"Private Link Pages" — a new communication channel?
The Product
CorePage is the first in a series of next-generation
online sales tools from Revixio Software. CorePage takes its name from "core messages"
and "core values." Like those, CorePage helps you get to the heart of a
very fundamental issue; finding out if your prospect is engaged in the sales
process with you, or not. For a sale to be successful, your prospect can't be a
passive observer, he has to be a willing participant, and must ultimately
see the value in what you're offering. If he's willing to engage with
you early on, to look at what you have to show him, that's a good start, and
will pave the way to next steps.
While creating CorePage, we came to understand that we weren't just developing a method of distributing specific links to specific people. We were also creating a new communication
channel of sorts; one that we might call "private web pages" or more accurately "private link pages."
Is CorePage a simpler version of a customer portal, review site or extranet? Yes, we think it is, and much more. It's
also a tool that allows a non-technical person to create a custom sales experience (in about 30-seconds) that requires almost nothing from a customer or prospect, but a
couple of clicks. And, it's a closed-loop that provides feeback on the success or failure of certain tactics.
A combination of content and asset management,
URL-shortening and click-tracking technologies, CorePage brings a number of
already successful practices and new ideas together in a simple package that's optimized for sales — in any industry. Of course, we've thought of other uses for CorePage too, and we know that our customers will show us even more.
One of CorePage's not-so-obvious benefits is that it can help a company make
better use of those expensive, often under-utilized marketing assets like
videos and Flash demos. CorePage helps you get them into the hands of
decision-makers at the right time. They're no-longer relegated to the website,
CD-ROM and trade show floor.
So, give CorePage a try and judge for youself if it really is a new communication channel or just a great "fill-in-the-gap" kind of product that helps you to understand if your prospect or customer is engaged in the selling process with you...or not.
The Company
Based in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, Revixio Software was created by a group of four partners; senior software engineers, Ryan Provencher and Haig Didizian; CTO and architect, Ed Sager and founder and CEO, David Peltz. All are
hands-on software professionals with years of experience creating custom online
applications, websites and multimedia projects for other companies. We're
creating what we hope our customers will come to regard as "revolutionary online
sales tools," a term we've adpoted as the company tag line and from which the
name Revixio grew.
We love the "Web
2.0" world of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and had seen lots of great applications out there, many of which we
were using ourselves. We also noticed gaps where some really useful tools
could be inserted... and we had a few ideas.
One of those ideas began in 1997 at an advertising agency that was just beginning its journey into "new media." You can read more about this in David Peltz's blog posting, "The Genesis of CorePage."
As for our market, we intend to first serve the needs of people who
sell products and services one-to-one — in every
industry. Usually working on commission, people who sell are highly motivated to find ways to improve that process, save time,
and ultimately be more effective. We reasoned that tools that could help
do that, at a fair price, would be welcomed.
For those with deep pockets,
there are some really robust sales tools out there, like big customer
relationship management (CRM) and sales-force automation
(SFA) applications. There are also a number of really good, simpler and
less expensive tools. Our products will live somewhere in the middle. We
won't try to do it all, but instead be really good at specific tasks, and work
in conjunction with other online and off-line applications to fill-in some of
the gaps, and help people sell better.
Look for us to integrate with products
in the online storage, video streaming, CRM, SFA, knowledge and asset management
spaces.
Acknowledgements
We'd like to acknowledge the inspiration and information we received from a great web application development company called 37 Signals. Many of us at Revixio have used their products for years and are unabashedly huge fans. We also read and recommend their book, "Getting Real" and adopted their iterative development process in the creation of CorePage. We also built CorePage using Ruby on Rails, the open-source web framework that they pioneered. Finally, thanks to their CEO, Jason Fried, for his advice and inspiration.
