Lead Zeppelin

Cross posted from our blog on cre8:

The Cat’s out of the Bag

…or rather, the air is in the bag. Our home-grown web app, Lead Zeppelin has taken off and is accepting beta testers!

What is Lead Zeppelin? Our attempt for an easy-to-use customer relationship management (CRM) web application to manage your leads and customers. What drove me to want to create our own (yes, there are others out there), is that a number of our customers have a basic website with a basic contact form. But your inbox is no place to manage your leads.

Some of our customers have asked for a place that they can manage these leads separately, outside of their inbox. For most of our small business owners (SMB), building a custom webapp can be cost prohibitive. After seeing a few requests like this, we decided we’d build one “for the masses”.

The key part, to me, is connecting your form on your website to your CRM. There are some CRMs now that have this ability, or you can stitch it together thru a couple APIs, but most of our customers are small, busy, businesses and don’t want to hassle with multiple app integrations and signups. They also don’t have the time to learn an app that has more features than they need. They just want to go one place and see their leads.

Further, some of our customers are having great success with lead generation from using Google Adwords, landing pages, and the like. But, they suck at follow up. And they admit it. So, this is somewhere we feel the Zeppelin can help. Along with reminding you that you have new leads to qualify and keeping track of your closing ratio, we plan to build in tools and reminders to help cultivate your leads into customers.

Altho our webapp can be classified as customer relationship management (CRM), I’d like to think that it puts more emphasis on the prospect. Perhaps we’ll use the Blue Ocean Strategy and create a new category, Prospect Relationship Management (PRM). But I don’t want to go too far with that, as this webapp can certainly be used as “cradle-to-grave”, helping you convert leads into customers, retaining your important notes and files generated while in the conversion process well after they’ve become a customer generating referrals for you.

We’re excited to have gotten this far and welcome your suggestions and feedback!

Divide and Conquer

Let your team help you close your leads by adding them to your account. Now you can keep track of who posted what note and when about a lead. Soon, you will have the ability to assign a lead to a user, so you can delegate some of your workload.

Enhanced Security

We added an SSL certificate to our site today, so you can begin logging in at https://www.leadzep.com. Having additional security will be a feature for paid plans only, when we officially launch.

It’s a short week over here at the hangar, but we still managed to get a few small new features out:

Account Tab

You’ll now see a Account tab over by itself on the right-side of the navigation bar. Here you can change your password if you don’t like the one we initially assigned to you. If you’ve forgotten your password, that’s OK too, as you can now request a temporary one from the login screen.

New Status: New

Leads that get entered into the system from your website form will have a status of New, so you can hit those up first after you login. Also, any leads that you may be manually entering, but haven’t qualified yet can be assigned this status.

Converting Leads to Contacts

Following on the heels of our recent addition of the Contacts tab, you now have the ability to convert a lead to a contact. Now you can keep your lead list tidy as well as keep any notes or files you may have added to a lead after you convert them to a contact (customer).

We’re storing the date you convert customers so in the future we will have some metrics that show your New > Convert (close) ratio for the month… as well as average days to close.

Feedback Loop

Per beta tester Lou, we added a little feedback mechanism to the site. Its the little “feedback” tab that’s sticking out on the right side of the site after you login. If there’s any features you’d like us to consider, please feel free to post them up there.