OnePageCRM Raises $749K For Its “Zero Admin” CRM For SMEs

OnePageCRM, the cloud-based CRM targeting small businesses or SMEs, has raised €575,000 (~$749k) from unnamed private investors and supported by Enterprise Ireland. The Irish Galway-based startup says it will use the new funds to staff up in engineering, specifically web and mobile developers, along with marketing and customer support — creating a total of 12 new jobs.

Prior to this, the company was self-funded while it rolled out an “experimental” MVP in mid 2010, which has since been rebuilt from the ground up and designed to be mobile-first

Although the CRM market is a very crowded one, from giants like Salesforce to a plethora of smaller players and startups, inspired by the GTD movement, OnePageCRM’s pitch is that it takes a “zero-admin” approach that isn’t just designed to help manage contacts and track sales, but to actually help sell. Starting from the premise that a lot of sales management software and CRMs require too much data entry and admin — a charge that I think can be applied to many productivity apps in general — the company set out to design a cloud-based and mobile offering that would be as simple as using email, with a UI that resembles the workflow of an in-box, hence its “OnePage” branding.

“To us, other CRMs are just databases. You wouldn’t open up a telephone directory (listing A-Z) and start selling? Our app forces the user to make up-front decisions about that next action required to move a sale forward,” CEO and co-founder Michael FitzGerald tells TechCrunch.

What this means in practice is that rather than relying on an A-Z view, contacts, with their associated follow-up task, automatically float to the top of the list and turn red when action is required. Staying within that single dashboard, each time you complete a sales action, say make a follow-up call or send over a proposal, you’re prompted to decide what’s next and when e.g. “Follow up after sending estimate in 3 days time”. The contact then moves down the list and floats to the top again after the time is up. “Essentially you’re trapping prospects in a continuous loop until you get them over the line,” says FitzGerald.

In addition, contacts çan be categorised based on where they sit in the sales pipeline and can also be loosely tagged, so that they can be filtered in various ways. The system will also send an email each morning reminding you of what actions/follow-ups need to be taken that day. It’s the kind of thing us distracted journo-blogger types would probably benefit from.

To that end, after a 30 day trial, subscriptions start from $12/month/per-user, down to $8/month/per-user with volume.