ContactMonkey

Apr 15, 2013

April 10, 2013 1:00 am No Comment 0 18  First hitting the scene in 2011 the startup company Contact Monkey has just raised $1 million in seed monies from angel investors. The program offers integration in multiple CRM services and is used for tracking in detail outgoing emails. Canadian concept ContactMonkey launched in March by raising $1 million in angel seed monies. The email tracking system has already launched with multiple integration with the top CRM solutions. ContactMonkey is able to be added as a plugin seamlessly to either gmail or outlook that provides a continuous app diagram on the right side of the viewing screen. The Toronto based founder and CEO Scott Pielsticker describes his product as providing insights to take action on by giving the status of what has happened to your email after you clicked “send.” The on screen display shows a caption of which emails have already been opened by the recipients, which emails are most important and which the hottest. Pielsticker thinks the application will have a tremendous advantage to sales people as it provides details of the emails happenings. Sales reps will look at the results and know where the recipient was when they accessed the email, how many times the email was viewed, and when it was first accessed, enabling sales people the knowledge of when to follow up. Obviously if a recipients or prospect accessed the email more than once the sales person then knows that the prospect is truly interested and can be contacted sooner than later. Shortly after its launch venture capital investment came from Palzacorp, which is at the top of the condo development market in Toronto. Plazacorp is not a venture capital company, but has invested in a few technology startups. ContactMonkey hopes to gain subscribers after the 14 day free trial has ended by offering $4.99/ month service or the annual subscription reduced rate of $49.99/year. Seeing itself as a true tool for the everyday salesperson ContactMonkey has become partners with some of the sales tools most used in the marketplace such as Nimble, Goldmine and Sage ACT, and Salesforce to name a few. Pielsticker feels that the program will really appeal to current Salesforce users who manage 10 or more salespeople at a time. He thinks it’s a powerful way to quickly view what their team members are working on and with whom. It also gives them the opportunity to ask the sales reps if they have followed up on specific leads that appeared hot by reading the initial email sent multiple times. He concedes that for those recipients that are not interested it doesn’t offer any way to further garner interest, but that it does give a way for the leads that are then “hot” to be contacted right away. ContactMonkey is probably not for sales people who work on only a few prospects at a time, but for those who cast large nets. The CEO feels it best works for sales people who are trying to manage tens, dozens, or hundreds of leads at a time. Other sales email reporting types of competitors exist on the market such as ToutApp which begins at $30/month for an individual user, or Yesware that charges a minimum of $5/user a month. Though similar in many ways neither offers the detail of ContactMonkey does, just general information on how many emails were opened, nor if they were opened multiple times. Pielsticker feels that the investment that they made in making certain that the plugin is simple to install, even for the technologically impaired, but believes that users will immediately see the value in the detail provided.