CRM upstart aims to undercut Salesforce.com

The Australian arm of a young online CRM company has launched a custom version that targets finance, pharmaceutical, real-estate and other industries with agent-based sales structures.

LeadMaster Australia’s Lead-Xpress had a faster lead distribution system that allowed managers to push out leads to agents, the company said in a press release. Agents could respond to leads faster and close more deals, it added.

LeadMaster Australia, the exclusive distributor of LeadMaster software in the Asia Pacific, has claimed its software as a service (SaaS) provided a similar feature set to Salesforce.com for a “rock-bottom price”.

LeadMaster’s customer base was below 100 seats and so didn’t compete directly with Salesforce.com, said David Mackey, managing director and owner of LeadMaster Australia.

Mackey said Salesforce.com was focused on winning enterprise accounts and directed smaller businesses to sign up through its website. LeadMaster sales staff would service businesses of any size and support times were within 24 hours.

In comparison to Salesforce.com, LeadMaster was “not the cheapest but very competitive” and the company had a “high customer-service ethic”, Mackey said.

The SaaS service was also easier to customise, Mackey said. “Salesforce is created to make dependencies on force.com developers.” LeadMaster customers could customise the program themselves to build new campaigns or alter business processes.

LeadMaster Australia was looking for resellers to sell its service, particularly those with experience in server-based CRM. CRM resellers were saying that customers were asking for a web-based solution, Mackey said.

LeadMaster was available as a branded or white-label service. In both cases the reseller owned the client relationship and invoiced directly, Mackey said. LeadMaster sold its service at a wholesale price with a recommended retail price to give resellers a healthy margin, Mackey said.

Resellers could declare a customer list that would give them a period of exclusivity, Mackey added.

“Any professional services that are required around implementation and support is all theirs,” he said. “If they want us to do (implementation) we will charge them a rate which they will invoice to their customers.”

The vendor had signed seven resellers across Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore. It was hoping to expand to 20 resellers with an existing CRM practice that provided professional services, implementation and support.

“The application suits B2B sales teams. Most customers come from it, telecommunications, financial services and contact centres,” Mackey said. “I suspect it's because those industries are competitive, have large salesforces, and so a tool that can give them a competitive advantage is important to them.”

LeadMaster Asia Pacific counted 500 users in 30 companies as customers, and 10,000 users globally.