Projects of the Month - October 2006

Introduce you and the other team members

Donato Diorio, Donato is the Founder, CEO and Chief Architect of our software offerings. Andy Theimer, Director of Operations. Andy spearheaded this project with Sugar CRM

Talk about why you decided to embark on this project

Our sales team was frustrated with the limitations of our old CRM. We were hitting a wall in terms of expandability and customization. We evaluated many web based CRM's including Salesforce Salesnet and Netsuite. Each had its pluses, but what appealed about Sugar was the open source concept; it was the philosophy behind open source. Among the open source alternatives, we felt Sugar was the by far the best. No CRM is going to fit every business process. We found an army of developers in which to build custom add-ons and tweak sugar to our precise needs.

Contact Capture is our product that we developed. We all use it every day. We had to have the connectivity to sugar. So basically we built it first for ourselves.

Does the word Broadlook mean anything in particular?

It's how we look at the opportunities to improve sale processes. Our logo is two colors... the proportions of which match the proportions of carbon to silicon. That's our message: the best sales process is the RIGHT combination between automation and human interaction. Carbon and silicon. Human and machine. Picking the wrong combination can mean automating an already bad process; leading to sales process disaster. Picking the right combination... well that's what our products do.

Contact Capture... great example of Broadlook product

Describe your offerings – who uses it, target market, etc.

Contact Capture
Used by sales, marketing, business development, research, recruiting and administrative professionals to eliminate manual data entry.

Eclipse
Used by sales and marketing professionals to quickly capture and extract content from online lists, directories and data-driven websites

Profiler
Used by sales, marketing, and recruiting professionals to find names, titles,emails, and phone numbers from company websites and deep Internet sources.

Market Mapper
Used by Marketing and Sales Researchers to build target niche-lists of companies in any vertical market or industry sector.

News Pulse
Used by anyone who wishes to stay track, review and distribute breaking news on companies, people and market trends.

BroadMail
Real-time email tracking meets Instant Notification

Content Hound
Real-time aggregate of rich web-content and one-click publishing to websites to organically grow website traffic and rise on search engine results

Job Pulse
Used by recruiters and consulting companies Job Pulse Searches over 200,000 online sources to find job posting matching specified keywords

How long did it take you to do the integration?

We spent a month creating the integration and performing the necessary QA to make Contact Capture production ready. Since we use Contact Capture for SugarCRM every day, we are continually adding and improving its features and capabilities.

Now that we have the integration with SugarCRM built into the Broadlook Universal Exporter (BLUE), we have connectivity to all Broadlook Products. Most clients start using Contact Capture first and move on to our more industrial strength solutions like Profiler or Eclipse. We don't announce products before they are ready to ship, but I can say we are working on some tools that will be great enhancements to any CRM including SugarCRM. Look for them in Q1 next year!

The community was a huge asset to our development process. Having thousands of users, developers, and Sugar team members available for feedback, testing, and suggestions became invaluable to our team.

As the project moved forward, we learned from the community that Contact Capture could be a great asset for improving the quality of data going into SugarCRM. We developed our duplicate checking and custom field features with that in mind and ended up with a great way to group and monitor accounts, contacts, and leads going into the CRM.