Spreadsheet is always a good start. Simple , free and works on a small scale. As you overgrow it, you will know why it is not working anymore and that will help you to find a tool that does what your spreadsheet stopped being able to do.
I absolutely agree. This applies to not just CRMs but almost every area of your business.
1. Start with simple, readily available tools.
2. If you outgrow those: Buy an off-the-shelf product.
3. If you also outgrow those, only then consider building your own solution.
If it's not a key differentiator for your business then you're probably better off with not overthinking it and going for the simple, boring but adequate solution.
I agree. We’ve recently migrated to sales force. We like it. But we started with a mishmash of bugzilla, Trello, and google sheets for managing sales leads, production planning and service issues. As our needs grew it made sense to move to something like SF. But we totally did not need that on day 1.
Big fan of Pipedrive myself. Fairly lightweight, but with good features. Visual pipeline structure is nice. Easy to use interface (though text formatting is a weak spot).
Shameful self promotion, but I am currently working on a user feedback collection crm at www.testimonly.com check it out to see if you might be interested.
HubSpot is actually pretty good. For starters, it's free. They have most of the tools you'd want to run an efficient sales process available as add-ons too. It's also gaining steam and likely to end up with the most third party integrations behind Salesforce. They also have a HubSpot for Startups program which can get you 90% off your first year.
Full disclosure: I used to work at HubSpot on the product team, but I didn't work on the CRM. In fact, I kind of built a competitive product to the HubSpot CRM internally for awhile, so wouldn't say it was good unless it really was.
+1 on hubspot. They also have nice APIs and their freemium package is very nice. API usage is part of the freemium package. We use it to send leads from our backend system.
I think their premise is that CRMs are a commodity and all the value is in upselling the type of features that they charge for. So making sure the baseline CRM is very good drives sales for that. Either way, it's a decent product.
I have to disagree on Hubspot CRM. We moved to it on the startup plan you mention about 7-8 months ago, and have found it very difficult to use in a fast, intuitive and streamlined fashion.
There are key areas that are missing basic functionality (EG: being able to see a list of deals that haven't been contacted recently) and if I could turn back time, I would not have made the decision to move to Hubspot.
In our work we use Salesforce CRM. It is highly flexible and helps us to manage customer accounts, track sales leads, conduct and monitor marketing campaigns and provide service post sale. Our company hired specialists from KeyNode Solutions https://www.keynodesolutions.com/ to help us with implementation and ongoing Salesforce support. If it's within your budget, I recommend Salesforce.
I'd suggest you to start with Google Sheets. Most of the needs would get fulfilled there. By the time it becomes a hassle you'll know exactly what extra benefits/features you need and which app solves them.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 33.2 ms ] thread1. Start with simple, readily available tools.
2. If you outgrow those: Buy an off-the-shelf product.
3. If you also outgrow those, only then consider building your own solution.
If it's not a key differentiator for your business then you're probably better off with not overthinking it and going for the simple, boring but adequate solution.
Full disclosure: I used to work at HubSpot on the product team, but I didn't work on the CRM. In fact, I kind of built a competitive product to the HubSpot CRM internally for awhile, so wouldn't say it was good unless it really was.
I think their premise is that CRMs are a commodity and all the value is in upselling the type of features that they charge for. So making sure the baseline CRM is very good drives sales for that. Either way, it's a decent product.
There are key areas that are missing basic functionality (EG: being able to see a list of deals that haven't been contacted recently) and if I could turn back time, I would not have made the decision to move to Hubspot.