Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Article

AppMesh is the developer of the SalesMesh customer relationship management (CRM) platform for salespeople that allows professionals to work more efficiently with one another. The company's latest announcement regards a new social feature that seeks LinkedIn (News - Alert)-style networking as an add-on to its effective CRM tools.

With this announcement, SalesMesh reaches version 3.0 and now comes with the ability to share information about company contacts, sales leads, recent deals, and notes relevant to customer interactions. Everything in a salesperson's world is now shareable between company representatives whether or not they use CRM, so salespersons can share data in their own departments or, for instance, with trusted contacts in marketing or human resources departments.

Leo Tenenblat, the CEO and co-founder of AppMesh, spoke in his company's announcement about how the latest SalesMesh release tries to overcome the hurdles enterprise CRM software typically poses.

“Enterprise software is great for the enterprise but down at the user level it's still largely rejected because it doesn't support or help reps' actual

day-to-day workflow,” Tenenblat said. “It's time to balance things out and have apps work well at the personal level too: collaborating naturally across hierarchy and company boundaries, and giving people more control over data visibility.”

The big difference between traditional applications and SalesMesh is reflected in the idea of workflow. Sales personnel do not just sit by a phone or computer all day and speak to customers. They must also collaborate with other team members and employees in other company departments in order to secure deals and make sure their customers are getting what they need. In order to do that, they must send emails and share important data. SalesMesh acts as a central hub for all those communications so no salesperson needs to switch from the phone to CRM to email and come full circle just to pass a note.

This functionality comes with the normal CRM tools that capture email, calls, notes, and personal events in the CRM system itself for use by individual sales reps. The platform tries to automatically capture as much information as possible so salespersons can save time. There is also integration with Salesforce to transfer data from one platform to another and have all previously collected information make its way to SalesMesh.

AppMesh says its release is part of the “rise of employee-centric sales tools” that empower employees to work efficiently while also remaining in line with corporate goals. This comes in addition to overall growth of the CRM market and could represent a fundamental shift in how sales departments interact with their teams and their clients. AppMesh is creating continuity between departments much like others in the field such as Aspect (News - Alert) with its Experience Continuity platform. This could be a definite change for the better, and the end game will certainly reflect how customers relate to their brands.