CiviCRM
Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
31–40 of 85 posts
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#32Capsule
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#33Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#34PipelineDeals http://pipelinedeals.com/
Their leads page is really the best I've used.
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#35I am not at a startup, but I use free wiki plan from PBWorks for my personal projects (e.g. organizing a conference)
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#36For b2b you can't beat Salesforce.com. High-rise is a nice contact manager but a terrible CRM.
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#37We tried a whole bunch of things, but sharing contacts, managing notes, follow-up reminders, etc. was just too much of a hack to bother with for a two man shop like ours. So here's what we did: 1) Make a Google spreadsheet 2) Share with the team 3) Add a "follow up" column of dates 4) Sort by that 5) Learn to love the find-in-sheet command Works great!
Would be nice if you could make an example with your sensitive data replaced?
We just organically added columns as we needed it. That's the magic of using a Spreadsheet :-)
Here are the columns we have (with footnotes):
Name, Email, Company, Role [1], Intro [2], Rep [3], Last Contact Date, Last Contact Notes, Next Action Date [4], Next Action, Other Notes
[1] Profession, job title, info about decision making power, etc.
[2] Who/what/why/when of how we were introduced to this person. Useful if we need to lean on a relationship for follow up.
[3] Which of the co-founders were the primary point of contact for this person. This prevents the human race condition for replying to emails or following up on the next action date.
[4] Only used for soft follow-up values. That is, we periodically check this spreadsheet and handle people in a priority queue style. Hard follow up dates are handled with Google Calendar events & email-based reminders.
Recently, I've begun using Boomerang a lot too: http://www.baydin.com/boomerang/
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#38Salesforce: my opinon is salesforce does everything you could ever want but its very expensive for small companies, and every add on makes it even more expensive
Highrise (My preference): Doesnt have 'all' the features i want, but has 90% of them, is cost effective and a lot of other apps use its APIs. I also find it easier to add data in as I go, where as with Salesforce I was a chore that I alway put off.
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#39I'm interested in whether anyone has found one that will let you log messages from within GMail. I'm not talking about the "social CRM" that can pull up an avatar. I don't want to have to forward or BCC messages to get them into my CRM, so a simple "log message" button in GMail would be ideal.
what do you mean by a simple log message button? what are the benefits for this? I'm curious because I'm currently using Google contacts.
Well, don't tell anyone, but I used to use Outlook with Business Contact Manager. It was great. When I exchanged email with a potential lead or a customer, I could log all correspondence from within my mail app. I didn't have to worry about remembering to forward to some address or have to manually enter the message on some 3rd party site.
I was give a simple "log message" button and it got added to the contact's history. I could optionally annotate it. But it was dirt simple for keeping track of email communication (far and away my most common form of communication).
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would be nice if you could make an example with your sensitive data replaced?
We just organically added columns as we needed it. That's the magic of using a Spreadsheet :-) Here are the columns we have (with footnotes): Name, Email, Company, Role [1], Intro [2], Rep [3], Last Contact Date, Last Contact Notes, Next Action Date [4], Next Action, Other Notes [1] Profession, job title, info about decision making power, etc. [2] Who/what/why/when of how we were introduced to this person. Useful if…
Well, this is a step above Excel - because it's hosted and can easily allow multi-user edits, but that's about it. So many small companies do this and I guess I shouldn't knock it. However, I can tell you that it doesn't scale well and will lead to inefficiencies down the road. Many of the open source CRM projects are so easy to get up and running that I would think it is worth the time to do so...but I guess I'm wrong! :-(
Many small companies work thousands or tens of thousands of leads, and this spreadsheet approach simply isn't effective (think direct mailers, etc...) to manage the leads and then orders, and more.
Gotta love the spreadsheet though - it's probably the most popular CRM tool out there. Ugh...