Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?
I am getting to the point that I need to be managing sales prospects and relationships with more people than I can remember on my own. So I am thinking about investing time into loading things into a CRM. The questions is, which one?
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[ 97.9 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadNot likely though....
I am going with Google contacts / spreadsheets for now.
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=47926
"You can add users who aren't in your domain to the shared contacts list using the Shared Contacts API script. The Shared Contacts API will also allow you to enter in additional details like address, phone number and more to domain contacts. These additional details will only appear when shared contacts are viewed in the Contacts Service. The Shared Contacts API is supported by our API team."
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...
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!
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/
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...
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.
I'm sure the real contact management tools are nice, but I also love the beauty and ad-hoc nature of spreadsheets. It's so easy, anyone can do it, and so everyone does do it. Might as well embrace it and build on top.
Sharepad at http://gosharepad.com
Connects to any Google Apps or Gmail account and does a real time sync of email, contacts, and tasks back to the connected google account. Simply drag and drop any contact to your Padmates group to share access to your pad. In the process of getting up the FAQ and video right now.
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I look forward to seeing it progress.
Page displays a grey box with "video" in the middle. Tried FF and Chrome.
FAQ, Getting Started, & Twitter links all fail with a Posterous "Sorry, we couldn't find what you were asking for".
Shame, as I was very interested in what you are doing.
Thanks for your interest.
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).
Their leads page is really the best I've used.
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.