Upshot Expands Sales-Force Offerings

Web-based sales-force automation company UpShot Corp. said Monday that it's expanding its offering with the addition of UpShot Dashboard and plans for integration with Lotus Notes.

UpShot Dashboard is now available to all the company's customers free of charge. It provides business executives and sales management with a snapshot of information most critical to sales activity, says Keith Raffel, chairman and founder of UpShot.

The dashboard, built using Microsoft Excel, can be configured to provide precise information for sales tracking, he says. It can show forecast by territory, a company's top 10 deals, pipeline analysis, and sales activity by specific sales rep.

Raffel says individual customers had been requesting the Dashboard addition to its UpShot software, and the company decided a customerwide addition would be the best approach. "We are very focused on making ourselves very adaptable to our users," he says. "We want to give managers what they want so that they can actually use our CRM solution."

Sheryl Kingstone, an analyst with the Yankee Group, says UpShot "continues to make inroads with large companies by offering them the features that improve their sales effectiveness, online or offline. The UpShot Dashboard gives sales reps and managers the visibility they need to make decisions in real time, while integration with Lotus Notes will let them share their communications with prospects and customers."

Raffel says UpShot integration with Lotus Notes will be available in October, with pricing to be disclosed at that time. Users will be able to manage their calendars, tasks, and contact information, and with a single mouse click synchronize their Lotus Notes with UpShot, he says.

"Analysts estimate that Lotus Notes has up to 30% of the corporate market, largely concentrated in big companies," Raffel says. "We've been listening to our base of Fortune 500 companies and are adapting to the way they work."

UpShot is a privately held company, with five customers in the Fortune 500's top 15, including Hewlett-Packard, he says. UpShot has tens of thousands of users, Raffel says, "and we are growing as fast as we can manage to grow."