Yesware, from Vendasta since the October 2022 acquisition, is a service for salespeople that helps them close deals faster. An email service tracks email, templates responses and syncs to CRM.
BL is great is you're going from a manual process to something more sophisticated. I'm not sure what the competitive landscape looks like with regards to Reference Software nowadays, but when we were evaluating a few years ago, BL was ahead of all other vendors in terms of functionality and integrations with SFDC
It works for my company and my problems. If you need a Sales CRM you can go for higher-end products that will give you what Yesware gives along with other stuff. Wherein we had specific problems we wanted to solve. -We needed a solution for a smaller team within our bigger sales team. -We needed a solution to be easy to use point and click and did not require any setup. -We needed to have a better solution to YAMM.
The system provides more visibility into available references and prevents references from being over-used. It allows the client (reference) to choose how often they can be contacted in a given time period and provides a closed-loop feedback mechanism to make sure the client is providing positive responses.
Allows account executives (sales people) to easily request references based on: product Used, customer vertical, location, account size, expertise, etc.
Uses a “Five Star” method to show how relevant the answers are when a results are returned from a search.
Tracking open rates, link click rates, and reply rates. This allows us to compare different templates in order to see which allows for the most interactions and meetings set directly from email engagement.
Seeing exactly when someone opens an email and whether it is in their normal location. Also if they are opening on a mobile device versus a computer to be able to organize the set up of the email in a more beneficial way.
Being able to save Templates for Mail Merges to avoid the duplication of effort that other mass email systems utilize.
It could be cool if there was some automated built in surveys that could be used and attached to the reference. For example very short quick survey to the potential customer about how they felt about the reference, a short one to the sale rep involved to show if it was a good fit to bring the reference and potential customer together. Then show those collective results on the reference record and when searching for a reference.
I would like a better way to build and track points for those at the contact level of a reference and a the account level.
The ability to unwrap iframe embeds on email (e.g. if I send a Vimeo link over email, have that video thumbnail show and link out to a video)
Removing recipients from a campaign. If my ruleset is to remove a contact from a sequence after he/she replies, sometimes a person will reply from another email and Yesware doesn't recognize it. (e.g. if I add jeff@amazon.com to my campaign and jeff.bezos@amazon.com replies to my thread, Yesware will still send an email to jeff@amazon.com unless he is manually removed)
I like the product, but due to the limitations I don't love it. I'm curious to revisit other options, particularly in lieu of Yesware's recent price increases (although I'm on a legacy plan). Some of my challenges to be browser related (I'm on an older computer) -- I'll have to see how things go when I receive my new computer. If the glitches (especially with regard to tracking accuracy and send later feature) go away, I'd be much more inclined to renew
Pretty good overall, but again it needs some tweaks to ensure user frustration is kept to a minimum. This would go back to the autosave feature I mentioned which would immediately be a value add but not something that should need a user to move into a paid tier.
Because it deserves this rating. The features and functionality provided are great. Our Sales team is very satisfied with this software as it integrates very well with our other software like Outlook, Salesforce, etc. Yesware provides great follow up with customers, which is essential for sales. Meeting scheduling is also flawless.
The process of asking each reference how often they’d be willing to be contacted was the biggest task. We made assumptions for current clients, and ask each new client once they become a customer. Along with which specific skill-set they’d be willing to be a reference
While I was one of the decision makers in this process, I didn't sit on the demos for the other providers (I was brought in further in the sales process). My understanding from my team was that BL was much more configurable and support more robust integrations that the competitors
All of these tools do what Yesware does, and more; but Yesware does the follow-up email portion best, in my experience. It is reasonably priced and is regularly adding new functionality to make it a sticky license for us to have. Yesware does not have predictive analytics or a particularly strong dialer solution, but it does provide team-wide and template efficacy tracking, and a basic dialer.
Increase time to fill: All references are filled within 2.5 days or less. For a program that isn't managed by one person, full time, we look at this stat as a win for our organization. BL def. helped us in cutting down the time it takes to find a reference.
Increased employee efficiency: The customer marketing team still owns the day to day administration (approvals) of the system, but we've drastically cut down their effort. We no longer need to search for the reference (the sales reps now do this themselves) - and the triggers to the account managers have been a huge help in cutting down the time to approve.
Greater visibility: BL has allowed us to capture denial reasons - which means we know why a references is being denied - which means we can hide them from coming up in future search results.
I think net positive ROI from generating meetings that lead to closed deals. Ultimately very difficult to quantify the ROI since it is essentially automating a lot of the manual prospecting done by BDRs/AEs - so ROI is likely higher than just that quantifiable number around deals closed.
