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Mynetsales.com Review
By , Application Development Manager,

Mynetsales.com offers an online Sales Force Automation (SFA) solution for small- and medium-sized businesses. It provides a browser-based system for storing your customers, contacts, sales leads, calendar, and opportunities. Major competitors of mynetsales.com are salesforce.com, UpShot.com, and OracleSalesOnline.com.

The most interesting part of the application is the sales process builder. This feature guides a manager or administrator through the steps of creating a sales process or strategy. Each sales process can be made up of multiple steps, for which there can be multiple outcomes, and allows branching logic so that a sales person can be guided to separate steps within the process based on the answer to a previous step.

Like its competitors, mynetsales allows you to import data from commonly used personal information managers (PIMs) such as ACT!, Goldmine, Outlook, and Palm Pilot. Using the online help, I was able to find out in which format to export my Outlook contact list, and was able to quickly import the data into the mynetsales repository. I did not test the ACT! or Goldmine capability.

Accounts (companies and contacts) appear in alphabetical order, and are in page form after the first 20 appear. While this, at first, appears to be a logical way to offer access to this data, it will not scale well if you have thousands of companies or contacts in your database.

Let’s say you’re looking for a company that begins with “HE.” “HE” may not appear until the third or fourth page of the letter “H”. It would nice if you had the ability to designate your favorite companies or contacts to appear on the first page, and then search for others based on name, industry, etc.

Opportunities can be tracked by using the Deals module. You can name the opportunity, associate a contact with the opportunity, select the products or services related to it, track the sales process you used, etc. One thing that I liked about this module is that it allows you to associate the sales process with the opportunity, which then drives the due date on the opportunity.

The due date is calculated from the amount of time you specified for each step during the course of building the sales process. This process works very much like a manufacturing due date on a work order, where the assembly and latency times of the sub-assemblies and raw material determine the delivery time of finished goods.

I do think, however, that the level of detail with which you can track an opportunity is sorely lacking. Aside from due date and estimated amount, there is nothing in this module to provide the details of how a deal was won or lost. You can’t run a report on the real closure rate versus the predicted closure rate, and the deal funnel doesn’t really show you anything of value.

A feature that I did like, however, is the Document Library. This allows you to upload and share documents with other people in your company. It can act as a shared repository, or a personal repository of template proposals and other things you may need while you are on the road. It also allows a company to have a single point at which templates and other master documents can be stored so that their people always have access to the latest versions.

The Document Library allows you to share documents with specific people in your company and provide different levels of access to those documents (read-only, read/write, etc). This feature is exactly what the Internet was developed to do; share information and documents to allow collaborative work.

This application is another of those Internet solutions that represent next generation SFA applications. It’s easy to set up, use, and, hopefully, will continue to add truly useful functionality that will make the life of a sales person easier. As of now, however, only companies that need the very basic functions will be satisfied by this, or any other online SFA vendor. In other words, the problems inherent in all online SFA solutions are found in mynetsales.

This doesn’t mean that it’s not worth watching this market for innovative solutions. Soon, mynetsales and others will have a critical mass of features that will make them a “must use.”

Review Matrix

Features	Y/N	Comment
1. Customer Management	Y	Good. Can store companies and contacts.
2. Opportunity Tracking	Y	Fair. You can track deals/opportunities. However, I think there needs to be the ability to track more details of the opportunity.
3. Activity Tracking	Y	Good. You can create calendar appointments, have them recur on a regular basis if necessary, and create a “to do” list.
4. Quote Management	N	None.
5. Marketing Automation	N	None.
6. Sales Process Automation	Y	Good. This is probably their best feature.
7. Forecasting	Y	Fair. There is a deal funnel report, but this feature needs work.
8. Reports	Y	Fair. There are a few reports, but nothing you could use to make a wise management decision.
9. Mobile Capability	Y	Good. There is a downloadable add-on to synchronize information with your Palm, Outlook, ACT!, and Goldmine.
10. Import Capability	Y	Good. I was able to seamlessly import my contacts and companies from Outlook. In Outlook, all customers are stored as a single entity with the customer name and contact name rolled into one. The import facility was able to break this chunk into its constituent pieces with no problem.
11. Online Help	Y	Good. However, I would expect a mature application to have context sensitive help.

Things that need to be added to the application: Quote Management –- add the ability to track historical quotes for customers. Context sensitive help. Richer reporting features -– add some canned reports to allow the user to create analytical reports for management decisions. Product/inventory management –- allow the user to store a list of hierarchically structured products with on-hand quantities, etc. Order processing – add order-processing or credit-checking capability. Lead management – the company has recently signed an agreement with MarketSoft for this capability. Integration to backend systems – provide an out-of-the-box communications infrastructure with backend ERP/legacy systems. Overall Rating Interface – (A) Cost – (A) Ease of Use – (A-) Ease of Setup – (A) Overall Functionality – (C)

Sunil Ciszewski, sciszewski@saleslobby.com, is the Application Development Manager for The Alexander Group, Inc. Sunil has worked in CRM and ERP systems as a designer, developer, and consultant.