Company: Tactile, Redwood City, CA
Company Description: Tactile is on a mission to make the world a happier place to work by creating tools that empower individuals and enrich companies. The company’s personal sync platform connects business data from the systems and apps that professionals use every day and lets them act on it from anywhere. Tactile was founded by former Salesforce.com executive Chuck Ganapathi and is backed by Accel and Redpoint.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Relationship Management Solution – New

Nomination Title: Introducing Tact - The first mobile command center designed for salespeople

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 650 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and sales to date:

Tactile is on a mission to make the world a happier place to work with tools that empower individuals and enrich companies. Tact is a first-of-its-kind mobile command center designed specifically for salespeople that combines the tools they use everyday -- phone, email, calendar and CRM -- into one seamless experience.

Tactile was founded by Chuck Ganapathi, a former top executive at salesforce.com who led one of the largest product development efforts in the company’s history and was responsible for its flagship Sales Cloud, Chatter and Mobile products. He founded Tactile to address the biggest challenge in CRM technology today: low adoption by salespeople.

After spending more than 15 years building products that were great for companies, but not for the users, Chuck knew that there was a better way to effectively engage with prospects and customers. He wanted to build enterprise software solutions that salespeople actually like and function the way people work - a stark contrast from the way enterprise technology was built in the past. Tactile was founded in 2012 and operated in stealth until March of 2014 when the company unveiled its inaugural product offering and $11 million in funding by Accel and Redpoint Ventures.

Tact is already used by 10,000 salespeople at more than 3,000 companies across the country. It has received heartfelt accolades from salespeople who are sick of inputting data into CRM systems and wasting time they could be using to sell. Customers include Canon, Corning, Dupont, Ohio National, Pep Boys and Sysco.

The Dirty Little Secret of CRM

Traditional cloud-based CRM products force salespeople to operate in a silo, disconnected from their daily flow of customer calls, emails, and meetings. As a result, the industry experiences incredibly low adoption rates. In 2014, CSO Insights found that less than 37 percent of companies report successful CRM adoption. Tactile is leveraging the mobile platform to redefine the role (and adoption) of CRM by integrating it with critical communication tools.

The major innovation behind the Tact product line is that it’s powered by Tactile’s patent-pending sync platform, allowing salespeople to truly work anywhere -- regardless of whether they have wireless coverage. Similar to Dropbox or Evernote on the consumer side, this means that Tact is accessible even when a device is in Airplane mode or there is no wireless coverage - a must have for salespeople on the road. This is a massive gap in mobile CRM offerings on the market today.

In addition to increasing individual salespeople’s productivity, Tact supports companies’ unique sales process by automatically adapting the mobile user experience to customizations made in Salesforce. The product’s feature set includes:

- Email designed for salespeople: Inbox prioritized by customers and deals; email templates; notifications when emails are opened by recipients.

- Calendar built for customer follow-ups: Daily agenda for meetings and tasks; reminders about past interactions; option to record notes and next steps.

- Relationship-driven contacts: Consolidated address book enhanced with past conversations, social profiles and Salesforce history; option to create a daily call list, dial with a simple tap, and capture notes and follow-ups.

- Salesforce when you need it: Customer emails, calls, and meetings enriched with CRM data; real-time logging of sales activities and updates to opportunities in Salesforce; customization of Salesforce fields to fit personal sales process.

- Works everywhere, even offline: Important customer data is synced locally to the mobile device to provide the fastest performance, instant access, and full offline capabilities.

- Enterprise controls: Data encrypted in transit and on device; user administration and remote wipe of corporate data.

With more than 10,000 salespeople from 3,000 companies already using Tact as part of their daily sales workflow, Tactile is helping solve the massive user adoption problem in the $20B CRM market.

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