Looking to improve sales as well as your relationships with customers? Check out a new RTP firm in the CRM space.

ZynBit.com, an RTP startup that emerged just a year ago at the CED venture capital conference, is gearing up for growth with $500,000 in new financing.

The new funding is being announced Tuesday. Sandy Roberson of Healthview Capital led the round.

ZynBit touts its solutions as “sales acceleration” technology for use in CRM, or customer relationship management. Key points ZynBit touts include:

  • Get CRM for their Inbox and easily sync, track and analyze their best leads, contacts and opportunities.
  • Connect email, calendars, tasks, and web visitor history with Salesforce, marketing, sales management and admins to gain insights about the key activities which drive their pipelines.
  • Use data to dissect contacts, accounts, and opportunities
  • Analyze trends across teams for pipeline management

In an extensive Q&A, CEO and co-founder Phil Dixon tells the ZynBit story.

  • What was the origin of your idea for the company – what were the “pain points” you saw that needed to be solved?

Our leadership team has been in Sales and Marketing throughout their entire careers with extensive experience implementing CRM systems and observing their success rates. Essentially, reps (sales reps, services reps, and support reps) and their managers need two very different solutions for CRM. Reps need a CRM that works for them, not the other way around.

Reps need a solution that helps them sell or service customers more effectively – spending valuable time entering data into a CRM doesn’t help a rep do their job. Whereas, managers need email, task, and pipeline history with dashboards and reports to do their jobs more effectively. This is the CRM conundrum and why they fail.

Companies hire reps and expect them to sell and service customers, yet in order to manage a team of reps a manager needs a lot of data input into the CRM. Data entry isn’t part of the job description or what reps are actually measured on. Some companies try to solve this problem by implementing performance reviews, which include how well a rep documents their day-to-day activities, but we’ve never seen it work well.

Additionally, operations want to optimize process and cut out waste. They need quality data over time in order to analyze trends in the business. Most companies buy a CRM expecting people will use it, but user adoption is where CRM often fails before it ever gets started.

The bigger pain point we set out to solve was to create actionable analytics for both sales reps along with sales and marketing managers.

We knew we would need our customers to have quality data first, so we focused our initial product offering on “CRM for your Inbox” and “synchronize your customer data and key activities.” The bigger problem we see is that companies and their customers interact with each other more and more through email and their website.

Email, Website, and CRM each house tons of useful customer data, yet these three data sources don’t integrate with each other.

Our goal with ZynBit is to offer an interactive website analytics experience and have it contain all of your CRM and email history as well. From there, reps should be able to see an entire prospect or customers interactions with their company embedded inside of email conversations. Managers and reps should be able to drill way past their standard pipeline reports and forecast dashboards, to see what activities are happening, when they happen and why.

Over time, the data should be able to show you things like, which customers are likely to buy from you and when or who you need to engage at a company to close a deal.

When you put these three data sources together you also get some really interesting insights using white space – things that have not happened which normally do. When you think about it, most managers spend 90% of their time trying to figure out when and why there is white space – are people doing their jobs?

Are customers responding?

Are key decision makers involved in the purchase decision or are we only interacting with lower level employees who can’t make decisions for the organization?

ZynBit helps generate these analytics that can help businesses be more successful.

  • What sets your product apart in meeting these needs?

Simplicity.

When we named ZynBit, we wanted the name to express simplicity.

Zyn stands for simplify and bits of course stands for information/data. Simplify your data.

Our customers most often comment about our product’s ease of use and the user experience. This was our goal, because it supports solving the first problem — user adoption. Data collection should be automated wherever possible and interacting with data should be insanely simple.

The second differentiating factor is our Salesforce integration. Our customers often remark how fully featured our product is and the depth of integration we provide with Salesforce.

We pack a lot features into very little real estate, which requires you to be highly attentive to your UX design.

Check back later today for Part Two of our Q&A.