This post is a guest piece from Richard Rosen, CEO and founder of Fastcall, a Salesforce CTI vendor and one of my clients. I was talking with Rich about customer focus for focused businesses in a crowded market, and our talk drifted into how limits arenāt a bad thing.
Our chat was fun. It was deep. Quotes from the Tao Te Ching and/or a Star Wars prequel may have been thrown around, and I didn't want to keep it private. To that end, I asked Rich to turn it into something applicable to other business readers. Fastcall is my client and itās my job to show its strengths, so of course itās the example in play here. But Rich presents a much-needed perspective whether youāre a user or developer of business applications. I turn things over to him now.
Representing your brand as an owner requires a tricky balancing act in an industry where integrity and thought leadership are highly valued. You want to attract new customers and shout the qualities of the product, of course. But thatās making a sales pitch, and nobody wants to read a sales pitch. Then again, integrity and thought leadership mean revenue in the future, when your company (especially a smaller one) needs revenue now.
Iāve been holding back from writing about what Fastcall is capable ofāthatās what the website and the AppExchange listing are forābut this is an incredible company and thereās plenty for me to brag about. So hereās my plan: I will talk about what Fastcall does best, but with as little reference to the products as possible. Itās about why you should consider us, but not what you should get. Itās about why the specialized company is often the right one, and why boundariesāas represented by what Fastcall āonlyā doesāare empowering.
Home Field Advantage
A discussion of which Fastcall products you should use would be a short one anyway, because we only have three apps. The word āonlyā is misleading, because having those three is a conscious decision to keep us focused on our core competencies. We know Salesforce CTI very well, itās our home field. Why should we play on somebody elseās? We are very comfortable doing what we do, and Iām confident that our work will stand up against any other vendor.
Fastcall is only available on the Salesforce AppExchange. Thatās our native environment, and everything Fastcall does was built exclusively for it. Thereās no reason to go cross-platform; Salesforce is the #1 cloud CRM platform, and all the customers we could ever want are here. Customer focus also means going where the customers are, after all. We are subject matter experts on Salesforce technology. Our certified developers know the platform, we know Apex and visualforce. Fastcall customers know that if they need solutions to a problem, we will always be able to provide the best.
These Shoes Fit
Finally, we will only sell you what you agree that you need. Our main product, Fastcall, has three pricing levels. The first one, Essentials, is about half of Fastcallās functionality. The next step up, Pro, has twice as much and costs twice as much.
Our third level, Custom, is for customers who want to pick which specific functions they want without anything extraneous. We donāt charge a premium for that customizability, and why should we? One great thing about cloud computing is that each part of an application has an on/off switch. Besides, we only charge for usage.
The walls of a house are its boundaries, but they also hold up the roof. By knowing our business and channeling our efforts, we can focus 100% on serving our customers the most up-to-date CTI application in the Salesforce ecosystem. Those are the things that make Fastcall what it is, and what let us be the best at what we do.
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