Musings VII - Where Did the R Go?
CRM - Customer Relationship Management seems to be a dying artform. Automation is not always a good thing.
Linkedin Desktop App
A new app just appeared on my Windows laptop. It seems that Microsoft is taking advantage of their ownership of the operating system and the business / social networking tool, but it might not be a good thing.
We’ve talked about Linkedin a few times on the Pilote Podcast, but I’ve noticed a few things recently.
Like Twitter, the use of Linkedin and real work are inversely related.
I’ve changed my location to Mount Eliza, which is a sleepy town outside of Melbourne and my unsolicited inbound messages have dropped significantly from when it was set to Dubai.
This could be because I am posting a lot less (See point 1) or…
There are fewer people using Linkedin in Australia for outbound sales. The platform itself is not used as much as elsewhere - many profiles are 5 or 10 years out of date!
I have also removed Web3 and other buzzwords from my profile, so that might also explain the reduction in approaches.
There are a lot more ‘dumb’ approaches by people using so-called AI to sell irrelevant things. There is a trick you can use to see if your details have been scraped from Linkedin.
If you can change the name of your company on Linkedin you can add wording that doesn’t appear anywhere else. For instance, on my profile I list a role at Pilote Media. But on Linkedin the company name appears as Pilote Media Network & Full-Stack Marketing Agency. So any email or In-mail that I receive which includes that phrase verbatim has been automatically inserted.
Speaking of CRM…
Every so often I revisit CRM systems for SMEs. Basically, I want something that is more than a spreadsheet and less than Salesforce and there are a lot to choose from but…
Some of these SaaS CRM systems have pricing plans like mobile phones. Some charge on the number of contacts, some on the amount of messages used, there are bundles of modules that make no sense and some even charge for things like custom fields.
Product Management is something that fascinates me. As a buyer and a user, It’s interesting to compare different systems against a set of user cases and, for want of a better word, requirements.
So I trialled Pipedrive. I’ve used it before. It’s relatively simple although it has more bells and whistles now than it did when I last used it. But the product is not intuitive. For example…
You can label a contact, but labels are mutually exclusive. Which means that a contact can only have one label at a time. Maybe that keeps things simple, but it is a restriction that is frustrating. You can get around this problem by creating a custom field, but custom fields are part of the charging model. But that wasn’t the biggest problem…
Throughout the free trial I assumed that I was seeing Australian pricing. I am sitting in Australia, the company information was set up as Australian so I figured, when it said that the price would be $32 per seat per month it would be Australian dollars.
Then, as the trial was ending and I entered my billing address in the UK, the price changed to GBP 32. That’s about 61 Australian dollars which is a big hike.
When I challenged the pricing using the live-chat support I was told that…
It costs more to deliver a SaaS product in some countries than others.
Which isn’t the best sales pitch I’ve ever heard.
Even if the price I had been seeing wasn’t Australian dollars but US dollars, GBP 32 is $40 USD which is a 25% difference based on billing address alone.
When I spoke with one of Pipedrive’s partner agencies, they had never considered that the price would be different in different markets (I’m always the edge case). When they spoke to their channel partner about it they were told.. that’s it, that’s the rule. You get billed based on your billing address.
And it seems that the pricing is just lazy. Rather than peg the price to a certain currency, they peg it to the numeric value. Which means if you are paying in GBP, you pay double or 25% more than elsewhere in the world!
Now the thing about SaaS CRM systems is, they are a commodity these days. Switching costs are low. You can export out all your data in a CSV file and import it into a competing system.
So I have decided not to use Pipedrive, and I am trialling something new, which has it’s pricing in local currency - actually it’s free!
Threads has launched and I have a profile - https://www.threads.net/@dmfreedom I’m not really using it a lot… but we will see what happens.