Late last month, UpShot.com announced the arrival of its Extended Service Plan (ESP), an addition to its strategy of services for managing sales.
According to Keith Raffel, president and chief executive officer, the new suite of services targets the fast growing and medium to large businesses that can’t wait for a robust CRM solution for its sales teams.
UpShot.com realizes that companies are not interested committing large sums of money to client-server CRM solutions that require extended time to deploy.
“We’ve heard from prospective customers who want the competitive advantage of our instant-on, zero-IT sales management solution-and they want it yesterday,” Raffel said.
Because of economies of scale and the underlying Internet architecture of its service, UpShot ESP can offer a quick start solution with an enterprise-strength SLA without a huge investment from the customer.
With UpShot ESP, the company guarantees a 15 business day implementation of UpShot.com’s Internet business service. UpShot ESP also provides a SLA with a guaranteed 99.9 percent uptime, around the clock customer service, systems administration training and a monthly CD backup.
The company did not pinpoint a target for number of users by year end, but did say they expected explosive growth.
Lew Hollerbach, senior analyst for Boston-based Aberdeen Group, said, “As the functionality, services and ease of deployment of field sales application ASPs such as UpShot.com continue to improve, so will the market.”
Hollerbach also believes that with the range of tools UpShot ESP includes, the service will appeal to a wider range of mid-sized customers.
An expansion on UpShot.com’s core service, UpShot ESP costs $80 per user, per month. There is a $5,000 implementation fee, along with a one year commitment.
