Less Annoying CRM

Makes a simple, focused, and affordable customer relationship-management software designed with small businesses and small teams in mind

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Less Annoying CRM makes a simple, focused, and affordable customerrelationship-management software designed with small businesses and small teams in mind. Less Annoying CRM gives its users all the best of a CRM platform, while ensuring that the platform is—well, less annoying.

 

When asked for an elevator pitch about Less Annoying CRM, partner Alex Haimann likes to turn the  question back to the asker, the better to succinctly explain what it is that Less Annoying CRM does in terms most meaningful to that person. It’s an adaptability apparent in Less Annoying CRM’s model.

“Our system is intended to be able to be used by anyone in any industry that is focused on specialized sales or tracking or keeping in touch with customers,” Alex says. “I actually get asked for an elevator pitch with some frequency because our name’s pretty weird.

 

Alex’s partners Tyler and Bracken King founded Less Annoying CRM ten years ago in San Francisco, when they set out to accommodate small businesses in need of CRM software. Unlike larger companies, small businesses had some barriers to entry in terms of CRM software; they seldom have their own IT team, for example, and they can’t afford to take large financial risks—like purchasing expensive software without knowing whether it will be a good fit.

“Because people wear many hats in a small business, we wanted to be able to provide as much service as possible. So we’ve focused on simplicity, and we’ve focused on price— making it affordable and easy to access from a no contract perspective—and we focused on service.”

Less Annoying CRM has had the same price point from its inception, and it offers unlimited customer service, adding great value to small businesses that need someone to turn to for that sort of help. Ninety percent of the time, Alex says, the Less Annoying CRM team interacts directly with the owner or the primary decision-maker, which means there’s less information lost in translation as the respective teams work together.

 

“Small businesses have an appreciation for focus and simplicity,” Alex says. “For us, those are huge pleasures of working with them.”

Focus is something important to the Less Annoying CRM team as well. A lot of their innovation as a company has been about how they want to make decisions about being deliberate.

“It might sound like a strange thing to say,” Alex says, but the company’s move to St. Louis from San Francisco five years ago was a byproduct of the deliberate decisions they pride themselves on. “We wanted to be prospering in five years from now, ten years—twenty. One of the earliest things we knew we needed was to get out of San Francisco, and we were drawn to St. Louis because of its talent.”

 

St. Louis has the best concentration of the types of talent Less Annoying CRM was after: engineering, customer-facing, software development—all aspects of their business that they would want to bring onto the team. In fact, much of Less Annoying’s innovation has been around how they hire, recruit, and train their employees. And they’re doing something right: since moving to St. Louis, only three employees have left the company—two for graduate school and one because of a spouse’s transfer to another state.

“We’re very intentional, very focused on our team,” Alex says. “Two of our lead developers started off as customer service people—we call them CRM coaches—and they did internal projects, at their own interest, to learn how to code. Now one of them leads the developer team but had zero background in that area.”

Though Less Annoying CRM was perhaps among the first companies created with small businesses in mind, it has garnered much-deserved attention in recent years, earning high praise from PC magazine, Business. com, and other well-respected ranking systems. They’ve also seen some mimics and competitor advertisements targeted against them—another good sign they’re doing something right.

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“We were also named to the Inc. 5000 list and in 2017, Best Place to Work for Young Professionals by the St. Louis Business Journal, beating out companies of every size for the honor. If there was to be any thirdparty validation of our innovation and our intentionality around how we’ve built our team, it was the 2017 award,” Alex says.

Going forward, Less Annoying wants to add to their software offerings to become a support suite, and they stand in good stead to do so. With 17 full-time staff members, 9,000 company accounts in 70 countries, and $2.5 million in revenue for 2018, Less Annoying is the next big thing in small-business support.

 

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