A while ago I had the pleasure of talking
with Austin Willms who took me through a tour presenting GreenRope, a CRM
solution for small businesses that offers three āsuitesā of functionality
across ales, marketing, and operations. The operations suite probably needs a
bit of explanation but is essentially the customer service portion plus functionality
covering project- and event management, knowledge management, a wiki,
collaboration and ā important ā the majority of contact management
functionality.
The Sales suite covers workflows,
activities, leads, and contact handling and the marketing suite provides
marketers with the tools they need to do their job.
āTheir jobā mainly being e-mail- and website-marketing,
with some social media marketing added to it. This is something that GreenRope
is particularly well geared for. The software has its origins as an e-mail marketing
tool that evolved into a business suite of CRM-related tools that supports
additional customer requirements. The objective behind it is to provide as many
tools as possible in very affordable packages, while being able to support a
nearly unlimited number of contacts. GreenRope has customers that run the
solution for millions of contacts in their database.
The philosophy behind GreenRope is that it
shall make people effective, by allowing them to organize easily and
efficiently. It is not necessarily there to serve as an immediately revenue
generating tool. There is no preferred industry for GreenRope, although its
ability to deal with millions of contacts shows a B2C affinity.
This making it easy for users philosophy is
also exhibited by GreenRope regularly sending mails that help in the onboarding
process and the easily accessible and very performing help, which not only
includes help pages but also cheat sheets, videos, webinars, etc.
Perhaps the two most powerful
tools/functionalities within GreenRope are the automation and the groups.
A group is the first level of contact
organization. It is a very powerful concept, that however requires a bit of
thinking ā because it is so powerful.
Every contact belongs to at least one
group. Groups allow setting access permissions and can be used for custom
content or fields. A group also acts as a filter to allow for viewing of
customers in different stages and a kind of segment or target group for
campaigns or workflows, including group specific web sites or landing pages. It
can also be used to assign a customer to another GreenRope user.
I wouldnāt be surprised if the group
concept also lies behind GreenRopes separation of their own customersā data.
The internal automation tools offer a
simple way of creating pretty powerful workflows and, well, automations. Building
e.g. a to-do list or action items is extremely simple. Based upon an event it
just takes a few clicks to create an action item for a sales rep to call a new
lead. Multi stage campaigns and drip campaigns can get created easily simple
using the Journey tool, Workflow Manager, and Drip Campaign tool. The Journey
tool is a way of modeling a customer journey through a purchasing process. It offers
four simple, yet powerful objects: A decision, which essentially is an
if-then-else block, actions, which true to the focus on e-mail offer the
sending of e-mails, the execution of a workflow, and the adding and removing of
an object to or from a group. This, e.g., allows for advancing a customer
through the sales stages. Additionally there is a delay that can get used to
model delays for actions and a stop element to mark an end to a journey.
Interestingly there is a conversion
analysis and prediction module, which I couldnāt review lacking data. It is
intended to predict factors that drive conversions using web site tracking. I
assume that it doesnāt allow for personalization and identification of
customers but still should do the most imminent job: Giving insight into what
helps and detracts from successfully converting a prospect to a customer.
My Take
GreenRope is an āall-in-oneā CRM system
that consists of a lot of tools that are molded together to build something
that is complete in itself, given its strong focus on website- and e-mail
marketing. I like the modular build of the solution and the clean UI.
Main competitors, as the GreenRope team
sees it for themselves are Infusionsoft, Hubspot, and Salesforce, although the all-in-one
market is considerably bigger. This is a very strong and renowned group of
competitors. One of the challenges that GreenRope faces when looking at Hubspot
and Salesforce is that those two vendors have a far higher brand recognition, a
wider ecosystem and at least in Salesforceās case, also more capabilities. GreenRope
to some extent reminds me of helpshift; both are hidden gems that deserve more
of the spotlight than they get.
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