Today seems to be a Customer Resource Management afternoon following our previous story on Cloudtex, but summer is coming to an end and it’s time to get back into touch with the rest of the world. Five Hundred Plus, the LinkedIn CRM tool with Icelandic roots, is seeing good growth, now having more than 50,000 contacts under management for its users. Geir Freysson of Five Hundred Plus tells us that five months after launch the application was already managing 10,000 contacts – five months later that number had quadrupled to 50,000 contacts. Now they’ve added more premium features, like tagging, and have started charging for the service after 25 connections.
We covered the web app last October when they launched, and I’ve found it useful for remembering to get in touch with certain contacts every now and then. After logging into the service with your LinkedIn credentials, Five Hundred Plus splits the screen into columns, giving you a searchable list of your contacts. Once there, you can drag and drop people into the weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly columns to signify how often you want to be reminded to contact certain people.
After that, you get a Monday morning email reminding you to shoot out some emails. It’s a super simple concept, and it makes LinkedIn actually useful to me, rather than it being a big list of people I handed my business card to once. New users get 25 contacts to manage for free, while existing users still get 6 months before they start monetizing by charging $14.99 a month for the service, which is probably a reasonable investment for the marketing professionals, small business owners, and management consultants it’s targeting.
“We built Five Hundred Plus for ourselves, because the majority of our business comes from our network of professional acquaintances,” says co-founder Geir Freysson. “We’re extremely pleased that it turns out there are more people out there in a need of a super simple CRM solution to generate leads from their professional network”.
