I am loving being an early-ish adopter.
I certainly was not first but I am hanging in there even though not everything is perfect yet.
I could jump onto a suite of salesforce.com products that do all of this but I am loving Asana for projects and Nimble for CRM – really social CRM.
The only thing that is lacking in both is a state of the art mobile app, they are coming, then they are coming and when they get here….
I spend a lot of time on the go at events and travelling, I work on tube trains and in co-working spaces. I decided long ago that reading the metro newspaper on the train was a crap use of time. Also it is amazing how much you get done on aeroplanes and trains.
I quickly brought into the Nimble and Asana products, it was partly to do with the functionality. Nimble is “simples” to get started, to connect to your social networks and is not the car crash that others social CRM’s have been.
Asana is just really rocking fast on-line – you can blaze through a list and the assign what to do. I am secretly addicted to organizing rather than doing the actual work so the path of least resistance is vital for me!
But mostly it is the culture, Nimble is by Jon who founded Goldmine and the boys from Asana came from facebook.
As Lisa Gansky says in her TED talk “Zip car early on worked out that a product is souvenir and a xxxxx. Also that Zip car is not a car company it is an information company.
If you listen to Jon talking in most interviews he says that CRM will go away and we will be social connected. I agree and this is where my head is. Asana seem addicted to speed, collaboration and communication, as their roots are in facebook (see this talk here) they are about people not and tech. They talk about people doing “work about work” and Jon talks about the same notion with CRM and sales – it produces work about work.
I have used apps developed by tech people not users, I know people who work as developers on some of the worlds best know games and brands and do everything in Google docs if they were asked to build a project management app they’d dive.
