Upshot Puts Sales Execs on Alert

Upshot Corp., a Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of Web-based customer relationship management (CRM) services, yesterday announced Upshot Alerts, a feature designed to alert company sales reps and executives about critical changes in the status of a deal or account. The announcement was made the the DEMOmobile 2002 conference held this week in San Diego.

Upshot Alerts, according to the company, is designed to help change in the way people work with an online CRM application. Rather than having to search for information or run a report, Upshot will notify sales executives of potential problems or opportunities when there is still time to make a difference.

Users can set criteria and have notifications sent to a variety of devices. According to Upshot, a contact, account or a deal can be used to trigger an alert.

“Even in Upshot, there is a lot going on. What’s important is revenue,” Keith Raffel, chairman and founder of Upshot, told ASPnews.

Upshot Alerts work like this, according to Raffel: If it is the end of quarter, for example, and a vice president of sales knows there are three deals that need to close to meet projections, he or she could have any status changes sent via Upshot Alerts to a desktop computer, notebooks, Blackberry RIM, Web-enabled PDA or a cellular phone or pages via text messaging.

“In these rocky economic times, deals can get into trouble quickly. Upshot Alerts work in real time to give sales executives the time they need to save a deal,” Raffel said.

Upshot Alerts are available now as part of Upshot XE at no additional cost.

“Alerting sales executives when a significant change takes place makes incredible sense, especially now when the economy looks more anemic than ever,” said Sheryl Kingstone, a CRM analyst with the Yankee Group.

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