It all began seven years ago when Nick Spooner co-founded Salesorder.com, a company that would address the ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) needs for small business customers.
Spooner, who’s also the CEO of the Reading, U.K.-based company, said Salesorder.com got its start when he was asked to help a friend find a CRM and accounting solution for a company he worked for. After researching and evaluating what was already available in the market, Spooner said he decided to start his own business, which eventually became Salesorder.com.
“What we found were a lot of the solutions out there were costly and the features were complicated,” Spooner said. “It took nearly five years to design an application framework where we then built Salesorder.com on top of it. Today, we have a small business ERP solution that’s incredible easy to use and it’s extremely low cost.”
Although the company has just 11 full-time employees and home-based workers, Spooner said the company has grown its customer base to number in the thousands of users in 31 countries. The company, he said, doesn’t do any marketing and so it relies on word of mouth to grow.
The small business ERP and CRM solution, which targets businesses in the one to 100 employee range, can be learned in less than eight minutes, Spooner claims.
The solution is currently delivered through a network of various affiliates and consultants, which includes systems integrators, solution providers and resellers. Spooner said the company is in the midst of looking for distribution partners.
“Partners can earn significant margin when they sell our product because we pay them 30 per cent of the revenue every month for the lifetime of the contract,” Spooner said. “The revenue share goes up to 50 per cent for partners that chose to white label this too.”
Salesorder.com has a “couple” of consultants offering solutions in Canada, with hopes to add more.
We’re looking for solution partners, ERP resellers, accounting software consultants and affiliates who know their stuff and their markets and who have a genuine determination and passion for helping and selling to small businesses,” Spooner said.
While he didn’t name a specific number of partners that he’d like to see signed up with the company, Spooner said he wants to keep Salesorder.com a certain way.
“We don’t want to be Salesforce.com or NetSuite,” Spooner said. “We’re a very boutique company and want to remain that way. Our customers are those small businesses who want to be listened to and understood and they also require functionality.”
The Salesorder.com solution is a Web-based ERP management software solution that includes CRM, a customer access portal, ERP accounting, e-commerce and business intelligence reporting. When using the solution, all business data is regularly backed-up and secure on servers that are owned and operated by Rackspace.
The solution is sold on a monthly basis, without a contract, which gives customers the flexibility and choice of being able to leave whenever they want to, Spooner said. The solution is also available as a 14-day trial with support for free, for customers who want to try it out. Pricing for one user starts at $47 a month and for 50 users, the cost is $1497 a month, or $29.94/person.
“There’s a really strong case for small businesses to have an ERP solution and everyone should have the luxury of having something like this, especially the smaller businesses,” Spooner said.
Follow Maxine Cheung on Twitter: @MaxineCheungCDN.
