CRM options for early-stage B2B startups?
What are some interesting CRM options for early-stage B2B startups? What are good questions to ask or features to seek? And what problems have you encountered with the CRM solutions you've tried?
Advantages: It's OSS, and there's a freely downloadable community edition, so all it costs us is the price of a VPS. Sugar is fairly full-featured and has a vibrant community around it.
Cons: While "fairly" full-featured, there are some things missing (at least in CE). For example, the record for a company doesn't have a field for NAICS code. That, to me, is a fairly basic thing a CRM ought to have.
Also, Sugar is written in PHP. Now that's not necessarily a "negative" in the broader sense, but it's a negative to me, since I'm not a PHP programmer and I don't like PHP. The net result is, I'm very reluctant to make any customizations to our Sugar install.
There also doesn't appear to be much in the way of process or workflow features. This is the kind of thing that we'd hack in ourselves if we were using something written in Java or Groovy, but not really interested in maintaining a bunch of PHP stuff.
Still though, for an early stage startup, who just needs a place to track accounts, leads, opportunities, etc. Sugar is a decent enough option.
it is only a few click away to add your own custom fields.
Some other advice: From being peripherally involved in many CRM installations/rollouts/configurations (I mostly end up getting the website and analytics integrated), _every_ bit of CRM software appears to suck at the beginning. I've recently had clients using Sugar, Zoho, MS Dynamics, and Salesforce - at the start, everyone thinks the software sucks. I think that's because "CRM" as an activity sucks, at least to start with. You'll be asking people to change the way they do things, and record information they think doesn't need recording - and they'll know "the system" keeps track of them, and they'll hate it. And even if those people using the CRM software _do_ see the benefit, it's too long-term to provide the "reward" to motivate them to learn and continue to use the CRM. But if everybody involved perseveres, it's _so_ worth it.
I guess my advice is this: Don't sweat which CRM you choose - choosing one isn't the hard bit, or even an important decision. Choosing to use one at all is the important decision, and grinding through the steep learning curve and lack of immediate reward is "the hard bit".
It combines marketing automation with sales, and I've heard it's easy to use and works well; they hold your hand for the first 30 days to make sure you know how to use it to its full advantage.
Planning on using it at my next company.
Disadvantages: Not much of good UX. You might need to customize to get better user experience.