A www.LongJump.com Sales Rep asked me to share my experiences with a
prospect that is considering investing more time and energy into the
LongJump platform.
CRM and hosted development platforms (like LongJump, SalesForce, Intalio,
etc.) are my passion - I continue to be dazzled by the incredibly powerful
yet inexpensive tools that are now available to businesses of any size. They
enable us to organize and manage enterprise data (prospect / customer /
order / marketing) and business processes (ex: what does your org do when
you get a lead?) that can then be leveraged and automated.
Here are my answers to the prospect's questions...
* How long have you used LongJump?
Since March 2008.
* How many users do you have?
8
I have trained double that number on how to login and use the system over
the past 1.5 years. This is important. I have never needed to create a user
manual or drag a user through any kind of complicated training. Navigation
is clean and quick. Learn one app and you can use all of them. Staff LIKE
LongJump. When I moved staff from a hosted spreadsheet service I was testing
over to LongJump, they made it a point to tell me how LongJump made them
more productive.
* How stable has the system been (errors, down-time, etc.)?
Very stable. I have seen the service go down (unplanned) a few times (maybe
3?) in the past 1.5 years. The outages have only ever been minutes (not more
than 10) so system problems have never affected our ability to get our work
done.
* How much customization have you done (fields, objects, applications,
etc.)?
Hundreds of hours. I have modified the existing objects (ex: the Account and
Opportunity tabs) by adding fields and triggers, and have created many
custom applications (a collection of tabs) containing custom tabs to
organize and manage my business processes within LongJump. Exciting stuff.
Customization is what lead me to LongJump. In March 2008, as I understood
it, Salesforce was going to charge me for customizations beyond 5 "tabs". I have since created around 15 custom apps, each containing many custom
tabs, so I would have exceeded Salesforce's 5 tab limit quickly (costing
additional dollars). There are no customization limits or extra costs (other
than data storage costs) in LJ.
A couple of custom app success stories are...
- Converting a paper+Excel based marketing service that builds date driven
events for our clients into a LongJump powered custom app. My national staff
connect from their homes, complete their tasks, with the app then handling
many tasks (email, fax, etc.) via automation that was once done manually.
- I moved a direct mail marketing service originally developed in MS Access
+ Outlook to a custom LongJump app. The processing power of the LongJump
platform solved a huge bottleneck issue. I can now send thousands of pieces
of mail in one click. Before, my locally run solution could only process a
few hundred pieces per hour and would tie up internal hardware and network
resources.
* Any limitations you have experienced?
1. Storage rates need to improve. Price was just cut in half...now $25 per
50MB - and that's still ridiculous. Hard to understand this rate when I can
buy 1TB USB drive for under $200. Salesforce now offers 1 GB min for all
accounts to cover data and files. LongJump needs to match the market. 2. Are you an MS Access or SQL database user? Joining tabs within views is
not supported. Gets in my way. You can do 3 table (aka object) join in
reports, so that's some relief, but I would like my "relational data"
to...relate, easily. 3. A feature to copy the Data Policy (DP) object. The DPs are my favorite
part of Long Jump. Using plain English, business users can but the records
to work. Automate updates, send merged emails, force data integrity checks.
Huge feature. DPs let you leverage and automate your data. So...I now create
DPs often. And that's a problem since they can't be copied. Imagine having
to recreate a complex Word doc from scratch each time. I have a request in
to Support. 4. Data export has a glitch that needs to be addressed: exporting records
that contain double quotes (ex: html email body text) breaks the outputted
CSV file since LongJump only offers to use double quotes as text delimiters.
I have been told the next version will address this. 5. I have not found a LongJump user forum. I have used forums to learn how
to develop on other platforms. I have not spent much time searching for
users since LongJump is easy to learn and Support is excellent. 6. BPM (Business Process Management) tools. I have not spent time using
LongJump's Workflows which look like a good first step on creating and
managing and running Business Processes (BP) graphically. Based on what I
have read, the workflows are limited to the data (records) in one tab, which
I expect will block my creativity when it comes to leveraging my data. I may
want a BP that updates an Account with revenue recorded in the Opportunity
tab, and then goes on to mine related data in the Contact tab and other
custom tabs...driving a series of follow-up events (marketing, cross
selling, customer satisfaction).
* Have you used tech support and how responsive have they been?
Amazing. Best Support I have experienced in 20 years. The team has made
changes to the system based on my requests...kind of mind blowing. Example: I have a solution (this might be of use to your org) that allows me
to create emails and send them to a service that converts them into a paper
letters (imagine - I send thousands of pieces of mail with no Mail Dept and
no batching...direct from email to printed letter to Post Office to
recipient). This process requires a long subject line that contains the
target address. The LongJump system did not allow more than 100 characters
in the subject line (an arbitrary limit). I explained what I wanted to do
and why, and the Support Team worked with the Development team to make the
change to allow more characters. Your Sales Rep could probably pull a report on the many questions that
Support has provided to me and feature requests that they delivered shortly
after I requested.
* Overall impression of LongJump CRM system?
Easy to try. User cost is inexpensive and monthly pay-as-you-go was a great
fit for this small biz. Short learning curve. Quickly learned how to
customize and program with no code. Our Marketing and Sales activities use
the CRM, while our Production and Operations are now powered by our own
custom apps.
* If you had to do it over, what would you do differently?
I would have made more time to explore and use the built in email marketing
tools (Vertical Response). I never got around to using this excellent built
in marketing tool until recently, and instead was focused on sending email
using another (less effective) method.
ChrisChristopher Swanson
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