WorkinBox By Tylr Mobile Brings Email and CRM Together

Today Tylr Mobile unveiled WorkinBox, an iPhone application designed to help sales professionals by bringing together email (via IMAP) and CRM (currently Salesforce.com) information.

Unlike so many of today's startups who pontificate about the evils of email, WorkinBox embraces the fact that email is a critical tool for Sales professionals. They recognise that the problem with email is that it does not contain all the information Sales people need about an account or opportunity, as that information is contained in their company's CRM system. To solve this, WorkinBox aims to eliminate the cumbersome processes of switching back and forth between the two. For example, when an email message arrives in WorkinBox, it tries to match the sender to the corresponding record in Salesforce.com.  You can then sort your inbox based deals and close dates rather than just message senders and delivery dates.




While WorkinBox's sorting and viewing features should prove quite useful, what impressed me most was the integration of actions and tasks that Sales Professionals can take right from within the application. For example, you can turn any message into a task, which will then sync back to Salesforce.com and be linked the appropriate record. Similarly, when you respond to a message you can use email templates from your CRM system and the replies are recorded back in the opportunity record.

The challenge for Tylr Mobile will be in proving to Sales Professionals that using WorkinBox (on their mobile phone) can help them close deals faster, be more responsive to prospects and be better connected to their contacts. They claim to have several large organizations already testing the beta version of the product. I look forward to seeing those companies become public references as WorkinBox moves from beta to its first release. Their product roadmap also includes future integrations with popular file sharing and task management platforms. I am sure Salesforce.com's acquisition team will be keeping a close eye on Tylr Mobile, as any product that can improve the quality of their CRM data is of great value.

Tylr Mobile was founded last year by CEO Ryan Nichols, previously from Podio which was acquired by Citrix. He has assembled a team of his former Appirio colleagues, all of which have excellent enterprise software experience.