Javelin – Shooting an Arrow into CRM

Javelin has just released its CRM product after a four month private beta period. Javelin is a product that is aimed at bridging the gap between basic CRM/contact management and higher level, but complex, CRM systems. It’s designed specifically for the small business market and hope to succeed with a strategy of being;

• Simple and intuitive to use
• Easily customisable by end users
• Sufficiently functional to enable pipeline management

Javelin is priced at $12 per month per user with generous limits (50000 contacts and 2Gb storage). In keeping with the freemium model, Javelin’s free plan allows 2 users, 250 contacts and 10Mb storage.

The jumping off point for CRM users is the contact page and Javelin’s seems fairly clear and intuitive. Contacts aren’t differentiated by type (lead, customer, vendor etc) and there is the ability to tag contacts, view their history and attach emails and files to them (see the screenshot below for a contact view).

Javelin understands that RM users come in lots of different shapes and sizes – they give users the ability to configure custom fields that can be linked to the contact type (eg all customer contacts have a customer number field).

Javelin contends that the difference between contact managers and CRMs, in terms of customer need, is the ability to manage the sales pipeline. javelin’s approach to this is to track opportunities by milestones and calculate forecasted income based on each milestone’s individual probabilities.

They’ve also provided for standard sales process methodologies – in this case by providing the ability to define sequences of tasks that they call tracks. Once a Track has been documented, it can be selected upon creation of an opportunity, thus ensuring a consistent sales process is followed.

I especially like this approach as it recognises that small businesses tend to lack a clear documentation of their process methodology. The fact is that documentation is time consuming – but creating it as part of a job, and then leveraging the process for subsequent jobs, is a nice approach. The configuration behind the Track functionality is pretty quick and simple.

The CRM space is incredibly busy – there’s a huge number of SaaS and open source options out there. From my limited look Javelin seems well thought out and intuitive to use – definitely worth a look.

For a limited time Javelin is offering a 25% discount to new users for their first twelve months – use the discount code JAVELINLAUNCH