Emerging Vendors

November 03, 2009

Company: Jesubi

Headquarters: Indianapolis, Ind.

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: Jesubi sales force automation software

Year Founded: 2006

Number of Channel Partners: 5 in the U.S.

Ideal Channel Partner: SMB-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Jesubi positions its eponymous sales force automation applications as more effective and easier to use than such competitors as Salesforce.com and Sage SalesLogix.

The Lowdown: Jesubi, which has been selling its sales force automation (SFA) software for almost two years and recently began offering a Web-based version of the application, tries to remedy the shortcomings of today's SFA technology.

SFA applications today, despite all their capabilities, are largely used for contact management and sales forecasting, argued Jesubi president Bill Johnson. Most, in fact, make sales representatives less productive with all their data-entry chores.

"First and foremost, we're easier to use," said Johnson. "I can train any sales rep to use Jesubi in less than an hour." His claim: Jesubi users with one click can do tasks that salesforce.com users may need a dozen clicks to accomplish.

Jesubi

Jesubi's software uses what Johnson calls "programmatic prospecting," an approach that applies methodical scheduling to calling sales prospects -- Johnson said most sales reps today call prospects on a very irregular, ad hoc basis -- and provides templates for e-mail and marketing campaigns.

The product also includes what Jesubi calls a "prospecting velocity" capability that collects and analyzes sales-call data, providing users with such statistics as the number of attempts to contact a prospect, the number of conversations that occur and the time interval between calls. That gives sales managers more visibility into a company's sales process, Johnson said.

About 60 percent of Jesubi's customers use the company's software as their sole CRM system while the rest use it to augment other applications including Microsoft Dynamics CRM, NetSuite or Salesforce.com, Johnson said. (The Jesubi name, by-the-way, comes from the first two letters of the first names of company's three founders: Bill Johnson is the "bi.")

Jesubi has just started to wade into the channel, enlisting a handful of solution providers that either sell and support the software or recommend Jesubi to their sales consulting services clients. Johnson sees opportunities for solution providers to develop best-practice services and sales analysis applications around Jesubi's programmatic selling technology.