Sprout Clients is finally here!
Before I dig into the app I’d like to express that Sprout Clients is our start to something bigger. We wanted to release a bit early to get more user feedback before we steer this ship into an untenable product that doesn’t help your business! Keep that in mind, your early use of Sprout Clients will help guide its future, as long as you send us your feedback ?. That’s not the only incentive, until the next release both licenses are 33% off.
CRM, Lead Management, or Contact Database?
The promise of “managing” your contacts is to build relationships — Sprout Clients sets to help leverage your contacts in a way that doesn’t stop at storing them for reference. Instead SC wants to make your process of building those business relationships easier and less time-consuming.
Leads vs. Clients
If you’re a Sprout Invoices user than you’re familiar with the term “Client”. While planning Sprout Clients I wanted to get past the confines of a CRM, instead I wanted to build a tool that would convert contacts into clients, i.e. sprout clients. We also couldn’t just call these records “Contacts” since we all know that a client, or lead, or customer, has multiple points of contact.
Efficient, Fast Organization
One of the first things you’ll notice when creating a Lead in Sprout Clients is that you’ll have the ability to set the type. Leads can be one of many types, including: Client, Customer, Developer, Lead, Supplier, VIP, and more. These types are easily customizable too: add more, delete some defaults, or rename a few.
Statuses are a way to help associated action. Need to follow-up with a contact in the near future, assign it the “Follow-up” status, or create a new status for “Follow-up in August”. Statuses will be used heavily in future updates, more about that later.
Not Stopping Here
Here’s a glimpse at some goals we set to accomplish in the next release.
Advanced Messaging
Message your contacts from within the app or via email — with some magic all correspondents will be shown in the contact’s history. I can’t go into much detail about this major feature set for the next release but it’s going to make a lot of people wonder ‘how is this possible?’.
Integrations
Manage your contacts in a way that gains more clients and customers. In a future release Sprout Clients will integrate with the best WordPress e-commerce plugins (i.e. WooCommerce & Easy Digital Downloads) to bring a full featured customer management system for site administrators. Examples of what’s in store: full customer purchase history, event tracking, e-commerce customer management, and messaging.
Automation Magic
Use the power of Sprout Clients to automatically follow-up with your contacts, set statuses based on actions, and send you notifications and/or reminders. Some examples use cases that will be present: an e-mail that can be dynamically created for a lead based on certain status, a message that was written just after meeting a lead but scheduled to send later, a notification sent to you about how you haven’t heard back from a lead in a few weeks.
Looking to the Future
As you can tell Sprout Clients isn’t close to complete. Like Sprout Invoices it has some great features ahead of it.