Totango Releases Public Beta Online Service

Totango today launched the public beta of its online service, providing sales teams with an assortment of tools intended to increase visibility of their customer bases.

For the past year, the company worked with 30 software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in private beta to build the initial product offering.

"The entire idea of Totango came from seeing this great momentum of cloud computing, and we have noticed that most of the attention is being driven toward the technical aspect of how to solve this problem," explains Guy Nirpaz, CEO of Totango. "But we have noted that it is not just that the technology is changing but also customers and business interaction is changing dramatically."

"The current CRM solutions that are based on the fact that there is direct contact between the sales and support teams is no longer in place," Nirpaz continues. "A new set of tools needs to be put in place to support the entire customer lifecycle."

Totango was founded last year to "help SaaS companies understand how their customers interact with their businesses."

"We build a set of tools to enable them to be smart in their interactions and be very specific when serving their customers’ needs," Nirpaz says.  

"Totango's solution lets SaaS companies know exactly who is using their services, what they're doing, and how often they use it," said Rona Segev-Gal, general partner of Pitango Venture Capital and a Totango customer. "This gives salespeople invaluable information in qualifying prospects and prioritizing the people to contact who are most likely to buy or renew. Totango represents a new, exciting market, and this team is well positioned to execute on it."

According to Nirpaz, businesses need to constantly create more value for their customers. Totango gives sales teams a "wholistic view" of how customers are using their services. "It's critical for businesses to understand their customers through their entire lifecycle," he maintains. "Totango has identified that it's critical to understand the value that customers are getting through their entire lifecycle and monitor that for business users so they can take action to make sure customers are continually getting value and are happy with the service they are getting."

The online service's key features include:

• Progress tracking for opportunities. Users can track the progress of a prospect during evaluation, of a new customer during ramp-up, and of a mature customer over time, and understand their engagement. They can also get the status of any opportunity at a glance;
• Fast filtering and segmentation. Users can segment opportunities and customers in the pipeline based on their usage;
• Personalized Daily Digest. Daily updates reflect opportunity status per sales representative and recommend actions that should be taken to improve the chances of a sale;
• Account activity page. Totango provides detailed activity information for a specific account through its entire usage life-cycle;
• Notifications and alerts. Users can be notified of all customer status changes and usage in real time;
• Integration with native Salesforce.com applications. Data is stored in Salesforce; and
• Activity Stream. The user receives eal-time tracking of customer usage of a service during and after a trial, with ability to drill-down to account and user levels. 

Totango is free for customers through the end of this year. Nirpaz says his company will come out with a pricing policy that "meets the exact value and ROI that customers are getting from Totango."

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