We used to use Pipeline, but recently switched to Bantam Live. Better pricing model, better user interface, decent reporting, plus it has an iPhone version. Worth checking out.
Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
51–60 of 85 posts
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wro…
We tried a bunch of other solutions, but the needless complexity and apparent inflexibility was just not worth the time investment to understand and bend to our needs.
We're handling several dozen business contacts this way. Eventually we broke out potential investors into their own spreadsheet. We'll break out potential hires into another. Hopefully customers will overflow the pipeline soon, so then we can re-evaluate solutions then.
In the mean time, I think this is a key lesson for a lot of startups: the path of least resistance is very, very attractive. The world is run on spreadsheets, for a very good reason. In general, they simply get the job done without much fanfare. They might not be ideal, but then again no tool is.
Spreadsheets let me stash some data, slice and dice it, and provide a moderately painless migration route to more specialized tools when necessary.
As far as I'm concerned, every single productivity software product today needs to first solve the problem of "How will we be two orders of magnitude better than Excel/Gmail/Word/PowerPoint/Notepad/Horizontal-Productivity-Tool. Not one order of magnitude: two. That's how much it takes to overcome the activation energy to use something other than the defaults.
Also, realize that if you are a programmer, then you are not normal. Normal people use MS Office for pretty much everything. I've got enough empirical evidence of that to consider it pretty much fact at this point.
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#53Can anyone suggest a good CRM workflow? I'm considering FatFreeCRM but I'm not sure what are the differences between "Opportunities" and "Leads" and how to use "Campaigns."
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#54Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#55The simplest one in the market: Rapportive
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#56vtiger CRM
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#57Currently using OpenLeads. Decent price with room to grow. Has great e-mail functionality and awesome automation workflow tools. Very customizable.
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#58Can anyone suggest a good CRM workflow? I'm considering FatFreeCRM but I'm not sure what are the differences between "Opportunities" and "Leads" and how to use "Campaigns."
Check out "The Sales Process" at http://is.gd/l4kLZJ
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#59How about Dashboard? Any user here?
Link - http://www.getdashboard.com/
Re: Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
#60I'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.
I wasn't aware of insight.ly until reading one of the other comments on this thread. Good news for you - looks like it has a feature like this!