Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: What CRM do you use at your startup?

69 pointsjaxn78 comments

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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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!

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/

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Added. Please vote :)

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.

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).

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!

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

<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>

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.

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.

Very sorry about that. We just finished the MVP and we're still in the process of putting up the blog/video. All should be ready by Monday. I'll email you when it's done.

Thanks for your interest.

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"

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.

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

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

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.

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.

http://disqourse.com <plug>

The simplest one in the market: Rapportive

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.

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

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.

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.

None of the above, rolled my own.

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

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.

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.

Other: Pipelinedeals.com

Highrise as part of the 37signals suite.

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

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

" Contact sharing does not allow users to share their personal contacts with each other." You still can't share contacts stored by each user's account

http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=47926

I think this is in a state of flux.

"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...

Homebrew Rails app for managing a small company (projects, CRM, time tracking, staff holidays etc). We’ve been considering productising it for a while but haven’t been willing to jump without a firm sale.

I'd add BatchBlue. It's what all the cool kids are using, I hear.

Can 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."

Currently using OpenLeads. Decent price with room to grow. Has great e-mail functionality and awesome automation workflow tools. Very customizable.

PipelineDeals http://pipelinedeals.com/

Their leads page is really the best I've used.

I am not at a startup, but I use free wiki plan from PBWorks for my personal projects (e.g. organizing a conference)

How about Dashboard? Any user here?

Link - http://www.getdashboard.com/

Daylite. It's mac-only, but I'm mostly using it for my own purposes, so that's not a dealbreaker.

I'm surprised no one's mentioned MediaWiki. Does it have some obvious problems I'm overlooking?

Overkill, non-salesperson friendly syntax, no CRM-specific functionality (that I know of).

Ah yes, I don't think it has any CRM stuff at all. Thanks!

I wanted to try Solve360 at my company but we can't use things no one else uses.

Email + Personal contact + communication and just have each others backs.

OnePageCRM. It focuses on "that next task" required for each contact.

Google Apps Contacts does it for me. It syncs with my phone.

The phone sync is particularly nice.

Google Contacts is not considered a CRM tool so it may not fit what you need. Good luck, let us know which one you choose to go with.

Agreed. Google contacts is not a CRM but could be so much more. It could be an amazing CRM if they implemented my wishlist: http://www.sennza.com.au/google-me/

Not likely though....

In case you don't catch the other comment I left...

I am going with Google contacts / spreadsheets for now.

What about Saleslogix and Microsoft Dynamics CRM?

Try MS Dynamics CRM Online – it’s web-based so you can access anywhere and it has full sales, marketing and service features. You’ll also be able to sync up a mobile device and use offline synchronization when using Outlook. There is a promotion for new customers - $34/user/month (USD). This link will give you more details: http://smb.ms/OutreacheMPSH

Regards, Jodi E. Microsoft SMB Outreach Team msftoft@microsoft.com

just deployed fat free crm, and tracks on a EC2 micro-instance... no looking back. i just wish django had apps like these.

Microsoft CRM Online

everything for me is on github and workflowy.

emacs text mode

OnePageCRM.com

Elements CRM?

Capsule

CiviCRM

karmaCRM.com

vtiger CRM

insight.ly

Yeah, Insightly rocks !

How / why is insight.ly free?

insight.ly - integrated with Google Apps, looks great, simple to use, tons of potential and in active development - we are testing it now - so far so good!

Joomla HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I use amphis crm www.amphis-software.com cos its easy to use and does all I need with contacts, mail merge, customer notes, multi-user and customizable.

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