Bullhorn's Email Analysis Tool Gives Companies a Better Understanding of Ongoing Relationships

Bullhorn, a provider of cloud-based CRM solutions, expanded its offerings today with the introduction of Pulse, an email analysis tool that mines conversations to give companies better direction in their dealings with long-standing customers.

Bullhorn's existing email tracking system automatically compiles data from email, notes, and tasks within email services such as Outlook or Gmail to give users a clear understanding of their past activity. The added capabilities of Pulse can determine who within an organization has the most significant communications with a customer, as well as the most substantial email exchange record. Bullhorn can be used independently but can also integrate with companies' legacy system if those companies are already using salesforce automation (SFA) programs.

Traditionally, Bullhorn has catered to staffing and recruiting firms, but since redesigning its platform in 2013 and shifting to a mobile focus, the company has been finding more applications across other industries.

Bullhorn Chief Marketing Officer Gordon Burnes says Pulse's enhancements go beyond the traditional CRM system in two critical ways. First, it eliminates the need for salespeople to manually input email data into the system by automatically recording data. It also gives salespeople and account executives a road map for how to proceed rather than forcing them to figure it out themselves.

Burnes reports that many of his customers are adopting Bullhorn alongside their legacy systems, because while SFA platforms offer great reporting and management processes, he says, they don't clue in the user about conversations. The data can also yield counterintuitive insights that will surprise some users.

"[Users often] find that the relationships are not necessarily strongest where [they] think they would be," Burnes says.

A common pitfall is making assumptions based on the title of a position held by someone within a company. "[They] might think that the account executive would have the strongest relationship with the account, but when you look at the data [that proves not to be the case]," he says.

Bullhorn plans to enhance Pulse by adding more predictive and prescriptive capabilities and developing text analytics capabilities to determine what can be gleaned from the content of email exchanges.

Bullhorn is used by 10,000 organizations and has 350,000 users. Though the offerings are used by companies of all sizes, Burnes says the ideal customers finds himself engaged in B2B sales with several parties at once.

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