Bantam Live

Today we're releasing pipeline management functionality to better view and manage deals you're working on. Relatedly, as noted in the post above, you'll also see that when you make modifications to a deal, it can optionally be posted in the dashboard activity stream for better awareness, motivation, and interaction among the team or between a sales manager and a sales person. Here are the highlights...

- Filter your sales pipeline: You can now drill down and total your deals by sales person, the stage, amount range, expected close date, probability and category.

- Modify deals in-line: From the deals list page, click on "modify" when your rolling over a deal and change any setting within that deal, such as amount or probability, etc. You can also optionally post your modifications to the activity stream. All modifications will be recorded in the deal's history.

- New design of deal updates in activity stream: You can now see new posts with graphical, colored up/down arrows for changes to closing probability or revenue amount for a given deal. A new display for learning about other modifications to a deal is also published in a new stream format for quick glancing. Juicy, isn't it? We expound in the post above.

- Close date: When estimating an expected close-date for a deal, a user can now specify an actual calendar date, which is then used for analyzing expected vs. actual dates that we'll have in the new analytical charts (coming out next week).

- Customizing deals, Drag-and-drop reordering: You now have the ability to customize deal stages, amount ranges and categories in the backend settings, under 'Deal Settings'. And you can drag-and-drop stages to reorder. See also the post below about customizations.

In addition to the new pipeline management module released today, we've also added the ability to customize your deals in three new ways, as noted here...

Customize Categories: In Bantam Live you can now create customized categories for each deal to better describe and group them. We added the default categories which can act as examples, which are: Biz-Dev Alliance, Existing Account, New Business, Product Sales, and Service Contract. You can change or delete these to suit how you'd categorize your deals.

Customize Stages: In addition to Active, Won, and Lost, you can now customize the name of stages associated with a given deal. For instance, you might add "Qualifying" or "Proposal" as a stage to better indicate how far along a deal is in the sales process. (Note that the Won and Lost stages remain fixed, as this is integral to determining pipeline revenue numbers in the system.)

Customize Amount Ranges: Customize amount ranges for High, Medium and Low so that you can easily drill down on deals with those amount ranges from the deals list page. We've set the default amount filters to $501,000 - $1,000,000 for High, $251,000 - $500,000 for Medium and $0 - $250,000 for Low, but you can change these ranges in the "Deals Settings" section under "Amount ranges" to reflect the typical pricing of your deals.

If our customers ask for more cowbell, we should probably give them more cowbell! Login to your team's account and really explore the workspace.

New in the Dashboard

• Linking in the Publishing Zone of the Dashboard: By popular demand you can now "link to" and associate Tasks, Files, and Events to your Contacts, Projects, and Deals - right from the front-and-center publishing zone in the Dashboard as you input updates.

New in Social CRM

• Google Buzz imports: This is just a little taste of what's to come with our Social CRM functionality. You can now enter a contact's Google username in a contact record and view his or her public updates within that contact's page within Bantam Live.

• Tag List Export: To create special mailing lists or other purposes, this new feature allows you to do an export of your contacts (people and/or companies) based on a tag or multiple tag search that generate the list.

New in Task & Project Management

• Colored Task Types: Now you can group "types" of tasks, and affix an associated color for a given type of task to easily view them in the Dashboard and task section.

• Categories for Projects: To more easily collaborate and sort all your projects, you can now create and assign your project into various categories. Easy editing of category names, too.

• Filtering Tasks: Who's doing what? In the task section, you can now filter all tasks by co-workers to view in numerous ways with a simple drop-down.

• Filtering Projects: View your Projects alphabetically, by category, or by most recently viewed.

• Icons for Notes and Comments: In the Task Widget in the Dashboard and in the Tasks section, you'll now see if co-workers have written a note or commented on a task.

• Show/Hide Tasks in Calendar section: View (or hide) a right-side Task panel in your Calendar for a better view.

• Linking Tasks to a Contact, Project or Deal: Now you're able to link tasks from either the publishing zone in the Dashboard, or in a Task Widget, or via the Task section.

• Email Alert for Task Completion: Get an email alert when co-workers complete tasks you've assigned them.

New in File Sharing

• Categories for Files: You're now able to create and assign "categories" for the Files you share and store in Bantam Live.

• Linking Files to a Contact, Project, or Deal: Now you're able to link Files to any object like a Contact (person or company) Deal, or Project from the Files section or upon uploading a new file into Bantam Live.

• Filtering Files: With this enhancement you can sort and view Files alphabetically, by category, by size, or most recently viewed.

• Widgets for Files: Documents associated with Contacts, Companies, Projects and Deals can now be displayed in a widget on each of these object's pages.

Bantam Live mixes microblogging, messaging, profiles, project & task management, social CRM, file sharing, calendaring and stirs that with people, content, and data in an online collaboration platform.

With its mix of features and buzz it generates, Bantam Live is the Long Island Iced Tea of collaboration apps.

(Sorry about that one, folks. We came up with that one after work over drinks at Fanelli's. We'll try to keep our messaging chill.)

We like Hugh MacLeod's work and the GapingVoid blog he's created, which is why Bantam Live invited him to create something for our launch this week. Hugh's range goes from abstract drawing to characters with social bite or existential musing. We like the simple "collab" and "oration" words around the tangle of a network abstraction. Thanks, Hugh. (Check out the new "Hugh's Daily Cartoon," the new mailing list to receive a daily cartoon in your inbox.)

The background of our relationship with Hugh goes like this... Bantam Live launched its public-beta last summer onstage at TechCrunch's Real-time Stream Crunchup at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City, Michael Arrington auctioned off copy #1 of "dream big. techcrunch 2009" serigraph by artist Hugh MacLeod. I won the auction. I figured it was a good cause (to the Electronic Frontier Foundation), would give us a promotional bump, and would commemorate for the team an achievement of sorts to have launched in beta as a selected startup from the stage on that day. As Hugh explains, the serigraph was a "social object." It hangs in our loft today.

Most "webinars" are thinly veiled sales pitches. The webinar we're hosting as part of Social Media Week doesn't have much veil. What's wrong with sales pitches, anyway? Join us on Thursday, February 4th, at 2pm EST for a webinar entitled "Social CRM & Lead-Generation on Twitter for Business Teams." In this 30-minute online presention, we'll paint a picture of the broad spectrum of Social CRM and quickly get to Bantam Live and give you a demo of how it works.

REGISTER NOW FOR THE FEBRUARY 4TH  DEMO OF BANTAM LIVE

Our beta program has just ended and we've launched the the commercial version of Bantam Live with paid-subscription plans that require credit cards for sign-up. All plans will include a free 30-day trial, beyond however long you've been using the beta version. There is also a free plan. If you don't wish to subscribe to any plan, you can cancel your account. The application has some new design tweaks and optimized performance. Moreover, the social CRM module and Twitter integration has been completely redone and improved for lead-generation, contact importing, and CRM workflows.

During February, March, and April we're working on a range of enhancements big and small. These include Google App integrations, bolstering the project management features, adding deeper social CRM functions along with improved pipeline management and analytics for deals. OAuth for Twitter is coming in the Spring, too. Later this year, we'll also be releasing an API and federating the collaboration features such that users will be able to create multiple workspaces for different groups. There's lots more in ongoing development. iPhone you ask? Probably summertime. The optimized mobile access we have now actually works surprisingly well but we know we'll need to offer an app.

Whatever happened to bold statements like, "I challenge you" or "I dare you" in the realm of a wager? Yesterday we came across a sweet tweet about Bantam Live that said, "BantamLive.com is HUUUGELY awesome. SugarCRM is kind of the Defacto, but Bantam is rad as F***  ...Delighted with that user sentiment, I tweeted that I was going to take "Bantam Live is rad as F***" and make a T-shirt out of it. About four hours later, the user tweeted back, "Toxx-Clausing this. Maybe a twitpic of the shirt to satisfy the bet? (I'd buy one)."

Toxx-Clausing? Wha? After a cursory search, I learned that "toxx-clausing" is a sort of bet to follow up on a promise or proclamation that originated on internet message boards. ...Uh, ok. We grew up on the streets of NYC, Boston, and Providence and if any one of us had ever said "I toxx-clause you" you could be sure you'd get smacked upside the head. But hey, interland can be a strange place with a language all its own.

Anyway, I followed up with my original intention to make a T-shirt which you can buy now as we just did. And to Landon Noss of Noss Media: Thanks for your nice compliment about Bantam Live. Now we challenge you to buy one as you promised!

UPDATE >> Landon Noss is a man of his word. After conceding the bet he good-naturedly tweeted "Bantam Live is THE defacto SCRM/SPM tool out there, and it's not even finished" and then took a twitpic of his proof-of-purchase for the T-shirt he inspired us to create. Rock on, Landon.

"What a fantastic product! I have been using Bantam Live to manage several projects here at Brown Medical School, and I have yet to find a tool that makes collaboration as effortless as yours does. I have tried Yammer, Salesforce, Google Apps, Basecamp, Backpack, and others. None of them have worked for our organization until we found Bantam Live."  -- Kumar Vasudevan, Brown University Medical School, Careers in Medicine Program

Unsolicited feedback that's sent to us by email is often a delight to read. Above is an excerpt from one such email we received this week. We contacted the user to get permission to post the feedback and he happily obliged and provided us a headshot too. For us, this validation to our product roadmap helps us shape the answer to the ongoing question related to what Bantam Live can do.

(Thanks, Kumar. And nice to meet you. Beers are on us somewhere on Thayer Street someday.)

Bantam Live got a nice mention in TechCrunch's January 1st post entitled "Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010" in the "Social CRM" category. While the DNA of our product has social CRM in it, we grapple with our product's positioning in the market, as it's capable of social CRM and much more. Perhaps our little tough-in-cheek ad banner now running says it best for now: Huddle up, Yammer On, and Get Your Salesforce beyond idle Chatter. Of course, this cheeky messaging in our beta phase will change in 2010, as Bantam Live expands its unified, integrated apps for business teams during this year. Anyway, we're happy to be mentioned as a serious player in Social CRM in 2010.

Happy New Year!  We hope 2010 does indeed rock for Bantam Live in the Social CRM category - and others. ...For past coverage of Bantam Live on TechCrunch, see:

Bantam Live: The Ultimate Social, Real-Time CRM

Bantam Live Takes The Beta Covers Off Its Social CRM