Before CRMs, contact managers were the norm. They sat like an unattached rolodex on the sales rep’s computer, usually built as a part of their email client. But contact managers put too much sales information on an island, making sharing and management of customer information difficult. They also significantly put your data at risk. A hard drive crash or stolen computer can debilitate you for weeks.

If you’re a team of 10 or more, relying on contact management software to run your business is a lot like dialing up each member of your team individually and asking “how’s it going” and trying to condense that into actionable intelligence.

Part of what makes real CRMs so powerful is establishing a sales portal for all necessary information regarding accounts. This involves pooling data from various internal business systems and often requires a commitment to help from IT departments. LongJump can provide all the necessary integration points, enabling internal organizations to establish the necessary project requirements within their teams to get the data.

Data integration is critically important to getting sales teams to actively use the tool because of the time-savings they achieve by gaining a 360º view of a customer in single screen, including their orders, customer issues, credit status, finance notes, contract detail, credit limits, contacts, etc.

This complete view of the customers is what enables people to break away from emails, spreadsheets, physical file folders and sticky notes as the convenience choice. And it allows the business itself to maintain a record of account activities and contacts for seamless hand-off to other Reps or teams when assignments change. LongJump provides that view of all the customer data you need.

LongJump is designed to integrate with existing enterprise data using a variety of methods (including REST-based Web Services). And once that data comes into the platform, a series of actionable processes can be put into place, automatically triggering workflows, emails, tasks, SOAP messages, changes in the data, or even internal scripts to further automate business processes. And LongJump’s reporting engine enables even the most basic user to design reports based on mashed up data.

In short, there is no comparison to LongJump with your run-of-the-mill contact management software.