Think about it.

If you want to deploy even a basic email management system for your business, you will need to pay someone like Deerfield $8,000. That’s a lot of money, but if that saves you from hiring another support person, then it’s probably worth the cost.

Oh, but then there is the setup and maintenance. For that you need an expert. Someone who can learn about your business, buy the server, and set everything up to make sure it works the way your company needs it to work. Once it is up and running, you will need that expert to come around occasionally and fix all the things that have gone wrong with it.

Suddenly, this email management system does not seem to cost effective anymore. Even if you added up all the cost to do this and it still worked out to be cheaper over the long run than hiring a second person, is it even worth the headache?

And what if you work alone? Or there are just two or three of you? Forget it.

The truth is, most business software is built with the assumption that you already have an IT department ready to support it. In fact, many business software companies sell there software solely by hiring ‘rainmakers’ skilled in selling products to CIOs and heads of IT.

Yet, what about all of those companies out there with no IT department? For them, buying software means hiring one or more people in addition to the raw purchase. What are they to do?

That is why we need business software designed for companies with no IT department. This software must be easy-to-use and low cost, of course, but that is only the beginning. This software must manage itself.

And therein lies the challenge.

If you want to run your business on technology without hiring an IT department, your software must watch how you work and configure itself to follow your business process all on its own. This ability alone could do wonders for many small businesses, who often don’t understand their business processes well enough to setup software anyway.

Is it possible to build something like this? We think so. In fact, we put this idea to the test with Mailroom, Sproutit’s first business software product.

Mailroom is an email management system for small businesses. It is designed to help you with your sales and support email. By suggesting replies and organizing your email, Mailroom can both save you time and keep you better in touch with your customers.

What makes Mailroom really revolutionary, though, is that it does all this automatically.

Most email management systems need a lot of setup. There are routing rules and canned response managers and sales funnel management and dashboard and, of course, lots of expense to go along with it.

Mailroom, on the other hand, has almost no setup. All you do is create an account and then forward your sales and support email addresses to it.

As you reply to emails, Mailroom saves your replies along with some information about the email you replied to. It learns what types of emails you send certain replies to and then starts suggesting those replies to similar email. You get all the benefits of email management–consistent replies, a knowledge base, and time saved from not typing the same thing over and over again–without any of the cost.

Over time, the replies you send are going to change. That’s OK, Mailroom will notice your behavior has changed and just follow along. No maintenance required.

The same thing applies to routing emails. If you have several people in your business that answer sales or support email, all you do is add each user to your account. Then, when you receive an email, you assign it to the right person. Mailroom will actually learn as you do this and then start routing emails on your behalf.

Just like before, if you change the way you work and start assigning emails to someone different, Mailroom will pick that up and follow along.

With Mailroom, you get all of the benefits of an email response management system without any of the setup and maintenance cost. We even host it on our servers so there is nothing to download or install.

No IT department required.

Now, we don’t think Sproutit is alone in this effort. There are some other kindred spirits out there thinking along these same lines. People like 37signals, Blinksale, Jadedpixel, and iotum are developing solutions in other areas of your business that can be used with almost no setup either.

We envision a day when a person can start a new business, subscribe to a package of affordable hosted software and have a nearly functioning business all ready to go. All they have to do is add the part that makes their business unique. We are not there yet, but no-IT technology like Mailroom is definitely headed in the right direction.

Watch this space.