in building more efficient tools. With such a big market, building tools for them just is the right place to be.

Users & Funding

KeyMails had a public launch in June of this year and right now they are working on adding more users. The current user base befits a product newly launched but they have seen individual beta users come from organizations ranging from Viacom to Infosys to even the White House.

The venture is partially self funded by the co-founding team of Pankaj and Phaniraj with the money coming from the sale of their previous venture S7 Software Solutions and venture money coming from investor Yogi Kandlikar, who also happens to serve as the teams resource in the Silicon Valley.

Product timeline

Pankaj promises that what the user sees right now is just a sneak peak of the things to come. In the coming months they would be focusing on marketing campaigns and documenting content to help make the on boarding process a breeze. 

The short term goal for KeyMails is to introduce a freemium model of the product to get the user a taste of the product which is currently priced at US $25/year or US $3/month with a 30 day trial period. Apart from this Pankaj emphasized on the long term vision of building a host of services and tools around and email and productivity itself. Which would begin with email diagnostics and team collaboration to knowledge management, to help document recurring issues in the organization to help the staff.

On one hand desktop users would find boon in the tool built by Colimetrics on the other lack of multi-device or mobile support could be a bummer in certain regard. But then no two email users are alike head on to Outlook and give your productivity a spin on KeyMails!