What’s happening with Sprout Clients? Priorities.

Sprout Clients has been pushed aside for a long time, a really long time; to be honest, embarrassingly too long. I had a lot planned for version 2.0, which was pitched as the “what I originally wanted to release” — although, things change.

The good news: I’m putting my head down and finishing up v2.0 of Sprout Clients this month and a release can be expected early next month ¹. I’m comfortable giving this timeline after not meeting any of my other expectations because I’ve changed the scope.

Originally Sprout Clients was set to focus on e-commerce integrations, creating a single customer/client page for those using WooCommerce and EDD. Time has showed that this “feature” would have been pointless since these projects have improved in their latest releases, especially EDD.

The other “main feature” was integrated messaging that allowed for you to send automated messaging with logic for unread e-mails. That “killer feature” that required an integration with mailgun is the single feature that I dreaded to build and for good reason. When I started developing the integration I found a lot of drawbacks, too many to overcome the continued development. So it was easy dropped.

So the scope has changed and truly happier with what is being built than what I had planned.

What will Sprout Clients v2.0 look like now?

Improving the messaging experience with your leads/clients/customers is still the major focus. The two major features that will be added to achieve this goal for many users will be:

Scheduled Messaging – write to your leads/clients now and have them delivered later. Now when you meet someone new you can write a message to follow-up with them while it’s still on your mind, there’s no need to set a reminder to follow-up.

Use Case: Next time you meet someone in the hallway track, get their information, create a new lead within Sprout Clients (soon after), and write a message in your future self to follow-up…”Hey, it was great meeting you last week at the WordCamp US. How was it that…?”.

Engagements – create engagements to keep better track of whom you met where. Sprout Clients wants to tie these engagements to your clients for reference and custom automation.

Use Case: At the client meet-up or call create an engagement and take notes for future reference.

What’s about after that?

There’s a lot planned for Sprout Clients but it really depends on its users. Since I’m dogfooding my own products v3.0 should include an integration with Help Scout Desk. Although, I’m open to hearing what you need.