can save every single person and sales force manager a half hour to an hour a day throughout all our customers, that’s going to be a huge productivity gain,” he says.
Ultimately he hopes Yesware can track how potential leads respond to Yesware users via e-mail, and use that information to automatically populate the different fields in a customer account on Salesforce—much the same way Intuit’s Mint.com scans financial transactions and automatically categorizes them. He says this will help sales teams better forecast sales and determine quotas.
For now, salespeople’s use of Yesware templates can help their managers see how well they’re doing their job. “As the salesperson is using the tool, they’re also leaving behind a trail of data,” says Bellows. That data could, for example, help a manager pinpoint where a certain salesperson is succeeding and utilize him or her in training others on selling a particular angle of the product. Bellows also hopes that ultimately a company can use Yesware to generate friendly competition among salespeople, to share the most successful e-mail templates among its staff via an interface like the iTunes store.
The plug-in, which so far works with Gmail only is now available for Google Chrome; Yesware is working on a Firefox version next. The company is also working on building out its interface for Outlook. Since launching its beta product about two weeks ago, Yesware has attracted a couple hundred users and is working with about four to five companies. For now the plug-in is free, but Yesware ultimately aims to charge on a monthly fee per user per company.
Yesware, which has seven employees, closed about $1 million in funding this spring, from venture firms very familiar with e-mail and Web app spaces, as well as Boston-area angels. Bellows declined to publicly name the investors at this time.
There are, of course, some big name sales software companies that could potentially benefit from scooping up Yesware and its technology should the system work out as intended, but Bellows isn’t looking to sell the company if and when it starts getting some buzz.
“We see this as a big company; I don’t want to flip this thing to some California company,” he says.
