If you’re a microprenuer or small business whose bread and butter comes from networking and sales and you are looking for an affordable CRM, Contastic is one SaaS that you should check out.
While most CRM subscriptions range from $50-$500 per month depending on the number or users, Contastic starts at $9 per month — perfect for one- or two-man shows.
It’s basically a plug-and-play system.
You set up your profile using your LinkedIn account and Contastic your account to find personalized articles for you to share with your contacts.
Next, it asks to link to you Gmail account so that it can import your contacts. Contastic then tracks how many days it has been since your last outreach email to each contact in your list, gives you the options of creating email templates, creating groups and setting reminders for yourself.
For microprenuers, individual sales, small business operations and consultants it’s actually pretty genius.
That’s why when we saw Contastic we had to get CEO Cy Khormaee on the line.
When it comes to building SaaS, selling, marketing and networking, Cy knows his stuff. Besides being the CEO of Contastic, he is the CEO of Poll Karma and the founder of CIMLS.com, which is the leading Commercial and Industrial Multiple Listing Service connecting commercial property owners with buyers and tenants nationwide.
If you want to know more about how to develop a smart SaaS, market it and keep making it better while its base of users grows, read on.
How did you come up with the idea for Contastic?
The fundamental truth about sales is it’s all about prospecting. When people first start they focus on closing, thinking sales is about persuasion. In reality, it is about discovery — efficiently identifying people who need what you are selling. It’s critical to find a way to be in the right place when they are ready to buy.
While in the sales org at Microsoft I put this insight into action — diligently keeping an Excel file to stay in touch with my clients. Quarterly, I’d go down the list to make sure I was in touch, and top of mind, with all of my contacts. I’d ask about their lives, businesses, or just send a new article to stay in touch. This made me one of the top reps in the company in a matter of months.
We built Contastic to automate this process. At 5-10 minutes per email manually staying in touch can take hours. Contastic enables you to send personalized compelling emails to your contacts in seconds – enabling you to stay in touch with more people, develop more leads, and close more sales. In fact, here’s how I personally use Contastic today:https://blog.cykho.com/2014/03/how-i-manage-my-personal-network-with.html
Does it pull emails from LinkedIn as well? Or just the articles?
We don’t yet integrate LinkedIn messages (but we’re working on it!). We work with LinkedIn now to provide some contacts for the users as they follow up. We observed that people would want to be reminded of their contacts professional profile from LinkedIn, past email from Gmail and any personal notes they may have. That’s why Contastic combines all of those elements in one page to make the reconnection process as seamless as possible.
Can I integrate it with multiple Gmail accounts?
This is something that many users have asked us about and we’re working hard on. It’s coming soon!
What are the prime differentiators between Contastic and other CRMs?
Contastic is the first platform that automatically generates sales emails with personalized content. At the core of what we’re doing are our recommendation engines. We intelligently recommend people who you should follow up with (based on past interactions and personal data) as well as content to send to them (matching content topics to a recipient’s interest) – so all a salesperson needs to do to stay in touch is hit send.
Where do you see Contastic going from here?
We’re very excited to see Contastic grow — we are adding about 50% to our user base each month. It’s incredibly gratifying to hear from our customers that Contastic is making their lives better.
Interested in seeing what others are saying about Contastic? Check out their testimonials here.
We develop explainer videos for websites and love SaaS apps, developers, startups and awesome new technologies. Do you have one you think we would be interested in? Give us a shout onTwitter or Facebook and we’ll be in touch!
