With Prince due to perform at halftime on Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast, I guess DEMO presenter Charlie Crystle picked a timely line to get his point across. Charlie, of ChiliSoft fame, is now CEO of Mission Research, located in “that hotbed of technology,” as he says: Lancaster, PA. But I gathered that Charlie and his colleagues like it there just fine. Life’s quieter, no big city problems, less turnover of people, etc. Besides, as he said in kicking off his on-stage demo, his company is about “applications for the rest of America, not the Silicon Valley crowd.” Take that, you early-adopter, techco-weenie Crackberry freaks.
Mission Research is well known for its GiftWorks fundraising software for non-profits, which it debuted a couple years ago at DEMO. It used this year’s event to tell the world about its next big thing: SalesWorks customer management software system for small and SOHO businesses. 
The point Charlie was making in his “so 1999” reference was this: in-house software is preferred over outsourced services by a majority of this market. These smaller players are more leary than you think about trusting their valuable data to any hosted platform located off in Timbuktu somewhere — platforms that we all know can, and do, go down. [Did you hear about the big problem with Google Analytics today, by the way? Oucherooo….]
Now, don’t tell this to Mark Benioff, but I know from my involvement in marketing to small and midsized businesses (“SMBs”) that surveys do back up Charlie on this one. There’s a very large market out there for easy-to-use apps with dead-simple UIs designed for the small outfits that just don’t have IT people on staff. They want the software on their own machines, thank you very much — or, more specifically, they want their data on their own machines. (And they should want it backed up, too, preferably offsite.) What’s interesting, though, is the SalesWorks platform actually features the best of both worlds. It’s a hybrid that “boasts the power and safety of desktop applications integrated smartly and safely with web-based functionality,” the company says. It integrates with a variety of online services — for e-commerce, geo, and online marketing, for example — and, most significantly for 3.6 million small businesses out there, Intuit’s Quickbooks.
SalesWorks is described by the company as “customer management software that anyone can use and everyone can afford.” A beta version can be downloaded here.
Below, I’ve pasted in some screen shots of the SalesWorks software, showing the simple, clean interface, and some of its features, such as mapping of your contacts and options for doing customer mailings.
Charlie is an interesting guy, and a damn good musician, too, by the way (he played guitar at the famous DEMO jam session, along with guys like Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal). He also has a blog, separate from his company’s blog, where he talked recently about the SalesWorks launch.
I think Charlie’s really onto something with this product, and has a great experience base to build from in GiftWorks. There are obvious similarities to extend this functionality to small businesses (not all small businesses, but certainly many). There’s no doubt the SMB/SOHO market is huge and growing. But its massiveness and amorphousness (is that a word?) are precisley what make it such a challenge from a marketing standpoint. I think SalesWorks will succeed only if it secures distribution partnerships with big players that reach this broad demographic of mom-and-pops and businesses of less than, say, 50 employees. These big partners have the clout and marketing muscle to take this to the small business masses. But Charlie knows that, and has a plan to achieve it. And he has a great bunch of people on his board of advisors, too.
I would not bet against the man.
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