Meet the Australian tech team disrupting the CRM market with its all-in-one campaign platform

SwiftFox, a Melbourne-based tech company is disrupting the CRM industry, with its all-in-one campaign platform. SwiftFox is set to change the way organisations understand and communicate with their desired audience.

While global giants like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and HubSpot have traditionally dominated the CRM industry, SwiftFox has brought a fresh and local approach. Created by John McLindon and a team of Australia’s best data and technology minds, SwiftFox draws from decades of experience working across campaigning, politics and software development. 

“Some might think of campaigning as marketing or advocacy, but any organisation that has a goal and needs to win over its audience to achieve it, is campaigning,” says McLindon.  

“Campaigning includes efforts to grow your business, sign up more members, grow your donors, deliver major projects, find more customers, or build better relationships with your clients. Basically, anyone with a mailing list.”

McLindon says he was inspired to build the platform after being shocked by how many Australian companies were reliant on spreadsheets or conversely, ineffective and expensive software tools to track their data.

“We originally founded our data analytics consulting company called Red Fox, and we were spending 50 per cent of our time organising a client’s data before it could even be analysed,” says McLindon.

“We’d advise companies to sign up for a CRM, only to discover the large players cost a lot and are really challenging for small to medium-sized businesses or non-techies to navigate.” 

SwiftFox allows clients to talk to their audience at scale. Users can store unlimited contacts, send mass emails, texts, make calls, manage events, run surveys, manage subscription payments, and record contact history. 

And everything happens in just one platform, enabling in-depth data analysis, revealing how an organisation’s contacts are likely to behave. 

“With data consolidated in one secure platform, artificial intelligence can study patterns and help in predicting if someone is going to engage with you, if they are likely to leave, if they are likely to buy,” says McLindon. 

“This knowledge is invaluable for our clients to understand how best to communicate, which they can then do using SwiftFox’s tools.” 

The team believes their backgrounds across both campaigning and business means they are ideally suited to help organisations use their data to grow.

Although SwiftFox is a relatively new platform, it is quickly growing its presence in the Australian CRM market.

SwiftFox is chaired by former global vice-chair of Ernst and Young, Tim Eddy. Eddy says he is excited about what the platform is offering its clients.  

“Our purpose is to enable our clients to deliver positive change. The beauty of SwiftFox is in its simplicity, affordability, and the use of AI to lead innovation and to deliver this positive change,” said Eddy. 

“This will only happen with a skilled team that is totally committed to our goal which is to build the world’s best campaign platform. Out team are all on that bus.” 

So, what sets SwiftFox apart? The team lists the following four areas: 

1. Experience: SwiftFox’s leaders, its data team and its tech team all come from campaigning backgrounds, ensuring they understand the tools clients need to successfully talk to their audience. 

2. Local Partnership Mentality: SwiftFox is local. It is developed in Australia, client data stays in Australia, and users can pick up the phone and speak to the team - not a chatbot. The SwiftFox team takes responsibility for implementation, onboarding, and the features roadmap, shunning the use of expensive implementation partners. 

3. Simplicity & Price: Technology is intimidating for many, and embarking on new projects is particularly daunting. SwiftFox ensures that everything, from its onboarding to its user interface is user-friendly, so clients don’t need an IT degree to use it. SwiftFox also champions organisation-wide access, moving away from a pay-per-user model which it believes disincentivises take up, and therefore the effectiveness of customer relationship management platforms.

4. AI-led Innovation: SwiftFox is a universal CRM, so data stays securely in one place, eliminating the need to have multiple subscriptions. By storing all your data in one, it enables AI to predict audience behaviour, enabling a more targeted experience.

Amid this remarkable journey, McLindon brings to SwiftFox the same mentality he had when working in campaign strategy.

"Understand what your audience cares about, develop your solution or offering, and then communicate it in a targeted way,” says McLindon.

“We want SwiftFox to feel like a campaign head office, ready for big, exciting change, whatever your goal.”