NEW YORK (April 16, 2012) — In what began as an honest attempt to get Cisco’s shareholders to seriously consider our tender offer, SalesCrunch may have inadvertently started a feud with the networking giant.

It has been three weeks since SalesCrunch issued its public tender offer to acquire WedEx and while no formal response was issued to SalesCrunch, one media outlet claimed to have received a statement from Cisco’s PR department stating: “This is a cute publicity stunt from SalesCrunch, and we appreciate that they like our technology, but we have no intention of selling WebEx.”

SalesCrunch founder and CEO Sean Black was perplexed by the purported statement and issued a statement of his own:

“What’s interesting about that response—if it was actually issued from Cisco’s PR department and not simply pulled from Twitter—is that they got it all wrong.  For starters, our tender offer is a genuine one in which we hope will help avoid another disastrous scenario like Flip and save hundreds of jobs.  Further, both the tender offer and background presentation are based on the premise that we are not impressed by their technology, but instead interested in migrating WebEx’s millions of users onto a next-generation online meeting platform that integrates with market-leaders such as Salesforce and LinkedIn.  An intention to hold onto WebEx may be the truest part of the statement simply because history suggests they’ll shut it down before selling it.  I sincerely hope Cisco’s shareholders and Board are taking our offer seriously.”

Meanwhile, Cicso has swiftly upped the ante with a not-so-subtle flex of its marketing resources by beginning a paid Google search campaign on key phrases that include the copyrighted word “SalesCrunch.”

“Most of our customers have already tried WebEx before finding a better solution in us,” said Black, “so I’m not convinced the strategy of targeting professionals specifically seeking SalesCrunch is a worthy endeavor.  But, we got one on them last month, so we’ll let them have their fun.”

It appears Black is sincere in that statement as SalesCrunch seems to be having a little fun of its own.  Last Monday, his organization launched DontSuckAtMeetings.com, an online community dedicated to helping people, well, not suck at meetings.  In anyone’s guess what the company plans to do with its other recent domain acquisition: webexsucks.com

NEW YORK (April 9, 2012) — New York-based start-up SalesCrunch today announced the launch of a new site called DontSuckAtMeetings.com, an online community for people to share their awful experiences in meetings to help others not suck so much.

Recently, SalesCrunch released an infographic by the same name that caught the attention of a whole lot of people.  Twitter was ablaze for the better part of a week and several media outlets and bloggers crafted stories around the eye-opening figures SalesCrunch published with respect to how much time and money is spent on meetings.

The infographic was based on more than 10,000 meetings hosted on SalesCrunch’s next-generation online meeting platform over a period of 18 months ending February 2012.  It was just a taste of the kind of customer-specific meeting data that SalesCrunch captures and shares with its business and enterprise customers.  Others may call it best practices.  SalesCrunch calls it meeting intelligence.  While you can take SalesCrunch for a free test drive for your next online presentation, SalesCrunch wants you to first have a little fun by sharing some of your worst practices of meetings.

When asked about the company’s motivation behind DontSuckAtMeetings, SalesCrunch’s head of marketing, Jay Chalnick, offered the following:

“Meetings suck.  But our mission at SalesCrunch is to help our customers not suck at them.  To that end, we make a wealth of practical and customer-specific meeting intelligence available to our users.  At the same time, we like having fun.  Did you happen to catch our tender offer to acquire WebEx for a buck?  DontSuckAtMeetings was created in the same vein as FMyLife, a popular community for users to share anecdotes about the unfortunate experiences that occur in life.  Similarly, DontSuckAtMeetings has been created for all the poor souls who have ever been subjected to excruciatingly boring, inefficient or downright humiliating meetings.  And considering that’s most everyone, we say, ‘You’re not alone!’ and invite them to visit the site to share personal experiences and tips regarding what not to do in meetings.”

DontSuckAtMeetings is offered free-of-charge by the good folks at SalesCrunch, who have also made it easy for you to follow DontSuckAtMeetings on Facebook and @dontsuckat on Twitter to get a laugh every time you login to those communities. Both pages are automatically populated with the best posts from DontSuckAtMeetings.

Besides sharing the site with your friends and colleagues, SalesCrunch encourages you to share DontSuckAtMeetings with your boss.  After all, how else will meetings start sucking less?

Many couldn’t help but chuckle when venture backed, two-year-old startup SalesCruch recently offered Cisco $1 – yes, you read that correctly, that’s one dollar – plus 15 percent in the online meeting platform to take WebEx off its hands.  SalesCrunch officials submitted this unsolicited bid on March 13th in an effort to “help” the networking giant further focus on its core business and stated that Cisco and WebEx’s more than 5 million users will all benefit.   Cisco didn’t take the offer very seriously, however, releasing a brief statement in response that said, “This is a cute publicity stunt from SalesCrunch, and we appreciate that they like our technology, but we have no intention of selling WebEx.”

The offer is low-risk and possibly high rewards as it improves SalesCrunch visibility, which, again, could help secure additional funding while it builds out technology and builds up a customer base.  The New York-based SalesCrunch was founded in 2010 and is backed by Accel Partners, First Round Capital, NextView Ventures, and AOL Ventures.  SalesCrunch Chief Executive Officer Sean Black said that WebEx was not part of Cisco’s core business and that integration with his company would allow for better features and pricing.

Cisco bought WebEx in 2007 for $2.9 billion in its efforts to expand beyond its core business of Cisco routers and Cisco switches that direct Internet traffic.  SalesCrunch points out that since Cisco acquired WebEx in 2007, it has sold or closed a few of its other “non-core” businesses, most notably the Flip video camera and Umi Telepresence.

Cisco decided to shut down its Flip video camera division last year rather than sell it as part of a major company reorganization. It had bought the video camera operation for $590 million in 2009 in an acquisition spree to build a stronger consumer business.   In addition to ending several programs, Cisco laid off hundreds of employees as it looks to shrink operations. “Although WebEx doesn’t fit into Cisco’s core business, it doesn’t have to suffer the same fate as Flip,” Black said in a statement.

Sean Black went on to say, “At SalesCrunch, we deliver a far superior technology platform—optimized for sales and meetings efficiency—at a fraction of the cost attainable by WebEx and its competitors who have massive legacy infrastructure costs.”  SalesCrunch has made it clear that the offer stems from its desire to gain all of Webex’s engineers and other personnel, and put them to work on SalesCrunch’s own products.

A successful acquisition by SalesCrunch would aim to migrate current WebEx customers to the SalesCrunch platform as quickly and easily as possible.  SalesCrunch offers an online browser-based collaboration platform that includes online meetings, analytics, sales delivery, training and other collaboration capabilities, and integrates the platform with others, such as Salesforce.com and LinkedIn, according to its Website. The system can do everything from set up personal meeting rooms and dedicated conference numbers to letting meeting organizers know whether attendees are listening or answering email.  All of which WebEx cannot do.  If nothing else, SalesCrunch’s offer may sway disappointed WebEx customers away from Cisco and towards SalesCrunch.

SalesCrunch’s Black said that his company made a bid for WebEx last year, but that Cisco officials were not interested.

“We met with them about six months ago in San Francisco.  It quickly became clear that the only way to get them to take our offer seriously is to bring it to the attention of the shareholders,” he said.

That’s where the 15 percent stake comes in. Black reportedly said that with an offer that includes a stake in SalesCrunch, Cisco’s board of directors would have to at least discuss the offer.   SalesCrunch appears unfazed by Cisco’s baulk at their offer, and says they do expect talks with Cisco to ensue.  Knowing there is interest in WebEx, if Cisco does intend to shutter the brand, SalesCrunch will likely have to pay a modest sum that will be above $1.

To read the full article, click here.

I learned a great lesson from a friend long ago. She said I need to be able to track each hour of my day and make sure I am paid for each hour. My time and your time is valuable, but many clients are “meeting happy”.

They want to have meetings for an introduction, then another meeting to see your proposal and review and then another with more staff members to possibly finalize. This is crazy. This is money lost (unless it is a 5-6 figure deal, possibly)!

If your company has meetings with several staff members often this applies to you as well. In-house meetings cost money and they often waste time and money.

If I could give any advice it would be to minimize your meetings and phone calls. You are losing money on both. I do believe talking to our clients is important, but how much is acceptable?

I am going to throw some numbers out as examples. Let’s say your hourly fee is $150 and you are doing a $5,000 SEO and website project. The client phone calls and meetings add up to 10.5 hours of your time (and you aren’t even thinking about all the emails you answer). Of the $5,000 you were suppose to get for your time and work you have now lost $1,575.

Ouch, and on what? Wasted time. You now need to make sure that you can pay your developers and cover all the work time with $3,425 and we all know this is not possible. You have just lost money on the deal. You can’t afford to lose money on any deal. If you lose on every deal you are putting yourself out of business.

Meetings Cost

Many meetings require transportation and this requires money spent. Typically beverages and snacks are bought at meetings and this costs more money. Your time is money. You then have to get back to work and that is more transportation money. Start calculating the costs of your meetings and you may be surprised.

Is the meeting worth it? Only you can decide, but you do need to carefully evaluate how much time you can afford to spend at meetings. Another option is when you are creating a proposal add in time you will spend on meetings so you are not losing money. Make sure you make it clear that your time is valuable and stick to the hours your have set up for the client in the proposal.

The infographic below, by SalesCrunch, offers a lot of facts and tips about meetings and money lost. I highly suggest you print and stick on your wall. Use it and think about it with each client.

[Click here to share or embed.]

By Sean Black, March 19, 2012

This belongs to a series of posts on how websites like SalesCrunch are integrating LinkedIn functionality to add value to their users. Here’s Sean Black, SalesCrunch CEO on the integration of LinkedIn’s APIs. – Ed.

As the world’s largest professional network with more than 150 million members, LinkedIn represents an incredible opportunity for services like SalesCrunch, a next-generation online meeting platform that enables professionals to monitor engagement during meetings, collaborate with others across an organization, and measure the efficiency of meetings like never before.

We are cognizant that professionals deal with an increasing number of virtual calls these days — whether via online meetings or email — so we built a single, elegant platform that tracks, measures and analyzes every aspect of both the meeting itself and the follow-up process. This not only enables our customers to identify the specific approach and tactics of their most successful salespeople, but they can also replicate them across the organization.

Starting today, you can identify key decision-makers and connect with other LinkedIn members directly on a SalesCrunch online meeting.

Simply put, integrating with LinkedIn makes meetings more social, enabling participants to quickly put a face to a name and make a personal connection. Once authenticated, SalesCrunch displays relevant information from LinkedIn including common connections you have, professional history, college or university attended, and other LinkedIn members “you may know” at another participant’s organization.

Presenters and participants can now establish new LinkedIn connections with their associates, prospects, suppliers, and business partners with the click of a button during a meeting.

When a meeting concludes, all authenticated users are given the option to once again invite other participants to connect on LinkedIn. This makes it especially easy for salespeople to stay close with their customers and prospects, and clients to stay connected to their associates, suppliers and business partners long after the meeting ends.

With many organizations continuing to slash travel budgets, online meetings are an attractive solution for salespeople hosting frequent meetings. We are seeing the trend of companies doing business virtually and with our new LinkedIn integration, we’re excited about helping people make personal connections in ways never before possible.

Meetings can be like torture chambers. But they don’t have to be.

Web conferencing company SalesCrunch has created a guide to “meetings that don’t suck.”

It’s gathered the data from its management software, which tracks things like if people are really paying attention (looking at the screen or not), and if follow-up materials are opened.

We’ve looked at the stats and come up with five good tips for the next time you call a meeting.

1. The 15 minute meeting. No meeting should last more than 30 minutes, and 15 minutes is better. In the first 15 minutes people pay attention 91% of time. From 15 to 30 minutes, people start getting distracted 15% of the time. After 30 minutes, they are giving one-quarter of their attention to something else.

2. Everyone needs to talk. If all participants talk, people will give the meeting 92% of their attention. If someone is yammering on, it gets only 78% of their attention.

3. Send follow-up materials within 5 minutes. About 14% of folks will read follow up materials right after the meeting. Nearly two-thirds will read them within one day. A few more will read the next day, but not many.

4. Shorter follow-up materials are better read. People will spend 52 seconds with a short follow-up — up to 20 pages or slides long. But they will spend only 10 seconds on some mega 100-slide document — just long enough to know they don’t want to read it.

5. Reach out via LinkedIn immediately. Nearly three-quarters of meeting attendees will accept a new LinkedIn connection after an online meeting.

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To read the full story, click here.

NEW YORK, NY (PRWEB) March 19, 2012

Silicon Alley start-up SalesCrunch today announced that its next generation, browser-based meeting and presentation platform is now integrated with LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with 150 million members worldwide. Meeting hosts and participants can now view and establish LinkedIn connections straight from SalesCrunch’s online meeting room.

Once authenticated, SalesCrunch displays information pulled from LinkedIn including meeting participants’ profile images, professional and academic experience, geographic location, shared connections and other people the user may know. Presenters and participants are invited to establish new connections before, during and after a meeting with the click of a button.

Sean Black, founder and CEO of SalesCrunch, is thrilled with the innovative use of LinkedIn’s API. “Enabling meeting participants to view LinkedIn profiles brings online meetings one step closer to face-to-face. Not only can presenters quickly identify decision-makers, they can make a personal connection with customers and prospects like never before.”

With many organizations continuing to slash travel budgets, online meetings have become an increasingly attractive solution for salespeople hosting frequent meetings. The growing trend of business occurring virtually presents SalesCrunch with the unique opportunity to measure and optimize the entire sales and presentation process.

“Business is all about relationships,” says Black, “but it’s hard to connect with someone on a personal level through a computer. Our LinkedIn integration brings meetings to life by showing who is in the meeting, what role they play at their company and how they might influence your deal.”

Bringing “social” to the online meeting space is the latest of several next-generation features offered by SalesCrunch, the organization that “applies science to the art of selling.” Real-time monitoring of user engagement, seamless integration with CRM applications such as Salesforce, and tracking which customers open and read follow-up decks are just a few of the tools SalesCrunch offers sales executives who are interested in gaining insight into why their most successful salespeople are successful and how to replicate such success across an organization.

For additional information, including screenshots, please visit www.salescrunch.com/linkedin.

About SalesCrunch

Backed by Accel Partners, First Round Capital, Nextview Ventures and AOL Ventures, SalesCrunch is a next-generation meeting platform focused on applying science to the art of selling. The company offers a software-free, social, and scalable solution that helps track and measure customer interactions and sentiment across a company, makes selling transparent and empowers organizations to meet the demands of a new generation of buyers to power profits. For more information, visit www.salescrunch.com.

Read the full article here.

MARCH 13, 2012 AT 4:04 AM PT

For months, the rumor mills have whispered here and there about WebEx, the remote-meeting service owned by the networking giant Cisco Systems. As that company has gone through numerous contortions, shedding jobs and business units, WebEx has stood out as another acquisition that might find itself on the chopping block.

I made the case myself last year about why Cisco might kill or sell WebEx, only to be told in no uncertain terms that Cisco didn’t see it that way. Collaboration is still a big part of Cisco’s strategy, because it fits with enterprise video.

And yet the rumors about WebEx being shopped around persist. So today, a bold offer emerged from a start-up called SalesCrunch to buy WebEx for $1 and 15 percent of the equity in the company. The plan is to transition WebEx’s entire customer base to a new platform, kill off the old one, and move on.

It may seem a trivial offer, but it’s not, though there’s a good argument to be made that it’s a publicity stunt meant to get a lot of attention. SalesCrunch is backed by Accel Partners, First Round Capital, NextView Ventures and AOL Ventures. It’s essentially a new, more flexible, fully thought-out competitor to WebEx, one that poses a fair competitive threat. SalesCrunch is more social than WebEx, and tells you more about how engaged the parties attending a meeting actually are, or whether they’re zoning out and checking their email.

But why offer to buy it? SalesCrunch CEO Sean Black told me that the plan is to grab Cisco’s WebEx assets, including its engineering teams, and put them to work on building out SalesCrunch.

WebEx isn’t a core business to Cisco, Black says, and is in many ways comparable to the Flip camera business that Cisco infamously killed last year. “Cisco admitted that it’s in a lot of businesses that it shouldn’t be in. There’s been a lot of outcry from shareholders that it should stick to the business of selling routers and switches,” he told me. “WebEx is really the first online meeting application. It is literally as old as the Internet itself. And the team that put it in place is there to wring every efficiency they can out of the business, so they’re good at efficiency, and not at innovation.”

Cisco’s WebEx team, Black argues, is too busy running the business and maintaining its large user base to build the next great online meeting platform.

The idea for offering to buy WebEx came up in a management meeting as sort of a jokey, offhand comment. “But the more we thought about it, the more it made sense,” Black told me. “Why shouldn’t it be us? We’ve heard it’s been shopped around for eight months, with no takers.” Without a buyer, it might suffer the same fate as the Flip camera, and simply be shut down, he says.

Cisco hasn’t commented yet, but it probably will. I’m no expert on these things, but I wonder if this constitutes the kind of legal offer that will require Cisco’s board of directors to consider the offer seriously. We’ll see.

Read the full story here.

In what looks like a publicity stunt, two-year-old startup SalesCrunch just made Cisco an unsolicited offer for WebEx, the web conferencing business Cisco acquired for $3.2 billion back in 2007.

SalesCrunch wants to pay Cisco $1 for WebEx — plus a 15% equity stake in SalesCrunch.

Yes, the offer is for real, we’re told. And we love the gutsy fun of it, even though we can’t imagine Cisco will.

SalesCrunch had previously approached Cisco but the talks didn’t get far, founder and CEO Sean Black told Business Insider.

“We met with them about six months ago in San Francisco,” he recalls. “It quickly became clear that the only way to get them to take our offer seriously is to bring it to the attention of the shareholders.”

Because SalesCrunch is genuinely offering a 15% stake, Black believes Cisco is “going to have to talk about it now. The board is going to have to have a conversation,” he says.

When Cisco hit troubled waters in 2011, rumors circulated that it was looking to unload WebEx, even though Cisco offered a limp-wristed denial at the time. This gave Black the idea that Cisco would be willing to sell.

SalesCrunch is a WebEx competitor, known for its management tools. It’s browser-based meetings don’t require a download or plug in. Plus it documents everything from who is using the service at any given time to which meeting participants are secretly answering e-mail.

(Disclosure: Business Insider is a customer of SalesCrunch, though the SAI editorial staff doesn’t use it.)

Cisco has already met its promised goal to cut $1 billion in expenses and has declared its restructuring is over. It posted overall growth in its last quarter, too. So it doesn’t need to shed more business units — even an oddball business for it like WebEx.

Cisco consistently points to its Collaboration unit — of which WebEx is a member — as a key area for its future. The Collaboration unit posted over a $1 billion in net sales in its last quarter, up from $952 million in the year-ago quarter. That makes it Cisco’s third-largest business unit.

Cisco doesn’t break out WebEx’s results, but Black from SalesCrunch estimates that it could be doing about $600-$700 million in revenue per year. This is based on the $380 million of revenue in 2007 when Cisco bought it and assumes 15% growth, which Black says is typical for the web conferencing market overall.

Since launching in April 2010, SalesCrunch has done well, accumulating 10,000 users across about 30 enterprise customers including Yelp, CareerBuilder and Jive, says Black.

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Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/salescrunch-startup-wants-wants-to-buy-webex-from-cisco-for-1-2012-3#ixzz1p09rYEI2

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Tiny online meeting company SalesCrunch — with just 10,000 users and 15 employees — has made an offer to mighty Cisco Systems for its world-leading collaboration platform WebEx.

Insisting that the offer is not a publicity stunt, SalesCrunch has offered Cisco $1 and a 15% stake in the new company. SalesCrunch said that by acquiring WebEx, Cisco (CSCO, Fortune 500) and WebEx’s more than 5 million users will all benefit.

The problem with Cisco’s ownership of WebEx, according to SalesCrunch, is that the meeting software is too far outside the company’s wheelhouse of switches and routers. Like Skype when it was under eBay’s (EBAY, Fortune 500) umbrella, Cisco isn’t giving WebEx developers the tools they need to modernize the product, SalesCrunch argues.
Some industry analysts agree.

“It makes sense for Cisco to sell WebEx,” said Rebecca Wettemann, analyst at Nucleus Research. “The bottom line is Cisco is not a software company and thus not a great match for WebEx.”

Would Cisco go for such a deal? The company wasn’t immediately available for comment.

Cisco bought WebEx in 2007 for $3.2 billion to break into the then-burgeoning communication applications space. But the kinds of companies that buy collaboration software are completely different from the ones that buy Cisco’s core networking products.

What’s more, real-time communication has since evolved and become more integrated with the desktop or browser, as is the case with tools like Google’s (GOOG, Fortune 500) app suite or Microsoft’s (MSFT, Fortune 500) Lync.

As evidence that Cisco can’t properly support WebEx, SalesCrunch points to the fact that Cisco has a history of simply killing off non-core products.

Last year, Cisco terminated most of its consumer product lines, including Flip video cameras and its Umi home teleconferencing system, laying off 16% of its workforce in the process. WebEx had been rumored to be next on the chopping block, yet nothing ever came of that.

“Cisco’s innovator’s dilemma has extended to WebEx,” said Sean Black, CEO of SalesCrunch. “Cisco can’t just take all of its customers and launch them onto a modern platform, because WebEx customers would leave the way Netflix (NFLX) customers did.”

Yet SalesCrunch’s solution is to do just that: The company wants to buy WebEx for its user base, not the technology. Over a period of 12 to 18 months, Black said that SalesCrunch would phase out the WebEx technology, and transition them to the SalesCrunch software.

About 1 million, or 20% of WebEx’s customers will leave, Black predicted, most of them switching to rival GoToMeeting, which is owned by Citrix Systems (CTXS).

Black said the reason it plans to leave WebEx for dead — if it is successful in buying the business from Cisco — is that it’s an outdated technology, with software that can’t utilize social networking, analytics, or any modern advances. SalesCrunch, by contrast, is browser-based, so it can be built to incorporate third-party social or analytical software.
Analysts were skeptical of the terms of SalesCrunch’s offer though.

“Cash deals draw more serious attention, and this one is for $1,” said Colin Gillis, analyst at BGC Partners. “I don’t see them parting with WebEx anytime soon. The company’s clearly restructuring, but WebEx is not one that they have been telegraphing as up for sale.”

SalesCrunch admitted that Cisco wouldn’t likely bite at first, and it would take a push from shareholders to force Cisco’s hand. But the company also noted that if Cisco were to get rid of WebEx, no other company has stepped up to buy it.

Black said it’s unclear how much the 15% stake will be worth, but he noted that it will be “more substantial than if Cisco kills WebEx like they did with Flip.” He also said the advantage for Cisco would be that WebEx would come of the company’s books immediately.

“The alternative for Cisco is to lay off thousands more people and shut down the most-used online meeting business,” he said.

Read the full story here.