I wanted to start our blog off with the story of how we became ClickPoint. I think it’s always important to get a good feel for an organization before you do business with them. In all truthfulness I never imagined that I would be running a software company. I got my started working for a site called artandinterior.co. I always envisioned myself working as the head of an ad agency, marketing company, or some kind of organization where I could use the creative side. It all happened about 6 years ago when I got my first real experience working with programmers and developers on small projects for a marketing company where I was vice president. I immediately saw that although you have to be much more patient with software there is tremendous opportunity to use your creative attributes.
The first time you see something you thought of come to fruition is amazing. With software you not only get see it as it comes to life but then you get to see how the people using it react. I started to get the feeling that with the right team of creative and technical experts we could contribute something to the business community. Finding the need wasn’t hard. Working in the online marketing space which hasn’t fully matured was and still is an industry full of opportunity. Literally every week you hear from someone that they wished their software could do something that would make their lives better. Picking exactly which direction with so many to choose from is not as easy as it sounds. You have to listen to what customers, friends, colleagues, and industry experts are telling you. Most importantly you have to do the research and come to your own conclusion.
My conclusion was that existing CRM, sales, and lead distribution software were much too complicated for the average sales person. Not to say salespeople can’t understand it, but most of what I was seeing just wasn’t practical for salespeople. In my opinion most early CRM companies were designing software with the decision maker in mind forgetting that if the salespeople weren’t happy with the application they would lose the business. You have to remember who the software is intended for and I think a lot of the early companies missed the boat. Maybe they were originally sought out by marketing directors, IT, and high level management that gave their input to the perfect system. I’m not sure but I could tell by listening and using these applications that they weren’t working.
Google and Apple have shown us over the years that simplicity can be the best weapon when selling technology. People want ease of use in their life not clutter. We heard from sales agents in the online industry, finance, education, insurance, and retail that they were ready for a change. The most important things to salespeople were efficiency and ease of use. It was after seeing the need and knowing we had a great grasp of how lead management should work that ClickPoint was started. I knew several programmers that were running their own companies but one had done amazing work for us on projects from time to time. I immediately sought him out to make the move to ClickPoint in early 2005. Michael Sawyer our CTO and I embarked on building practical sales tools for the finance industry. After getting user reviews and a steady referral base we sought out funding and were able to secure it on our first pitch. It seems that even our investors understood the need for easy to use practical sales software. So just like that ClickPoint was born. Now we are faced with making our software unique and remembering why we started in the first place. Simplicity was demanded and it was only a matter of time before the right entrepreneur listened and took action.
