Month: March 2013

Crushpath Reboots the Pitch

I caught up with Sam Lawrence just before SXSW to hear about his latest milestone with the company he founded in 2011, Crushpath.  Readers of this blog will remember Sam as the first highly visible CMO for Jive Software.  Sam’s Go Big Always blog defined the category for social software back in ’09.  Sam’s contribution was always edgy, always provocative, and always right.  There were few in our space that had the voice, influence, and insight Sam had early on.  I’ve missed him over the years, and am really happy to see him back with this amazing new offering.  I told Sam on the phone I simply could not be objective about this product because I frigg’n love it.  Even though I was a Sam fan already, I’m an even bigger Crushpath fan.

What is Crushpath?  As usual, Sam says it best:

Crushpath gives people a way to pitch their product, service, idea, or event with a simple, one page website that grabs the attention and captures leads in a way that email can’t. Your pitch is searchable, shareable, and social, so you get tons of eyeballs on it and are notified every time someone is interested. Then, keep track of your business relationships with a chronological play by play of all activity as it’s happening.

Sam gave me a trial account to experiment with, so I’ve begun building a few pitch sites to see how it works.  The elegance of the user interface and drop-dead-simple design is what does it for me.  Until I spoke to Sam, I didn’t realize Matt Wilkinson was a co-founder.  Matt led product development for another product I absolutely love: Socialcast.  So, that the product is simple to use, looks great, and has a lag time of about 15 minutes to usefulness does not surprise me, considering Matt’s track record with building great software.

But, really, what makes Crushpath brilliant is what it does.  It’s built on the philosophy that “everyone pitches.”  And this is where the company taps into a wellspring of need that has previously gone unanswered in the market.  The plethora of junky email marketing, CRM systems, cold-calls – younameit – that clutters up today’s marketing outreach is sorely in need of a dramatic improvement.  Crushpath cuts to the chase. It sums up what you’re selling and let’s you do that in a straight-forward, no nonsense way.  In the company’s latest announcement, Crushpath reduced its pricing to $9/mo. for a limited time.  At that price,  it’s the best investment you can make on the social web to get your story out and connect directly to your market.   Definitely check it out.  I’m sure you’ll love it as much as I do.

cp

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Business Process 21C: The Jackhammer Tales

suitOver the past few months I’ve begun to reflect upon how I arrived here at the intersection of process and innovation in the Enterprise.  It occurred to me that everything I learned as a researcher, a writer, and an industry observer in the services provider space  (my pre-Internet career) now had great bearing on what I was seeing in the Enterprise as a result of the pace of disruptive technologies impacting the market.  The question that kept re-emerging for me was: how are rigidly defined business processes that were hammered out in the 90s reconfiguring to adapt to better, faster, more efficient ways of meeting customer needs?  Even more puzzling is, if my friend Josh’s old joke is correct, “SAP is like pouring concrete into a company,” how are large enterprises dismantling foundational ERP systems to include disruptive technologies?  After all, no 21st Century business can stand to stay frozen in the past.  Even SAP itself is retooling to provide greater flexibility and real-time actions and insights with its HANA in-memory database and its JAM social platform.

This big question has been vexing me for a while, so I asked my friend and fellow Enterprise Irregular, Phil Fersht at HfS Research, if he’d be interested in an exploratory study to see how BPO providers and consultants are responding to new advances in mobile, social, the Internet of things– all new capabilities that were not present when the majority of institutional business processes were “cemented” into the Enterprise. I’ve seen evidence of several companies who’ve been introducing social, in particular, to provide greater value to customers.  Of course, some of the best examples are coming from platform vendors themselves such as this post, “Enterprise Social is about Business Process Redesign”  by CEO  at Socialtext.  But, I’ve seen other examples such as Deloitte’s work in this area explained in this post, “Social Reengineering by Design,” and even examples about how large consulting firms are changing their own internal processes as a result of new ways of working, as evidenced by this post, “Spark – taking Collaboration and Corporate Social Networking to a new Level at PwC.”   Luckily, Phil agreed this is an area definitely worth pursuing, so we’ve kicked the study off this week.  We’re compiling data and hope to publish results in the early May timeframe.

I’m really happy to be working in this area that combines my long history of covering the traditional outsourcing sector with my area of interest for this current iteration of my career in next generation technologies.  Phil has done an amazing job with HfS Research, too, so I’m proud to be contributing to their strong brand in the market.  HfS was recently named one of the leading analyst firms in a formidable field of competitors.  Last week, I paid a visit to my longtime business advisor Mort Meyersen, who is an icon in the outsourcing field having helped build EDS and then Perot Systems.  It feels good to be back among old friends, mashing up what I’ve been learning from new friends.

I will be working hard on this study for the next few months, but also working on the startup we announced a few weeks ago, Change Agents Worldwide.  So, busy, busy, but really having fun.  Hope to see some of you at SXSW, but I will be hunkered down and only getting out to a few of the evening events.  Please keep up with me on Foursquare if you’d like to connect while you’re here in Austin.