Leadmaster Australia is based in Sydney and is the exclusive distributor for APAC and EMEA of Leadmaster USA.

Their management team consists of David Mackey (CEO), Glenn Uzell (GM), Aurélie Cornu (Marketing), Alex White (Sales) and Socrates Jimenez (CFO). Aurélie who is of French origin, and Glenn, who is of Irish descent, presented their solution to us.

The product does the three main branches of CRM, Sales Force Automation and Marketing Automation, and Customer Support and integrates with tools such Helpmaster. They have as clients business and financial services, utility companies as well as contact centers. The biggest clients do more than 150, but the SMB market is primary market, for between 10 and 20 seats. They rightly pride themselves on a churn rate of about 1%! They 3 different pricing models, starting with flexi for 9.95 per month for which you can buy additional modules, then Corporate at $80/month and then $140 /month for advanced functionality.

They have three main featuresets in their product: ‘classic’ CRM, eDM which facilitates communication between Sales and Marketing, and Lead Xpress which enable field sales to easily update Leadmaster in real-time by email, considered by them to be more ubiquitous than dedicated mobile apps. The flexibility comes from not having to log into the CRM system and the automated parsing of the content. Nonetheless, they are working on a native iPhone application, which should be released next year.

Their CRM features are what you’d expect, with the ability to define sales process steps to guide the activities of a representative. They also do some risk analysis, by doing risk identification via definition of win probability – but there’s no fancy behind the scenes analytics yet. Their unique value proposition actually lies in how they drive customer experience through marketing automation, for example how more target collateral is sent based on the actions of the user.

What they wanted to show us in particular was the attention they pay to listening to their customers. They do monthly surveys, provide more in-depth content thru a blog on they website, a customer community for peer to peer support as well as the more classic ticketed support.

Their approach to us seems very SME-ish, but when you look at their client base they clearly aren’t talking to this audience although seat count tends to be still relatively small. This makes rolling out their product very hands-on, almost like co-creating the solution for the best outcome for each particular customer’s need. As such, they seem to be system integrator for their own tool which could be problematic if they need to scale the approach when they on-board more clients. They recognize this and this is reflected in their roadmap.

They state the following in their roadmap:

• Partnerships: Further develop their partner program (channel distributors, referral partners, etc.)
• Integrated capabilities: Integrate with Marketo, Xero Accounting, QuickBooks (90% done now), Hubspot, Zuora and other software applications in the next two years
• International expansion: specifically to the European region in the next three years through new offices and partnerships (China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the UK)
• Corporate Social Responsibility: Continue and increase our support of Angel Flight and Royal Flying Doctor Service, and form partnerships with other NGOs

It's refreshing to see Corporate Social Responsibility being such a big part in their planning, which is something we usually don't encounter much as a competitive differentiator in companies of their size. We would have loved to find out what impact this has had on their sales.

Overall, the products covers all the bases, is functional without going over the top with features. The strong points reside in the Marketing Automation piece, where actions are driven by the outcomes of previous interactions. We would have like to have seen this presented in a bit more detail, and if they move on to the next rounds, we will surely ask more about this!

Reviewed by the CRM Idol 2012 Primary Judges