Think about that. The interface for engineers to manage servers is almost identical to the interface we give sales people to manage customers :)
We think there's something wrong with that and have tested it already with many sales reps and seen great results.
Just as a bit of background: we are currently running sales campaigns for many venture backed startups in the valley and are very familiar with the space.
Would love to invite you to visit our little "sales lab" in Mountain View and hear your feedback :)
In my experience, a CRM is typically fed leads by a marketing automation system or bulk record loading from offline events. All the reps need to do is sort their list of leads by priority, call on them, and flip the status to "meeting" or "closed/won" when they're done. That's nowhere near data entry slavery, IMO.
With a CRM, we want to ask: * How full is our funnel? * Where are our leads coming from? * What's my projected revenue this quarter? * Is anything stuck? * Who isn't working their leads fast enough?
All of these things are hugely valuable and none of them have to do with being a "communication" tool.
That is exactly what we do with Discourse ( https://discoursehq.com ) - there are couple of usecases where this makes a lot of sense:
- real-estate brokers can track pipeline based on real life customer interactions - car sales - financial services sales - telco services sales
We have integrated Discourse with Facebook fan pages so leads generated on fan pages can be immediately converted into prospects - right there on the spot.
We have a growing number of customers and we are looking for more :)
I'd happily give you feedback, I do sales and use Salesforce daily so anything that can make it better sounds great to me