Nsite 6.0 serves up small-scale CRM add-ons

Effective sales management can be an overwhelming challenge to small businesses. Lacking IT savvy and budget to automate, many SMBs are still mired in an error-prone mix of manual e-mail, spreadsheets, and word processing applications. Add advanced partner and channel requirements to the equation and the dismal degree of control and visibility simply stymies efforts to compete.

Nsite 6.0 from Nsite lights the way to competitive advantage by improving communications, visibility, and workflow among partnered sales channels. This SaaS (software as a service) package delivers on-demand, browser-based quote and proposal generation, as well as channel management -- fully customizable to meet the specificity of even the most oddball pipelines.

Nsite’s strengths include one-click PDF-proposal generation, solid workflow and approval routing, and an SOAP interface to Salesforce.com and Siebel CRM OnDemand applications.

Nsite also includes an application development module that allowed me to actually build my own applications without ever touching a line of code.

Nsite, however, is not without its shortcomings. Reporting and analytics remain unsophisticated, there is no offline client or Outlook plug-in, and, without a published API, data access beyond the application is difficult.

In addition, competitors abound. Firepond and BlueRoads offer complex pricing and good partner tools. And NetSuite has just unleashed Version 11 of its CRM/ERP hybrid sporting an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) interface, enhanced customization opportunity, and templates for several verticals, leaving Nsite room to grow.

All told, though, Nsite offers small businesses -- say, companies with a handful of sales reps -- an inexpensive means of closing gaps in CRM functionality without committing a large up-front investment, and without blowing profit margins on IT to get there.

Everything for getting started with Nsite is right in your JavaScript-enabled browser -- no additional plug-ins or add-ons are necessary. Nsite currently supports only Internet Explorer 6 and higher, and the company has no plans to extend browser support until 2007.

Logging in to my Nsite account, I found the home page to provide good graphical presentation of real-time data: deal stats, quotes and partner activity status, and workflow routing conditions, for example. The tabbed layout offered quick paging between components.

Each application’s home page can be populated with its own customized dashboards -- a nice touch.

Nsite’s rules-based workflow proved to be another strength, enabling assignments and approvals to be routed for delegation and sign-off via browser or e-mail. This automated feature will certainly help companies with outside contacts and road warriors ensure that deals don’t slip through the cracks.

I was easily able to surmise routing status from the well-defined graphical cues. Furthermore, alerts can be set on predefined criteria (such as the number of days past due) to fire off e-mails and on-screen pop-ups.