Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?

[jaxn]

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?

[snprbob86]

We 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!

[pamelafox]

On the teams I've worked on at Google, we pretty much take the same approach. The only problem is when you're looking beyond your own team's contacts, and you have to search a few different spreadsheets to find the contact of interest. We've thought about using the API to provide a central search to all of the spreadsheets for that case, which wouldn't be too difficult to do.

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.

[quellhorst]

Would be nice if you could make an example with your sensitive data replaced?

[JonZack]

My best answer is "why do you want a CRM?". If it is to manage sales people now or in the near future then Salesforce is good if you can afford it, it is also good to grow into if you plan to have customer service people. Plus I hear they have a free version for small companies - not sure. If it is just for yourself, then the question is how many prospects are you managing. If it is a lot (over 200) then SugarCRM or Highrise is best suited. If less than 200, Google docs spread sheet is good to start with unless you need to track a lot of data/ prospect interactions, then use one of the former. If you have never done this before I suggest starting out with a spread sheet and keeping it simple since you will inevitably be making changes to it regarding what you will track and how you will use it to make more sales. This approach will help you refine your immediate and possibly long term needs, and what product is best suited for you. I personally always start with a spread sheet before making a commitment to any system until I know what I/we need. Zoho is a good happy medium between these two choices.

[codeslush]

You might want to add FatFreeCrm to your list - it's not as feature rich as some, but also doesn't suffer some of the same bloat. It's written in Rails and easy to modify.

[jaxn]

Added. Please vote :)

[nirvdrum]

I'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.

[ajessup]

http://www.noosbox.com/ (in private beta) does exactly this, without too much extra fluff. Contact me through my HN profile for an invite.

[codeslush]

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!

[cch2011]

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.

[fjabre]

<plug>

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.

</plug>

[jaxn]

You have identified a definite pain point. Unfortunately it doesn't yet look like there is enough there for me to choose it as a core business tool.

I look forward to seeing it progress.

[auxbuss]

Your site is very broken here :(

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.

[willrobins]

Sales Force is great when you are small - I went from Start Up to 20 Sales Reps and 5 back office with 42 total people in last few years. Here is the breakdown of what works when and why.

http://www.robinsunleashed.com/?p=106

Great info already with the voting... here is the "WHY"

[lachlanj]

I totally agree with you here. If you are planning on scaling up you team Salesforce works well, especially for managing big teams or even a number of teams.

However if you are small company say under 10 people, salesforce can be cumbersome.

So really it depends on what your company does and what you need to capture.

[fnazeeri]

For b2b you can't beat Salesforce.com. High-rise is a nice contact manager but a terrible CRM.

[jaxn]

Why? I have never used a CRM (I am more of a hacker than a salesperson).

[bearwithclaws]

This is probably absurd (and yes, I've tried most of solutions) - I use SimpleNote (thru Notational Velocity desktop app) to manage almost everything - including CRM.

[lachlanj]

Salesforce: 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.

[JarekS2]

http://disqourse.com <plug>

[davidedicillo]

The simplest one in the market: Rapportive

[jefe78]

Over at my last company, we used Salesforce, with a lot of success. I was the implementor, so it was all a little over my head, but the sales guys seemed happy. Its was for a team of ~9 sales staff.

[irious]

We wrote our own, lots of work but it's fully integrated into my company.

[darren]

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.

[blender]

We used to use Solve360 but we use Bantam Live now too. Solve360 is actually a very powerful CRM platform/toolkit but the non-technical people didn't really grok it. Bantam Live has some warts but it provides a lot of functionality without making many compromises. Second that it is worth checking out.

[tony_landis]

None of the above, rolled my own.

[cookiecaper]

I'm working on a custom one too. Also manages invoicing and accounting.

[jaxn]

FYI, I think I am going with Google Contacts and Google Spreadsheets for now. When I being on a head of sales they can decide to use another CRM if they want, but I don't want to manage contacts two places and I want them in my phones (iphone and android). I may also play with insight.ly at the same time. I would use Highrise if it was integrated with Google Apps.

Thank you for all of the feedback.

[_urga]

A colleague and I started off with Highrise which was great. But we wanted auto email importing, real-time feeds and fast search. We were building an offline-capable web-app at the time and decided to build these features in. It's faster for what we do. I am releasing this as a standalone service. Please let me know if you're interested.

[flgb]

Other: Pipelinedeals.com

[scottmagdalein]

Highrise as part of the 37signals suite.

[proee]

Is there a way in google contacts to share you contacts between multiple users?

[jaxn]

Yes. Google Apps now allows you to share contacts across the domain.