I had breakfast this morning with Nick Desbarats of Choicebot and we were discussing the Newton - Apple’s first version of the iphone - and Nick mentioned that the product had several “fatal flaws” - a term they use often at Choicebot to describe something that is not “ok”, or “I can live with”, but is a feature that actually eliminates the product from consideration.

It’s an important consideration.

In fact very few things are on a linear curve from “bad” to “great”.  Most things that I don’t engage with are because of one very specific fatal flaw - it is too expensive, it doesn’t integrate with my email, I can’t do x with it…  I can pinpoint a specific issue that deterred me from the product.

Oddly, I assume that the opposite is not true.  It is not one single feature that leads me to purchase or engage.  It has to be a couple of features - brand association, reliability, and a killer feature.

As we get closer to completion of Dex, I have been working hard on making sure our killer features are going to really impress people.  Now I’m going to be spending more time looking for fatal flaws that will turn people away.

Thanks Nick.

(PS - for more information on fatal flaws and great product selection, check out choicebot.com)

One of the core goals of dex is to create a dependable and complete source of information about the people in your professional network.

To keep contact information dependable we reach out to your contacts and ask them to confirm or update their contact information to keep it updated.

To make information more “complete”, we encourage you to write regular notes about your contacts, automatically collect email and calendar events related to this contact (more about this feature to come!), and collect relevant content about this person from popular “networking” and news websites.  We try to gather as much relevant information as we can about the person so that they aren’t just a name in a database, but a three-dimensional person based on your relationship with them.

Through dex people will finally transcend the sterile address book view and take on a much more complete, relevant, and useful profile that will help you interact with them in a much more meaningful way.

Why it matters:

1. An undependable or “dirty” contact database won’t be used
2. Strong businesses rely on strong relationships with customers and partners
3. Your knowledge of a person is limited.  By gathering external information, you can learn more about people which can help strengthen your relationships.

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This is a series about killer features and common sense approaches to professional network management (and what used to be called CRM).  If you have any specific things that vex you about CRM or professional networking, please comment and I’ll blog about how we are addressing it through dex.

Let’s admit it. CRM can be a bit dry. Part of what’s cool about how MG is approaching CRM is that they are incorporating tools that more closely emulate a personal relationship. That’s what the “R” stands for. Now that things are in full production, its interesting to see a lot of these ideas come alive in the product. Since we are all fans of Twitter, Scott and the team thought it would be a great idea to include something similar in the product. If you check out the screen-cap, you’ll see what I mean. On the right side is a place where you essentially can post tweets or really short messages. If you look above the text box you’ll see that messages are being filtered for “Mike Sullivan” which show messages to Mike.

The ability to send short messages around in a team environment is a great idea because it emulates real life. That is how most office conversations take place so why not build a real world purpose into your CRM.

More on this later, but there are some really amazing features in the pipe that will really change the way relationships are valued. This is just one of them.

PS: The screenshot has no look and feel yet. I will Andrew wow you with that once its ready.