Why Emily Came Back To Daylite After Using Salesforce For a Year

Our Customers / November 9, 2017 / Kristie

When customers that have used Daylite and left to try out something else as their needs change, we often hear that they have come back to Daylite with a new appreciation for it. Here is one of those customer’s story.

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As a business owner, it’s important to regularly evaluate the tools you use to make sure you’re getting the most of them, and they’re meeting your needs. We do this with tools we use, so we completely understand when a customer wants to explore other CRMs that may be a better fit for their business as their needs change. While we’d love for every customer to stay a customer, we realize that we can’t be everything to everyone.

We never like to hear when a customer leaves Daylite, especially when they’ve been a customer for years, but we understand the importance of doing what’s best for your unique business. Of course, our door is always open if they decide to come back and use Daylite, as was the case with Emily.

Emily Rudow is a young, female entrepreneur with a lot of ambition, so it’s no surprise that she’d want to explore CRM options to make sure she’s maximizing her return on investment. When you launch a startup at 27 and break a world record for most consecutive half-marathons run the next year, you understand the importance of maximizing your time.

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Emily Rudow’s company, Oneiric, develops innovative protective base layer apparel for hockey players. Oneiric’s patented design has added safety and performance features and are sold in about 45 stores across Canada and the US. You may have even seen them on Dragon’s Den.

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Deciding on a CRM

While Oneiric sells directly to consumers online, they also sell to retailers, which is why Emily needed a CRM to keep track of these sales as they have a longer sales cycle. Emily had previously used Daylite while working at Marketcircle, but her mentor suggested ZohoCRM.

“I was recommended by my mentor to use ZohoCRM. I Tried it out but but didn’t like that it wasn’t intuitive. It felt like it had a clunky interface and wasn’t that easy to use.” – Emily Rudow

Emily then contemplated Daylite or Salesforce. She had used Daylite for managing projects and tasks before, and used Salesforce in a later job at a marketing agency. The deciding factor was when she was given a one-year free license of Salesforce as part of a startup accelerator program.

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Why She Stopped Using Salesforce

“After the first year of starting Oneiric, my renewal came up for Salesforce but it was too expensive for the stage of my startup. Another problem was only I could use it because it was too expensive to add users. I wanted to be able to share data with my business partner, Kayla. She handles the operations side of the business and manages re-orders with current customers while I handle acquiring new business. I wanted her to be able to go into our database and see notes I’ve added about customers when she does her follow-ups.” – Emily Rudow

Trying Daylite Again

Emily started looking at alternative solutions and that’s when she tried Daylite again.

“I felt comfortable with Daylite because I had used it for projects and tasks before and the price was way more affordable than Salesforce, especially if I wanted to be able to share data with Kayla.” – Emily Rudow

Emily started a trial of Daylite and started using it to track leads and manage her cold calls. She remembered that one of the things she had taken for granted was being able to work offline.

The biggest thing I love about Daylite is that it’s a native Mac app. If I have a bad Internet connection while I was out or working in a coffee shop, I couldn’t use Salesforce. I’d have to write my notes in Text Edit and then try to remember to copy them into Salesforce later. With Daylite, I can just add my notes and follow ups while I’m on the call. I don’t have to remember to do it later.” – Emily Rudow

Managing everything in one place

Another thing Emily had missed about Daylite was the ability to get a quick overview of her week from the Home Screen.

“I’ve always loved this about Daylite – having your whole day at a glance. What’s due, what appointments I have, and what’s coming up on my to-do list. I like how it combines sales and task management all in the same place. I couldn’t get that with Salesforce.” – Emily Rudow

Loving email again

One key thing that Emily appreciates now with Daylite is the integration with Apple Mail.

“With Salesforce when I’d schedule a follow up after I got an email I had to copy and paste the emails in the description field. There wasn’t anywhere to put the email history in Salesforce which was a really big pain. With Daylite, I can just add emails and correspondence right to the person or company and create a follow up from Apple Mail. It’s a massive time saver! I hate doing admin work – copying and pasting stuff into my database. It made me not want to enter info or sometimes I’d forget to enter it. Now with Daylite, I don’t have to think about data entry. I just click a button and it’s linked to the person.” – Emily Rudow

Daylite’s integration with Apple Mail has also made Emily’s process easier when dealing with new leads through email.

“I love how I can add a contact right from an email. Anytime I get a new lead such as a retailer or distributer, I can just create a new person in Daylite right from the email and create a follow up. Most of my leads come through email so it’s a nice time saver. Before with Salesforce, I’d have to open Salesforce and manually add the contact and then copy and paste all the info and create the follow up.” – Emily Rudow

Noticeable improvements in Daylite

“I forgot about all the great things that Daylite has that you just can’t get in other CRMs and it’s much more intuitive. Since I was last using Daylite, there have been a lot of really good improvements. It used to crash quite often but now with Cloud, it’s much more stable. I remember a big issue was syncing and things weren’t updated in time. Now with Cloud it’s so much faster I don’t have to worry about whether or not it’s syncing.” – Emily Rudow

Working better together

“Daylite has made it much easier to share things and collaborate together with my business partner.I can create a project for everything we have to do for a show coming up and make it really easy to make sure we’re not missing anything. We used to use Slack and email to delegate things and we had a weekly goal list organized by marketing, operations, etc. It’s really hard to work and delegate over email because there’s not a way to track what’s been done and what needs to be done. With Daylite, we can delegate things to each other. Instead of having to get an update on what’s done, I can just see in Daylite whether to not it’s done.” – Emily Rudow

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