Bullhorn's new CRM tool mines email for deeper relationship insight

Pulse is a new, stand-alone software-as-a-service product that's designed to give user companies instant insight into the health of their relationships with customers and other contacts. Using a built-in email-tracking system, Pulse automatically mines email communications and analyzes them in real time.

What it delivers is cross-department visibility into who knows who, who has the longest-standing or highest-quality relationships, and who engages most deeply with a contact or organization, for example.

Underlying the new tool's capabilities are Bullhorn's passive email-tracking system and integration with Outlook, Office 365 and Gmail, as well as with social platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter. Pulse can complement any sales force automation tool, including those from companies such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle.

Equipped with the resulting data, organizations can use Pulse to create a map of their employees and infer both relationships and customer health, said Art Papas, Bullhorn's CEO.

"Say we've got a big potential customer," he said. "I can see if our account manager has any significant relationships with key people there; if not, we may need to reassign the account to someone else."

Companies could even divide up sales territories based on the quality of existing relationships among the staff rather than arbitrary geographic lines.

Originally launched with a focus on the staffing and recruiting industries, Bullhorn completely revamped its platform in 2013. Today, its "mobile-first" offering supports more than 1,500 API integrations, processes 1 billion transactions per week and sustains 99.993 percent uptime, said the company, which claims a client base of 10,000 organizations and 350,000 users.

Pricing for Pulse is still being finalized but will be on a per-seat basis, Papas said.